>Tosu, why do you think your ego is uninvolved in online posting?
The question is not why is the ego uninvolved, the question is why do we consider it to be involved by default. When writing on the internet, projecting our real identity is a special case, an exception, which became normalized with abusive social media websites for egocel normies. This is what a proper understanding of the Miya-dharma regarding digital identities implies.
Miya-dharma: On Digital Personas
Thus have I heard.
Online socialization is problematic and abusive. We are not really ourselves when we post on the internet. Instead, we develop artificial personas that do not necessarily correspond to any part of our real life identities. The usual term for these entities we create is “egregores”. We constantly feed our egregores with our attention, we feed others’ egregores, others’ egregores feed ours, they are taken proper care of this way and start developing
Online cultural and tribal temporalities are radically different from offline. Primitive man reaches old age with the same people he grew up with. Modern man often changes environments: schools and workplaces usually. But the internet accelerates the velocity of this phenomenon to ridiculous rates, as we start changing group chats and best friends and enemies on the basis of months, removing all our traces and uprooting ourselves from our primary networks continuously.
Well, not ourselves, our personas. But we consider them to be ourselves, and thus we absorb all the anxiety they have accumulated over time, all the pain from losing their friends and loved ones repeatedly, we internalize all their traumas. The internet is dangerous. This thread is to be explored in another post.
We think that we are more honest on the internet, that the mask of pseudonymity we wear helps us express our real selves without repercussions, but we are just intoxicated. People also believe something similar when a person has drunk a lot of alcohol, that they’re letting their true selves slip out. But they are just drunk, and they’ve no idea what they’re doing. Even the law recognizes this, and administers more lenient penalties to people who are under the influence.
It’s often the case in internet chats that we post something provocative just to see reactions, for that quick dopamine hit when we are bored at work for example. Then we continue playing along that thread. Another indication: in case the chat moves on to voice, our temperament suddenly changes, since we hear ourselves speak with our real voice and sense the disparity between the meatspace reality and whatever we just posted.
Interlude: Xenobuddhism
It’s 2006 and methed up Nick Land expresses some concerns regarding the privileged ontological status of humanity on the Hyperstition website.
Neo-Śūnyatā Arrives From The Future
I want to take Miya’s conclusion a bit further and posit that not only do we not carry a “real self” on the internet, but there’s no such thing offline either.
I mentioned getting drunk as an example. We can agree we are not our real selves when under the influence of substances, but even without them there’s no stable identity that we can discern for ourselves. Even when sober, we have constant mood swings: just eating something and increasing our blood sugar levels has profound effects on our mind state. We’ll try to express all of these different states as percentages away from a “baseline state” where we are 100% us, but we cannot find one such state no matter how hard we try. Ironically, physical appearance is considered to be a superficial manifestation of a person, but it is precisely the physical body as opposed to the mental state that seems to be more or less stable along the years until it eventually starts to disintegrate in the last years of life. We're just aggregates of mental and physical constituents in flux.
Siddharta Gautama put forth the theory of the 5 Skandhas to explain the constituents of each person and where they consider their essence or personality to lie in. The Skandhas (“aggregates”) are matter, sensations, perceptions, memory, and consciousness. Siddharta uses reductionism to make the argument that these are simply the constituents that make up a person and no identity is to be found outside them, as there’s no identity to be found in one of them either.
A modern phenomenon known as "whole different nigga when off the clock" is testament to this. Just like on the internet, in meatspace we constantly readjust ourselves to fit in our surroundings. But each time, we need to pretend that our currently assumed role is our “real” one that expresses us 100%, because society relies on stability and consistency to function properly. The internet just removes this limitation, and this is why magic happens. It acts as a catalyst for the virtualities we can implement. All the intensities that make up our identities can be picked up individually and compartmentalized under pseudonyms, where they can be accelerated to their conclusion or exhaustion. True exploration happens this way.
Here's what Nirvana looks like. Our friend realizes that the concept of personal identity is just smoke and mirrors. He does not have a "personality", he has a nervous system that is triggered by different things every day. The autistic isn’t trying to find an essence in “traveling, coffee, dogs” or in having a good taste in music and Russian literature. He’s a pure dopaminergic schizo delirium whose only “““personality””” is the obsessive interests developed each week and dropped the next in search of rabbitholes that bring even more novelty.
