The Post-Individual

As the internet evolves, especially for us “very online people,” there’s a deepening sense that we are, together, becoming something beyond the scope of our original intentions. We are rapidly approaching a sum far greater and more mysterious than what we often perceive as its cold, mechanistic parts.

While we conventionally think of ourselves as “u... See more

What the internet allows us to do is to see what we have in common. This resulted in a new experience of what it means to be a person. We have multiple lenses and identities ready to be activated at any given moment. They are meaningful. Digital avatars are just as meaningful to us as other identities.

What I’ve come to realize is that while our potential identities are infinite, our energy is not. Energy put into one identity is energy taken from another. To be Very Online is to be Never Offline. To become infinite is to become infinitesimal somewhere else. As Turkle wrote in The Second Self :

“For adults as well as children, computers... offer c

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Like so many technologies that came before, it seems to be here to stay; the question is not how to escape it but how to understand ourselves in its inescapable wake.

In his new book, “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, argues that “the present situation is intolerab... See more