#PulpNonFiction: Future you; is personal identity even a thing anymore?

Now of course, as our identities (professional, personal and corporate) become increasingly distributed and fragmented across the physical and digital universe, the answer to that question, “Who are you?” just becomes even harder to resolve.

This week, I read two new books that dealt with the tricky issue that is identity, The Future of You: Can Identity Survive the 21st Century Technology?, by futurist Tracey Follows; and Klara and the Sun by one of my all-time, top-five favourite authors, Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Future of You looks at established philosophy and new technology and explains how the very idea of an individual identity is under threat as society (both organic and artificial) nudges us towards submitting to greater surveillance, collectivism, central control and consensus; and away from privacy, personal space and even the idea of free will. The more pieces of ourselves (our ideas, our data, our biometrics) we share in the name of greater convenience, efficiency and the greater good; the less “I” is left. As we begin to consider the real possibilities of personal digital twins, and even artificial immortality, where our minds are cloned and uploaded to live on the cloud (as long as future generations of intelligence keep supporting our software and operating system, that is) we have to start thinking about whether personal identity is worth preserving, and if so, how.

Somewhat ironically, the author concludes with the suggestion that the way for us to preserve our identity might be to fragment it. That is, for us to choose which pieces of ourselves to share with whom, and when, and to develop a set of different external identities or social masks, each targeted at a different audience. In this way, we may be able to protect our innermost core from being assimilated into the whole (and, therefore, being lost).

This vision of a multiple-identity identity might seem weirdly futuristic but it’s not so different to the way we have always thought about these things. After all, the word ‘person’ is derived from the Latin ‘persona’, which literally means ‘mask’ – the kind of mask that an actor in Roman times would use in a play. Perhaps we all wear many masks and play many different characters, and the idea of using pseudonymous AI-enabled identities is just a more overt way of organising that. ~ Tracey Follows

Unlike The Future of You, Klara and the Sun is a fictional story set in the not-too-distant future where people purchase “artificial friends” and genetically enhance their intelligence in order to compete with article intelligence (and each other) in the competitive and shrinking job market.

However, at their core, both books raise the same questions around what it is that makes us us. Both books ask us to consider if there is something inside us that cannot be programmed, nudged, controlled and copied. They also both ask us if this something is worth preserving. What is more, they both ask us to consider the masks we wear and they different faces we present to different groups in different situations.

Here, there are clear lessons for businesses and brands as well as individuals in both the narratives.

Who are you? Are you consistently yourself, or do you show different faces to different people in different places?

As individuals fragment themselves, as Tracey suggests, by taking advantages of self-sovereign identity solutions, digital twins, and carefully curated avatars that allow them to display and share only the parts of themselves they want you to see, your business and your brand will have to understand that in a world where everyone is wearing masks, no one is exactly who they appear to be. In other words, in many ways, in many instances, you will be selling to and communicating with artificial people, programmed to behave and make decisions rather differently to the way we were previously used to. You will have to work that much harder to get behind the mask to connect with the individual behind it.