Book Review: You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity by Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio

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★★★☆☆

Also posted on my Goodreads account.

Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio’s Genuine Pretending is a favorite book. In that book, the authors looked at the ancient Taoist classic The Zhuangzi as a critique of ancient Confucian and Chinese customs that called for sincerity and authenticity as impossible to attain. The idea of sincerity, that you should bring emotional commitment to prescribed social roles, and the idea of authenticity, that you should follow your heart, are misguided. Instead of trying to negotiate our path through societal expectations as if any of that has cosmic importance or negotiate with our own heart as if we know what we want, the genuine pretender presented by the authors from The Zhuangzi finds wholeness in the dissolution of self into the bliss of not taking one’s self and one’s life so seriously. If I could summarize that book in one sentence, it is, “Wherever you find yourself, play along.”

Identity is, thus, a central theme of their prior work, and with that as a backdrop for my review, we can talk about You and Your Profile, which tackles the subject of identity not in ancient China but in our current we-all-have-our-faces-in-our-phones world.

Most of us are disgusted and perplexed by people who are famous and rich because they have a bunch of followers on social media. Most of us have scratched our heads at the notion of viewing the world through a phone (and then applying filters) rather than putting the phone down and viewing the world for what it is. Yet we are increasingly participants in curating how people perceive us on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter. We all know that nobody’s life is as perfect as they present it on social media. Yet many (most?) of us increasingly filter our experience of the world and present a carefully curated profile of ourselves to the world in ways that were unimaginable even when I was a child a few decades ago.

The authors call this “profilicity” and argue that it has superseded social calls for sincerity and authenticity as the definers of identity. Further, and more importantly, the authors want to make the case that this is the modern expression of the genuine pretending introduced in their prior book on Zhuangzi. We curate and manage our identity and have different identities in different contexts and the act of doing so is itself genuine pretending.

And that’s where it breaks down for me.

I wouldn’t know a Kardashian or Jenner or their boobs and butts from the man on the moon. But do you think that they think that their carefully curated social media posts are not presenting the real them? Do you realize that your Facebook posts or Instagram posts or LinkedIn profile are not YOU? If social media is how you view the world and how you present to the world all day every day, then how could you not think it’s real? When we take the likes and dislikes and comments and apply filters with seriousness, then we’re not genuine pretending, even if we are engaged in a form of identity (and identity management) called profilicity.

The genuine pretender is whole because he doesn’t become emotionally invested in being sincere or authentic. The key is to not care and to not be emotionally invested. I think that in a world where we define ourselves (identity) through the lens of what we think others think of how we present ourselves on our social media accounts (say that ten times fast), we are more invested in what people think of us than ever and that profilicity for most people is further away from the wholeness of genuine pretending than the sincerity and authenticity of ancient China ever were.

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