The Coming Identity Bubble

Millennial Aging and Other Observations

‘In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning, significance, and experience of the body are utterly transformed and distorted.”

Eric McLuhan, 2015

The last 50 years, with an emphasis on the last 30 in an age of digital communications have radically altered the way in which man views himself. Even to speak in on my own experiences, a White American Male born in the middle of the 1990s has seen a radical shift in how my own identity is perceived, and those around me see themselves. Inescapable factors of identity, the immutable characteristics are still at the forefront of much of our discourse, however online it becomes just as much of your word as it is who you are. There are many great writers, “creators” (more on that term later), and thinkers who may have views, backgrounds, or practices I find distasteful, but nevertheless listen or check in on what they have to say because they are who they say that they of their words and their works. Authenticity is a difficult thing to discern, even claiming to have authenticity quickly finds itself in the same trappings of a brand, as we’re selling ourselves on the digital street corner of the attention economy.

The attention economy, always at war for your mind, time, and eyes, was given its accelerant as harsh lockdowns during the covid era shifted ourselves away from what was in front of us to what was simultaneously beyond our reach yet always in our pockets. Digital life contains a wave-particle principle to it, it is simultaneously a consumable psychotropic drug but also a plane of existence, a digital ayahuasca of sorts. Designer drugs and algorithms tailored to send you further down the rabbit hole, with identities almost perfectly made and tailored for someone whose sense of self is a mile wide but an inch deep, or at the very least willing to be fashioned for the sake of depth. The one-shotted turbonormie screaming at you that what they believe in, what they repost is authentic truth to what they believe in, when it’s just something that you might find on a simple starter pack meme. This isn’t a hatred of the normie, each man and woman is susceptible to the jiggling of keys of tailored content for their own niche interests.

There’s a cable like quality to it, in which there are millions of fandoms, genres, products, IPs, Histories, and lore to become a part of. Community is traded in a transactional subtraction for what was once taken for granted in a relatively high trust society. Atomization begets digital facsimiles of what once was, with no real understanding of effective gatekeeping due to the radioactive social fallout that came with the destruction of the freedom of association in meatspace.

There’s much to the history of how we got to here that would take far more time than what this rambling essay would allow for, and a great deal of literature is out there on the subject of our online life with cognition, personality disassociation, and how we associate with others online. We can fall easily into predictive discursive traps wherein we’re given the idea that we know far more than we actually do, but this is either because we’re relying on the mediation of the idea itself to come to us through a group chat or our favorite internet personality telling it for us, as we’ve gone full circle and created our own Tom Brokaws or Walter Cronkites in an age of high mistrust of the mainstream press and credentialed classes of experts.

However I must pause for a moment of reflexivity as I realize that I am speaking primarily above all, with a distinctly millennial frame of mind. It is the generation that I recognize or at least identify the most with, even as a third culture kid with my own antiquated idiosyncrasies and a remembrance of “before times” remember dial up, the rise of cell phones and watching as seemingly overnight classrooms began to fill in with the first iPhones with people spending their free periods playing Angry Birds. We’re getting older, with the youngest millennials like myself turning thirty and the oldest of us entering now into middle age. So much our own culture and online groupings are formulated by the test-bed generation that still wants to hold on to that cultural dominance even though the memes, blogs, videos, and formats (Oh flash games, my beloved) will one day be given their own strange historical/generation setting in the way that there’s the “50’s on 5” channel for satellite radio users. Now there’s a technology that no one talks about anymore.

I start with this reflexivity in part because I think it is important to understand that my prediction, that there is a coming “identity bubble” may apply to them specifically, although the consequences of this bubble (which I’ll get into in just a moment) will have second order effects for those younger than myself. Such is the case with any previous generation that participated in or was subject to monumental changes that we still live under the long shadow of today and will continue to do so in a multicultural data focused security state. As Marty Phillips, author of the short story collection Millennium, so craftily put out in the introduction of the book:

“The millennial generation has lived a tragic existence thus far. Theirs has not been a time of turmoil and conflict on a global scale as with prior generations, but like a dreamer experiencing a nightmare, they have watched massive changes overtake them with little control over the world they inherit. They are the children of September 11th, coming of age under an oppressive wave of alarmist and hyperreal media events as reality shifted beneath their feet in less dramatic but more insidious ways. The results have been massive shifts in racial demographics, economic decline, and institutional decay. They had one brief and fleeting glimpse of a much more decent country with semi-functional civics, a stabilizing White majority proud of their history, affordable housing, and a broad middle class.

…

This book was written for that tragic generation. Although comprised of four stories with different characters and settings, each is part of a singular arc forming the millennial bildungsroman. This is an anthological novel. Some stories are more fantastical and absurd than others, but my intent was to capture facets of the millennial White male experience and explore the harsh realities of a world that has been so spiritually and psychologically hostile to them.”

We’ve gone from the pastiche, on the street boner comedy of Tom Green to the explosion of influencer microcelebrities that are more effective at pushing ideas and ideologies than Tom Cruise or the Church of Scientology ever managed to succeed to do so, and with better infiltration/connections to intelligence communities as well. The pull of the Gen X or Baby Boomer TV and Film Star couldn’t pull a fraction of influence that even someone like the odious Tate Brothers do, in part because the technology simply didn’t exist at the time, but also that the cultural messaging of the time was working with differing demographics and of shared/expected cultural norms. The internet age at first saw a great decentralization, there were blogs and places to navigates to specifically if you wanted find exactly what you were looking for. Schawb notes this quite well in his latest article for IM-1776 titled “Slop World.”

The Old Internet is best grasped from the perspective of the culture of pre-digital reality. Because it was largely decentralized and user-driven, it was closer to a 20th-century physical space than a 21st-century digital environment. Users had to invest considerable effort and time to navigate it since content discovery relied on manual searches and complex site directories. Encountering something unconsciously on the Old Internet was almost impossible.

….

By the early 2010s, outlets like Breitbart, Daily Wire and Vox had perfected a formula to leverage algorithmic amplification. By employing polarizing narratives, incendiary headlines, and emotional appeals based on profiled demographics, these outlets were able to exploit existing algorithms to maximize content-sharing across multiple platforms. Platform-based echo chambers, effectively experiencing alternate realities, were born, and a feedback loop between creators of sensationalized content and the centralized social media infrastructure into which it fed was created.

The whole article is well worth reading, and Gio and I have covered it on The Digital Archipelago as well:

Attention Economy Brain Hacking would be something that would make the ill but creative mind of the late Francis E. Dec, Esq. blush and confirm his ramblings to be true, as the minds of white pedigree males have been hacked either for the purposes of going down radical pipelines of politics or even worse become court eunuchs to a state religion that advocates for their own destruction and asks them to find the inversion of Christian self-sacrifice to be salvific for the sake of Yass Queening Girl Bosses to replace them. Prior to his so called “scandal” it should be clear to the reader that individuals like Harry Sisson or former VP Candidate Tim Walz was the Liberal/Progressive answer to straight white men, TV Dads who had “white people tacos” or were nebbish twinks doing tiktok dances because the opposition candidate was convicted on trumped up charges.

As the internet rapidly recentralized for the largest drag nets to be collected for data, the ocean is no longer a safe place, we’ve commoditized privacy with every relatively large YouTuber shilling for a shitty VPN in their ad reads for sponsorship. As Heidi Messer wrote six years ago in an opinion piece for the New York Times, the youth have a much different view of privacy in the way you and I might have, or at the very least grew up with from our parents:

Young people who have grown up on the internet — so-called digital natives — have a much more nuanced view of privacy. They start with an awareness that their data isn’t private. They aren’t shocked that companies collect it, perhaps because they know that this collection enables them to get valuable services free. They know their texts can be sent all over the internet, that any of their emails can be forwarded to anyone else, that their chat rooms can be infiltrated by strangers — with or without their consent. But if a platform violates their trust, they stop using it.

However Heidi gives up the game earlier in the piece when she says the quiet part out loud “My Revenue Stream Relies on Your Data.”

My own company, Collective[i], is a data network that uses machine learning to help companies manage revenue with the goals increasing economic prosperity and reducing layoffs created by uncertainty.

I think everyone at this point knows that there isn’t really privacy, try as we might to evade robo-calls or talking too loudly about something before advertisements for those products come into our social media feeds. The cyberpunk dystopias we live in are far from the adventurous hellscapes of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, with the political spectrums effective contained within a hypercapitalist operating system in which the left wing neo-luddite perspectives of the average 1990s anti NAFTA protestor are now considered to be right wing positions today. Echoing the familiar tune of bioleninism, the only ones ensuring that nothing human survives the near future would be the very ones striving to be seen in games, film, and have the medical public-private-partnership ensure that you the tax payer ensure that their otherness is subsidized and access to your children is enshrined by law.

Thanks Kojima, very cool!

What happens though when the bullshit ends, the trend ages out, or is attacked by differing political classes, or becomes demonstratable to even just the masses that this all really unpopular bullshit? This isn’t explicitly about the transgender movement, horrid and destructive as it is, but of all things. With identities hypercommodified to become vague facsimiles of communities that we once took for granted in the age before “touch grass” was an insult, what happens when people realize that they’ve become shallower?

The Shallowing

The great splintering off into various online communities (even while staying on the same mainstream tech platforms and websites) meant that you could effectively never have a clue what your classmate or your neighbor was into. Growing up you could always tell who was who based on the stereotypes or how they acted. You always knew who the anime kids were because there was always at least one kid who the Naruto-run down the halls in between classes in high school. Just as it was then now we have hyperspecific linguistic identifiers that are their own version of polari, if you know it, you know it and they are in your orbit or relative community based on shared languages and experience. “Based” or “Lindy” come to mind, although there are even more specific ones now as we have textual but a more pictographic language as well, the text now supported by hieroglyphics of memes and gigachad dialogues. Try having to explain to your grandparents over dinner why you think it’s a three way guessing game about how “Frasier Payne” might just be the Vice President of the United States’ alt account, complete with gigachads cursing each other with with magic induced “Norwood 7’s.”

Our perception of others is limited, shallowed out because we expect that those around us are relatively the same age unless stated otherwise, and are on here for similar reasons as to why we are. Maybe it’s to make money, rug pull a meme coin they’ve been dosing their audience with, or perhaps to find like minded people and do well for themselves. If anything my own naiveté is showing because I take breaks from drug/digital astral plane and try not to live my life entirely online. It’s a productivity sink, Twitter is the GroupChat app for me more than it is for actually tweeting these days, as it really is a network force multiplier. This very essay will be shared in those chats as I reactivate my account, hoping to boost its numbers. If anything my usage of it is shallow, as others have found their wives, their husbands, their employers through that app and I am poorly misusing the resource that is right in front of me.

But what is noticeably shallow (and not me rambling on about myself) is how once great cultural, ethnic, and religious touchstones of a collective identity with the hope that its past heroes will be emulated leading to greatness for the future are now merely trinkets for people to collect in their gamified existence. Renan wrote:

The nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate: our ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past with great men and glory (I mean true glory) is the social capital upon which the national idea rests. These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again.

What glory is there to claim when ancestry and the ancestors of great battles of the past have been blackwashed or worse their statues torn down and replaced for something else? The great legacy of America or any other nation shouldn’t be reduced to films about the heroes of sneakers or food.

Great ancestry, the challenges that people face today in our present age is that there is nothing shared, and those who study or attempt to preserve these great things of the past are left navigating through an already oversaturated market of memes, junk history texts, and the difficulty without credentialed access to primary sources that would get to the actual truth. Wikipedia’s policies make hard enough as it is to get access to primary sources, as they usually cite secondaries first with an obvious political bent. Most political commentators will rely on those wikipedia pages or a cherrypicked article off JSTOR to make their point rather than to take the time to dive into the actual materials. The politics feel homeopathic, and people will listen to their favorite niche micro-eceleb to tell them that America had esoteric jewish roots in its founding or that the CIA is still working hard to keep the revolutionaries down, while not engaging in the sources themselves that they claim to back this up and instead just posting covers of books that they probably haven’t read themselves.

Great ancestry washed away for the shallow and flattening.

As I wrote two years ago:

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The present age has a sameness to it, wherein each television show, movie, or music is going to promote the same social message. White male protagonists are the impotent goofs, or retired or aged leaders of a beloved intellectual property that has been rebooted only to have him be emasculated for the future face for modern audiences that can subvert your expectations. Swearing for edginess’ sake and the millennial monoculture for entertainment can be seen vividly in the Games Industry, from WH40k being targeted for its “toxic masculinity” to side shaved heads of female antagonists who happen to be streamers in the last Borderlands sequel. The sameness, can be seen everywhere from the writing to the visual style.

Culture is just as much a reflection of the people who wield the measures of shaping the culture, which is power and offices of authority. Sovereign may be he who decides the exception, but that sovereign can also decide what is and what isn’t in the message of the zeitgeist. This brings us back to Kierkegaard’s concept of the leveling.

Hubert Dryfus gives us a pretty good definition, which I will use here: Leveling is a social process in which the uniqueness of the individual is rendered non-existent by assigning equal value to all aspects of human endeavors, thus missing all the intricacies and subtle complexities of human identity.

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If everything is leveled out, shallowed and hollowed out, what remains are vestigial limbs and bones and structures of what remained before. While some like Roko Mijic are in orgasmic ecstasy that the present technological age has eroded a great chunk of Christianity, (only for older heresies and techno-synthesis of gnosticism to reemerge) he has a valid point that the Faith has been tokenized and reduced to shallow imitations of their older glories. I don’t assume when I see people wearing a cross in public to be confessing believers, instead The Life Giving Cross is a fashion statement. Young people who are so desperate to belong to something may not even attend the Catholic Mass or The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom but will argue over minutiae in theology while never reading the Greek or Latin directly.

Religion however tends to know how to filter people out, and it is after all a matter of Faith in the end. Do you actually believe or are you just LARPing for the sake wanting to belong somewhere? Hence the identity crisis that is to come, although I do want my younger audience to give me a better idea of how it is like for those raised online completely, as my frame of reference both online and in real life is incredibly limited and skewed. There’s a million different fandoms tied to religion, games, film, franchises, hobbies, etc. Eventually some things go out of style like JNCO Jeans or never really get popular that people popularly look on with nostalgic cringe like Ska or ShoopDaWoop.

If she was goin to be remembered for one thing, Katherine Dee had asked that it would be for the prediction she made four years ago that there would be coming wave of “sex negativity.” She was right.

What has come since this prediction has been a cargo-cult cottage industry of “Big Trad” of various influencer types to the reformed roastie types, and feminist types who took what manosphere guys were saying about women and simply said “and that’s good thing actually!” Natalism is mainstream talking point both by the likes of Bennett’s Phylactery (See the Natalism Conference) and Elon Musk talking about demographic woes. Real problems trying to punch out of the slop of “Saved Forever Momma” or guys telling you the same thing being the same way to approach every problem, with the “Yes” gamer meme being used in excess to never dive to the root causes of the issue.

This isn’t to disparage those actually doing any actual work on these problems. There are dozens of good names and accounts working to solve these spiritual, demographic, and cultural ills. But with any social movement, organic or otherwise, it contends with the same problem of slop and the fog of war that is “who is paid” and “who’s talking points are you actually laundering?” Authenticity, once a beloved commodity, is treated as it should be with proper skepticism in the age of Pandora’s Vox.

The Coming Identity Bubble

So what happens when the millennials who grew up and explored this place like the pioneers they told they were realized that they have no real homestead but an irl and online apartment in the city, with no marriage or children to prove they made it or have something to show to themselves or others? That’s a bone-chilling question to ask. Identity crisis are nothing new, people sell their souls for trends and 30 pieces of silver to betray themselves for clout or their worst passions. Just look at Kris Tyson if you want a good example of this.

There will be plenty of people in the late twenties and early thirties that will either listen to their biological impulses and seek to shack up, or find themselves coming to be disillusioned with their political affiliations and walk away or simply change teams if they sense a winner (or better yet money and status.) I fear, as anyone who takes their faith seriously not just for their own salvation but for those they love that there will be a great “E-Apostasy” and a return of a bitter, more vulgar atheism that has its parallels to when someone de-transitions. St. Anthony’s prediction about the age of madness is certainly here to stay, whether you like it or not. Bitterness will be a key feature as the millennials continue to age, some will accept and make due with settling down or finding a place where they might belong in an age of childlessness and the Obama Dear Colleague Letter enabling MeToo and other kinds of culture war inquisitions that will carry down to their younger colleagues. This can be seen with Zoomers not approaching women at all, and Millennial men no better than the Zoomers.

While there is great conversation being had on the subject of “Re-enchantment” right down to effeminate hand wringing over even using that term, the question of “what if you don’t succeed” should be in the back of the mind of anyone seriously engaging with that term. Realistically you cannot save everyone, nor does everyone want to be saved. That vulgar irony we see from many millennial coded left wing accounts on twitter barely veils their sincerity and bitterness, at least right wing twitter has fun with it while calling out those who are in a state of defeated loserdom as an attitude to avoid on main.

Not everyone will want to be re-enchanted, or fall into the allure of community or belonging lest they win another “fell for it again award.” The desperate desire to be seen and to be heard, a human desire for connection above all things, will allow the worst facets of the last decade of culture wars to continue on into disintegration of most depth until there is simply just roving gang of GCs shooting other GC in a ratio intense drive by for the sake of engagement while the world goes to shit right outside their windows. After all if you live in a cyberpunk dystopia, why log off when you can at least make someone else’s digital escapism just as miserable of a place to be as yours is?

This dividing line will probably come with a renewed emphasis on the real world and irl conferences, meet ups, and events. Launch parties and signings for books will popular again now that the covid hysteria has been buried away. Even if it just means having a bunch of guys at a someone’s house to read books and poetry, the nostalgic desire for the third place will be reinvented online only to transcend the digital and into the real world once more. The old traditions of relying on your friend’s recommendations and word of mouth over the mainstream press never really went away, but they certainly have reemerged. However there will be countless others who will want to stay miserable, ignore the words of therapizing morality and “fetishize their own sadness” and make sure others know what they’re doing to. There’s a moment when the enemy, or even the protagonist in any story knows that they’re going to lose or at the very least not make it out of the battle alive.

The real culture war front that will emerge then as we get older, still online as ever, will be those who want to take as many people with them as possible both online and in real life before they too slip from this mortal coil or fall away in to irrelevance. This is a uniquely millennial phenomenon, and its poison will lead to organizations, cults, shootings, and other strange and terrifying facets of “culture” that will be commodified and grow into gradual part and parcel features of our modern way of living. There are trans terror groups in America, people plotting to take on Churches and Christian schools, and Techno Sex Cults with the revival of those simply wish not to die.

The Identity Bubble will come, as those living lives of quiet desperation will hook onto something before going totally numb, or lash out in their own version of a midlife crisis to make sure you know about it and that it’s about how you need to do something about it because accountability in culture doesn’t exist in an age of rampant anarcho-tyranny, and state sponsored commoditization of identity itself. Others will fake till they make it because it’s better than being alone. We all get older, we all see the grays in our hair, and fight with our egos and vanity as we work out, take supplements, and live like we’re 20 when we’re actually 30. Eventually the wound up spring of arrested development finally springs out and you get to see if your launch was a failure or if you made somethin for yourself.

In an age of fandom, pastiche mascot identifiers in social media bios, and woke and anti-woke inquisitors on all sides asking for your money, something has to give. For whenever the levee of meaning and belonging breaks, the call will certainly come from inside the house.