This month’s Frame: The “Extreme Self”, web3 and designing for fantasies
A framework that describes how identity is shifting and how business should respond.
Most people associate the metaverse with a persistent, immersive world enabled by VR technology. There is a more interesting way of looking at it: the metaverse symbolises the moment your digital self becomes more significant than your physical self.
By this definition we’re all on a metaverse spectrum. Some of us are “extremely online”, our careers and social life contingent on globalised, digital spaces. Others occupy a minimal online footprint, focusing on local relationships and jobs.
But the direction of travel is clear. Post-COVID more of us are crossing the threshold into the metaverse.
Is this significant? Anthropologists have long argued that we experience both digital and physical worlds as part of the same material continuum; that since the Stone Age technology has diversified the potential for self-expression. Digital spaces are merely an extension of ourselves.
But does that continuum hold if there are now parts of our selves over which we have little direct control?
The framework
This is the question Basar, Coupland and Obrist address in their 2021 graphic novel. The Extreme Self is a bricolage of text, memes and art that explores the meaning and consequences of living in the metaverse. They claim:
“A large part of you has been extracted from you. An ever larger part of you now exists everywhere and nowhere. It’s both voluntary and involuntary. It exists independently of your five senses.”
In the absence of direct sensory inputs from the world, we rely on proxy signals to assess the performance of our Extreme Selves. Basar et al. paint a picture of how this operates.
“She said her followers drive her to post more pictures of herself.
She deletes the ones that don’t instantly please.
She wants the crowd to curate her image.
She doesn’t know them but she trusts them.
She’s modelled by their unfiltered preferences.
She knows exactly how to make the algorithm love her.”
Like a “lean start-up” which responds to data signals from the market, our Extreme Selves “pivot” based on these feedback loops. As a result our identities come to reflect the incentive structures of different algorithmic contexts.
The independence of these contexts leads to a division of identity, as our Extreme Selves develop in happy ignorance of one another.
The opposite of the Extreme Self is the Sensing Self. As a Sensing Self we are cognisant of the diverse contexts of our life. Everyday identity work is about integrating different aspects of ourselves, so they don’t conflict.
For example, Sandra is a criminal barrister with a passion for tattoos. She desires tattoos on her lower arms but refrains. She fears doing so would undercut her professional standing. Sandra is forced into this compromise because she can’t entirely split herself between these identities.
Our Extreme Selves are different. Part of the appeal of digital spaces is their detachment from ourselves and each other. Deracinated from the Sensing Self, expression is unencumbered, responsive only to the rewards of the specific digital context we find ourselves in.
Using the framework
web3 has been built, in part, in service of the Extreme Self. The untethering of financial infrastructure, organizational hierarchy and consumable assets from the physical world enables a fuller online life, unhinged from our embodied limitations. web3 is the necessary groundwork that can make the metaverse feel like a concrete reality.
As time spent in the metaverse increases the question for business becomes not whether to build products for the Extreme Self, but how.
Web3 entrepreneurs understand that value in these spaces is created through community. Products, through distributed ownership, become an expression of shared identity. At a basic level this guarantees a market. But the passion generated cannot be explained by economic interest alone.
Viewed through the lens of the Extreme Self, it is clear that many web3 projects are an act of group manifestation; an attempt to establish a new, detached reality in which new fantasies can be discovered, explored and realised.
In the metaverse, Sandra the lawyer and Sandra the tattoo aficionado can live two entirely separate lives. The products and services each Sandra seeks will no longer be a compromise, but rather a pure reflection of the desires of two distinctive people responding to two separate contexts.
The companies that grasp this bifurcation of identity will be the ones that profit in the future.
News
New hires strengthen Data Science capabilities.
Stripe Partners is proud to welcome Qamar Zaman and Carol Wang to the team. Find out more about the new team members and what they are bringing to Stripe Partners on our website.