The Post-Individual

The activist and technologist Pia Mancini once told me about the emergence of a new word in Barcelona: yosotros — a combination of “I” (”yo”) and “We” (”nosotros”) that represents the collective I, the singular We. The term emerged through political movements, but its implications feel bigger. Could this represent a form of collective self? A new p... See more

“I like to think of my work as ‘out there.’ And I am ‘in here.’ The thing with the computer is that you start to lose track of the ins and the outs.”

Like content feed algorithms, the internet grants us the ability to segment our micro-personas into distinct identities that create and join communities with the micro-personas of others. On the internet our inner selves come alive to manifest parallel realities so powerful they’re overtaking the world that created them.

For individuals before the internet, the key existential question was “Who am I?” After the internet, it's “Who all am I?

The internet opened up a new inner-outer virtual world where our thoughts were typed, confessed, searched, expressed, and manifested with the thoughts of others. A world where we became born again as individuals in a new realm.

No longer were we constrained by physicality or geography. We could be whoever we wanted to be. We could be however many we... See more

We’re in the midst of a significant evolution in what it means to be an individual. This experience and confluence of forces is what I call post-individualism — a term intended to capture the ways computers and the web have changed our sense of self and how society is changing in response.

Earlier generations were bound by family, geographic location, and their physical being. People today face few limits on their ability to explore, express, and manifest distinct identities. But our approaches are shaped by the platforms and algorithms we identiate through.

The spaces previous generations filled with close human relationships we fill... See more

What I’ve come to realize is that while our potential identities are infinite, our energy is not. Energy put into one identity is energy taken from another. To be Very Online is to be Never Offline. To become infinite is to become infinitesimal somewhere else. As Turkle wrote in The Second Self :

“For adults as well as children, computers... offer c

... See more

Post-individual collectives: In an era of individualism, how many followers you have is the key social indicator. In an era of post-individualism, it’s what groups you’re a part of that matters. The individual isn’t erased, it’s supported and strengthened by aligning with others. As more of our social and inner lives are lived online, internet-base... See more