Living as Digital Dividuals

Hall of Mirrors: Digital Personae and the Fractured Self (3/3)

Open Twitter, scroll, like, fidget; switch to LinkedIn, check notifications, roll eyes; answer a Slack message, scan your email inbox—all before your morning coffee is cold. With each platform switch, you've cycled through different versions of yourself. Not dramatically, perhaps, but noticeably: tone shifts, interests change, vocabulary transforms. This isn't pathology. This is Tuesday.

We established that the self is a constellation of assemblages rather than a unified essence and that different parts of the self are recruited into distinct online personae. Now, we confront a more fundamental question: What are the psychological and social implications? How do we live as digital dividuals?

What happens when Deleuze's concept of the dividual meets McLuhan's understanding of media as extensions of ourselves? The two most far-reaching implications are:

1. Schizophrenia becomes our baseline, not as pathology but as adaptation

2. Identity transforms into an object: weaponizable, playable, consumable

We're only beginning to understand the cultural shifts these changes will bring. There will be new freedoms, harsh downsides, and countless unpredictable second-order effects. One thing is certain: we're in for a wild ride.

Schizo is the New Normal

The term "schizo" has been claimed by Twitter posters, internet researchers, and tech founders as a badge of honor. This is no accident.

Rapid context switching, holding contradictory ideas simultaneously, and speaking in different registers to different audiences—these are adaptive traits of the digital native. Other symptoms associated with schizophrenia seem less adaptive but are even more common online: problems with attention and executive function, reduced motivation, and social withdrawal. Doomscrolling, anyone?

Schizo is the new normal for the terminally online person, the only question is whether in its adaptive or pathological version. The new class stratification is between prolific creators and passive lurkers, between the Netocrats and the Consumetariat (in the language of Bard & Söderqvist).

Through a Lacanian lens, we can understand why our digital fragmentation would result in schizoid patterns. Each platform establishes its own Symbolic order—its language games, social codes, and hierarchies. Our profiles in each space constitute different Imaginary formations—distinct ways of seeing ourselves reflected in the platform's particular mirror. We're not witnessing a collective descent into clinical psychosis, but rather the emergence of a new psychological structure: the ability to navigate multiple, partially incompatible symbolic-imaginary regimes simultaneously.

Deleuze & Guattari prefigured this shift with their practice of "Schizoanalysis," which sought to break down fixed categories and boundaries. Unlike traditional therapy that strives to create a whole, integrated person, schizoanalysis leans into bifurcation and complexification. What seemed radical in their day now looks prophetic.

From Integration to Harmonization

Modern psychotherapy (particularly CBT) prizes integration—uniting different aspects of the self into a cohesive whole. But for dividuals navigating multiple digital contexts, this creates impossible pressure:

• How can you conform to the expectations of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram simultaneously?

• Do you limit yourself to the vanishingly small common denominator between different platforms and social graphs?

• What happens when the cognitive dissonance between your various profiles and alts becomes undeniable?

At the limit, distinct parts or digital personae might wage an internal war over who gets to be the "true self”. In the digital age, clinging to the notion of a unified self is likely to result in madness.

Living as digital dividuals means abandoning integration for harmonization. Harmonious differentiation acknowledges and embraces distinct parts without forcing unity. Your professional LinkedIn persona can be impeccably polished precisely because your anonymous Twitter account provides an outlet for rage and frustration. Different personas can develop symbiotic relationships rather than competing for authenticity.

Digital Personae Need Grounding

"Touch grass" has become the ironic rallying cry of the chronically online for good reason. The more disconnected from the bodily dimension, the "flatter and faster" online personae become. Without grounding in physical reality, digital dividuals enter runaway feedback loops, making harmonization impossible.

The body serves as the alchemical cauldron where digital personae can learn to work together.

A persona is originally developed by recruiting suitable parts from the assemblage of the self, and somatic experience closes that loop by re-establishing contact with the rest of the multiplicitous self. Grounding practices make harmony possible within digital dividuals:

• Face-to-face social interactions

• Physical labor and exercise

• Time in natural environments

• Embodied practices like dance, yoga, or martial arts

The body is the control center from which we can spawn, modify, and harmonize different personae. This practice fundamentally changes our relationship with identity from subject to object. We become aware of our personae as constructs that we can modify at will.

The Objectification of Identity

This transparency-opacity shift marks the transition from authenticity to profilicity. In the authenticity paradigm, identity was the transparent medium through which the "real you" expressed itself. In the profilicity paradigm, identities become opaque masks we consciously craft for specific contexts. Your LinkedIn self isn't hiding your "true self" - it's one valid performance among many, each calibrated to its environment. The question is no longer "Who am I really?" but rather "Which configuration of self is appropriate for this platform?"

This objectification of identity opens three distinct pathways:

1. Identity as Weapon: Pseudonymity Against Control

In a Deleuzian 'society of control,' identity fragmentation serves as defense against multiple forms of power. By distributing yourself across platforms under different personae, you limit what any single institution or social group can exert over you. Nation-states—built on biopower that relies on individual bodies with single names—particularly struggle with this proliferation. Their control structures target physical bodies, not digital profiles; you can't imprison a Twitter handle or deny entry to a Discord avatar.

This explains the increasing attempts to bind digital expression back to controllable physical bodies through digital IDs, facial recognition, and centralized authentication systems. As wearing many masks becomes more common, we should expect mounting political pressure on platforms to disallow pseudonymous accounts altogether.

At the personal level, managing multiple profiles functions as risk management: if one profile gets banned, canceled, or compromised, others remain intact. This is why doxxing—revealing the connections between someone's separate profiles—constitutes an act of violence in the digital age. Since different personae express different psychological parts in different environments, they inevitably contain contradictory or dissonant elements. Linking them together not only removes protective boundaries but also undermines the credibility of both profiles by forcing them into an artificial unity they were never designed to maintain.

This tension between identity control and identity freedom isn't new—we're going back to the future. Before the rise of the modern state, fluid identities were the norm. Medieval Europeans routinely changed surnames based on profession or location. Indigenous societies and feudal Japan practiced name-changing at significant life transitions. What we're witnessing with digital pseudonymity is less a revolution than a restoration of identity fluidity after centuries of standardization that represented biopower's expansion.

The stakes extend beyond state control, however. Multiple power structures seek to consolidate identities: social groups police adherence to their norms, platforms enforce content policies, and employers monitor professional reputations. Each social graph and platform functions as an arbiter of power, controlling both access and information flow. Against these various forms of surveillance and control, pseudonymity emerges as the digital equivalent of the court jester—speaking truths from behind the protection of a mask. Like network-level tools such as VPNs and onion-routing, pseudonymous profiles form part of a broader defensive arsenal that preserves zones of freedom within increasingly monitored digital spaces.

The battlelines are drawn: proliferating personae evade control, while controlling powers strive to consolidate identities. More profiles lead to more tracking, which prompts VPN use, which triggers IP blocking, which spurs platform-switching. A cat-and-mouse game around identity unfolds.

2. Identity as Toy: Experimental Expression

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." - Oscar Wilde

Pseudonymity creates space for creative expression by loosening the grip of social commitments.

Throughout history, masks and alternate identities have served as release valves for truth-telling and free expression that was socially or politically not permitted. Medieval carnival traditions temporarily inverted social hierarchies through masked revelry. Literary figures deployed pen names to escape the social constraints of their assigned identities and Samizdat writers in authoritarian regimes used pseudonyms to speak dangerous truths.

The digital mask follows this tradition, not as mere deception but as a technology for revealing otherwise inaccessible truths. But this is about more than just free speech. Pseudonymous accounts function as extended thought experiments—hypotheses about possible ways of being. "What if I approached the world through this perspective?"; "What if I expressed this part of myself without restraint?" Each profile tests different answers to these questions, generating insights that couldn't emerge within the constraints of a unified identity.

Certain Twitter communities have pioneered this approach, with users maintaining multiple accounts: public professional ones, pseudonymous ones known to friends, and completely anonymous ones for unfettered expression. What distinguishes digital pseudonymity from its historical precedents is its collaborative nature—these identities aren't crafted in isolation but through dynamic interaction. Followers shape the persona through their responses, expectations, and engagement, creating feedback loops that influence its evolution. The boundaries between creator and audience blur, with the pseudonymous identity emerging from this collective process rather than from pure self-expression.

"Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on alt Twitter'' documents this transition from analog singularity to digital plurality—users treating identities as experimental laboratories, transcending conventional selfhood boundaries. They engineer diverse alter-egos and playfully navigate the dissonance and harmony among their myriad selves.

This is schizoanalysis in action: not pathological fragmentation but liberated expression through multiplicities. These pseudonymous explorations represent what Deleuze called "lines of flight"—vectors of escape from stratified identity systems. Each alt account opens a line of flight from the constraints of consistent selfhood, allowing us to explore potentialities that our unified social identity would foreclose. These experimental personae don't just express pre-existing aspects of ourselves—they actively create new modes of being through their very performance.

In these digital laboratories, we can trace how identity doesn't just fragment but mutates, evolves, and discovers unprecedented configurations. What begins as play reveals itself as profound exploration—not just of who we are, but of who we might become.

3. Identity as Desire: Commodification and Financialization

When identity transforms from something we are into something we have, it inevitably becomes an object of desire and consumption.

René Girard's mimetic theory reveals a profound truth about desire: we don't want objects directly but through others' mediation, usually a peer or a role model. I desire something because you desire it. This triangular structure creates mimetic rivalry—we compete for the same objects because others' desire makes those objects valuable.

In digital spaces, however, this triangle undergoes a strange mutation. The subject doesn't merely desire objects—the subject becomes the object. Through profilicity, we craft profiles specifically designed to be desired by others, influenced by profiles we find desirable. This creates a recursive loop: I study what qualities attract desire in others' profiles and incorporate those elements into my own profile, which then becomes an object of desire for others. The object-level desire becomes secondary online, as it is mostly an expression of a given persona.

Mimetic desire shifts from "I want what you want" to "I want to appear as you do."

Social media's entire economy rests on this profilic mimesis. Influencers don't just showcase products; they showcase optimized identities. Their followers desire not just the products but the influencer's position of being desired. This explains the viral spread of profile aesthetics—we're not copying elements we personally desire but elements we believe will make us desirable to others. In the digital age, it’s not just bisexuals who constantly ask themselves “Do I want her? Or do I want to be her?”. The mimetic contagion accelerates because the boundary between subject and object collapses.

Capitalism naturally exploits this shift, creating markets that serve this desire for identity:

• Players buying pre-leveled game characters

• Influencer economies where products function as proximity to desired identities

• Markets for followers and engagement metrics

• NFT profile pictures signalling wealth and insider status

We are consuming identity

This commodification extends beyond mere transactions. In hyper-mediated environments, our identities become increasingly derivative—assembled from fragments that have proven desirable across our feeds. We craft ourselves not from internal authentic impulses but from external templates of what generates engagement. Algorithms don't just shape what information we consume; they reshape who we aspire to become.

The ultimate consequence is profound: we are no longer just alienated from our labor, as Marx described, but from our very selfhood. Our identities become products to be consumed by others, optimized for engagement rather than expression. The self transforms into a perpetual performance, mined for attention, data, and mimetic desire in service of platform economics.

Navigating the Fractured Mirror

Embracing the self as multiplicity offers a path through our digital reality. The struggle to maintain a unified, "authentic" self across platforms is not only futile but misses the point entirely. What if, instead, we consciously cultivated our digital dividuals to differentiate symbiotically and harmonize together?

The schizophrenic patterns emerging in digital spaces aren't pathological but adaptive. They represent an evolution in self-conception that matches our distributed environments. This adaptation offers two distinct possibilities that we must distinguish carefully:

Identity R&D & Authentic Expression: At its best, pseudonymity creates laboratories for experimentation and personal growth. These spaces allow us to explore aspects of ourselves previously constrained by social convention, professional requirements, or physical limitations. Here, fragmentation serves exploration rather than approval-seeking. The alt account that lets you discuss weird philosophy without your colleagues' judgment, the gaming persona that expresses competitive drives unwelcome in your family life, the creative channel where you can develop without premature exposure—these represent authentic multiplicity.

Mimetic Traps of Profilicity: Contrast this with the mimetic dynamics we've explored, where profiles become objects crafted for others' desire, constantly reshaped by engagement metrics and algorithmic feedback. These personae aren't expressions but mere performances, optimized not for discovery but for consumption. The recursive loop of observation, imitation, and competition creates dividuals who ultimately serve platform capitalism rather than personal expression.

The key distinction isn't between unified and multiple selves but between authentic multiplicity and mimetic fragmentation. The former opens up new avenues of becoming; the latter confines you to endless optimization within parameters you didn't choose.

In the digital age, 'becoming' triumphs over 'being' as we recognize identity as a process rather than a product. Fixed self-concepts give way to fluid exploration. But fluid doesn't mean unmoored—every river needs banks to guide its flow. And it is precisely our embodied experience that provides these necessary boundaries, anchoring our digital multiplicities in the rich reality of physical existence.

The most radical act in an age of digital dissolution might be remembering that before algorithms shaped your desires, before screens reflected your image, you are a creature of flesh and blood, whose identity grows from roots deeper than any profile can capture.