Cultivating an online identity is often derided as 'influencing.' In this paper, I treat this cultivation as an aesthetic practice and a site where new modes of identity and (digital) subjectivity are already being speculatively fashioned.
Being online isn't optional. We have to use digital media to participate in everyday life. Online tools for communication, interaction, play, or labour have become infrastructures for being. But being what? The old cliché is that no one on the internet knows you're a dog; now, no one on the internet knows who's not a bot. Treated as an aesthetic practice, the cultivation of online identities becomes a site for creating new modes of subjectivity through the adoption of personae and the acts of sharing and posting. These 'subjects' don't fit conventional identity categories.
We are already engaged in the creation of new forms of (digital) subjectivity. These forms don't necessarily conform to the 'human'; we find them, instead, in social media presences, memes, digital avatars, and chatbots. They emerge in and through the circulation of data and media, through play with the constraints and affordances of digital interfaces. Rather than asking what makes an artificial computational agent 'intelligent,' I argue that speculative play with identity online shows us that what we need is a concept of subjectivity supple enough to embrace the aesthetic practices and technical agents that already speculate with identity.
Scott Wark is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research combines an interest in theoretical approaches to media and culture with analyses of digital cultural phenomena, media infrastructures, data processing, artificial intelligence, and techniques of racialisation. He is co-editor of Figure: Concept and Method (with Celia Lury and William Viney; Palgrave, 2022) and 'Pharmacologies of Media,' a special issue of Media Theory (w. Yiğit Soncul).
