The article begins with the premise that part of the modern, post-enlightenment world we've come to enjoy included the ability of an individual to move between different domains in their life where their identities shifted to the needs of that domain. From the article -
After Europe’s religious wars, Anderson mused, as centuries of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants gave way to a liberal, live-and-let-live order that tolerated freedom of religion, something remarkable happened:
People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains? That is what it is to be free.
That’s a bold claim! Yet one needn’t accept Anderson’s definition of freedom to appreciate her insight. Here’s a more modest version: The ability to slip into a domain and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining identities in other domains is something most Americans value, both to live in peace amid difference and for personal reasons.
A 28-year-old woman might attend a march of radical feminists on Saturday, be a deferential caregiver to her ailing conservative grandfather on Sunday, teach high-school sophomores virtue ethics on Monday, perform open-mic comedy that no 15-year-old should hear on Tuesday, indulge a guilty pleasure for Disney musical numbers in the privacy of her car on the way to work on Wednesday morning, and meet up on Thursday night with the pierced, tattooed punk rocker she is dating. And if she interviews on Friday for a new job in a typical field of employment? Most of that will be none of the interviewer’s business.
This rings true to me, and I think reflects on the richness a person might experience in life where their personal freedom is not defined by rigid, pervasive social identity but is, instead, defined differently based on context and one's relationships in that context that don't necessarily transfer to every other context in the same way. That isn't to say freedom is defined by amorphous inauthenticity, but rather that authenticity is defined by freedom to let aspects of ones identity advance or recede as appropriate to a context without those that are receding being anyone else's business within that particular domain.
The article then points out how the internet has evolved as part of this dynamic, at first being a place where expression and finding like-minded others could be facilitated that enhanced this level of self-expression and identity flux -
If humans lost something when most of us ceased to live our whole lives in small tribes, if American life is no longer organized around small towns with all that they offer their residents, at the very least we made these countervailing gains. And this freedom to be different things in different spaces was enhanced by the early internet. Every subculture had its chat rooms. Far-flung people with niche interests could find one another. And no one knew if you were a dog.
- to something quite the opposite today where it serves to collapse domains into a new "small town" dynamic that makes what you do on a Saturday night and your job on Monday overlap more and more; where your home life in balanced respect with a true believing Mormon spouse could be collapsed in on one's anonymous expressions of dissatisfaction with the LDS church very easily with full expectation by others that this is just how things work.
In edge cases, almost all Americans will see the implications for freedom, as with China’s push toward an Orwellian society of surveillance cameras, facial-recognition technology, machine learning, and a state-assigned score for every citizen to rate their merits.
Thornier cases will implicate norms and manners that evolve as a society adapts to relatively new modes of non-state, non-coercive interaction.
For example: I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.
Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent a half hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.
On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.
Food for thought.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ge/579553/
