The future fault lines of identity

In the last post I was looking at the tension between #looksmaxing and #beautyburnout. One moment you’re looking at a plan for what your face could become. The next you’re reading about people exhausted by the work of keeping up. I wonder if there’s a politics of identity beginning to take shape in that tension.

The thought starts somewhere else, actually. In dense, globally connected cities, people from different parts of the world meet, have children, and make a culture together. Ancestries overlap within families. The old racial categories can get harder to fit around a single household, even as someone in that household still encounters racism looking for a flat or a job. Where some of those boundaries do loosen, what else starts to matter in how people identify themselves and sort one another?

I suspect some of the next fault lines will run through things we still think of as taste. Maximalism, minimalism, materialism and its less tangible counterpart. You can own one grey sweatshirt and spend hours tending to a version of yourself that exists mostly on a screen. I’m coining #jammymaxing, from jammies, for the art of taking casualness as far as it can go. I can imagine people taking real pride in how little of themselves they’re willing to make into a project, and an industry selling them the right pyjamas.

And who’s authoring any of this? I choose how to present myself. The systems I use pick up on what I choose and what I linger over. They were built by people, they change as we use them, and they put possibilities in front of us that we might never have thought to choose. Somewhere in there it gets hard to say whose idea it was.

That’s where I want to take #identitystratification. Two people from the same city or family might grow up with very different ideas about what parts of themselves are available to change, and what they’re willing to let a machine decide. I keep reaching for the word speciation. Give them a generation or two. I wonder what each would recognise in the other’s idea of being yourself.