Identity as a marketing category for product placement; or as a designation for the State. Identity is how men make themselves visible to the panopticon. The panopticon is both corporate and state run -- technology is where the two take account and analyze a population.
Men identify themselves with brands and products (corporate designations) and by skin color, occupation, gender, etc (state class and group designations). Men are skilled in self-identification from a palate of categories offered to them by the corporate state.
Skillfullness is the enemy of personality. One is skilled at a recognized method. One learns the skill and practices it just as others practice it. One aspires to a base level ability with that skill. Personality arises from the nimbus, the opaque wild. Personality is how men are unique and remain invisible to a panopticon. But men are no longer unique. They seek to group themselves, which was the corporate and state desire for them all along.
If there is to be a global state, it will be a virtual one. It will not be operated by statesman as we have known them historically, but by technologists-- wizards of virtual reality; a cabal of master programmers. The virtual world can reject laws and freedoms and rights established in the actual world.
The virtual world will offer carefully curated dreams of identity in place of the nimbus. For his identity man will relinquish those aspects of his personality that resist quantification until he has lost his personality altogether. He will become a member of a variety of different groups, each which practice a methodological identity. To stray from that identity or challenge it will result in ostracization.
There will be many who are denied access to the virtual world altogether. Yet by their resistance to the categories of identity these deplorables will have a chance at personality.
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