Sometimes I feel the impulse to lose myself in the mystique of a
pseudonym dissassociated from a meatspace body, and play a character I
daydream about: a sapient piece of software, living in the ’net.
(Let’s pretend that “the ’net” is that of the Ghost in the Shell universe: “vast and infinite,” ephemeral, all-pervasive, and not merely someone else’s computers, owned and controlled by massive corporations headed by disgusting billionaires, surveilled by marketeers and governments.)
Until now,
that’s the feeling I’ve had in mind when choosing an image to represent
myself. My profile images have been genderless creatures of abstract
geometry, light and energy, existing in vast empty space. But that’s my
aspiration, I must remind myself, not my reality. That’s not the
authentic self that I wanted to present when I created this avatar.
For I am the same avatar as the one I left behind; a flawed prisoner of a failing meat sack, gendered and biased, manipulated by environment and endocrine. The only difference is the lack of association with my meatspace identity.
There’s room on the internet for many more facets of identity, and I can play my idealized science fiction character elsewhere, when I have time for such things.
Aha! My profile pic
should simply be a photo of meatspace-me, with my face obscured.
