Identity in a Networked World

Part Two: Who am I, to You?

To understand what it means to BE a writer in the networked world, we need to understand what identity means in the networked world.

At the start of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, he tells us that when George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans)…

…writes in Middlemarch that Rosamond ‘was almost losing the sense of her identity’ it’s because Rosamond is faced with profoundly new experiences when she learns that Will Ladislaw, the man she thinks she loves, is hopelessly devoted to someone else. Identity here is utterly particular and personal. The identities we think of today, on the other hand, are shared, often, with millions or billions of others. They are social.

But from the perspective of a “node” (me) in a high-speed global network (this), it’s important to acknowledge that a person’s “identity” can only mean their unique personality in the Middlemarch sense in a community (or novel) contained enough that we are humanly capable of getting to know everyone else — I mean, the subtitle of Middlemarch is “a study of provincial life,” and the town, “Middlemarch,” ain’t no London. It’s not terribly “diverse.” It’s small enough that there’s just one Rosamond.

Today, most of us live a decidedly un-provincial life. Even if we live in a remote or homogenous geographic location, our digital networks extend our communities, connections, and awarenesses outward, making us conscious of a staggering number of people, and our minds need to categorize and short-hand at least some of them, especially the ones we barely know. But we inevitably apply this same categorization and short-handing to ourselves. What starts out as a tool becomes a world-view.

Most of us still want to be regarded as individuals, our identities “utterly particular and personal.” This desire drives us to maintain long friendships with the people who really know us, seek intimate relationships where we can be completely naked (emotionally or otherwise), and perform religious devotions to an omnipotent god who sees our soul and knows us better than we know ourselves. And this desire also drives us to be writers.

Ancient poets, Medieval bards, and Victorian playwrights might’ve just been Naso, Kit, or “Rosamond” to the people who knew them best, but once their reputations spread their identities became more social: the rich one, the poor one, the foreign one, the handsome one, the one who puts all those jokes in his supposed-to-be serious plays. But even today we can read them and still understand them as individuals, “particular and personal.”

To further confuse the issue — because why not? — we’re also told that we should “separate” the writer from the work; and then, quite contradictorily, one of my students recently pointed out, young writers are taught to “cultivate” their “personal brands.” If the work is supposed to be separate from the writer, then how come the personal triumphs or failings of the writer affect the success of the work?

Short answer: the work is not separate from the writer. It never has been. It’s all a lie.

In writing we’ve inherited the ancient rhetorician’s idea of ethos, which means, in part, that who we are informs how we are understood. No one is a voice from the void, except maybe an AI. All living, experiencing humans speak from a position, and to understand what it means to write in the networked world, we must understand how that position is regarded in the contemporary human network.

The name of an artist who becomes well-known becomes a “brand” in the sense that “Shakespeare” or “Dickinson” is a brand: it signifies not just an artistic style, not just a tone or mood or time or place, but also the artist’s biography and our legend-form interpretations of that biography and the philosophies that can be derived from it.

The identities of the artists are not incidental to their work — not in public perception, but also not in actual fact: the work is a manifestation of their unique place and perspective in (and on) the universe.

As Hannah Arendt put it: “a writer is his life.”

Many artists are actually fairly stage-shy. Performers have to either love the spotlight or learn to suffer through it (sometimes coping with alcohol and drugs, with tragic consequences), but writers do not have to be performers. Writers, like painters, or sculptors or composers, can work in solitude. They complete and then present their work. And maybe they do want it to stand “on its own,” but it’s hard to disappear. If the work says anything, the truth of what it says will always point back to the author. Be reclusive like JD Salinger and people will write whole books about how reclusive you are.

They’ll also write about how all the things they perceive about you — your race, gender, nationality, religion, and all the nuances of your biography they can dig up — shapes, even explains, your work. Your “particular and personal” identity will be short-handed and mangled against the values of the reader’s culture and time. It will be made into or mashed into your “social” identity as understood by the audience who interprets you. This is not new. This has long been the case.

And so writers are driven, by the same passion that drives us towards love, friendship, and religious devotion, to write ourselves into a form of naked submission to the gill-nets of future generations of strangers, volunteering to be held responsible and accept full consequence for each of our choices of thought or phrase.

Tho we are ostensibly the “gods” of the page we compose, we throw ourselves on the mercy of the reader. We have no say in how we’ll be remembered, or whether we’ll be remembered, and we know, because we can see the long, bloody trawl line of writers who have come before us, that even with the best of luck (and I mean the BEST), we will be mocked, dismissed, subjected to eye-rolls, denounced as boring, regretted for a slog, and taken to task by a bushy-tailed PhD who sees in us delicious errors and failings to analyze and exploit, or a literary criminal whose sinister hands must be nailed to a tree.

Why the fuck do we do this?

In The W.E.I.R.D.est People in the World (how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous), Joseph Henrich explains how the human brain, when confronted with the challenge of literacy (when asked to become a brain that can read, despite having evolved for no such activity), has to repurpose existing parts that evolved for other purposes. One of the parts of the brain that gets repurposed so we can read evolved to identify human faces.

This is just one among many W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) features possessed by probably anyone reading this. This cluster of features makes us all behave bizarrely and unlike the majority of the humans on the planet Earth who are actually the “normal” ones, since they vastly outnumber us.

Many of the other ways in which we are weird involve our failure to be normally family-tribe-clan-focused — we actually think nepotism is wrong as opposed to a moral obligation to one’s kin! We also have an abnormal sense that other people’s moral failures are any of our business — in fact we will correct or even punish those we see breaking the rules, even if they’re not harming anyone we care about, or affecting our fortunes in any way. W.E.I.R.D. people stand up for the principle of the matter! In doing so the W.E.I.R.D.-o volunteers for a short-term penalty and immediate danger. But ALL the W.E.I.R.D.-o’s benefit long-term from these short-term losses and risks.

Take, for example, an experiment where two strangers are paired together and one gets to choose how to divide $100 between them, while the other gets the right to accept or reject the offer: accept, and both subjects leave the lab with cash, reject and both subjects leave the lab with nothing. If you can read this, you probably would split it 50/50, in part because of your sense of “fairness” — even with a stranger? So W.E.I.R.D.! — but also because you’d expect the other person to reject the offer if you got greedy and tried to take $90 leaving them only $10.

But in fact, normal people, all around the world, both offer and accept exactly those terms. The person taking the $90 and the person accepting the $10 are both being more rationally self-interested: they’re taking the full measure allowed them, and it’s rational to accept $10 rather than get zero. But to W.E.I.R.D. people like us it’s more important to punish the greed and unfairness of the person trying to take $90 — to stop them from getting away with it! That means turning down a $10 reward, but if you live in this network, that’s what you will do, and should do — but probably won’t have to do, because if you live in this network, people know they’ll get nothing if they go for the grab — they’ll most likely offer you a 50/50 split, you’ll accept, and thusly the W.E.I.R.D. global-social-network contract will be maintained!

Henrich doesn’t dig into this point, but I think it’s interesting, as a writer, that the very brain adaptations that make literacy possible go along with this whole set of social-network rules that end up being a large part of what we write about: does Antigone owe her allegiance to her brother or the law? How does a family navigate having five daughters and maintain their class and status in a system that demands male heirs? Should Peter Parker use his powers to make a buck and help out his struggling family, or should he stop strangers from getting mugged across the whole city?

It’s also interesting that the adaptations that include literacy make us so concerned with what strangers think — and rightly so, because the thoughts of strangers affect our fortunes and collectively define the nature of the world we live in. This is also what we write about: the praise or blame of strangers, the prison cell and the concert hall, the conspiracy of whispers — the challenges faced and self-sacrifice endured so the young person, armed only with these moral social network rules, can go out and navigate a universe of strangers, defeat a danger to someone they didn’t even know, and return to be hailed a hero.

Becoming W.E.I.R.D. meant that we moved to cities and became very tolerant of being surrounded by crowds of strangers — something that makes normal people fear for their lives. We developed customs about how to interact with meshes of masses, moral ideas of what we owe them and what they owe us. Meanwhile, the changes literacy itself made to our brains also made all those people look a little more “alike” to us. Perhaps this made one person’s face close enough to another person’s story that we could assume we understand strangers on sight, at least enough to keep the peace? Perhaps this made the face in the mirror more like any other in the crowd?

Many have observed that heavy readers of literary fiction have high levels of empathy. They ask: does literary fiction make us more empathetic, or does empathy make us more likely to read literary fiction? Setting aside the chicken-egg question, observe the virtuous reinforcement loop: the part of the brain that reads words evolved to read faces; that doesn’t just mean identifying Jim from Bob, that means seeing Jim’s love for Bob turn into hate, and feeling the danger. So when we read about Bob’s desire for Jim we feel all the dangers implicit in his actions and words. The words themselves are a face, and we are reading them, and that means we are feeling them too.

The writer is on the other side of the empathy channel from the reader, working to communicate those faces and their feelings with the available words. The writer tries to make different perspectives on the world intelligible to (themselves and) others. As I’ve been writing on my syllabuses for years, “writers make the unfamiliar familiar, and make us see, as though for the first time, the things we thought we knew.”

The goal seems to be awakening, in ourselves and others, our often-dormant sense of wonder, our delight at this gift of a life, and just how dumb and funny and crazy all of it can be. At the same time, we are honing those face/word interpretive-empathy channels that help us understand the minds of strangers. And our stories reinforce that the minds of strangers are important, that in this global-social-network the interactions among all people are what make the rules, and therefore create the nature of the world.

A writer is a person who (perhaps like all artists) is more-aware-than-average of the wonder, irony, beauty, tragedy, and the energy and vibrancy of life. But being aware of it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be able to communicate it. For that, the writer needs a brain that’s been rewired in an optimally W.E.I.R.D. way, a strong sense of self (confidence, ideally, but arrogance will do), a high sensitivity to the rules of the social games and all their nuances and/or a willingness to study them, and, in some balance, a relentless commitment to truth combined with a good ear for words — on the page, a long-labored analysis can seem to gracefully roll off the tongue.

This is an essential role. Without writers, and without writers sharing their writing, our vast and powerful W.E.I.R.D. global network has no way of making sense of itself, no way of organizing this messy, complicated web into a coherent, moral, story. Without writers, there is either ritual and repetition, or there is chaos and nihilism. Without the writer there can be nothing new.

An obsession with “identity” is a defining feature of our contemporary networks, and like a lot of people, I’ve read a lot of books about race: Working Towards Whiteness, So You Want to Talk About Race, How to Be Black, Between the World and Me… I just finished Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews (←highly recommend), and I’m just starting Noah Igantiv’s How the Irish Became White.

So far, tho, it feels like the best book written on “identity” is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity. All the other books seem to accept identity-categories and analyze them from the inside. Appiah approaches the subject as a trained philosopher — who happens to be a half-Ghanaian half-British gay man living in the US. Which is to say, he’s got the outside perspective and inside position to get a lot of things really stunningly shockingly right.

Its impact begins even with its title: “the lies that bind” immediately suggests that the thing you depend on (your anchor in the drift of the world?) is a lie — that perhaps race or identity itself is a lie. But of course we all knew that, right? That race is a social construct, an invented category? That gender is performative? That nations are conjured from language families, murderous purges, and the contours of riverbanks? Setting “identity” right next to “lies” and “bind” already does some of the work.

Appiah’s theory of identity is straightforward: identities have to do with some choices, but can’t fully be chosen because identities are social. They are “assigned” to us from without. Yet we also feel them within: we will walk or talk in a certain way because people in our category are expected to do so or have been trained to do so (think of whatever accent you speak with, or what clothing feels “normal” or “comfortable” to you). We make choices of dress and food and habit because of these expectations. We make moral decisions based on what we believe people like us are expected to do.

When people try to move from one lie to another they discover they are “bound”: they might wish to move from “white” to “black” or vice-versa but other people have a say in how successful they are. So much of shifting gender identities has to do with getting other people to acknowledge them. In such a vocally individualist society, we might expect people to decide, “pft, who cares what they think? This is about my particular and personal sense of self!” Instead we see examples like this:

I used to identify as a cis-woman but came out as nonbinary/gender queer last year at work and shared at a staff meeting that my pronouns are now she/her and they/them. I told the team I liked being referred to as they/them but that “she/her is fine, too.” Everyone was affirming, but I’ve never heard or read any of my colleagues use they/them to refer to me in the many months since, and it’s starting to bother me. I wish at least some of the time they would affirm my they/them pronouns, which help me feel seen and known.

Yes, it is entirely reasonable to care what others think, and to expect to “feel seen and known,” even in a relatively transactional social space like a workplace, because our identities are social. If you consider yourself they/them and your coworkers don’t call you they/them, then what the hell does they/them mean, anyway?

Identities are fictions — the “lies” of Appiah’s title — but they are fictions that govern the connections between nodes; we don’t get to invent them by ourselves, and they affect how we feel and act and how others treat us, determine what we can say and must say, cause us to demand respect or politely demur… which is basically everything that’s important about being human!

These identities can also be blurry: Appiah introduces his book by explaining that others find him racially ambiguous. He can travel around the world and people assume that he is one of them, or they ask him, baffled, what are you? He knows all the details of his class, culture, country, and so on, but others can’t read him; this is where identities being social can become a problem — others expect clear signals. They know that how they treat you depends on “things about you.” If they can’t discern those things about you, they don’t automatically know what to do!

We might enjoy being gender- or race- ambiguous: Appiah finds it amusing, and why not? It’s nice to be freed, even momentarily, from the “binds” of others’ expectations. But other people can find it damn annoying, especially if they were raised in a network where such ambiguities did not exist. Someone of my grandmother’s generation might have been raised in a network-reality with two gender possibilities and two “race” possibilities. To someone like that, the contemporary network in general is… upsetting? confusing? Maybe even “morally wrong”?

Appiah speaks an elite dialect of the English language, and his speech, education, dress, class, worldliness, and so on, affect who considers him an insider or an outsider. He’s a male raised in a patriarchal society whose father comes from a matriarchal society. As he points out, this means that his mother’s culture believes the father claims him and his father’s culture believes the mother claims him, leaving him a doubly unclaimed son.

He’s gay and lives in New York where his sexuality is a trivial fact, yet in his father’s country it is a non-trivial fact that invites controversy and the possibility of harm. And these are just the aspects of his identity that a mainstream “Western” audience will identify with — there are deeper identities within Ghanaian culture that are obscure to us, including a multitude of religious practices and language families, and individuals whose status (and treatment) varies for reasons that to an outsider might seem very arbitrary.

The real question to ask yourself, now that you’ve read my summary of Appiah’s biographical details, is how these details affect your interest in reading, or willingness to read, his book. Or even how do they affect your opinion on or understanding of his ideas that I summarized and shared? How does this man’s position in the mesh of the global network affect the value we assign or the truth we perceive in his work?

Appiah’s book falls short in only one way, to my mind, in that he doesn’t account for technologies nor for the passage of time. For reasons known only to Art itself, Appiah included only categories that start with the letter “C” — like Country, Creed, Color, and Class. That means that he doesn’t account for the “lies that bind” us to technologies or to generations. He doesn’t mention the subcultures of Discord, Reddit, or Instagram, or the differing rituals of Millennials and Baby Boomers. These could fall under “Culture,” but he doesn’t address them there, or anywhere. The differences between his own and his elders’ generations get a few humorous nods in his personal anecdotes, but no analysis.

Instead Appiah keeps the book short and ends us on an uplifting note by quoting the Latin poet Terence’s famous: “homo sum - humani nihil a me alienum puto.” As he translates: “I am human. I think nothing human is alien to me.” And he concludes: “now there’s an identity that should bind us all.”

In 2019, when this book was published, this ending might have read as fairly banal. But today, even casual readers might sense a bit more weight to it, because since November of 2022 we live in the post-ChatGPT-era, and there are now things not human that may be alien to us, and we’re not so sure what to do about it, at all.

The biggest change in our contemporary networks is not that there are more genders or races in the mesh of connections, it’s that there are now also non-humans in the mesh of connections, and we don’t always know who they are. Sometimes the non-humans play the role of “the tools themselves” — so something we regarded previously as an inert object or programmed routine now must be understood as a manipulative force that can see us, probably better than we can see it.

Douglass Rushkoff published his book Team Human in 2019, the same year as Appiah’s The Lies that Bind, but Rushkoff was looking ahead, and had his eyes set square on technology. As the title suggests, he is focused on the moral alignment of all human beings in the face of… well, I guess some other, non-human team! Who could that be? Whoever or whatever they are, they underline Terence’s homo sum, and demand a homines sumus (we are humans). It’s Appiah’s “identity that should bind us all.” Unfortunately people often need to perceive a “common enemy” before they will come together — it takes a “them” to make an “us.”

Rushkoff’s book is organized into a list of “100 theses” which are gathered into a sections like “Economics” and “Social Animals,” each of which attempts to explain a part of the sprawling mesh we live in, and how these parts might be pulling apart our humanity. Each numbered thesis is given in a few pages or less, with explanations and examples, and each is riddled with BOLD STATEMENTS.

He points out in #11 (part of “Social Animals”) that “threats to our relationships are processed by the same part of the brain that processes physical pain,” to emphasize the degree to which we’ve evolved to need each other. In #18 (part of “Learning to Lie”), he explains that “for all the benefits of the written word, it is also responsible for replacing an embodied, experienced culture with an abstract, administrative one,” enabling the growth of ancient empires based on well-tabulated slavery and exploitation.

In #28 (part of “Figure and Ground”) he points out that “While people once bought products from the people who made them, mass production separates the consumer from the producer, and replaces this human relationship with the brand,” which is a helpful perspective for the writer who objects to being a “brand.”

In #36 (part of “The Digital Media Environment”) he describes the collision of our evolved instincts against our profit-seeking digitized lives:

We become addicted to digital media precisely because we are so desperate to make sense of the neuro-mechanical experience we are having there. We are compelled to figure it out, calibrate our sensory systems, and forge high-touch relationships in a landscape that won’t permit any of these things. We instead become highly individuated, alienated, and suspicious of one another.

Engagement through digital media is just a new way of being alone. Except we’re not really alone out there—the space is inhabited by the algorithms and bots that seek to draw us into purchases, entertainment, and behaviors that benefit the companies that have programmed them. They outnumber us, like “non-player characters” in a video game. We are as likely, or more likely, to be engaging with a bot on the internet than we are to be engaging with another person. And the experience is likely to feel more rewarding as well.

The book’s breadth doesn’t allow for a lot of depth — there are endnotes, but this book is a big-picture summary, a god’s-eye-view of the Human Network as a whole and what it’s doing to us socially, biologically, economically, emotionally, and so on. It establishes a general landscape on which members of Team Human may plant their many mortal feet.

Rushkoff’s final section is “You Are Not Alone”; the final thesis is “Find the others.”

It shouldn’t be hard to “find the others” if “the others” are just all the other humans. There’s billions of us, we’re everywhere! But it doesn’t really mean that, does it? It means find the others who are, like you, discontented with this new social contract: machine-mediated and machine-paced, trust replaced by verification, truth determined by clicks and statistics, and people replaced by brands.

Face it, there are lots of humans who are not on Team Human!

This doesn’t mean they’re consciously bowing down to their robot overlords, but this god’s-eye-view full of BOLD STATEMENTS isn’t something everyone’s going to understand or identify with: it assumes the W.E.I.R.D. world is “normal” for one thing, and there are plenty of W.E.I.R.D. people who won’t accept that they’ve been conned into believing a bot/NPC was a real person, or even that their interactions with the network can be described as “neuro-mechanical.” There are those who believe the gains of digital isolation outweigh its social losses, that this system will enable individual immortality, transhuman transcendence. More commonly, there are those who are simply too invested in the divisions among us, who disagree with Terence, who believe other humans’ identities ARE alien to them.

One of my students described these last, enduring divisions within what could be “Team Human” as a problem that will solve itself when older people die off, and I was sincerely sympathetic to this perspective, because in my younger days I’d said that too. But now I know this “wait for them to die” idea is not just unkind, it’s also incorrect.

“We” can’t wait for “them” die and cease to be obstacles to change because even dead, they help shape the systems in which we live.

The past in not really past. The past is why the world is how it is.

“Team Human” means nothing if it doesn’t include all manner of living, all manner of dead, and all manner of future possible people. The rules of the social contract are made of interactions and negotiations, and the way we enforce our values (even when they aren’t our business), and our willingness to pay a price. We weave this reality of words and faces, stories and selves, nodes and linkages, costs and benefits. It has a past and future, and neither can be ignored. That old greedy transphobic racist is just as much a part of the network as you are. Maybe more so, sorry to say, if she’s better or more centrally connected.

Jean Twenge’s most recent book, Generations, convinced me that the generational categories we come up with — GenX, Millennials, GenZ — are not meaningless bullshit. For a long time I believed they were, in fact, meaningless bullshit. The only “real” generation was the Baby Boom, because that was a demographic phenomenon. The rest is just looking for labels, right? But she was able to show in her book not only that the distinctions among the “generations” are real, but that they are explicable. While there may only be one post-war mega-generation, that generation emerged into an era of accelerating technological change. And those changes in technology affected how people thought and believed, how they felt, and what they wanted. As we continue to accelerate through more changes, we find ourselves as different from our own parents as our parents were from their grandparents, and as different from our children as our grandparents were from their ancestor peasant farmers several generations back.

It’s important to understand this if we want “Team Human” to mean anything: this is a team that must be multi-generational, and those many generations are going to have to be intelligible to one another.

The differences among generations, as Twenge describes them, have everything to do with the technologies that mediate our social experiences — how we understand and connect to others. So these aren’t trivial differences, like a mere change of fashion; these are fundamental differences in how we relate to other human beings, the mesh of the network, and its rules. In that way, “generation” is as much an aspect of “identity” as language or culture.

Being alive is a matter of identity that all living people share, even if they come from different generations with wildly different media habits and entirely different core concepts of the way the world works. All of us will die. Or “die off.” Yet even dead, all of us will help shape — and bear responsibility for — the systems in which future people live. Especially if we recorded our perceptions and experiences in stone, paint, or words. This is part of what writers do: we listen to the dead, and we speak to people who haven’t been born.

Our vast global human network includes most W.E.I.R.D. people through interests and media, family, jobs, schools, and other institutions. The network includes many races, genders, nationalities, systems of belief, and generations. But it also includes the dead — and some dead people are very centrally and powerfully connected in the network. Their words live on with their names attached. Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, and Emily Dickinson are still in our network, because, even dead, they’re still here.

We can’t name the nodes who have fallen off the network because they are by definition the ones we can’t name. Yet even they may have created effects in the network that are ongoing like ripples left by stones that disappear into a pond. They made our customs, honed our rules. We lack the knowledge to attribute them, just as we’ll never know who was the first person to use a slang term or tell the first iteration of a long-since-evolved fairy tale. But their effects live on, even if their names are lost.

Past people affect more than just how we think: any individual human who lived in the 20th century is responsible for a quantity of carbon in the atmosphere, and those greenhouse gasses didn’t disappear with them into the grave. Their lifelong contributions to landfills or mid-oceanic garbage patches are still here, even if they are not. Relationships they set in motion continue and lead to others in conflict or congress and the birth of new individuals who would never have existed without them. This is the physical, “machine” part of the human network that we live in, and it has a humbling effect: we realize that the shape of the world we live in is a collaboration not only with the living but with the dead and that we are collaborating with the yet-to-be-born, unable to predict their evolving preferences or needs.

So an enduring presence in the Human Network can go both named and unnamed; when we formulate ideas into words, tho, those ideas require an ethos, an intelligible human source with a position in the network; attaching our identities to our words can offer a kind of immortality should those words endure, but it comes at a pretty high cost: our reputation will continue to evolve long past our ability to say anything about it.

Writers ultimately decide it’s the only right thing to do — in a W.E.I.R.D. world, where principle takes precedence, and ideas travel the network via words both backed by human identities and shaped in our minds by the lines of human faces, and the ideas these words tell will form the rules of the social contract and make prosperity or catastrophe for the future people — so what can a writer do, but just keep writing?