“Self-Becoming on AirBnB”: Alexander Stern on Hans Georg Moeller & Paul J. D’Ambrosio’s *You and Your Profile*

Social media has wrought enormous changes in how we communicate with each other, organize and conceive of our social lives, and even understand ourselves. This much is cliched and largely agreed to by proponents as well as critics of the medium. But can we go even further and say that social media has inaugurated an entirely new kind of identity or “identity technology”? This is what Hans George Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio, authors of You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity, contend. The new flavor of identity that is outstripping authenticity — modernity’s previous preference — they give the name “profilicity.”

Despite taking on an urgent question — what exactly is becoming of identity in the internet age — the book fails to offer a compelling account of this new identity or to convince the reader that it is actually ascendant. The authors are, furthermore, unfairly dismissive of some of social media’s critics, and pay little attention to the history, forces, or incentives behind social media.

The book’s central thesis is that just as authenticity came to outstrip sincerity in the modern age, profilicity is coming to replace authenticity. They adopt their understanding of authenticity and sincerity from Rolf Trauzettel. In brief, on Trauszettel’s model, sincerity is a form of identity centered around conforming to roles. According to the sincerity paradigm, the authors write, “One should not only act in accordance with one’s roles but also endorse one’s actions psychologically. In this way, one honestly identifies with one’s roles.” Like all identity paradigms, which are fundamentally fictions we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives, sincerity generates serious tensions and outright paradoxes. The authors cite Antigone’s “being torn between being a good sister and a loyal citizen” as a paradigmatic example.

In modernity, authenticity largely comes to replace sincerity by emphasizing the individual’s actualization of an inner self, often in the face of externally imposed social roles. Authenticity contains its own contradictions, of course. Are we meant to discover ourselves or create them? Don’t our efforts to thwart society’s expectations still end up being defined — if in opposition — by them? Are our selves really authentic if we depend on others for validation? Despite these tensions, authenticity established itself during the modern period as the dominant “identity technology.”

In transition to the next stage of identity, the author’s claim, people give up representing true authentic selves online, and instead curate different profiles. Profilicity begins before social media, according to the authors, but only begins to become dominant in the social media era. They cite Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction” as identifying a similar phenomenon with the movie star. “While facing the camera,” Benjamin writes, “[the actor] knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. […] The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of personality’, the phony spell of a commodity.” Although the authors disagree with Benjamin’s pejorative evaluation, they see him as describing the prehistory of profilicity. The authentic individual is replaced by a “prolific persona” who presents himself to the marketplace or what the authors term “the general peer,” an anonymous observer the profile-maker aims to please. “Phony or not,” Moeller and D’Ambrosio write, “the ‘personalities’ of movie celebrities represent the commodification of identity. The same is true of the profilic personas of the rest of us.”

This account of the origins of profilicity raises a number of questions that are never satisfactorily addressed. First and most basically, is there any meaningful difference between celebrity and profilicity? (If not, it seems we can dispense with the unwieldy term.) Moreover, if the book’s central thesis is more or less that we’re all forced into something like celebrity online, it begins to look, on the one hand, quite obvious, and, on the other, to require much more of an examination of celebrity than the book provides.

The author’s do, to be fair, attach some more theory to the concept of “profilicity.” They draw on poststructuralism to construe it as “post-representational”: we perform multiple personas or brands, depending on context, that are defined not by an inner meaning that they represent but only in relation to other brands. And they do a good job of stressing the second-order nature of profile-creation online. Online we watch ourselves being watched by nameless observers. As Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism, a book the authors criticize, we develop a “sense of the self as a performer under the constant scrutiny of friends and strangers.”

Many readers will remain skeptical that what we are really dealing with is a new kind of identity. For one thing, many curate profiles online as a kind of chore that has a very tenuous relation to their real identity, even those, like writers and academics, who depend on a certain amount of online recognition for their livelihoods. Many if not most who are forced to self-present online for career reasons profess to hate it precisely because it forces us into a kind of phoniness. (For the authors, our worries about phoniness are a product of “authenticity nostalgia.”) Even those who enjoy days spent curating personas online generally see a need to cultivate a “real life” offline. In general, the authors tend to overemphasize the effects of online branding on identity formation. For example, they write of a special designation on AirBnB, “Superhost is not merely a business category; it can deeply effect identity [sic].” Can it?

For younger generations, the situation is admittedly different. Social media is not optional — at least not it doesn’t appear to be optional. This means it’s possible to consider that their identities are more bound up with online profile creation than those born in the 1990s and before. Given this fact, you would have thought the book included a closer empirical examination of online youth culture and experience than it provides. The authors could have reckoned more closely, for example, with research on identity formation and social media use among children and adolescents.

If nothing else, it’s clear that many young people engaged in this “profilic” kind of “identity work,” as the authors put it, feel a pervasive sense of isolation and dissatisfaction. Many critics are concerned that far from heralding a new form of identity, the pressures of “profilicity” stand in the way of healthy identity formation. Indeed, many of these problems seem to versions of the well-known pathologies of celebrity: like child stars, many adolescents seem to struggle to form stable identities given their reliance on approval from the “general peer.”

The authors are at pains to present the transition to “profilicity” as value neutral, but they have little to offer in response to this vein of analysis — which suggests that profilicity is more pathology than personality — except charges of nostalgia and a form of ad hominem. They repeatedly accuse critics of social media of “performative contradiction” because they too have online profiles. But the fact that these critics are compelled to cultivate an online presence has no bearing on the substance of their arguments.

In place of empirical data, the authors offer a number of anecdotes: a Chinese influencer who earns $50 million a year online; a YouTube influencer couple who struggle to live up to their followers’ parasocial expectations; a musician who performs under a variety of profilic pseudonyms. But extrapolating features of contemporary identity from these celebrities and influencers makes little sense. They remain a vast minority. It speaks further to the book’s failure to distinguish between the expansion of celebrity and the onset of a new form of identity.

The typical experience of social media is more consumerist. Far more time is spent lurking than actively creating content. Pew research found, for example, that 25 percent of Twitter users produce 97 percent of the platform’s tweets. Even fewer, one presumes, develop the kinds of followings that necessitate constant profile cultivation. Many of the examples about profile creation are drawn from Facebook, which has long been in terminal decline among young users (among whom any transition to a new identity technology would presumably be happening). Platforms more popular among young users, like TikTok, are scarcely mentioned.

The particulars of online experience are relevant to the book’s thesis because these particulars suggest life online is far more compulsive than creative. On this point, the authors have little to say except to dismiss social media critics, like Shoshanna Zuboff, who have detailed the commercial interests and finely tuned algorithms that manipulate users, keep them scrolling, and generate personal data for platforms to package and sell to advertisers. The authors concede that these threats of this addiction-by-design business model are real, but they suggest her concern for “individual autonomy” in the face of these forces is one of a number of “mere narratives employed to convince ourselves of a model of identity that once dominated an era.” In the absence of any substitute to the liberal value of the individual, however, the reader is left wondering how the authors imagine we will resist these threats. (This eagerness to abandon the value of individual autonomy is especially disquieting given a feeble defense of China’s social credit system the authors offer at one point.)

Ultimately, the book’s central comparison between the transition from sincerity to authenticity and that between authenticity and profilicity is unconvincing, at best, especially without an accounting of the conditions accompanying each identified transition. Its understanding of “profilicity” is even more troubling and seems almost willfully disconnected from common sense at points. For example, while dismissing Lasch’s criticisms in The Culture of Narcissism as mere “moral posturing,” the authors suggest that far from far from exhibiting narcissism, constant self-conscious attention to one’s image “represents an advanced mode of perception that is more complex, more socially attuned, and therefore more mature than clinging to the problematic notion of some authentic appearance.” It’s hard to see how any honest witness of contemporary social media theatrics could do anything but scoff at the idea that something like an “advanced mode of perception” is involved.

A more attentive reading of Lasch’s book could lead to a more nuanced understanding of contemporary identity. Far from a simple moralistic indictment of contemporary selfishness, Lasch offers a complex analysis of forces — including the market, therapeutic culture, and the media — that conspire to place individuals at the center of their own disconnected worlds. They are detached from genuine communities beyond a “general peer” whom they can never satisfy and robbed of genuine agency beyond the acquisition of frivolous consumer items that can never satisfy them. At its worst, You and Your Profile reads as apologetics for this sorry state of affairs.