J. G. Ballard once said "reality is a stage set that can be pulled down at any moment".
Is the fear of confronting reality crumbling in front of us the reason we cling so fervently to manufactured brand-tag hyperidentities? No amount of self-labelling has ever successfully managed to delude me into believing that anything actually exists underneath.
"What is a woman?" was a hot debate topic for a while, and despite receiving a wide variety of answers, the elephant in the room was never really addressed: that the entire concept is socially constructed and fluid, and furthermore that the most fitting answer for our times is in fact "a target group for advertisers". Our entire culture has been ripped up and devoured: our old ideas around social concepts like gender are outmoded. Social atomisation breaks down the original form of simple, tight-knit tribal identity, and makes way for (consumer-surveillance) capitalism to reterritorialise it. Identity is now manufactured, highly specific and more elaborate than ever before in history, and of course intrinsically tied to consumption.
It's also hollow and unconvincing. Hyperidentity doesn't come with the tangible sense of community of old: most of your identity "tribe" are physically distant online contacts, with a supplementary scattering of individuals throughout your "irl" life who you spend relatively little in-person time with anyway because contemporary (Western) life emphasises the individual over the community, and overwhelms you with work, study, digital-entertainment addiction, mental health episodes... "Reality" is socially constructed, so become isolated enough and it starts to falter.
Hyperidentity is distinguished from just "identity" in that it's primarily a relation with the self rather than a relation with others. Contemporary culture has created a new schizophreniform personality for us that "self-loves", "self-hates", "self-identifies". All a welcome distraction from the ever-more-apparent slipping of the veil over black space, all to the benefit of the system, always at the ready to affirm your identity -- your reality -- in order to exploit it for profit.
In order to effectively reconstruct social reality from the bottom up, we have to understand that it's constructed and constructable in the first place: to stop avoiding it, and finally confront the nagging, looming darkness beneath our culture. It doesn't have to be as frightening as it seems: beneath reality lie endless exciting possibilities. This is the part I'm not so sure about how to approach, it's where things really get interesting.
At least until identity can be once again reconstructed into something new, I'll be hanging around in the void a while.