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There are too many identity labels being circulated too quickly

I’ve tended to regard identity-formation as one of the positive features of platformisation. Providing forums around which people with common concerns can congregate creates the possibility for those who feel marginalised in their local context to find connections with others: maybe I’m not so weird after all? But it’s occurred to me recently how this instinct maps onto the experience of being a queer millennial who got the internet as a teenager, as well as the empirical phenomena which resonate with my own experience of the internet as liberating. The same dynamic can be seen with, inter alia, the incel community for example. Furthermore, the unambiguously positive framing fails to grasp the acceleration of these processes and how disorientating* they can be.

I thought this was interesting from Rob Horning, from whom I take this post’s title. Particularly his insightful observation that falling back into essentialism about personal identity is a vacuous response to this challenge:

When these coinages also function as personal identities — this Refinery 29 article from October 2022 by Jessica Cullen lists a bunch of them — they impose that same ephemerality on one’s sense of self. Or one could say that by adopting trendy microaesthetics one commits not to any specific one in question but to an overall project of perpetual becoming. To be invested in fashion is to fetishize change. Cullen’s piece is similar to Jennings’s in that it claims that there are too many identity labels being circulated too quickly, but it treats this flow as something we are required to try to manage and master, something that is “exhausting” and likely to cause “burnout.” But feeling exhausted is not so different from feeling exhilarated. No one who tries to keep up with fashion would be satisfied with being all caught up.

Cullen asks, “If you spend your life stuck within the rigid barriers of an aesthetic, is it possible you’ll never learn who you really are?” The idea is that it’s stunting to try to follow the prescriptions of a particular identity formula. But following fashion is precisely a commitment to perpetual becoming, to taking any identity as provisional, subject to arbitrary change. Trying to “become who you are” as though that somehow transcended all social prescriptions and formulas, as though it were a matter of ceaselessly demonstrating your singularity and inventing a way of being that took nothing from any established currents, is far more exhausting than following microtrends.

https://robhorning.substack.com/p/infinite-concretude

*A disorientation which I suspect has an inherent tendency to nudge people towards fascism, at least if they have pre-existing grievances which can be energised by a sense of socioocultural overwhelm.

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