Digital doppelgängers: What we can learn from VR’s double trouble
by Isabel Thomas
In the future, we will all become our own imitators.
As our lives become more involved in virtual spaces, we’re becoming familiar with creating new versions of ourselves. How we construct and style these avatars, our digital go-betweens in Virtual Reality, feels like a process we can control. But what if we are also letting technology take control of who we are?
By now, most of us will have had some experience of tailoring an online identity: perhaps by applying filters to our profile pictures, stickers to our selfies, or just by carefully curating the images of our social media streams.
In the case of VR, which is likely to play an ever greater role in our day-to-day interactions, the process of tailoring our identity will come into sharper focus as we create three-dimensional avatars. Offering us a space to experiment with identity, these avatars could be imagined as idealized versions of ourselves, fantastical alter egos or simply faithful reflections of who we really are. Whatever choice you make, though, they become a kind of self-portrait: your digital doppelgänger.
Doppelgängers have always been thrilling and weird phenomena. From the literary motifs of folklore and gothic novels, to the sci-fi fantasies of today, they have been imagined as uncanny twins, strangers with eerie similarities, or mirror images living different lives. That makes them an unsettling but useful metaphor for our VR substitutes. Are they tainted from the beginning, destined to alienate? Or will we be able to leverage them for our benefit?
Doppelgängers inevitably challenge our ideas of autonomy, individuality and personal agency. They do this by subverting processes of identity formation and socialization, particularly in virtual spaces where we consciously need to identify ourselves with a proxy.
Common to all variations of the doppelganger motif is the idea of an alienating experience and a loss of control. In a deeply personal process such as determining the appearance of our virtual avatar, the doppelgänger motif can manifest in two ways:
The rival
Tied to questions of how well our virtual avatar can represent us, and whether we like what we see, is the concept of the usurping alter ego that becomes our rival. That’s a classic motif in literature, from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double, in which the protagonist’s doppelganger eclipses him with better social skills and effortless charm, finally eroding his entire concept of self.
VR users face a related threat: when feeling authentic has a direct impact on our personal well-being, a limited selection of identity features for avatars (especially among non-dominant groups) diminishes our ability to feel comfortable in virtual spaces. With such a limited range of options, there is a high probability your avatar will resemble those of others. How unique can you be, if you’re just an identical face in a crowd?
The monster
The second concept around the doppelganger motif is that of a split personality, or a monster. One of the most prominent literary examples is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the protagonist’s self-indulgent double turns into an uncontrollable, murderous criminal. As doppelgängers multiply across disconnected VR platforms, what effect will it have on the integrity of our own self-image? Are you in control of yourself, when there is more than one self, or when your avatar circumvents social norms and limitations?
It would be wrong to see nothing but downside to doppelgangers, though. Take the benefit of digital twins, such as the models of a person used for personalised healthcare. Worries over identity theft based on easy data extraction are valid, but they can also be countered by greater transparency over data collection if we see our data being used for beneficial purposes. Likewise, there are some illuminating benefits to seeing yourself from a distance, such as the case of doppelgängers inspiring us to be “better versions” of ourselves when we try to emulate their behavior or attitude.
So, as tensions become more apparent with these doubles, we have a choice to make: we can either seek more control of our avatars or risk becoming alienated by them. Imagine, for instance, what difference it would make if avatars were created to be as unique and individual as our fingerprints? How much more connected to them would we feel if they moved seamlessly between different platforms, enabled by standards of interoperability? Giving people’s avatars unique identifiers — from beauty marks and scars to tattoos or wedding rings — can help us feel more like us.
Whatever the possible outcomes, it eventually comes down to a matter of trust: from feeling authentic in creating our virtual avatar to assuring others that we are who we claim to be. Otherwise the consequence, for business, society and planet, could be that the next evolution of the digital age leads to a throng of doubles, but very few individuals.
