How we collude with social media to hide our identity-choices

Why we let algorithms define us, and how to catch the choice before it happens

Collapsing our self-identity around our reactions

On social media I start to define myself by what I do with my attention.

I read “Elon said what about Trump’s bill?!” and I’m suddenly defining myself by a narrow ideology, what groups I belong and exclude myself from, and essentially what’s going to give me a shot of excitement—regardless of whether I endorse it as my more whole self.

I’m trying to point to the ego-collapse aspect of this well-known social media critique as a way to help us remain conscious as it happens. Essentially my self-identity wraps around the focus of awareness, rather than awareness itself. This is an analogous mistake to identifying my whole body with a single finger—my “self” includes my attention and my actions, and is indeed defined by them, but not exclusively (and not that much).

The unconscious choice of framing a self

This makes sense because this is how the platforms frame me, in order to sell me, in order to survive.

I don’t blame social media. I think framing a self is unavoidable for us mere mortals (when we’re out of flow, satori, oneness, etc). We have such an inborn sense of individual agency, we can’t help but project that onto the world, anthropomorphizing even volcanoes and tornados.

We tend not to pay attention to stuff that we take for granted, which includes these framings of a self. Most of us define the difference between “me” and “my environment” unconsciously, even though they demand each other and both arise in awareness. We don’t even realize we’re doing the framing or that its being done to us. It’s “the water we’re swimming in.” So it doesn’t feel like something we’re agreeing to, and therefore doesn’t feel like something we can change.

But we can! Doing a “subject-object move,” where we are able to see “who I am” as an “what I’m doing” in a new, more expansive subject of awareness.

Mixing up awareness and attention

I’m claiming that we humans feel our capacity to be aware as unlimited whether we know it or not; and we mistakenly extend this feeling to attention. This can account for some of why we always have more on our to-do lists than can be done; why we often feel surprised by our aging; etc. This conflation of awareness and attention means we’re often unaware of the real cost of being on these platforms and selling our attention.

I’m writing this out to try and understand how identity-formation and construct-awareness play in… here’s a construct I’m suddenly exploring: we collaborate with platforms to perpetuate the confusion we humans have between our experiential boundlessness of awareness and finite attention; the Divine and human. Platforms get to exploit this mix-up for profit and we get to remain ignorant about how much power we truly have to choose how we carve up the world with our distinction making, including our selves.

Blaming Big Tech keeps us tricarcerated

So with social media we commodified our limited attention, and then we mis-identify with that limited attention.

Yes, the economic model requires reducing consciousness to metrics and we Goodhart these.

Yes, if we blame Big Tech we never have to deal with a sense of responsibility and guilt for the self-frame choice we didn’t realize we made.

But we also don’t get a way out.

We end up “Tri-carcerated” as Bayo Akomolafe

talks about: seeking liberation through conventional frameworks (victimhood, blame, and external solutions) traps us further by obscuring our deeper complicity and relational entanglement with the issues we face.

Subject-Objecting identity as one way out

Lucky for us, we’re never actually stuck because we can’t ever commodify awareness. Something universal, infinite, and inexhaustible can’t be split into discrete units and bargained for. What’s infinity divided into smaller bits? Still infinity.

So anyway one way out for us individuals is to see the identity collapse mechanism as soon as possible, even after it happens. Usually it’s obvious in our reactions going against our preferences: “I’m so angry about this news item!” becomes “I’m treating my attention as if it were awareness. I’m probably scared of taking responsibility for this choice”

The intervention works regardless of awareness's actual nature as long as you agree that one can feel a sense of awareness being infinite, and misapply it. Which makes sense, because feeling infinite and finite at the same time can be a real 🤯 .

And luckily, every moment is fresh and offers this recognition as a possibility. Rather than identifying with whatever currently occupies the foreground, we can notice the awareness that it happens in. Not to bypass, or avoid; we are still our attention, but we are more. We take the power that was always ours to begin with.