Our lives function like a blockchain, where our experiences and interactions build upon each other to create who we are. Each day, we draw upon our past experiences, history, and emotional investments to create new 'blocks' in our personal development.
We maintain a mental blockchain of balances - tracking people who were kind to us, those who wronged us, favors owed and given. This personal ledger accumulates daily through our lived experiences.
Social media represents a Layer 2 version of ourselves - an abstraction of our base layer (real-life) identity. Similar to how blockchain Layer 2 solutions aim to improve upon their underlying chain, our social media presence often presents an idealized version of who we are or aspire to be. We carefully curate and present selected aspects of ourselves, creating a derivative of our authentic selves.
image created with DALL-E from ChatGPT
However, only significant or aggregate parts of our social media identities eventually get incorporated into our personal blockchain - our true self. Even internet trolls often display vastly different personalities in real life compared to their online personas. Their Layer 2 personality does not often connect with their base layer.
While most people maintain this separation between their real and online selves, there may be rare individuals who achieve true authenticity in their online presence. This typically occurs when someone has already aligned their real-life identity with their ideals, making it unnecessary to create a separate online persona. They always present their personal blockchain without having to enhance it on a side chain.
This post is rather timely. Our family has been talking about this concept in a similar-ish way. I like how you phrase the base layer vs. the layer two versions of ourself. Very interesting way to think about who we are IRL and online.
I had forgotten about this until I was reviewing voice notes. I recorded my thoughts after waking up one morning.
I have a whole lot of big ideas late at night which I cannot wait to dig into in the morning. When I wake up after a sleep the energy to do so seems to have faded.
I like your style of writing and I see where you're coming from. However I have to respectfully disagree. To minimize the human experience to nothing more than a transaction, a function, is, I think, a tremendous disservice and gross under estimation of our experience.
Computers are electrical. Binary. 1's and 0's. Simplistic and predictable.
However we are at least elecyrochemical beings. That secondary layer of chemicals, allows for a "quantum" spectrum of possibilities, in the quantum Computer sense. It is not binary, but infinite, and ever fluctuating.
Now I do very much agree that we have at least two layers, that is one which is authentic to who we are off line, and one online. But we have much more than that. We are different people around our parents, our friends, our distant family, our selves, our elders, our teachers, our students etc.. In fact the idea that we have one authentic identity that should never change no matter who we are with, I believe to be a fallacy. If I'm talking to my 5 year old son, I behave very differently than when I'm talking to my wife, or my sister. And I think that's OK.
I think my off line and online personas are probably closer together than most of my other "identities".
What do you think?
First, I don't believe that we are an actual blockchain. I am merely using an analogy to describe how our pasts shape our present experience. We're obviously not machines.
I do agree that we may assume different characters depending on the situation. I couldn't say whether your online persona is closer to your real persona than other identities. What I could guess is that you may feel it is not necessary to put on a mask for your online presence. The same anonymity that gives some users freedom to become awful people online can also give us the freedom to be ourselves, if we choose.
By that same token, in other circumstances you might feel that your true self is inadequate for that circumstance, requiring a different persona, much like you might choose a wrench rather than a ratchet for a particular job.
In my case, I blog under my own name, so I don't benefit from anonymity. I've had circumstances in which my writing has resulted in real in-person interactions. I haven't felt any conflict in just being myself.