> Show business had been one way of establishing identity by just put-ons. And without the put-on, you're a nobody. It always felt disingenuous to "smile for t

> Show business had been one way of establishing identity by just put-ons. And without the put-on, you're a nobody. It always felt disingenuous to "smile for the camera" when really my life circumstances were plainly miserable at the time. However, by refusing to participate in fraudulent representations of your identity, you now become a nobody; a digital vampire, without a reflection in the black mirror. > Role-playing has become the normal mode of survival in the business world. You adopt an alter-ego. In the modern information age and WFH era, this is a non-corporeal identity whose representation is purely digital. > When you're on the air, you're a discarnate being. It may or may not have any correlation to your "actual" (read: corporeal) identity. > Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. In modern censorious culture, the boundaries of your non-corporeal identity are being violated without consent - in order to have an identity (read: participate in most mainstream social media on the Web), you must adopt the ethics of the Moderator class and the masses of Users that uphold the group identity. Failure to accept the group ethos and install it into your non-corporeal identity leads to a deprivation of that non-corporeal identity; whether you were banned or merely refused to sign up on principle, the effect is the same - you are a ghost without a digital representation. > [...] and this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity. What makes this uniquely more dystopian in the COVID era is that identity has progressed to Baudrillard's third order simulacrum: "it masks the absence of a profound reality." Whereas the distinction between one's non-corporeal (digital) identity was clear in decades prior, due to, e.g. low megapixel cameras; low video resolutions & bitrates; historical groundings in BBS, mailing lists, and fora; etc. ...it is now becoming easier - tacitly assumed, even - to conflate one's digital identity for the "real person" (discussions of what a "real person" is notwithstanding). Indeed, for many people we encounter, our only interactions with them will be digital; especially during that time where in-person interaction was in fact forbidden, for reasons of public health. Thus, failure to assimilate into the group identity and uphold its manner of thought feels much closer to a direct assault on one's personal, corporeal identity.