Let Me Freely Speak Unto You

The bet is that people don’t want to co-create identity with consumer choices so much as consume their own identity obliquely as a consumer product. TikTok structures users not as people with agency to express their own tastes, but as people whose tastes are always already expressed as relevant and catered to. Rather than choose something and possibly choose wrong, users are habituated to the experience of not having to choose, as though that exempted them from the status anxiety of using taste to build cultural capital. “AI-assisted content consumption” allows users to enjoy the absence of choice not as deprivation but as convenience. They can experience preemptive personalization as the confirmation of identity rather than the platform’s self-interested imposition of it. The fact that you don’t choose content for yourself doesn’t show your ignorance and absence of taste, but your wisdom in letting AI constitute your taste for you.

Earlier iterations of social media made you work at building out your identity, reproducing it online within their database’s structures — this was the “immaterial labor” of being online during what could be called the formal subsumption of identity creation by social media: The identity work that used to be performed through taste displays and affiliations in “real life” were now being replicated on online platforms, but that work hadn’t yet been reshaped by the platforms’ affordances. They were only starting to function as the means of self-production. Now that the platforms are built out and the “primitive accumulation” of social data is largely complete, and the apparatuses of data capture are functioning more or less automatically, the real subsumption of identity has begun: This kind of identity is articulated within the horizon established by networked social media and is unthinkable outside it. What social media do is integral to selfhood as it is now socially constituted, structuring the desires, tastes, behaviors, and aspirations we might think to have.