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50 sats \ 7 replies \ @elvismercury 29 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: The faceless "you" meta
Yup, understood. They're not the same, just, like, cousins or something :)
This one I will push back on. Some identities, in some contexts, can certainly be abandoned. But in some, an identity is a thing that accrues capital. Human civilization is entirely built on the idea that there is a you and it accrues reputation over time -- are you someone I trust, want to interact with? Are you an enemy? Identity is at the heart of all that. Modernity has done weird things to that idea, sometimes for the good, sometimes not. In many cases, abandoning an identity is a profound loss.
Now that I put it that way, seems like another cousin is this morning's post. If we separate our identities from the "real" us, what are the consequences?
just, like, cousins or something :)
These posts are settling down a family it seems. 🥸
Some identities, in some contexts, can certainly be abandoned. But in some, an identity is a thing that accrues capital.
That's why being anonymous is important, there's potentially no limits of how many identities you can own and manage, say you're in a political community and also in another totally unrelated, some people could go against you because of what you said that doesn't even matter in the context you're in at that moment, keeping them separated from each other can help greatly for that.
If we separate our identities from the "real" us, what are the consequences?
It depends on what you do, is "you" really required for what you're going to do? If the answer is "no" or "maybe" you should keep it hidden altogether.
And, as I written in the post, the "real" you might just be a "persona" of yourself, I think we should ask something more like: "Is my face really needed to have a believable and valuable identity?"
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Indeed. In my experience, it's a question of how much time you want to allocate to such things. A person can become someone others find worth listening to, which can take months or years. If circumstances dictate that that reputation is lost, re-establishing it takes months or years, again. The intervening time is ... unpleasant.
Perhaps one day you'll write a retrospective, after a series of identities. That would be an interesting post.
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It's true, starting over again can take a long time, but surely you're not actually stating entirely from scratch.
Sometimes you can find people who seems to be capable of amazing feats like nothing, those are often people who have background experience that you'll never know that forged them in a way that let them stand out from the crowd.
I'm also interested in reading such stories from those people, here on SN or anywhere really.
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It gets kind of nuanced in defining what "from scratch" means.
I still have my brain and experiences, but (in these cases) I no longer have the shared context with people. They don't know how to evaluate me. So then I behave like myself in the new context, and over time they come to value that however much they do. But, during the times when I've actually done this, I've been surprised every time with just how long it takes; or flipped around: surprised at how valuable that common context and experience is, how much it's practically worth in any complex environment.
There are some environments where you can imagine this working much faster, e.g., if the only expression of who you are is with git checkins or something, you might quickly get a sense of how much a person is to be trusted. Most of human interaction is much less that way, though. I think people are often mistaken about the extent that this is true.
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Well, everything is highly personal here.
Some could go for a clean state, while others might use their previous identity as a base or even going against it to get back on track.
Each of us has their own way of doing it, the only common factor here is the knowledge gathered and the type of "exposure" required for a certain activity.
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Yeah, it makes me think how babies and animals act somehow.
They judge you for what you do, not for who you are.
If you're bad they avoid you, if you're good they'll approach to you.
Pretty much like that, if you can't see a face, you can only judge by the products of their work and if you screw up, no biggie, just wipe everything off and start anew.
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