weekly Go Flip Yourself

what you truly really want is wealth; not money

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.

Understanding how cultural transmission exploits relationships in a network of ‘bits’ doesn’t only help with the preservation of current knowledge. It can also give us an insight into new cultural practices that might be discovered in the future.

When you talk like this you locate authenticity at the level of the identity. “This is my authentic identity; the rest are fake.” But I have a lot of identities! I’m a father, a husband, a writer, a coordinator at a gallery—which of these identities is the authentic one? It is more useful to think of authenticity as being about how you play your identities. There is a way for me to play husband authentically, and there is a way to play it that is not. And so on for every other identity I have—including the obviously fictional ones. Authenticity is not about the identity, but the way you use it.

Identities are interfaces. Pseudonyms are social technologies.