I was playing in a charity cornhole tournament on Shelter Island earlier this week. I'm not a committed cornholer, but it's a surprisingly satisfying sport (Brian says any activity where you can smoke and drink while playing is not a sport). Another friend observed that it might be the whitest pastime on earth, somewhere between lacrosse and pickleball. Sadly, our team was dispatched almost immediately. Before leaving I grabbed a photo with the winner's trophy to send to my family. Never pass up the opportunity to enhance a narrative.
Something else caught my attention as I wandered around.
People I know. I see them once or twice a year and, normally, they're just a year older. This year I took note of the full overhauls. Heavy GLP-1, TRT transformations. New versions of themselves. In many cases, healthier versions. You’ve probably noticed the same.
We’ve spent the last twenty years editing digital versions of ourselves—carefully choosing photos, contexts, opinions and stories. Changing our physical selves is not new, but the changes are growing bolder and more commonplace.
The internet taught us to think of ourselves as software: something that can always be updated, optimized and versioned.
That observation came to mind on the drive back to Brooklyn. I was thinking about how identity now has much more intentionality. I opened ChatGPT’s new voice mode and started a chat.
(BTW, the new Chat model is truly nuts in its fluidity and humanness. Seems OpenAI feels the same way. The much anticipated voice-driven device will attempt to transform the capability into a consumer hardware offering.)
Anyhow, all this is part of the same disorienting modern condition. The digital become increasingly human. The physical becomes editable like the virtual. A singularity emerges. Identity is a SKU.
Below, I recapped my robot conversation cause I thought it was good.
Me: I was just at a party where a few people I’d known for years looked like entirely different versions of themselves. Not older. Different. GLP-1s. TRT. Better medicine. Better technology.
It made me wonder if there’s something bigger going on.
We’ve spent twenty years editing digital versions of ourselves. Now we’re beginning to edit the physical one. It almost feels like the internet taught us to think of ourselves as software.
It also feels connected to the final triumph of narrative. You become the story you want to tell. Maybe the story no longer follows the self. Maybe the self begins following the story.
Am I imagining this, or is there something genuinely new happening here? Start with the basics. What is identity? Get me smarter on this.
Sure. At its core, identity is the answer to, who am I? But that's not one thing. It's memory, roles, values, body, and the stories that stitch all of that together over time. Part of it is how you see yourself, and then part of it is how others see you. And the conversation between those two views is changing all the time.
Me: Give me a bit more on the philosophical underpinnings.
Hmm. Okay, so there’s a long argument there that maps pretty well onto what you’re noticing. Some traditions say you’re basically your body, but bodies are now modifiable in new ways. Then, you’ve got the idea that you’re the same person because of memory. Continuity of consciousness. But memory is slippery and edited by narrative. Then there’s the narrative view that we author our own lives. And now those tools of authorship are on overdrive. So the philosophical twist is the body is joining the narrative layer. It’s becoming as editable as a profile. So the question starts to shift from who am I to what about me stays unedited?
Me: Who has written good stuff on this?
Lots of people have been circling this idea for years. Marshall McLuhan thought technology changes who we become, not just what we do. Baudrillard worried that representations become more real than reality itself. Harari argues humans are becoming "hackable animals." What's striking is that these ideas no longer feel theoretical.
Me: Um, how do people come to terms with what is the core self?
I think a lot of it is noticing what's driving the edits. Is it your own desire? Is it pressure from other people? Is it a kind of exhaustion? Then asking what actually feels continuous across all those changes. Maybe it's a set of values or a few close relationships, or even just the style with which you make choices in your life. Not everything has to be anchored to one fixed core for everyone to see. But having one or two touchstones that don't rely on performance can really help steady the ship.
Me: Right. What do you think are the second order consequences of a society where identity is much more fungible than it was before?
I think it's pretty profound. If identity becomes more fluid, I think reputation matters less and branding starts to matter more. Self-optimization also turns from a choice into an expectation. And authenticity gets a lot harder to pin down. We might also see more churn. More rapid switching between selves, careers, affiliations, with politics tilting even more towards identity expression rather than policy. Hmm. One consequence I think is super interesting, capital starts to buy not just things, but possible selves.
Tech used to extend what we can do. Now it extends who we can be. I think that's new.
Me: Let’s break it down into a few categories. Consumer culture, professional life, relationships, the economy?
In consumer life, it's gonna become buying selves, not things. Brands selling who you'll get to be as their customer. Professionally, AI makes skills more portable. Your identity is less about a specific craft and more about your taste and judgment, your ability to reinvent and relaunch yourself. In relationships we might need new tolerance for our partners and friends updating themselves. Relationships may become less about accepting who someone is today and more about remembering who they've been. History itself becomes an act of love.
Economically, if identity is as editable as it seems like it's going to be, then whole markets might shift from goods to selves. Wellness, AI, education, creator tools, all that stuff. The economy starts trading in "becoming". Who gets to author the next version of you? You, or the algorithm?
Me: Some good points. It strikes me that we've been talking about all of these things separately. Taste. Wellness. Narrative. Even why social media has become so central to politics. Maybe they're all manifestations of the same phenomenon. If identity has become more fungible, then all of these become tools for constructing and projecting the self.
In a world of infinite edits, a coherent point of view becomes one of the few things that can't be commoditized. Taste matters because it determines which version of yourself you choose to build. Narrative matters because identity increasingly lives in stories rather than biographies. Wellness becomes less about curing illness and more about constructing identity. Even politics becomes more performative because identity itself becomes a political act.
Me: And the obvious counter reaction where we reject all of this. A longing for permanence and you know old-fashioned kind of values. Because we see the person that changes willy-nilly as a fraud or not authentic.
When everything is fluid, the opposite becomes precious. Continuity as the new scarce commodity. We might see it re-emerge as its own sort of luxury good. Long, visible commitments, kept over time, as a counter-signal to the rest of the culture. Some people will lean into constant reinvention, some will double down on being legible and steady. What we admire shifts. We used to admire consistency, now we admire transformation. The question is if that pendulum will swing back. Maybe, after a while, the most impressive thing is refusing to optimize.
Me: Interesting.
Other stuff:
AI gives good answer but also good bullshit. The result, the scarce resource isn’t information anymore, it’s trust. And, every AI-generated answer creates another verification step. The machine removes friction from production while adding friction to belief. New York Times Opinion: The Internet May Look Different After You Listen to This
Salespeople are having a moment. For years we convinced ourselves that dashboards and algorithms could replace relationships. As AI commoditizes content and search fragments, the people willing to "get their ass wet" suddenly look undervalued again. PvANotes: Hacker News Sales Rules
Local journalism keeps shrinking while national journalism keeps concentrating. Manhattan now has roughly ten times its population share of newspaper jobs. The result isn't just fewer local reporters but a national conversation increasingly produced by people living in the same handful of neighborhoods. Bloomberg: The New York-ification of Media Keeps Growing, Warts and All
Silicon Valley has a new AI wunderkind: Leopold Aschenbrenner. He raised hundreds of millions, wrote a viral manifesto, got margin-called, and still finished the year ahead. merica doesn't actually love prodigies. It loves hustlers. We celebrate the comeback story because it leaves room for us to imagine we could become the hero too. Financial Times: Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund..
There's a reason everyone is arguing about Rubberz. The song itself doesn't matter. People are trying to figure out whether provenance still has value once the output becomes indistinguishable from human work. Music is just the latest industry asking that question. Pitchfork: So Is Fenix Flexin's "Rubberz" AI or What?
Everyone wants to be YouTube. Netflix is licensing creators. Disney is adding social features. Streamers keep trying to import YouTube into lean-back television. But they misunderstand the product. YouTube isn’t just video—it’s an enthusiast platform built on intent, density and discovery. Wall Street Journal: Netflix, Amazon and Peacock Go Big on Popular YouTubers
The old guard won. Not by becoming creators, but by becoming indispensable to creators. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal now function as the reporting layer of the internet. Large newsrooms generating the facts that thousands of newsletters, podcasts and YouTube channels transform into analysis and opinion. The web fragmented. Reporting consolidated. New York Times Q2 Earnings |
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Hey Rich. Thanks for note. It just struck me that more of identity is in play. It’s gonna grow and get weirder.
This is the NUT graf for me (written by AI, not Troy ha): “If identity becomes more fluid, I think reputation matters less and branding starts to matter more. Self-optimization also turns from a choice into an expectation. And authenticity gets a lot harder to pin down.”