On February 10, 2026, I took part in an event at Spui25 that explored digital culture and the self through the lens of Alexander Douglas’ Against Identity. The book takes on the ‘uncomfortable’ topic of identity and decides to play against it, drawing on the philosophies of three very different figures: Zhuangzi, Benedict de Spinoza, and René Girard. Douglas argues that we, humans, have no true identity that comes from within, yet we act as if we did. This is because we have all fallen victim to the romantic lie: that you can become yourself ex nihilo. Obsessed with finding our identities, we look to external models and begin unconsciously imitating them. Of course, this does not fill the identity void; we find that we still feel empty and keep reaching for more models. This constant identity-chasing loop leads to rivalry, violence, and, essentially, the fall of humanity. The three philosophers, whose voices Douglas attempts to speak through, all show that identity is a hoax. Instead, their philosophies offer ways in which we can keep becoming, unselfing, and living against identity.
For the Amsterdam book event, Douglas’ philosophy was placed in a different context: the Australian philosopher, with a background in music, film, and engineering, took on the New Media program of the University of Amsterdam’s Media Studies department. As respondents, Jernej Markelj and I were asked to react to Douglas’ book from the perspective of digital researchers. Practicing the digital-researcher gaze is usually a bit goofy: jumping between memes, self-deprecating humor, and Theory with a capital T. Either way, we confronted Douglas with some web-embedded ways of selfing and unselfing, in order to consider the position of identity within our platform era.
As Douglas pointed out in his talk, the internet brought about certain promises:
- To discover who we are
- To invent who we are
He omitted another central promise: anonymity and with it, the possibility to be no one at all. The first phase of the internet was marked by frivolity and play; we went online to cosplay a little. That was quickly shattered when anonymity became equated with danger under Web 2.0 (heavily influenced by the post-9/11 paradigm shift). Your personal information now had to correspond perfectly to your profile, and everything quickly became personalized. The internet was turned into a highly disciplined and centralized space under the guise of improving user experience and getting rid of all the fakers and scammers 🙁 So what about the right to identity or to its absence in today’s web? Moderator Geert Lovink pointed out that soon we may need to get through a ten-step authentication procedure requiring us to show our passports when trying to enter any online service. The situation seems doomed.
Identity holds less and less promises for meaningful action or solidarity and instead seems to only trigger visions of tightened control and governability. I’m wondering then, if going against identity can really bring about radical change in today’s power? How central an issue is it in the current reality? The idea of a stable self seems to matter less and less in a political climate where truth and fact are outdated concepts. Will having a true identity matter in fifty years? Or will we all become more similar to chatbots that speak through an interconnected, scattered hyper-brain? Is identity truly our main opponent?
It increasingly feels as though it no longer matters what or who we are, and perhaps we no longer truly believe in being one thing. It’s about vibes, not truths. It’s about momentary dopamine kicks, not a harmonious self. To keep up with the algorithm, to keep up with the platform, we must change constantly—take up different trends, looks, political stances—based on what is trending right now. Nothing really sticks anymore: politicians make outrageous statements only to contradict themselves moments later; those who were canceled in 2019 are SO back; last month’s viral moment is next month’s history. Thus, while we are still definitely engaging in mimetic desire, those desires operate at an ever-accelerating pace, interrupted before they can even run their course, replaced by the next trend, the next signal, the next model.
This made me think of modes of being suited to this hyper-mediated, brain-rot, NPC-forward, AI-slop, kawaii environment. My question for Alexander Douglas had to be, inevitably, about the Girl. This is what I read during my response:
Douglas proposes that, to pull away from our toxic mode of identity, to go against it, we should move toward communion in a shared identitylessness. I wanted to explore another tactic against identity, one not grounded in the male philosopher, but in the figure of the girl. When I say ‘girl’, I am not talking about people with a specific physical body, but about all those participating in a set of cultural, mostly online, trends.
In recent years, the internet has become girlified. We’ve seen an explosion of girl memes (girl dinner, girl math, girl brain) alongside a broader affective desire: to be baby. These memes should be read as symptoms of a larger cultural condition.
We are living through extreme political and economic precarity. Stable incomes are harder to come by, home ownership is out of reach for the young generations, and everything that once was tangible is now a subscription. Nothing is owned; everything is rented, streamed, or stored in the cloud. You are always aspiring, but never quite able to actualise desire. Such is the capitalist design; always chasing, never reaching, stuck in an infinite libido loop that is never allowed to run its course. When being a financially stable, authentic, secure adult becomes increasingly impossible, it makes sense that online we pose as cute animals or silly girls.
Throughout the book, Douglas shows us that identity is never born out of a true self, but from an unconscious mimesis of the models around us. At one point, he notes that imitation itself is not necessarily the problem, but rather the fact that it happens unconsciously. What we can see happening online is a conscious and tactical play with models of identity. The girls take the external model they are meant to comply with, that of gender, and play into it as an identity tactic. The patriarchy has deemed girls passive, innocent, and not capable of anything at all, and so the girls have started weaponizing this presumed incompetence. They perform the ridiculousness of essentialist notions of girlhood in order to show that these models are inherently ridiculous.
This is what is going on online. We can see it as a certain identity tactic used against identity. But can we push our analysis of the girl even further and consider her a mode of identitylessness?
Girlhood scholars suggest understanding girlhood as a state of mobility preceding the fixity of womanhood, implying an unfinished process of personal development. It is a state defined by unfinishedness and unfixity.
The French writing collective, Tiqqun, already theorised this condition in the 1990s through the figure of the Young-Girl. For them, this late capitalist creation, the young-girl, is not always young and increasingly not always a girl but rather “the figure of total integration into a disintegrating social whole.” She is simultaneously consumer and commodity: optimised, easily manipulated, endlessly transformable, and without (yet) a stable sense of self. When placed in the virtual sphere, this becomes even clearer.
As Alex Quicho argues, we are all girls online. Online participation requires the flattening and emptying of the self. We maneuver ourselves as images, constantly recalibrating how we show up, each day flooded by a sea of new trends, news, and viral hashtags. To keep up with this environment, we must remain adaptable and moldable. The platform does not want a strong notion of an innate self; it wants a flexible, changeable subject. The ongoing becoming and unfixity that mark girlhood make it the perfect condition for interacting with the platform.
Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, in Cute Accelerationism, connect the girl’s malleability to that of the cute object. The girl becomes and unbecomes through cuteness. Cuteness demands a giving-in: de-subjectivizing, becoming blobby, soft, collective. A cute object cannot be cute on its own; it becomes cute through interaction with its surroundings, inviting squeezing, hugging, or sighs of awwwww. For Ireland and Kronic, cuteness aspires toward meltdown into the egg: a state open to all forms and possibilities, requiring constant rebirth into something other. Cuteness as a process of the self shatters any possibility of fixed interiority, as it always grows outward and never reaches a climax.
These examples show how the girl can function as a mode of identitylessness, one that makes no claim to any true identity, has no self to lose, but instead flows through a continuous becoming that never reaches a final form.
What I’m interested in is how Douglas’ project relates to modes of identitylessness that we can see online, as shown here through the condition of the girl. When identitylessness is already being lived and monetised online, how do we prevent the move against identity from collapsing into a condition that capitalism and platforms actively require? One thing is certain: accelerating into the total girl would definitely put an end to this male-coded need for a true self. Girls are everything and nothing all at once, they are fans of following the Dao.