Identity is contextual and, if we are to live, breathe, and grow, it has to remain contextual. The Internet of the “authentic self” — a loathsome, aberrant idea if there ever was one — is an exercise in slowly getting strangled by your past selves.

As we have seen in the previous theses, our digital environment:

Regulates our lives towards a smaller number of paths purposely designed by others rather than trails more fortuitous and exploratory.

Builds up a monolithic authentic self rather than a lush set of mutually-enriching contextual identities.

Is heavily focused on categorising people,

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These trends work together to keep us stuck in a permanent past because they make it harder to follow different trajectories, to see meaning, to grow as people. It’s a world that rewards predicting over inventing.

7. On the internet, the past is a black hole sucking the future into itself.

If Luddism is simply the preference for agency over structures designed and coded by others, we’re going to need a bigger Ludd.

On the Internet, the nudgeocracy isn’t very invested in your agency. A key effect of nudging is to effectively externalise accountability: the choice architect decides how most people will react, but people remain accountable for their own choices.

Structuration is a process of reciprocal interaction between human actors and the structural features of organisations, including organisations defined by technology. Human actions are both enabled and constrained by organisational structures; and those structures are the result of previous interactions.

6. Because on the internet we live in the past, the future is not lived, it is programmed.

If you know to look, you can feel the difference between software crafted with care for its users and systems of vacuous tradition that just happen to be good at producing the vapid fodder of convenience.