Losing Face in the Global Village

Why masks and faces are increasingly becoming the same thing

You Were What You Do

My favorite philosopher Marshall McLuhan stated in the 1960s that young people no longer wanted jobs; they wanted roles. McLuhan grew up in a world where it was still the norm that “you are what you do,” but that norm has changed.

Once upon a time, even a person’s name could signify a lifetime occupation and class:

“Smith”= Blacksmith
“Goldstein”=Gold jeweler
“Tanner”=Cures hides to make leather
”King” = Best-selling horror writer… I mean ruler of a country

If you lived in the same house, the small village, the same town all your life, it made sense for a blacksmith and his family to be named “the Smiths.” You moved in a very limited social circle and society didn’t change much, so your station was secure. Your class and economic status were mainly inherited and fixed from birth.

It wouldn’t make as much sense today to take the name “Singh Programmer” or “Amy Carmaker”; you can’t count on having a single defining lifetime occupation.

Who “are” you on the Internet? Who “are” the other Internet users to you? Do they feel like tangible, physical beings? (I’ll bet you’d speak differently to them if they were in the same room… and in a lower voice.) It’s a different kind of “identity” than interacting in physical space.

I’m trying to get at something here that can easily be misunderstood.

It’s not that a person’s “identity” is no longer a real thing in society. But as we interact with each other increasingly via digital media, and use them to define who we “are,” it will become harder to anchor personal/social identity to a concrete place and station. With that comes a confusion and anxiety around what constitutes one’s “identity.”

The Internet and the smartphone haven’t helped people gain or uphold a stable, confident sense of “identity.” The technology has effectively flattened social, geographical and status markers.

We’re really all the same class and job description on the Internet: Users.

I’d like to see this comedy skit:

”Who are you?”
”I am a person who uses a smartphone. That is what I do, who I am. That is my authentic, essential identity. I am Smartphone User.”
”You’re so brave.”
”Thanks. I hope I will be an inspiration to other smartphone users.”


The Quest For Performed “Identity”

In their heart of hearts, people don’t want to attach a sense of “identity” to the label “Smartphone User” - a job description they will soon share with everybody else on the planet - and that’s where McLuhan becomes something of a prophet.

He stated over 50 years ago that young people “no longer want jobs; they want roles.”

Many young Baby Boomers in the 1960s probably felt that the fixed lifetime occupations and “life stations” of older generations had gone stale and were holding them back. They wanted greater freedom to choose their lives, to construct their “identities” with fewer physical constraints. New technology (and of course, the Pill) seemed to make this freedom a real option.

On television, Marshall McLuhan explained to them that their world had become a “global village.”

Maybe it was less obvious to the young, then, that the stale old order had also given previous generations a sense of confidence. They knew who they were. They were what they did and where they lived. You could see on a person’s body and posture what kind of work had defined them.

I worked as a masseur for a short while, and it struck me how labor physically shapes bodies - so much so, I could feel it. Middle-aged office workers tended to have a recognizable lump at the base of the neck. An elderly Norwegian man, who had been skiing for much of his life, had feet almost as hard as wood.

I guess you can recognize the body of an iPhone user from the downward-pointing gaze, the carpal tunnel syndrome and the strained neck muscles.

Most young people today can’t get stable long-term jobs of the sort that will truly shape them physically. But they can get as many “roles” as they want, without the physical limitations that rooted a role in what one did, where one lived, who one physically lived around.

“Identity” today, in the global digital village, can mean many things… but you may notice how much "identity” on social media becomes a matter of performance, of acting and calling it out, rather than living it in anonymity without calling it to attention.

Harajuku cosplayers, Japan. Young fans want to dress like their human idols in most postwar countries - typically idols from pop music and movies - but in the “fandoms” began the trend of dressing and acting like fictional characters from anime, comics, science fiction and fantasy. (CC image source: Chris 73.)

Cosplay, that peculiarly modern form of costumed performance with stylized body language, bright primary colors and cartoonish designs, is surely one sign of the times.

Since games are now a common point of reference and shared cultural experience worldwide, the step to “become” a game character is a short one. You can “be” Princess Zelda or Cloud Strife in costume - if only briefly - just as you briefly “are” the characters you play in games.

The phenomenon is now so mainstream, there are cosplay TV shows with competing costumed performers - even in my country Sweden. I would claim that the popular primary-color hairstyles you see today are inspired by anime and cosplay.

A bit of perspective: I think I belong to the last generation (born pre-Internet) that still played “Cowboys and Indians,” and even in my childhood that game was clearly on the way out. (Hey, don’t blame us kids - blame the grownups who indoctrinated us with cowboy-themed movies and TV shows. At that time, computer games had not yet become the mainstream culture.)

I swear we didn’t have any historical perspective or thoughts about real Native Americans. We were just kids playing out of what we saw on TV and read in comic books - before those comic books folded for good.

Even as I loved computer games before they went mainstream, it never occurred to me to dress up like a computer-game character. That was for the later generations. (I settled for making games, which I still do.)

I wonder what goes on inside the head of a cosplayer while “in character.” Does the performer completely identify with the costume, as when playing a computer game? Or is the cosplay more in a “festive” mood, like a masquerade or a carnival - or like when the childhood me dressed up as a cowboy, escaping into (rather half-hearted) pre-computer play?

The thing about cosplay is: Now it’s teenagers and adults playing dress-up. I’m not making any value judgments here; I want to understand.


Zoom Killed the Movie Star

From my outside-looking-in perspective, it seems the post-Internet grownups sorely need the opportunity to play at being someone else. It can be an outlet. You’re briefly relieved of the pressure of performing oneself on the global stage of screens and social media.

If you don’t quite get what I mean by “performing oneself,” here’s a plain example: Many have been forced to do a lot of video meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s stressful enough that a Zoom meeting eliminates those subtle unspoken cues and body language of a physical meeting. Everyone’s body language is equal in video-conference space: A face, staring at you.

You see your own face lined up with the faces of other people, and that forces you to become aware of your face like never before… every little twitch and movement, what it signals to the others… their reactions to your face are plain to see… you check that your face is lighted the right way… and that self-awareness turns your video meeting into a drawn-out performance.

We have become the screen actors of our own lives. Zoom meetings are going to kill “Hollywood glamour.” We’ve gotten too good a taste of how unglamorous the actor’s job really is.

There are now filter options that allow you to “touch up” your video-meeting face, and recently came software that turns your face into an avatar in realtime… but you still have to perform with it. (At least until our faces are entirely replaced by software to “stand in” for us.)

That digitally altered “face” in your Zoom call is, of course, an actor’s mask - in many ways like the mask of the original Greek stage performers.

Stage actors in ancient Greece, and performers of religious rituals, wore masks. It made the “act” easier, and the actor as a person wasn’t so easily confused with the role (unlike actors on the modern stage and screen).
When video filters on Zoom and TikTok distort our faces into digital “masks,” are we back in antiquity?


The Man Who Would Be Somebody

Remember that guy who underwent extensive plastic surgery and then declared on social media, without irony, that he had now become Korean?

What were his other options? And why make that online declaration in the first place?

He could have chosen to avoid surgery, and just dressed up as a Korean “character,” or used some kind of Snapchat-type video filter, or… but of course he would’ve been called out for that.

Merely “playing” a Korean would attract mockery, scolding or criticism. He might be accused of only being Korean ironically, or of “stealing” identity from genuine Koreans.

Only surgery, apparently, could prove he meant what he said. Blood had to be spilled, so that even “naturally born Koreans” couldn’t say he wasn’t being serious.

The public declaration of “Korean identity” was obviously a cry for validation. Why settle for the validation of one’s close friends and family in “meatspace,” when the approval/disapproval of the entire world beckons?

(Side Note: To my knowledge, no one has used plastic surgery to assume an “authentically Swedish identity.” What’s wrong with us, huh? Swedish “identity” isn’t cool enough? Where’s the Swedish Rachel Dolezal?)

But was this whole thing with the surgery and the public declaration really about the actual, geographically Korean people and culture? Was something else going on?

Look: I see no malicious intent. And I don’t want to scold or mock the man who tried to make himself Korean. Maybe he was just trying - too hard? - to physically “be somebody” - flesh and blood - in a world where “Smartphone User” is the “identity” everybody has in common and nobody admits.

Like any ordinary person in history, he used the tools that were handed to him.

I can’t say I look forward to the day when someone, somewhere proudly holds up a damaged, swollen finger and declares to the world: “This is me! This is what I am! Here’s my lived experience, written on my body! Two decades of tapping on touchscreens! Respect this finger!”

There’s all this talk nowadays about “polarization” and “people living in bubbles” created by “algorithms”… but I think another trend is much stronger: homogenization through technology. We’re all becoming more and more similar.

Assuming that we are what we do, then it must have consequences that we all increasingly do the same kind of work with the exact same tools.

And the superficial reaction against this unstoppable process - unstoppable because it’s driven by technology we can’t or won’t get rid of - focuses on almost anything but the technology itself. You can’t be a Luddite and stay online.

”It’s my political opponents who are changing everything -” No. It’s really the technology. First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.


Standing in Line For Mount Everest

Social media have produced so many unintended consequences in social behavior.

For instance: When it became trendy to take Instagram selfies at exotic, unique locations, tourists flocked to them - and the peak of Mount Everest is the unique location. There were reports of crowding, lines and jostling near the peak, as people had to wait for their turn to pose at the (very narrow) top of the world and take selfies.

Because people saw others posting selfies of themselves standing on the peak of Mount Everest, they wanted to emulate that. Some of them are now permanently frozen corpses up there. (Perhaps these corpsicles will someday be brought down by future historians and exhibited in a museum - that’s better than a selfie in terms of posterity!)

(And then there’s the tragic case of the Japanese man who livestreamed his climb up Mount Fuji in 2019.)

When you’re posting your life on, say, Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or Twitter, you’re acting to “be somebody” on a digital world stage. What does this do to you psychologically?

Can you really have a solid, rooted “identity” that feels physically real to billions of people you’ve never met? Social media relationships are different from meeting in person. And that you’re competing with everybody else for attention and validation only makes it harder.

I’ve caught myself thinking during vacation time with my own family, “This scene would make a nice Instagram pic.” And then I started thinking: Is there a line, when it comes to posting pictures from my family life, that I shouldn’t cross? And where, precisely, is that line?

Brooding over this issue, I eventually decided to draw a hard limit. I’ve become very protective of my privacy. So I rarely post any photos of my family online, to avoid any chance that their integrity is compromised - in the present or in the future.

I may be overly cautious. But it concerns me that if we all just keep posting private stuff without a care over the years, then what makes up our personal “identities” - life, family, our faces - might slowly, unconsciously, morph into commodities… and our daily lives might morph into a kind of live-action roleplaying game (LARPing).

(I’ve come across a striking case of this happening on YouTube, but I won’t link to it.)

For some, a situation like that is manageable. The Kardashians seem able to manage the show about their “real lives” (which is of course staged).

An artist can, I think, handle one’s own life turned into a living work of art that could transcend mere commercialism.

(Or are we all turning into living artworks?)


Angels With Digitized Faces

Granted, one can argue that if we move our public and private lives onto digital media, then these “virtual lives” effectively become the new real - more or less as “socially real” as what we had before, and arguably just as valid.

Okay, maybe - but this new social environment has its own very specific limitations, blind spots and challenges.

The most significant challenge of having the Internet as the place where you “become a person” is the lack of permanence and physicality. Marshall McLuhan stated that while you’re talking on the phone, you’re like an “angel:” A voice without a body, a discorporate being. That was pre-Internet.

Loyalties and group attachments can also become flimsy when they’re not rooted in a physical environment, in something tangible that you can trust.

So some person you’ve never seen gave you a like and an encouraging reply for posting your heartfelt statement… nice! But… what if that was a paid Internet troll - or was being ironic (irony is now being implicitly associated with political extremism) - or was a bot?

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

How are you certain what’s a real person online? This anxiety is only going to get worse.


Why Kanye Hides His Face

Another growing “identity” trend: Hide your face entirely. Just mask it. It’s too much stress to perform anyway, plus the added worry that your digital appearance will be stolen for memes - or worse things.

Kanye West,* always eager to stay ahead of a trend, started to appear with face-covering balaclavas and various masks. I saw a YouTube video clip of him from a concert where his head is entirely covered up in a tight-fitting balaclava, and he sings the refrain “Sace fave / save face.”

That’s the Masked Singer and Sexy Beasts option: Lock up your "true identity” like the treasure it is. A tribal superstition has returned with a vengeance: Cameras can steal your soul - and it’s almost true.

Westerners used to frown on orthodox Muslims for putting on veils; now we’re busy making our own. What if veiled Muslims were way, way ahead of the curve?

(* FOOTNOTE added in 2022: This essay was originally posted in 2021. While I find Kanye West’s descent into antisemitism and Nazi sympathies loathsome, his obsession with face and masks remains relevant to the essay. Trend-chasing public figures are interesting in this context becuse they tend to exaggerate and make explicit what is merely implied elsewhere in culture. The resurgence of antisemitism as a possible side effect of a weak sense of “identity” could be the subject of another essay. -A.R.Y.)


This Is Your God

Surely there are other things than appearance, birthplace and work to anchor an “identity” to. Such as beliefs, religions…

Yeah, but:

I had this eye-opening moment when I saw a selfie that a woman had posted. She was on her pilgrimage to a holy city, and in the selfie she is smiling in the foreground, with the huge shrine looking very small in the far background…

That one photo was a revelation. I realized that billions of people now have one true shrine: the smartphone - our object of daily worship.

It has the godlike power to instantly turn old religions and huge temples into tiny background, turn nobodies into world celebritites, - and to turn every user into User, a kind of “generic person” who isn’t located or rooted anywhere… like a free-floating soul without a physical body.

Look around you - we’re all bowing our heads before our little shrines. It’s as if we’re praying to them to make us real, guide us and nourish our souls. And they turn us into secular “angels.”

Prediction: There will come a standard app with every new smartphone that delivers a “digital afterlife.” When your physical death is registered, the app processes your stored user data to generate an “avatar” with your face and personality, that your friends and family can interact with indefinitely.

(The horror is that there are people who think this isn’t some nightmarish vision in a Black Mirror episode, but a great business idea. How will this afterlife avatar pay for itself? Obviously: Sponsorship. The avatars of the deceased will be used as shills to sell products and services. Even in death we will be commodities.)

Let’s just say that as long as those shrines are privately owned commercial properties, I wouldn’t trust them with my soul.


The Caliphate Gains 100 XP

When I grew up there were moral panics about new media technology. Comic books were still accused of ruining children’s minds. VCRs were depicted as cultural Trojan horses that could turn an innocent child into a chainsaw-wielding psycho.

(Watch this subtitled Swedish “documentary” about video nasties from 1980. Note especially the opening montage, showing video violence projected onto a child’s forehead. The implication is that children are passive receivers - like TV sets - who immediately “become” what they watch.)

Violent computer games were also treated with suspicion… but perhaps they received less of the hysterical hostility because we young computer “geeks” mostly sat quietly in our own rooms, bothering no one.

And so the geeks were largely left alone to conquer the world. Now everyone’s a gamer. Elderly people and adults meet outside to play Pokémon Go. Everyone is becoming familiar with the concept of the RPG: You assume a game “identity” and play it to gather experience points. Playing at being someone else is now a normal part of living.

There is a theory that young men overall are less physically violent now because much of their natural hormone-driven aggression is being channeled into fictional game violence. I have reason to believe there is much truth to this (up to a point).

Can a gaming world lead to more peace? If everyone has the option to be a violent hero in an elaborate RPG, will they be less inclined to forge an “identity” with real violence?

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that the radicalized men who went to Syria to join a “caliphate” had instead chosen a nonviolent alternative. LARPing with strict rules and blunt weapons, perhaps riding on horseback, pretending to conquer imaginary territories… and nobody would get hurt.

But playing roles isn’t always enough to sate the hunger to “be all you can be.” For some, the feeling of being a nobody, a person without a face, grows critical. We’ve seen these persons lash out in the news during the past few decades - in school shootings, bombings and other pointless acts of violence.

H.G. Wells’ novel The Invisible Man (1897) made a spooky prediction about the kind of person who might shoot up a school or bomb a public building today. His invisible protagonist becomes totally isolated, losing everything that a person needs to make up an “identity.” So he goes mad and vows to start a “reign of terror.”

The broadcast violence of terrorism is the most extreme way that a minority of people - mainly young men - assert their existence to the world. Terror always makes the news. Thanks to electronic mass media, the “invisible man” gets to “be somebody” on CNN. (See also Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s 2005 essay “The Radical Loser.” )

Whether society’s “invisible men” will eventually be sedated with more advanced forms of roleplaying, where they can “exist” as the violent heroes of their own imagination - fully immersive VR? The Matrix? - remains to be seen.

Send in the Clowns

“Be all you can be” - the iconic recruitment slogan for the U.S. Army, with an implicit message about “identity”: Join us to become the ultimate “somebody.”

Until The Matrix is perfected - in a future when we no longer know who or what is real - there is still time to think about how to relieve the stress of trying to be a person in a global village.

Quit social media? Limit the smartphone use to x number of hours per week? Go offline on weekends to “be yourself”?

How about demanding that the IT industry takes actual responsibility for what it has created? How about making laws to protect individual integrity online? (Perhaps because I’m from Sweden, I trust in laws and institutions to help citizens.)

It’s a sickness of our time to hold individuals responsible for circumstances they didn’t get to choose. We didn’t choose to create Twitter; it was foisted upon us. Change the medium first, not the users.

At the very least, the public needs to be educated in “media savvy” to make it less easily manipulated by the forms of media… to increase awareness of how the media format itself turns “identity” into a performance, on a digital world stage.

I wish there was an app that if you used social media for too long and got too emotionally involved, the app would whisper in your ear like Caesar’s slave: “Remember, O User, that you are only a mortal,” or: “This is not the place where you become a real person,” or: “Does Mark Zuckerberg need another luxury house?”

Consider the therapeutic value of playful “identity.” To “be” in po-faced seriousness all the damn time is exhausting. That’s why carnivals exist and why a reasonable amount of gaming is healthy. For a brief while, we can pretend to be someone else - be engaged, yet not too serious about it - and then go back to our ordinary lives.

Maybe, if cosplay or LARPing or Sexy Beasts isn’t your thing, you could try this: Paint your face and work as a clown - a proper, nice clown who makes people laugh, not the menacing psycho kind.

Hypothesis: As society becomes more confused about defining personal “identity” in public, and our integrity is compromised by technology, the value of owning a “private face” - separated from the world - will increase. (Kanye in his balaclava is on to something.)

As a side effect of that, all kinds of masked play should increase in popularity. Hence, the circus clown could have a renaissance - first as a feared figure, then as a figure of fun and relief.

We could all use some good old-fashioned, socially integrated clowning now, in this dire world. And a proper clown is invincible - there’s no thicker armor around one’s true self than that painted face.

I could elaborate on why a particular clown-faced villain became an icon of fear, or why Boris Johnson created a “clownish” public face to become invulnerable to criticism… but that’s for another essay.

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FOOTNOTE: In my illustrated postapocalyptic novel DARC AGES Book Four: City of Masks, the plot revolves around a mysterious city where all the citizens hide their true faces. The novel is available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/DARC-AGES-Book-Four-Illustrated/dp/1549729225/