I don't know how I stumbled on this two-year-old post - ah, the joy of hypertexting your way through Substack! - but I will now be thinking about it every time I see an anime profile pic, a dog, a cat... etc. In other words, every day for the rest of my life, probably. It's a contender for the best thing I've ever read on this website.
(And this is despite finding your concluding thought, about the potential of the fragmented self, to be wrong! Or rather, I think we *are* moving towards fragmented selves, and that is bad - but this is maybe just my perspective from two years on, where stuff like Vtubing and ""alter systems"" are getting increasingly normalized, to my chagrin)
wow i had completely forgotten that i had written this, it's been so long! thank you so much for your nice comment.
i actually think i was too optimistic in my conclusion here, but i can only really say that with the benefit of hindsight. i still think that the model of the 'authentic' self has been replaced by an overly performative self, but i agree that this is starting to feel impossibly grim -- in fact, i feel some nostalgia for the obsession with authenticity that characterized the first half of the 2010s.
I don't know how I stumbled on this two-year-old post - ah, the joy of hypertexting your way through Substack! - but I will now be thinking about it every time I see an anime profile pic, a dog, a cat... etc. In other words, every day for the rest of my life, probably. It's a contender for the best thing I've ever read on this website.
(And this is despite finding your concluding thought, about the potential of the fragmented self, to be wrong! Or rather, I think we *are* moving towards fragmented selves, and that is bad - but this is maybe just my perspective from two years on, where stuff like Vtubing and ""alter systems"" are getting increasingly normalized, to my chagrin)
wow i had completely forgotten that i had written this, it's been so long! thank you so much for your nice comment.
i actually think i was too optimistic in my conclusion here, but i can only really say that with the benefit of hindsight. i still think that the model of the 'authentic' self has been replaced by an overly performative self, but i agree that this is starting to feel impossibly grim -- in fact, i feel some nostalgia for the obsession with authenticity that characterized the first half of the 2010s.