How The Software We Use Rewrites Our Identity: A Fragile, Reactive Self

-- By LinaHackenberg - 25 Oct 2024

The digital tools and systems we rely on fundamentally disrupt our ability to know and define ourselves. By overstimulating us with endless distractions and isolating us from meaningful human connections, they prevent the internal reflection and external support needed for a stable identity. This essay explores how, in a world dominated by digital platforms, we risk losing touch with who we are. This leaves our sense of self fragile, reactive, and vulnerable to external forces.

Yet, these challenges are not inherent to “the digital” itself but arise from the deliberate design of software that seeks to exploit our attention and dependence. By reevaluating and reshaping this design, we can move beyond fragility and reactivity to reclaim autonomy and stability.

Overstimulation Makes Us Reactive

We keep a phone constantly close. It allows us to "go all around the world" but floods us with a constant stream of stimuli — messages, notifications, and advertisements. These endless triggers prevent uninterrupted thought, stopping us from exploring ideas or integrating experiences into a coherent identity. Instead, we absorb external input, observing what others do, feel, and want, while losing touch with our own desires. Over time, we come to trust external input more than ourselves, checking our phones 2,600 times a day — not out of OCD, but dependency. This “habit” weakens our ability to think and act independently, leaving us reactive and disconnected from our inner voice.

Digital interactions also compel us to constantly switch between roles and personas. Parent, partner, professional — each role imposes expectations, demanding a different version of ourselves. Balancing these often conflicting identities undermines a coherent sense of self, leaving us confused and unsettled. This incessant adaptation prevents us from grounding in a stable identity, making us reactive to others' shifting expectations.

While external input and adaptive behavior are not new, the design of digital systems has drastically increased their pace. As our minds struggle to keep up with the constant exposure and adaption, we become overstimulated. This erodes the mental space for self-reflection, disrupting our ability to define ourselves. Without this foundation, we rely on others to tell us who we are.

Isolation Makes Us Fragile

Thus, we require genuine human connections to better understand our identity. Yet, despite promising "universal connectivity," the tools and platforms we use often weaken these connections.

Digital connections, while widely preferred, often lack the depth of genuine human relationships. Social platforms expands our social circle, but more connections often result in fewer meaningful relationships—those built on time, trust, and honesty. To avoid these demands, many turn to digital interactions that offer an "illusion of companionship" without the effort and vulnerability needed for true intimacy. Though seemingly easier, these connections cannot provide us with stability, self-confidence, or honest reflection. Instead, they offer superficial feedback, which we should not rely on to better understand our identity.

The design of these platforms also weakens real-life connections by eroding our ability to listen and care about the person in front of us. Even in person, phones create barriers, pulling focus from meaningful interaction. When we fail to listen, we miss opportunities to connect meaningfully. Again, distraction is nothing new, but the ability to hear or see distant events during conversations exacerbates the problem. This constant exposure shifts our attention to elsewhere, prioritizing distant events over those present. As a result, genuine real-life connections are weakened. This isolates us from the meaningful relationships we need. Without this external support, our sense of self becomes fragile, lacking the reinforcement that only genuine human connections provide.

Free Software Can Restore Our Identity

But it does not have to be this way. There is nothing inherent in smartphones, computers, or digital systems that must overstimulate or isolate us. The impacts we experience stem from the software we use.

The software we rely on is built around the "market for eyeballs" model, treating human attention as a resource to exploit. This model explains why many tools are intentionally designed to make us reactive and emotionally vulnerable — keeping us dependent and constantly engaged. By reducing users to mere "eyeballs" rather than recognizing them as "active intelligences," these systems prioritize control and distraction, sacrificing empowerment and meaningful connection in favor of profit.

Yet, this is not inevitable. We can choose software that supports our autonomy instead of undermining it. If software were designed to serve users, the dynamics of control would shift back to us — allowing us to reclaim the freedom and mental clarity we have lost. This is not speculative. Programs built on the principles of free software, which enable users to modify and control their tools, already exist.

Legal scholar Eben Moglen exemplifies this approach. Over fifty years of using computers, he has never seen an advertisement on his devices. Notifications on his systems are carefully crafted by him to avoid disrupting his focus. The tools he uses, which exclude social media, enhance personal relationships without overwhelming him with unnecessary communication. This demonstrates that a world where software supports autonomy and meaningful connection is not a distant ideal — it already exists. Living in it requires no expensive investments, only a willingness to learn and make intentional choices about the software we use.

Conclusion

The fragility and reactivity of identity often blamed on digital systems are, in reality, the product of poorly designed software that prioritizes profit over empowerment. By reshaping how these systems interact with us, we can transform them into tools for clarity, connection, and personal growth. The solutions already exist; reclaiming our sense of self simply requires the willingness to take control of the systems shaping our lives.

Feedback First Draft: One route to improvement is to tighten the writing, plenty. Your outlining is sufficient at the section level, but not enough to keep your paragraphs disciplined. Each sentence must make a distinct contribution and every word in each sentence must pull its weight. What doesn't must go, at both levels. Almost a quarter of the existing draft can be removed without loss.

Substantively, the most important avenue to increased learning is to break apart the abstraction "technology" and "the digital,." This mistaken essentialism is getting in the way of your pursuing your question. There's nothing that says computers used by people have to disturb attention or create isolation. The physiology of our network (how it behaves and how it structures our individual experiences of the world) is determined by software. If the software works differently, the effect of "technology" can be radically different. If the relation between software and people is different (if, for example, all software can be changed by those who use it) then the direction of control (how software's structuring of the network structures our life experience) will be changed radically: we will live differently, choosing how, not having the texture chosen for us.

This isn't speculation. As I said in class, I have never, in my life using computers for now more than fifty years, seen an advertisement on my computers. The only notifications I receive from the computers around me (and I live literally surrounded by computers, running dozens of computers systems simultaneously, all the time) are carefully crafted by me, over decades of constant tinkering and modification, to ad to my awareness of what I want to know by ambient means, that are customized specifically not to interfere with my trains of thought and reading attention. My means of communication which do not include "social media" platforms, at all, are used to maintain and enhance my personal relations, not to flood me with communications from strangers. Someone with whom I have no existing relationship can reach me by email, as one could send me a letter in the post. But email can be filtered, and mine is by software I have been continuously perfecting for my own needs since 1977. By now it works really well.

Imagine, then, that your computers were behaving differently because the software in them was different. Suppose that what you think of as the properties of "technology" are actually the bugs and features of software systems you don't want to be using and don't have to use. Consider a world in which the social effects of bad software described in your draft have been replaced by the effects of programs that work the way you want them to.

That world already exists. You can live in it instead of the one you are describing at almost no material cost. All you need is to learn some stuff. Do you want to?

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