from "The Liquid Self" by[@nathanjurgenson](https://x.com/nathanjurgenson) "The social media profile attempts to convince us that life, in all its ephemeral flow, should also be its simulation; the ephemeral flow of lived experience is to be hacked into a collection of separate, discrete, objects to be shoved into the profile containers. The logic of the profile is that life should be-captured, preserved, and put behind glass. It asks us to be collectors of our lives, to create a museum of our self. Moments are chunked off, put in a grid, quantified, and ranked. Permanent social media are based on such profiles, with each being more or less constraining and grid-like. Rethinking permanence means rethinking this kind of social media profile, and it introduces the possibility of a profile not as a collection preserved behind glass but something more living, fluid, and always changing." think of this in terms of Zygmunt Bauman's work on "liquid modernity". basically modernity liquefied traditional social structures that once gave people fixed identities, so modern individual must "self-create" without traditional guideposts. how does one prove one's existence + fluidity ? we have built social platforms and social tools where theoretically exploration and fluidity is embedded in our expectation of them, but rather as you accumulate profiles and build them up, categorize your experiences etc. intensifying our perspective of ourselves as rigid or at most as a continuous progression from only some lower levels to some higher ones. the opposite, for instance, to Heisenberg's concept of reality as “the continuous fluctuation of the experience as gathered by the conscience. In this respect, it is never wholly identifiable to an isolated system." *how do we build stuff that represents fluidity of identity, leaps in knowledge and sentiment and experience, non linear expressions of self? what does it mean to have more room to behave online, within your digital identity? is there a way to modify our current experience of online permanence?* reminescent in some sense of this wonderful quote from joan didion about her late husband: "We walked every morning. We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other’s route in mind and intersect before we left the park." How do we build offline and online ecosystems where one can wander, change routes, etc. while also intersecting at various points with their original interests and "lower levels" etc