The Age of Profilicity and Identity Politics with Hans-Georg Moeller and Sam Gilbert #5

Welcome to The Future of You. Today I'm joined by Hans-Georg Müller, who is a professor at the University of Macau. His research focuses on Chinese and comparative philosophy and on social and political thought. He's the host of the Carefree Wandering YouTube channel and the co-author of the book You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity, which he co-wrote with Paul J. D'Ambrosio. It's a book whose first quote is a quote from Marshall McLuhan, and regular listeners know what a fan and even a student I am of that. And we're joined by Sam Gilbert. He's an affiliated researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, is an expert in data-driven marketing, and was employee number one and CMO at Bought by Many, a well-known fintech startup. Previously, he was head of strategy and development at the data company Experian, and he was head of consumer finance at Santander. He is the author of last year's book, Good Data, and I have had the pleasure of doing several literary festivals with Sam, doing our Good Data, Bad Data double act on stage. He lives in Copenhagen, and with Georg joining us from Macau, we have a very international flavor to the discussion about identity today. And just before we get into it, I did want to mention that we were showcased by Apple Podcasts as one of the best new shows in tech recently. So please do share news of the podcast, and if you can subscribe, you'll never miss an episode. Thank you as always for listening. So today's conversation was always going to revolve around identity, data, and profiling. And I really wanted to talk about this for a long time because it's probably the area that I'm most interested in. And it was a pleasure to get these two guests together for such a discussion. We covered a wide-ranging remit. We talked about the death of authenticity, or certainly the need to leave the notion of authenticity behind, because in the modern world, our identity really resembles a different kind of construction, is made up in different ways, is of use to us in lots of different ways, and we should be thinking about identity as 'pro-felicity', i.e., it has a much more fluid sense about it, and indeed that fluidity is much more useful in the modern world. We actually touched on identity politics too, and where we are in the world of identity politics, and how dangerous it could be, and is, and the jeopardy that comes with having pride in some versions of your identity or some attributes of identity, how they could actually put you on the road to punishment or cancellation. We talked a lot about how profiling data is reached. We talked about search data and how that can be useful, not just on an individual basis, but as a collective, how we can have insights into both the individual, but also the collective. And we talked about what is the real self, Do we even really need that language anymore? And we wind up, of course, talking about where we are going, which is the multiverse or the metaverse, and what identities will be like in there. I was really lucky to get two such thoughtful and considerate guests who think about this topic all the time, and we had a very rich discussion. So to quote from Georg's book, Authenticity is now fading away. Authenticity relies heavily on personal interaction between people. Authentic individuals mutually confirm their identity value, and to do this, they must know one another and be at the same time in the same place. Well, I was very happy to be in the same time and at the same place as these two guests. Please join me in listening in to a conversation about identity and profilicity. Well, hello both. This is a conversation I've been wanting to do for ages because I think it's going to revolve around identity and data and profiling, all the things I think are really exciting that are going on at the moment. And I'm so happy to have you both here together to discuss this. I know it's going to be a fantastic discussion, but I wondered if we could start by thinking about where we are now as a society and as individuals when we consider identity. How did we get here? If there's been any change, what are the drivers of that, that change? So could we just get your points of view to start off on where we think we are with identity, how we should conceptualize it in today's world? Uh, Georg, perhaps I could start with you.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I hope I won't talk too long. It's such a big question. So you already brought up the word profile, right? And I think that's really, at least from my perspective, the major shift that happened in recent decades, and very strongly since the new media and social media and so forth, that we basically are forced to manufacture our identity in the form of profiles. And if you want to define the times we live in from a kind of a new existentialist perspective, existentialist in the sense of somehow trying to find, define the mode, the way in which we exist, in which we live, then I think identity is a good starting point, right? How do we, how do we build identity? How do we perceive the identity of others? How do we live identity? And yeah, I think that's a kind of a relatively new thing that we do so in the form of constructing profiles. And again, also, of course, of getting to know others through their profiles. I mean, I see both you, Tracey Follows, and Sam for the first time, but I already knew both of you through your profiles. And I guess that's the same uh, vice versa. That's how we found one another, and that's unusual. That would not have been the case a few decades ago.

That's very interesting, actually. I discovered your book via Adam Townsend tweeting it, actually, and I only really know him through his profile. Um, right, so these are new connections that we're forming, aren't they, in these different nodes in this network? Um, Sam, what do you think about where we are now at the moment? How would you How would you profile where we are now?

Well, I think it's a very interesting period, the last 10 years, because I think identity is quite a mercurial concept. It's very difficult to pin down. And when I reflect on where we were a decade ago, at that time I was working at Experian, the data company, and there was a big focus there on something the company referred to as identity management. And that really, I suppose, had a much more traditional attitude towards identity. So it was thinking about an individual's identity in terms of data points that would make them knowable or governable or allow their access to particular services to be accepted or denied. So what Experian was interested in was developing products that would facilitate that process in some way, including things like digital ways of validating or authenticating documents like passports or driving licenses. And that frame was very much, I think, the, the frame through which I saw the concept of identity at that time. And then what's been so interesting in the last 10 years is the way that a very different understanding of identity has emerged in public conversation. So particularly younger people will talk about identity as being a very important mode of self-expression, and obviously we've seen identity politics become very influential. People will describe themselves as identifying as something or identifying with particular political or social causes. So there's been this really interesting shift, and it's almost as if those two ideas of identity are actually not even commensurable, that they seem to mean such different things. So fascinating moment of things shifting and changing, even in what we mean when we use the term identity.

Yeah, one of the things I've been wondering about the modern world, if you like, is whether our identity or identity management, as you said, or perhaps creation or curation, is more complex than it ever was, or is it more simple actually? Because what, what I often see in an online environment is people creating a complexity around their identity, and obviously they use— there's a possibility of using lots of different aspects to do that, but also there's a homogenization of people as they perhaps get drawn into certain tribes or they feel like there are only certain actions or behaviors or values they might want to flag to belong to a group. So I wonder what your thoughts are on that, both of you. Is identity more complex these days or not?

Well, we don't really know about the past, right? Hundreds of years ago, we just kind of know about it through whatever books or stuff like this. And so we don't really know how hard it was for people to build or create an identity or have one. But I think it's quite telling that they didn't really talk about the problem. They didn't really have the word. It's a relatively new concept. So it seems that identity in one way or another was taken for granted, and then other things would be important, whatever, to keep your honor or to gain recognition and so forth. But identity as such seems to be a pretty new concept. I think it's very important, at least for me too, what Sam said, this rise of identity identity politics, and I find identity politics quite problematic, and I think it expresses a certain kind of form of obsession with identity in our times under our conditions. So of course people were obsessed with who they were under different conditions probably all the time, and again we can look at literature and we find all kinds of people, whatever, trying to make a name for themselves and, you know, trying to impress others, and these things are not new. But the very fact that we have this focus on the notion of identity and focus on this concept and on this idea, I think that is, that is a relatively new thing. And that has to do with the fact that the identity is no longer simply that clear.

Do you think that's maybe because Well, our identity was born out of roles in society to some respects. I mean, I've looked at like naming, for example, we took our names from the crafts-based work that we might do, i.e., the value that we would contribute to society. And therefore, in some ways it was taken for granted, as you say, people knew what we did and therefore how we should be named. And in a sense, that was our identity. Now we're sort of in this free-floating atmosphere where we're untethered from some of these traditional roles in society. Is that part of the driver of change then?

I mean, to me, that seems like a compelling explanation. It also puts me in mind of what Georg said at the beginning of the conversation about the influence of social media and online profiles, because I think although this idea of code-switching— so this is where you adopt different— a different set of behaviors, a different set of norms depending on the context in which you're interacting with other people. That, that has been a phenomenon of social life for some time. It does seem like the fact that there are now so many different social networking services that we need to use as part of our daily life, that has sort of led to the creation of a multiplicity of new norms and expectations. And so we end up having to, I guess, moderate or edit the way in which we appear in order to conform to the norms that exist in those different contexts.

I mean, and that's the big difference, right? In the past, we wouldn't have much choice regarding to dress or hairstyle. Right? First of all, you would be probably working most of the time, and then you would be just dressed properly for work. But like every, any other occasion, you wouldn't really have much choice which kind of shoes to wear, or in your cases, which kind of glasses to choose from. So all of these things would, would just not be even a question, right? And since all these tiny things, they are now all a question. And somehow we have to somehow identify with the glasses we wear, right? The glasses I'm— or your glasses that I'm now looking at, they are obviously perceived and need to be kind of chosen by you with regard to how they express your identity, what kind of profile. And so just like your glasses, right, they are all part of your profile curation, and it's impossible not to do that. I mean, you could maybe choose contact lenses, but they would also be ultimately a profile-related choice. And that's very different from a few hundred years ago or even a few decades ago.

That's very interesting, actually, because it might bring me on to ask Sam a question about search, because a lot of the profiling you've done is through search, isn't it? And search data. And that really is sort of pointing towards people searching for, you know, to make a better decision when there is this choice open to them. How much can we tell about someone through the buildup of data, through like search data? How much can we really profile them?

Yes. So as you say, Tracey Follows, the use of internet search data to understand the world is something that I'm a little bit obsessed with. But I guess I should make a bit of a distinction, which is between using that data at an aggregate level to reveal things about society or about large groups, which is the area that I'm predominantly interested in, and a different thing that would be revealed by that search data if you were to look at the searches that a specific individual has made. So, and just, just to say a bit more about the first of those things, that data is very powerful in contexts like public health. So in recent times, and particularly for things like tracking the spread of COVID outbreaks, that has been possible by paying attention to symptom searches that people are making through Google, and there is this very significant benefit to the public and society of that data being available in order that researchers are able to tell what's going on from a public health perspective. So that, that's the, that's the collective approach to using that data. There is also other interesting academic research that has been done on individuals' search histories. So particularly in areas like mental health, so researchers who are interested in what people's psychological state is in the run-up to episodes of self-harm or suicide attempts, perhaps unsurprisingly, their individual Google search histories are very revealing and very helpful to researchers trying to think about how to diagnose and how to design mental health interventions more effectively. So I think it is definitely the case that an individual's search history is expressing something quite profound, probably, about their identity. And it also puts me in mind of some— an interesting bit of work done by the designer Chris Downes, who quite some time ago now, like 15+ years ago, decided that he wanted to physically collect all of the data that organizations held about him. So that included all of his club card data from the supermarket that he shopped at, all of his transaction data from the bank. And so he wrote this series of subject access requests and got these organizations to physically send him copies of the data that they were holding. And one of the things that he found from that was that even things as banal as his choices about what type of laundry detergent to buy said something about the person that he was. So the specific example I've got in mind is that he'd been using Ecover, which is a brand of eco-friendly laundry detergent, for years and years and years. And that spoke to his concerns about the environment and the choices that he was making as a result. So it is definitely the case, I think, that these forms of digital data can say really profound things about the people that we are.

May I interject on this? I just listened to a talk I found fascinating by Elena Esposito. She's a professor in both Bielefeld and Bologna, and she works on algorithms now. And she was talking about the same thing that you were just talking about, right? That we make predictions based on, for instance, our Google search data about something that seems entirely unrelated, whatever, our suicidal tendencies, as you just mentioned. Now she says, and I think that's a very good point, that, that somewhat contradicts what you said, that this functions actually like old age divination. And what does she mean by this? She means all we're really seeing and all that we're really interested in actually as well is the correlation. We see, we have certain phenomena and then we, so to speak, divine by establishing a correlation to something that seems to be entirely unrelated. And of course, that works much better than old age divination. But the rationality behind it is basically the same. So we are not looking at causation. So we're actually not even interested why the two things are related and not even how they're related. So in that sense, we're not looking at the Google search of a person to find out who the person really is. But we want to find out, for instance, if they are suicidal or not. We don't want to find out why they are suicidal. And we don't want to find out anything about their personality as such. We just want to find the correlation between, between, let's say, data and a future event. And that's all. And that's very different from an interest in, let's say, a person's real self. But we still use this language of a person's real self, because that's something that we are kind of used to. But I think Elena Esposito has a good point in pointing out this, this thing that this phenomenon that you just described, or this method that you just described, actually has this divinatory function and is not really aiming at finding out who the person really is. They just want to find out if whatever, they buy this product or not, or if they commit suicide or not.

So I essentially agree with this criticism that you've raised, Georg, and this is a very important criticism in any context where people are thinking about ways of using big datasets and machine learning algorithms to make predictions that affect individuals, because exactly as you say, they should not be assumed to be saying something that is truthful about individuals. What they're doing is making probabilistic inferences about the future based on data from the past. So obviously in the context of things like predicting somebody's consumer preferences and whether they'll have an interest in a particular set of shoes or a particular type of food, the stakes are relatively low. The people who are doing that type of prediction are interested in being commercially effective at a very large scale. They're not trying to make a high-stakes decision about a particular individual. They're not trying to know that individual. They're trying to make educated guesses about how a large population of people will behave. I guess if we cross over from those banal use cases of this type of data analytics into contexts where the stakes are higher, I think the— there is a good body of academic peer-reviewed research in the field of what is referred to as infodemiology. So this is the use of these of internet search data and other digital data sources as part of understanding public health challenges and making better informed decisions about how to respond to those. And those things also, to some extent, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily matter if a causal relationship can't be established, because what is important is having an effective public health intervention in response to a a particular challenge. And I totally agree that if we get into the case of individuals' search data, it's right to say that we can't know something about an individual based on an analysis of any form of digital data about other individuals from the past, or perhaps even about that, that same individual from the past. So, so from the outside, it doesn't help us understand their identity. What it may do— and here I'm talking again about these other researchers who do ask individuals to share their own data in order to enable research or in order to target interventions more effectively— and again, the— well, I think that, that Data probably can say something meaningful about those individuals, but in the case of that research, again, the goal is to have a more effective future intervention on a probabilistic basis. So if you can understand from an individual search history that they have made a particular set of searches that relate to self-harm and that, that appears to be predictive of suicidal ideation, perhaps it's possible to design a public health intervention where Google Ads appear or are triggered by particular searches and promote suicide helplines, for example. So I think in that case we could say there's a— there's arguably a public benefit to that type of intervention, but I don't think we would say we'd necessarily— that that reveals something about the individual or the identity of the person who is making that search.

I saw, just to bring those two thoughts together, I saw an interesting tweet this morning while I was just scrolling. I won't say who tweeted it, but I'll tell you what it said. It said, it's from a woman who said, I have an MA, a PhD, 8 patents, 15+ years of funding tech, 20+ years of building tech, 5 of them at Google. After all that, today I see Google Search has generated a knowledge box about me. Apparently, I'm a wife. Tell me again how neutral algorithms are. And then to top it all, given we're thinking about identity and profiling, she says, happy hashtag Women's History Month. I thought it was the perfect tweet to see on the morning I was going to speak to both of you. I went to her profile actually to see, well, if she doesn't— I mean, given all of that she said, fine. Does she mention she's a wife even in her profile or a bio on Twitter? And it says, NJ by birth, J 'Bayhawk by marriage,' 'X Google Maps, YouTube, Android, etc.' And then in location, it says 'vaccinated.' I mean, it's a very interesting example because it's somebody who's giving out lots of identity cues, I think, lots of cues to how they would like to be profiled or how they would like to be seen. And the algorithm in this case has been perceived to come back and have chosen one very limited dimension. I just thought it was kind of, you know, ironic. Sorry, Sam, you're going to say—

I was going to add another quite similar example, which is yesterday I used Bing to search for Dominic Cummings, and that produced a knowledge box which prominently describes Dominic Cummings as the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, which, I mean, I haven't lived in the United Kingdom for a couple of years, but unless I missed something, Dominic Cummings was never Prime Minister.

But to be fair, Sam, he did think he was.

Well, I think this— so I tweeted this, and this was one of the comments that I've got, was, "But surely this just reveals that Bing knows things for sure that we only suspected." But I think that maybe the more plausible explanation, which depressingly also explains the example that you just gave, is it's to do with this thing called the knowledge graph, which Microsoft and Google and other tech companies have invested a lot in trying to build. So in the knowledge graph, you have the concept of an entity. So an entity might be a person, and then there are a lot of attributes that you can place against that entity in the knowledge graph. And when we see answer boxes or direct answers on search engines, they are drawing attributes from the knowledge graph to try and enrich your understanding of that entity. But, and this, this goes to exactly some of the problems that Georg was describing with the way that data gets constructed. Built into the knowledge graph are certain things which its initial developers deemed to be objective and neutral, like whether somebody was male or female, whether they were married or unmarried, a husband or a wife, and how old they are, how tall they are. These kind of things have ended up becoming woven into the search results that we see as a result of some very arbitrary decisions that reflected background assumptions of the people who developed the dataset and the concept of the knowledge graph in the first place. And so it's always fascinating to me to see these materialize in reality. And of course, they do probably say something about identity as well, and the way in which one— in the digital world, one's identity may end up getting fixed by the categories that a developer at a big tech company has unthinkingly created many years in the past.

I was going to ask about that. Perhaps Georg, you could talk around this or address this around that fixedness or not in online profilicity, but also who then is in control of our profile if we think we are representing ourselves in one way, but actually the algorithms are depicting us to others in another way, maybe a more limited way, but just maybe a different way. Who is really in control of our identity, persona or personas in these environments, do you think?

Well, I mean, obviously we're not in control and that we're not in control disappoints the modern idea or ideal of human agency, right? That's a central aspect of of Western Enlightenment philosophy, that, you know, the point of being human is to be in control, autonomous, autonomy. That's a central term, and autonomy means self-law giving, which means you don't follow the laws that anyone else has given you, and that means you're not under control of someone else. But so this idea that which was a scandalous thing at the time because it would break with the religious ideals, right? If humans were under religious ideas, you weren't really supposed to be autonomous. The Lord would be kind of the ultimate person who would be in control of you, and that was regarded as all right. But then in modernity, there is the idea that humans have to be in control, and the more control we have, the more autonomous we have, the better we are. Both as individuals or as societies. So there is this fixation of control which informs this whole, let's say, discourse that you are now referring to, because originally the whole new media— I remember that well, I'm old enough, maybe other than you guys, to remember like in the 1990s when these new technologies were being hyped. And of course they were hyped with the same semantics, with the same rhetorics. They will enhance control. We will be even more autonomous, right? But then very soon there was a disappointment that that actually didn't really happen. Right. And of course, why didn't it happen? Because the whole narrative is flawed from the beginning, because we were never really fully in control and we cannot really fully be in control of anything. Right. We're not in control of our bodily functions. We're not in control of control of our blood circulation, of our heartbeat right now, right? We're not in control. If you study psychology of our desires and of our perceptions, we can't, you know, be— I cannot be in control and, you know, see the color behind you differently. I just see it as I see it. And we're also not in control of ourselves socially, as a matter of fact, right? If we want to get— we're not in control of our profiles. Maybe no one wants to read the book we're writing, right? Maybe we made the wrong choice with a profile photo. Who knows, right? It's a feedback loop. And that is a social— that we are, we are, we have to somehow project and form our profiles in line with the social, let's say, tools that are provided to us. And even then, we're kind of entirely dependent on how it actually works. And unlike in, in previous times, again, going back centuries, we could basically know, yeah, we marry and have children, and then we fulfill our role. Nowadays, that's not even the case. Nowadays, you have whatever, you know, it's, it's not really that easy anymore. And, you know, you maybe that's not actually the best profile to be a mom with 3 kids, right? Maybe that's not that cool. And, and maybe that changes next year, right? We thought it would be cool, but then we find out after a year the whole kind of discourse has changed. And so, yeah, I think that's of course a real problem that we are still kind of orienting ourselves like Noam Chomsky says, we look in the rearview mirror of the semantics of the 18th century, basically. And we're trying to describe the 21st century with it and kind of desperately hang on to it and think we can transport it into the digital world. And I think the semantics is entirely hopeless and actually, I'm exaggerating here a bit, useless to adequately understand what's happening and equally helpless to understand what would potentially make things better or worse.

I think that speaks really well to where we might be going in the future with AI assistance. So when I've researched a lot, particularly with sort of what we might call Gen Z, particularly sort of people in their early 20s right now, they're using AI to outsource a lot of these decisions and make some of these choices for them. And perhaps older people might look on that and think that's odd. But I've spoken to, like, there was a young girl who was a fashion student and she wanted to be sure that she was making the right fashion choices for herself. So, rather than necessarily just rely on her own instinct to make those choices or decisions, she wanted an AI to sort of analyse her style and then choose some of the right outfits or whatever for her. And in digging into this, it just became clear that she didn't necessarily not trust her own instinct. It was that she thought she'd get a more analytic, somehow objective point of view about herself using AI. And I think this might be one of the interesting extensions to this profilicity that we see today, which is, can we use these AI assistants almost to not better curate our identity, but curate it in a different way, perhaps bring some new insights to ourselves and our own behavior that we couldn't see from our own perspective. And then maybe that will create a more interesting or richer sort of profile for each of us in the end. I don't know if either of you have thoughts on that.

So I have two examples of my own of using quote-unquote AI systems to make these types of choices. So one is very similar to the one you described, Tracey Follows, which is when I still lived in London, I used a service called Thread to buy clothes. So the idea here was that you answered a questionnaire about your clothing preferences, you took some photos and made some measurements, and then the algorithm told you what you should wear. You put your credit card details in and the clothes arrived. And I have to say, I got a lot of value from this service as somebody who is just really not that into clothes but of necessity has to sometimes appear moderately well dressed. So that was the first example. The second example is something that I really regret doesn't exist anymore, which is a website called justbuythisone.com, which was built by the reviews website Reevu. And the way that that works was that it would aggregate all of the consumer reviews for every product type. So you would just tell justbuythisone.com, "I need a new laptop and I want to spend £600," and it would say, "Just buy this one." And I loved that service because it took away the futile attempt to make the optimal decision about what laptop to buy. In this context of just an absurd number of different things that one has to choose from, most of which I neither know anything about nor care about. For example, the size of the hard drive, or what specific computer chip is being used at the core of the machine. So I guess to connect this to Georg's point For me, one way of looking at those services was that they dispensed with the old idea that I am a rational, autonomous chooser who can directly make choices about the things in my life, and it seemed to engage more honestly with the very complex reality and the sort of unknowability of what the correct choice is for us in the world that we currently live in.

Yeah, I don't know if I mentioned actually, I don't remember if I mentioned this in the book, but it's possible in the You and Your Profile book. It's a true story. I had this kind of existential crisis, I think, as many teenagers have around the age of 16 or so, when I noticed— because that was still very much in the age of authenticity, and so growing up was basically the task. You have to become, and very soon, an authentic person, and only in this way you can basically exist in your peer group as a teenager. So becoming authentic and knowing, and also being able to demonstrate this, is very important. Now, I still remember this, that I had this crisis that I found out, oh, I'm acting different with everyone, right? With these friends and with the girls, I'm acting different with the boys. And with these friends, I'm acting different than those. When I'm playing soccer, I act different than when I'm at school. And then I thought I'm just like, I'm a total cheat or anything, right? I'm just who I am. It was a real existential, my first existential crisis.. And I had no way of resolving this. And then later on, I started Chinese philosophy. And then I learned that from a traditional Chinese perspective, that's actually a good thing. And then I remember this, because according to Chinese philosophy, which is traditional sincerity thing, it's an art. Whenever you're with a different person, it's a different relationship. And you have to have, you know, develop different, different personality in order to make this relationship function very well, right? You can't act in the same way as a parent then you act as a kid, or right, and you, you're both a parent and a kid most of the time of your life, right? So you have to interact with your children and your parents, and you just can't do it the same authentic way. It's always a relational thing, right? So again, it's not— we're not in control of these. It's just like a national relations we're in. And in each of them, we have to learn to act in a different way. And so I found out then after studying this, like 10 years later, that my experience I experienced as an experience of my own fakeness. But that was just because I was applying the age of authenticity paradigm, right? If I would have lived in a sincerity context, I would have not experienced this as an existential crisis at all. I would have experienced as a good way of growing up and my relationship network becomes richer. I become like more, how to say, more nuanced, right? I develop different personas as it should be with different people. Again, that violates the ethics of authenticity. But again, this goes directly to your point, Tracey, that I think in profilicity, we can learn to, to get away from this paradigm of authenticity. In the book, I refer to an article by a colleague of mine, a sociologist, about electronic music, how electronic musicians in the same gig in the same night, like play under like 3, 4 different names, and they play different kinds of music. And not only this, in this music, they relate differently to the audience and relate differently to the persona they are. And it's like a whole different thing. And again, I'm just saying this in order to support your point, Tracey, that through profilicity, we kind of rediscover this ability that we once had in sincerity, We have to assume different identities in different relationships, which is a good thing, which is not a bad thing. So we experience this whole new social media thing. I think Paul, my co-author, quoted this in the You and Your Profile book. All these different profiles that people have, they should be united in one thing. Otherwise, people are fake, right? That's, that's exactly the thing. It's not true. No, this is why this is a stupid paradigm.. And in Profilicity, once we kind of get used to it, I think we can again, like, recover this actual art of existence that we have. And we all of them equally, right? We're equally the father as we are the kid. And that doesn't mean that we're— that one is— even though the two are completely different, that they don't kind of cancel one another out, they enhance one another.. And I think again, like with, with profilicity and living and curating and living up to and identifying with and being invested in, that's the terminology I use, being invested in, truly invested in different profiles, we can actually go back to some form of richer existence. Why not?

I think that's a really beautiful way of putting it. I mean, I'd said in my book that perhaps we should start to think of ourselves a bit like polymorphic code, that there's a sort of— in that there's a— the original algorithm is somehow intact, but it mutates according to the context. So, you know, 6 minus 2 is 4, but so is 1 plus 3, and it can— so the 4 can show up in different ways, sort of thing. I couldn't find— you've articulated it much more eloquently than me. I was trying to think about what was the the best analogy I could think of, and that was only the closest I, I could get, really. But I love that idea that you've just expressed, and it makes me feel like we don't have to worry so much about there being many selves. It's just embracing the fluidity of the self without being constrained by this authenticity. Sam, do you want to comment on that?

Yes, I mean, like you, Tracey, I will struggle to be as articulate as Georg I would really actually like to apply that clip to— well, I think many— this is a bit of a generalization, but many younger people in their contemporary workplace have very high demands when it comes to authenticity. And I think this is partly because there has been a trend towards authentic leadership and the idea that leaders need to be less command and control and more in touch with their own feelings and sensitive to the feelings of people who work for them. But I guess in, in my opinion, in the professional world, we have probably gone too far. And there are now a lot of people who have a set of expectations about how workplaces ought to operate that are predicated on the idea of people being their quote-unquote authentic selves. At all times. And what that translates to in practice is people just behave— or it can translate to people behaving in a manner that in previous generations would have just been thought unprofessional. So for example, in a work environment, if there is a decision that makes you very angry or makes you feel very upset The idea that it would be inauthentic to proactively manage your instinctive reaction to the decision on the basis that you are in a professional interaction with your colleagues, that has become a— seems to become a difficult idea for people to come to terms with. And I think there are many, particularly younger people, who would benefit in their careers if they heard the way in which Georg just articulated the value in having a sort of multiplicity of selves with which you meet the world, dependent on the context that you are in.

Don't worry, we're going to capture that beautiful articulation and we're going to enable as many other people to, to hear it as possible. I wanted to maybe take you back to something that's linked to what we were just talking about, but was also mentioned at the beginning of the conversation about identity politics. I feel like there's almost a new jeopardy in identity at the moment. So I know, Georg, you talk about— in the book you talk about pride, and you talk about pride being sort of like happy in the successful identification, a feeling of being at home with oneself. And of course, this is— this has been very important to people, and it is still important to people. I wonder if increasingly people are being punished for their identity at the moment. It could be, I mean, I think it kind of started certainly in the West around how they voted. Now it's even punishment for what charity they might give money to. I'm thinking about the Canadian truckers, obviously. But only even in the last 24 hours, I've heard that Big Tech are now flagging any content that you want to share that is authored by a Russian, flagging it and tagging it as Russian state-sponsored media. I mean, regardless of what the content is, regardless of the intentional motivation you have in sharing it, they've identified it and you very specifically, almost, I would say, to bring about shame. And so I wondered if you could talk to this idea, if you agree with it, or even if you don't, actually. We had a pride in our identity, and now there's some jeopardy because we're being encouraged to have shame over our identity, which gives some people a license to punish us. This feels to me like a very dangerous time.

Yes, I fully agree with that. That's a good observation. And I mean, all of these things are very ambiguous. So just maybe let's stick to Pride, but shame is very similar. So on the one hand, like Pride, I think is a main indicator of identity, right? So whatever I'm proud of is something I identify with, right? I can be proud of my family, right, to be whatever, but I can also be proud of your nation, of your country, right? And then you identify with like— and in Germany, we didn't have the best experiences with that, right? We took it a little bit too far, and that can happen very easily. Right. And the same thing can be with religion and so forth. Right. And that doesn't matter what you're proud of, what you're proud to be, whatever you're proud to be, I think is potentially dangerous. And on the other hand, again, it's ambiguous. It is a strong, let's say, emotional— on the one hand, it's an emotional confirmation that confirms your identity, which is somehow, I guess, essential, and necessary. And of course, it also has at the same time, the social signalling thing, right? Pride is then, is always something like you're proud, like the national identity with a flag, you proudly display the flag, right? Or you proudly display the signs of your religion, or you proudly through other things, display your motherhood in certain forms, right? So it's always also something that is an identity that is, that is signalled, right? Because you're proud of it, you you like to signal it. And again, that shows, let's say, the, again, like the precariousness of identity. I think, as I said, that's the same thing why I find identity politics problematic, as I said earlier, because if you base politics on identity and again, the German example for me from my national background, that's somehow unavoidable that that's always on your mind. Right? If you're too proud of your identity and make it into the basic thing of your fucking politics, that's like really the worst thing that you can do. So in this sense, I think I'm not at all, you know, but that's a similar thing between wokeism and, and the populism, right? And it's all that they all do identity politics. And that's really dangerous thing to do. So I'm not a friend of of identity politics, while I admit that in order to have function as a human being, and for society to function, there needs a certain form of, of pride. And there also needs to be, as Sam already pointed out, a certain form of shame, which is kind of the opposite of it. But again, it's, it's, it's a very volatile thing. Shame can also— and you gave an example, Tracey, which I think is also hugely problematic right now. But then you also have all these, again, in Chinese culture, that is the opposite of what I said earlier, in Confucianism, on the one hand, you develop this, this art of relating in different persona. On the other hand, it's a huge shame pressure, right? And you very easily, just as you, if you build your identity on shame as a negative marker, right, that, that you become oversensitive to issues of shame.

Yes, so very interesting times that we live in. I think that one of the best academic pieces that's been written about the age of the internet is a paper by David Runciman, which I think is called Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet. And one of the things that he does in that paper is look at the philosophy of Judith Shklar and particularly at her book on what she called The Ordinary Vices. And the thing that he draws out from that is, well, it's twofold. So one is hypocrisy. That's one of the ordinary vices that really seems to have been foregrounded by the internet. So It certainly seems to me at the moment that the internet both exposes a lot of hypocrisy but also somehow encourages everybody to be really angry all the time about hypocrisy, which I think then, you know, the anger about hypocrisy connects to some of the things we've already talked about in relation to authenticity. Because I think if you buy the idea that the virtuous thing is always to be your authentic self, then hypocrisy is the worst thing that you can do, because by definition you must be acting in a way that is contrary to your authentic self. And, you know, we see this play out in scandal after scandal. If we think about UK politics, we already talked about Dominic Cummings. We don't need to relive examples of hypocrisy in relation to him. The same goes with the Downing Street parties. It seems like the reason people are so angry about these things is because they, they seem like they're hypocritical. So that's one thing that David Runciman draws out of Judith Sklar's writing. And the other thing, the other ordinary vice, is cruelty, which for Judith Sklar, this was the worst of the ordinary vices. And she argues in that book and elsewhere that politics ought to happen in a way that minimizes the amount of cruelty that is inflicted in the world, mitigates the possibilities for cruelty to happen. But, um, what the internet— or another thing the internet seems to have done is create all these new ways in which cruelty can be inflected. So in the language of the public policy debate, we could talk about online harms like trolling or doxxing or cyberbullying. These are all new forms of cruelty that exist, and it seems like we now live in a world where the constant exposing of hypocrisy is an inevitability the response to that, because it is in conflict with the idea of authenticity, is for everybody to be really angry. And they then have many more tools to go and express their anger through new forms of cruelty. And so I suppose when I think about identity politics, I partly think of it in— through this sort of frame And yeah, you know, like, Jay Ogre have sort of deep reservations about it as the basis for politics. It seems to me the opposite of what politics ought to be achieving, which is some sort of commonality of purpose between people who have different perspectives and different interests. That's surely what political systems are for. Is making as equitable a possible trade-off between the views and interests of those different groups.

We seem to be walking away from our tolerance of diversity. For all the talk of diversity, we seem to be less tolerant than ever. And the point you're making there is fascinating because I find some of the cruelest people are the people who are shielded behind #bkind So there's an interesting interplay on identity and profilicity there, I think.

Yeah, I think this— what you just mentioned, right, and we see this has a lot to do with morality and moral language and moral communication, right? Because specifically now on social media, the things that you mentioned, the outrage, right, it's basically always a form of virtue signaling, of moral self-display. And that's such a— again, this is so similar to Sincerity Times where you were always forced to display your honor, where you were always forced to display kind of your conformity with the moral expectations. And now people do this very strongly because it's such a strong identity builder that you just publicly in and often in increasingly hysterical and aggressive and cruel ways you display your morality. And we see this with individuals, but we've seen it also, as you said, we see it very strongly now in a commodified way with companies. I mean, advertising, right? How companies advertise themselves. It's all them all making these moral statements because again, they enhance the prophylactic identity. They're a very strong, almost a drug-like function for the intensity of how identity is shaped in the form of, of moral language and moral profile curation.

So as we get to the end of our conversation, I wonder if I can ask you both to comment on where you think this is taking us. Because if we think we're perhaps entering some of these emergent media, which are much more immersive, very different to social media, closer to virtual reality, I guess, but not necessarily just that, just having an augmented sense of reality too, and these multiverses. And if we've accepted that we've left authenticity behind and we have a greater fluidity of our identity, as the fluidity of our identity meets these multiverses, what does that mean for us? How are we going to stay sane even in these new environments. I'd love to know your thoughts on, on the future.

Shall I say something a little bit deflationary about the metaverse idea? So I think that perhaps some of what you've just described, Tracey Follows, presupposes that we're moving towards a metaverse of the type that is depicted in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash or in Ready Player One, where we've got this completely immersive, interoperable, real-time virtual world in which people spend a significant portion of their time, partly because it is a more appealing place to be than the real world. And I, I suppose I suspect that the metaverse we will end up living in is more of a, a bottom-up metaverse. So it's one that makes the experience of massively multiplayer online gaming richer, which is great for anybody who is into gaming. It probably also allows the economic side of gaming to develop more than it has currently. And so I think in that world, people will continue to be able to live as different selves and experiment with different identities through gaming, as they already do and as they have done for a number of years. But I suspect there'll be another dimension to the bottom-up metaverse, which will be richer experiences of things like Zoom calls. So we've all had to get used to spending a much higher proportion of our work and social lives talking to people on video calls, and it's easy for me to imagine actually that virtual reality could lead to a significant improvement in our experience of these types of remote interactions with other people. So I think for that to make sense when it comes to identity, whereas you might well want to be a completely different type of being in a gaming environment, I think in a social or professional set of interactions in virtual reality, it's much more likely that you will want to have as photorealistic an avatar as possible. And I mean, I think a lot of people were quite scathing about Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the metaverse that he presented in his Connect presentation last year, but there were actually some bits of it that I found quite exciting. So one was the virtual rendering of a real apartment and quite how convincingly it was possible to recreate an actual real apartment, and that made me sort of excited and optimistic about the idea that, assuming life continues in the way that it has been in the period 2020 to 2022, if I can visit my friends and family in a virtual environment that almost perfectly reproduces their real home that I am familiar with, then I'm sure that would be a better experience than having to have Christmas dinner over a Zoom call. So I guess just to, just to sum it up, I'd see it probably as going in two directions. So one is the, uh, the gaming type environment in which a multiplicity of identities are possible, and then the other is the as realistic as the technology will allow environment where one will want one's, one's self and one's spaces to be faithfully reproduced in the virtual realm.

Yes, I'd say something actually similar from a very different perspective. Sam was talking a lot about gaming. I'd use the term playfulness, that we have a more playful experience of identity, right? So, and I mean playful again, like you can play in a maybe obsessive way that's not so good, but you can also play in a very intense and enjoyable way, right? And then whatever, you can play football, or you can play games. But in one, in some way, you know, we're also playing right now, right? We're also playing some form of game. And we'll take on our different personalities, our different identities. And hopefully, if the game goes well, I thought it went quite well. It was a very enjoyable game, right? But then, at the same time, we can approach one another's identity in the spirit of playfulness so that we don't overly, for instance, get angry or don't overly get moralistic or don't overly kind of shame other people, that we approach these kinds of interactions in a playful way, which at the same time makes the experience— and that's the Taoist point— absolutely genuine and intense. Like if you play a good game, that's a very intense experience. Of identity. It's non-authentic, but it's not inauthentic. It's very intense and very kind of a momentary strong experience of identity that at the same time, you can on the one hand let go, which is very important. And on the other hand that you treat, which is equally, if it may be even more important, that you treat the other like also co-players, that you treat the others also as, as identities who participate in, in your game. And if, if we can approach like identity, and particularly in a social context in that way, I think that that would be a very nice thing, a good thing for identity experience.

I think that sounds like an environment we'd all thrive in. I think my concern is about the commercialization of some of this, that's obviously, and Sam's alluded to it as well. I mean, in a previous episode, we've talked about whether you can Tokenize the Self, the gaming pioneers. And people are doing that already in a sense that they're almost giving a sense of ownership to others of their self in that they're monetizing their self. And it's become a series of economic avatars, if you like. And so one of the things we're going to have to be really cognizant of is how we can avoid that from happening. I mean, Maybe it happens in some places, spaces, verses, whatever, but we don't want it— I wouldn't have thought, unless you disagree— we don't want that to be the sort of majority experience. Sam, you look disconcerted.

I mean, speaking personally, it's very hard for me to imagine my enjoyment of any type of game in the broadest sense being enhanced by financialization.

Right.

So I hope that these worlds will be kept separate.

It's one of the reasons I asked who was in control of our identity. Not that I think, as we've agreed, we're not 100% in control of it, but it worries me some of the forces at play here that we've got an opportunity to, in a sense, liberate ourselves, you know, not play by the rules, if you like, of the physical world game. And explore something— well, it's the unknown really, to explore the unknown, because we don't know what it'll feel like or be like or what those experiences will be. And already we're being told that there's a commercial layer on top of it that might snuff that out. That, I think, that's the concern for me. Okay, so what we're going to do just to conclude is ask the question that I ask all the guests, which is what action for identity would you most like to see in the sort of near to midterm future. We're just going to take a short pause for an ad break.

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And we're back. So may I ask Sam and Georg, what would you like to see as your action for identity?

So I'm going to cheat a little bit and I'm going to go back to something that we discussed earlier, which is the social and the public good that can come out of people being willing to share data about them, which, as we've talked about, doesn't necessarily comprise their identity or doesn't necessarily need to be thought of as as being some fundamental property that ought to be protected. I think if people can become more comfortable with the idea of allowing anonymized data about them to be put into the public domain, there's all kinds of benefits that we can get from that. I think particularly in the context of public health.. And I think we can do that with a much lower risk to the integrity of our identities than we've probably become used to thinking about.

Good public data. Georg, is one of yours leaving authenticity behind?

Well, I mean, I was just thinking now of an answer. I also find it like really always important to have break, sort of a break from one's identity, but not just on online. So I still, we can also still experience, experience like offline activities, like going for a walk or going for a swim. Things like this, I think, are super important for enacting, being able to just as a kind of the break you have in between and the switch in between. And not in order to experience your authentic self, but to experience a kind of a moment of relaxation and kind of de-identification offline. I think that's also something I would like to stay the way it still is, fortunately.

A relief from identity. Yes, that's fascinating. Well, wise words just for life in general, as well as for this topic here. Thank you so much for such a rich, brilliant discussion. I've enjoyed it very much, and it's been a great pleasure to speak to you both. I hope you'll join me again at some point in the future. Thank you both.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.