hyperfantasy

Today, identity expression isn’t just performed through the act of contributing to digital media, but consuming it, too. The algorithm has become so fundamental to identity formation that a recent qualitative study of 13- to 17-year-olds in the US found that participants felt their 'For You' page on TikTok wasn't just for them but about them – a... See more

Lore Oxford • The egostack

adding on the impact of consumption
» related to how do we distinguish what’s our own taste and what’s the taste we’ve merely consumed and adapted as our own?

Potent spaces let us play with different permissions that snap us awake. They trade in unusual currencies - permission to scream, to be excessive, to be anonymous, to be scared, to shrink or take up space, to be intimate with strangers. The greater the delta, the greater the potency.

We’re Desperate For Potency

We are in an age of existential tension, losing coherence on what we should be or should do. In not knowing, we observe a collective reframing of the lack of direction into freedom to play & indulge in experimenting with new roles and identities.

There isn‘t a clean way to get around the idea that personal expression is always at least in part performative. Expression is partly fun because it’s performative.

It’s also not like this type of behavior is a new thing. There has always been the type of person who is performative of their own interests or pursues their work because of the kind of... See more

Charles Broskoski • Here for the Wrong Reasons — Are.na

not only are we playing an ever-expanding cast of characters, but we’re expected to commercialize them for public use, before facing their contradictions head on in the panopticon of our digital ecosystems.

Lore Oxford • The egostack

not just commercially, also culturally we are playing into different selves

This ordinary-day ache is a first world problem. That’s not a way to blithely demean it; it is the point. Most of us, in the West, are not mentally ill. We’re not going to go the doctor complaining of our dull, yearning ache. It’s not going to show up in official health statistics. But it’s there. From a distance it looks as if we, the people of... See more

A Crisis of Mattering

what’s behind it: the routine and mundane is safe, but we want excitement, a lil risk

If digital media has proven itself to function as an existential photocopier – with each of us as the source material – the next generation of AI-enabled tools promises even more rapid and radical replications of selfhood.

Lore Oxford • The egostack

If the times we live in could be defined by a single feeling, it might be a sense of disorientation. Trying to make sense of reality right now is like being lost in the woods.

Alexander Beiner • The Sensemaking Companion - Section I

Here was an existence, brand new to our species, that was defined by tightly controlled routines, bounded by regular shifts and rewarded with regular pay. Individual workers became easily replaceable parts in a massive machine.

Today, when we’re still so young we’ve barely had the chance to register we’re alive, we’re pushed into an education system... See more

A Crisis of Mattering

we are being increasingly disconnected from what was fundamentally human, and now we are trying to adapt.