Thursday, May 4, 2023

Chloe21e8 on Online Identity & Technology

Write a simpler explanation of this text, written by Chloe21e8 to explain why she presents her identity on-line in the way she does.

The default state of online existence is as an anonymous marketplace of ideas, a free market of memetic competition. The digital think tank of a sufficiently pseudonymous network, one that maintains devil’s advocacy as a constant, consistently achieves accurate analysis by disassociating content from context: to engage with an idea properly you must separate it from the proponent, allowing it to stand on its own. Biological identity is not only irrelevant but antithetical to this platform.

It is also my belief that advancing technology (VR, AR and AI-based deepfaking) will quite quickly develop to the point of a comprehensive infrastructure for an actively anonymized and reconfigured presentation of identity. “Catfishing” will be the new norm with being able to plausibly change whole gender presentation its ultimate test, and it will soon be as easy as changing out a profile picture: powerful AI filters over 2D selfies are already effective at transmogrifying the face even in real-time video, and 3D virtual reality avatars fully obscure the physical form for digital socialization in the metaverse, while primitive voicechangers are being augmented by increasingly accessible AI which will eventually fully give way to realtime Speech-to-Text-to-Speech for full anonymization and post-gender plausibility, and looking further into the future, we can speculate on an ever-present augmented reality overlay of custom avatars obscuring human forms entirely.

Whether you believe this is good or bad is not relevant, it’s just the fate we follow, and the only thing you can do is develop the conceptual tools to engage it consciously—but it certainly will further complicate the entryist’s attempts to reintroduce material identity into the discourse. It is interested, however, that they rally against these new technologies, one would assume it should be as eagerly anticipated by anyone concerned with the discrimination of oppressed identities as much as it is being readily adopted by the youth of those categories, but then again, the same is true of anonymity. I suspect the dishonesty in their criticism.

Regardless, many are already post-identity online, we have already transcended it, we already live this. Our virtual existences are as digital cyborgs: amorphous, performative, unmoored by any bioreality. And knowing the teleology of technology, we know we are simply the vanguard: we know the overton window of normalcy will continue to rapidly progress towards a universal digital experience, the physical full subsumption into the digital, until it’s reality for all of you too.

Chloe21e8 believes that online interactions should focus on ideas, not on the person presenting those ideas. She feels that the identity of the person should not matter, as it could distract from the value of their ideas.

She thinks that as technology evolves (like VR, AR, and deepfake AI), we'll see more people presenting themselves differently online, changing their appearance, voice, or even gender. Such changes will soon be as easy as changing a profile picture. This means the physical appearance of a person will become even less relevant in the online world.

She also suggests that some people might resist these changes, even though they could help reduce discrimination. She finds this resistance contradictory and suspicious.

Chloe21e8 considers herself and others like her as pioneers of this new kind of digital existence. They're not tied down by their physical identity and fully embrace their digital personas. She believes this will eventually become the norm for everyone, with digital identities taking precedence over physical ones.

Chloe’s text is here. She tweaked the text slightly when posting it on its own.

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