Your digital doppelgänger wants to be you
About the author: Sam Applebee is a social entrepreneur and consultant helping organisations save the world with tech. He is founder of Super Global, and Co-founder of Kickpush & Pilotfish.
It was harmless enough at first. It was just a bit of fun online with your friends. You created a Facebook profile. You shared your best and proudest moments. Posts were liked. Comments were made. Everything was dandy. Then one dark night in November as the eye of a particularly ferocious storm passed directly overhead *ZAP!* … In a blinding flash of LEDs the other you was born. The eery whir of modems still rings in your ears.
We all have digital doppelgängers. They’re highly curated versions of ourselves. And not only that, they’ve taken on lives of their own. Consciously or otherwise we make embellishments. Whether it’s the awkward guy in the club on his own, taking selfies to post about how much the party’s going off, or your Insta story of that coffee shop #workanywhere session where really the latte was shit and you achieved precisely nothing.
Who are these people of the internet? They’re not quite us. But we’re inextricably linked. Without our attention they’d be static — frozen forever mid-brunch. But even with no life of their own, they’re beginning to take control of what we do IRL (in real life).
Consider Second Life, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) that lets you create a virtual self with characteristics of your choosing. In Second Life you can simulate pretty much any real world activity with other players over the course of a lifetime — it’s what it says on the tin.
Psychologists have been swooning over the game for a decade . The anonymity it affords users lets researchers observe their uninhibited behaviour. People use their second lives to represent their ideal or aspirational selves.
Being badass online makes you more badass offline. The attractiveness and even height of people’s avatars improves their real-world confidence. At least temporarily — since we are, after all, limited by our physical bodies. And the sword cuts both ways. Violence in the virtual world translates into aggression in the real world.
A Second Life avatar might seem a far cry from your Twitter profile, but they’re similar exercises. The difference is that on Second Life you’re free from physical and real-world social constraints. You can be whoever you want. Meanwhile our social media doppelgängers are restricted to being mere distortions of our analog selves. Embellish too much, and we risk being discredited, vilified, and written off as weird.
Still, our digital relatives are usually a little prettier, cleverer and more exciting than their flawed, fleshy namesakes. This small dissonance between our online and offline selves can really mess up our mental health, driving us from distraction to anxiety and even depression.
In short: we make our digital doppelgängers better than us, which compels us to try to become them, and the impossibility of doing so makes us go a little crazy. So what to do?
Perhaps education offers a path to more authentic online counterparts? Or maybe we can force people to be transparent in how they represent themselves? China is certainly doing the groundwork with its social credit score, though for different reasons. For many, especially in the West where we hold freedom of expression sacred, this isn’t an attractive future.
But what if there was another way to close the gap between original and doppelgänger? What if we could change our real selves?
Body modification isn’t new. From hairstyles to tattoos we’ve been at it since humans evolved a large neocortex — the outermost layers of our brains, tightly packed in squiggly folds — which enables our capacity for complex culture.
Neither are mind-altering drugs, which have traditionally been used for symbolic spiritual and recreational purposes. Now ‘nootropics’ a.k.a. smart drugs, drugs designed to enhance cognitive ability, are becoming as popular in universities as they are in Silicon Valley.
But we’ve always been constrained by the limits set by nature. Technological advances mean those days are dwindling. Human enhancement is emerging from the realms of science fiction and appearing in labs.
Augmentations like prosthetics are often initially designed as aids for the differently-abled, though it’s never long before they’re developed to enhance human functioning beyond natural levels.
Improvements in our ability to precisely map patterns of neurons firing will soon enable practical applications for brain-computer interfaces: allowing us to control machines with our minds. Being a cyborg drummer might not be appealing, but how about gloves that give you the dexterity of a concert pianist and the ball control of Roger Federer?
Beyond the physical, we’ll be able to plug our brains into computers to enhance our intelligence — or so argues Oxford University professor and leading AI philosopher Nick Bostrom in his seminal book Superintelligence.
Radical developments in artificially intelligent systems (including machine learning and optimisation technologies), combined with progress toward quantum computers and neuromorphic chips, make this prospect not only possible, but potentially accessible to consumers as the technologies mature.
In a world where more and more of our lives play out online, it seems unlikely we’ll be able to resist the temptation of aggrandising our digital selves. The question is: how far will we go to become our doppelgängers?
