So much of being online is constructing and performing identity. You present yourself as something to people listening to, reading, or watching what you choose to put online, and that "something" isn't who you really are. It's not who you really are, first, because that's not how we work. We aren't really something, at least not in an essential and permanent way. We're dynamic, an ever-shifting bundle, and who we are today is not identical to who we were yesterday or who we'll be tomorrow. But, second, dropping down to a more practical level, the digital mediation of the online world means the people in the world only ever see of us, or typically only ever see of us, what we choose to show them, through messages we've shaped to be seen. Or read, or listened to. Our digital selves are constructions, not fully fictional, but more like, say, characters based on real people in a historical novel. Simulacra of who we are in real life, and incomplete ones at that.
What's more, unlike real life, what you present of yourself online is archived. If I meet someone new at a party or the grocery store or the park, I build a picture of them based on what they say to me, how they look, how they behave in that moment of interaction, but I don't have easy access to everything they've said to others going back years or decades. Online, I do. Or mostly. You reply to one of my posts, I can click on your profile and see all the other posts you've made for as long as you've been on the platform. I can check out the other videos you've posted on YouTube, the other photos you've uploaded to Instagram. I can reach your blog's entire library.
This means, in practice, when you're acting online, unless you work to avoid it, whatever you do is part of, even if unintentionally, building a brand. I'm not a fan of corporate speak or putting things in corporate terms, but here it applies. In the digital world, you are a brand, and that brand isn't who you really are in real life, but a construction, and one that's always getting constructed and reconstructed. You can have multiple brands, if you have alt accounts for example, but that just fractures the process, it doesn't change it.
This sounds grim: You're just a brand you've constructed. My Marxist friends would say it's another example of the late capitalism draining us of humanity. But let me push back. Because there's something amazing and optimistic and encouraging about this. Online, you get to be who you want, or who you can figure out how to present. And you can be that thing consistently.
You can, in other words, go all-in on your obsessions.
You can't do that in real life. Or it doesn't work as well. If you're obsessed with bad movies, in real life you can watch lots of them and talk about them, but your identity necessarily needs to be about other stuff. Like your job. Or getting things done around the house. Interacting with people who aren't obsessed with bad movies. In real life, you can't be bad movies. But online, you can. You can make that your brand, and get weird with it, and "online" is big enough that you can find tons of other people equally obsessed and into your weirdness. It's great. The digital world lets us say, "Here's the thing I love or the thing that matters the most to me" and then lets us construct our (digital) selves around just that.
It can go wrong, of course, if the thing you're obsessed with is bad and destructive, but most things most of us are into aren't bad and destructive. They're fun, lovely, silly, profound, meaningful. They're good to be obsessed with, and they're good to share with others. Start a blog. Write about your obsession for 20 years, and spend 20 years building an audience around it, of similar obsessives. To go corporate again, turn your brand into brand equity.
Except. The other thing about the online world, as it is now in its major structures, even if not as it always used to be, is that there are metrics. And metrics interfere with, smooth out, and dissipate obsessions.
What happens is, online now, in an era of analytics and platforms, you can see the numbers, and you can see which go up, and you can decide which number going up indicates "success." So of course you become curious about what you can do—what you can write, how you can promote it—to make that number go up more, or more quickly. And because it's a number everyone else can see, too, for the stuff they produce, too, whether it's views or likes or subscribes, they're optimizing the same way you are. And, because everyone has these big places they can talk, and share advice, and learn from each other, they come to learn what worked for everyone else, what made other people's numbers go up, and so they converge on strategies, on tactics, on styles of output.
Thus every YouTube thumbnail looks the same, because that's the thumbnail someone figured out works on YouTube, and then everyone figured it out, and so everyone's doing it. Until something changes, and a different thumbnail style works better, and then everyone will converge on that. Or everyone starts a newsletter about, or pivots their existing newsletter to being about, crypto trading advice. Or marketing advice. Or AI advice. Those are the topics where the numbers go up, you want your numbers to go up, so those are the topics you write about. And on, and on. And on.
Or you get audience captured. Because your audience are who make those numbers go up, you try to figure out what your audience wants, and then give it to them. Which isn't a terrible idea. Your numbers won't go up if you produce something no one wants, or so few people want that your numbers can never go up enough to sustain you. But the aggregate of your audience isn't always right, even if they are clicking or donating or subscribing, and it's just a fact that people often have no idea what they want until they see it and decide, "Oh, that's what I want."
Or, if you're not aggregating audience opinion yourself, the people who say they know what your biggest potential audience wants don't actually know—or don't know what your audience, or potential audience, would want or would love if only they saw it, sustained and stated with enthusiasm, or delight, or principle, or whatever value motivates your obsession with the thing you're obsessed with. The political consultants are often wrong, their polls telling them, and you, in aggregate what voters think, or think they value, right now, but not what voters will come to value if they hear it stated with conviction and moral weight. Or studio suits who have notes to make the movie more like those other movies that did well, because they have trouble imagining that the public can love something new. This traps you in playing to the wrong audience and not realizing that there are larger or better audiences out there who would love your stuff if only they discovered it. If only they came to share your obsession.
All this was prompted by a conversation between Jim Ray and John Gruber on the Off Protocol podcast. The example they gave was Apple versus Meta. Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram and those glasses guys use to secretly record women, lacks an identity. Meta wants to make money, and they want to do whatever will make money, and so they constantly chase and lean into whatever thing in the moment feels like it's where the energy making money is. Social networks. Short form video. Virtual reality. AI. Prediction markets. (They even renamed the entire company after their virtual reality play, and then promptly abandoned their virtual reality play when investor money moved on.)
Apple, on the other hand, the way Ray and Gruber put it, wants to make the best possible computers they can. That's been their obsession since they started, even if they've been inconsistent in its execution. And not just the best computers, but the best designed computers, which brought them success at a time when computer manufacturers didn't put much effort into making their products look cool. (In part because they'd been audience captured by corporate buyers.)
The upshot is it's hard to answer "What is Meta's product identity?" but it's easy to answer the same for Apple. And that clear and consistent identity, grounded in an obsession, is what's made Apple Apple, and what's made Apple dominant.
The other example they give, and it's a neater fit to the way we ordinary people create our identities by producing writing or videos or audio in cyberspace, is Disney. There's the thing Walt Disney is said to have said, "We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies." Disney was obsessed with movies, and wanted to make great ones, and if you make great movies, other people will think they're great, and they'll pay to watch them. If, instead, you want to make movies to make money, you might make some good movies and you might make money, but you're probably not going to consistently make great movies. Because you'll instead make movies you think will make money, and that means "number go up" thinking, and audience capture, and everything else above. We can, of course, tell alternate histories, or complicate the picture of Meta or Apple or Disney. But as illustrative archetypes, we can see this line between "we do our obsession" and "we go where the wind blows."
When we pull all of this together, we get two interrelated outcomes, both of them bad. Both a little dreary.
The first is sameness. If you want to do what is popular now, it means doing what everyone else is already doing, because everyone else also wants to be doing what's popular now. Or what they think will make money, or what they've been told will get them attention and money. And because they're all working off the same metrics, those metrics will point them to the same place. And that means not just creeping blandness, but that no one particular writer or video essayist or creator stands out, except for the few first movers whose numbers went up early and fast. And, because platforms are optimizing for the same numbers, it means that if you don't follow the trends, if you do stand out, if you do stay true to your obsessions, you're condemned to the fringes, to obscurity. The machine gods giving the people what they want are giving them more of what they already want. Which means not giving them what they might not know they want, or might not know they'll come to want if only they discover it.
Second, even if you do write about your obsession, or start off writing about your obsession, the pull of metrics means you're more likely to give it up for the thing that's popular. And because the thing that's popular changes, you're more likely to change with it. And that means not only is your brand going to look like everyone else's brand, but the fickle nature of audience tastes, and so what makes the numbers go up, means your brand will always be changing. You'll have no stable constructed identity. You'll never build brand equity, because you'll be more like Meta than Apple. You'll never get a reputation for being "The person obsessed with that thing" because you're not anymore. The metrics have bled your obsession dry.
I said it didn't always used to be this way. It wasn't ever fully not this way. There have always been metrics. There have always been trend chasers. But in its earlier days, the internet didn't used to be as much this way. Before people had all the metrics, and all the ideas about monetization tied to those metrics, the internet was full of people creating obsessive stuff. John Gruber's blog. Or The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. (Which is so old, even though it got an update just three years ago, that it doesn't even have HTTPS.)
You used to see a higher portion of people creating online going with their authentic obsessions, sticking with what they authentically cared about. What brought them joy, what they thought would bring others joy. Or what they thought could change the world, and what they thought others would see as changing the world. Fewer people thought of themselves as "content creators," with "content" to be filled in by whatever would make those metrics go up. More of the people creating online thought of themselves as writers, as thinkers, as artists. Because they were obsessed, and what else are you going to create than something you're obsessed with?