The Great Smushing: Your Avatar Needs You.

Richard Bradbury: Who will we be in the metaverse? Obviously, an avatar. But what will that avatar mean for the person in the real world. Has digital technology already eroded our identities?

Richard Bradbury: What’s up? Are you having an identity crisis?

Matt Armitage:

• Seems that way.

• We talk about identity a lot on this show. But usually from the perspective of privacy and identity theft.

• Today I wanted to look at it from a slightly different angle.

• And just to digress for a minute. I started work on this show a few weeks ago.

• We’ve had to do reruns for the last couple of spots because I finally caught Covid-19.

• You might be able to hear its lovely rattle in my voice.

• It managed to penetrate my quantum fortress despite all the subroutines I’ve been employing.

• And I have to say – even though I wasn’t in danger at any point.

• It really isn’t a walk in the park. It isn’t like flu.

• I’m vaxed and boosted and it still knocked me out.

• I’m still feeling it now – my chest is still congested, my energy levels are non-existent.

• It’s not a joke. It is real.

• And I hate to think what would or could have happened if I had been vaccine hesitant or sceptic.

• If you are still on the fence – my advice is to make that appointment, check with your GP if you have health conditions you think might be an issue.

• But we’re seeing the emergence of these strains that spread more easily and cam reinfect people who have already had the virus.

• So even though we are going to that endemic phase – do what’s sensible to look after yourself.

• But yes, back to identity. Which I’ve had plenty of time to think about over the past couple of weeks.

Richard Bradbury: You mentioned looking at it from a different angle?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, so we’re looking into the metaverse again.

• And what the emergence of those technologies might mean for the people we are and the people we become.

• The idea that in the metaverse we have this avatar identity. But that it might become our primary identity.

• If the metaverse becomes this place where we got to work, where we shop, where we socialize and go for entertainment.

• What happens to our real-world identity when our digital identity becomes the primary one?

• And not just as a metaverse phenomenon.

• We’ve had digital personas for a couple of decades already.

• So, it’s also a question of how much we’ve already made that transition, that movement to shifting our personalities online.

• And how much this has primed us for this development of the metaverse, virtual environments and all these other trends that are being labelled as a catchall Internet 3.0.

• The starting point for this was an opinion piece on Wired called Welcome to the Great Smushing by Zak Jason.

• And a tweet by Reese Witherspoon, which is not something I get to say on the show too often.

Richard Bradbury: Reese Witherspoon?

Matt Armitage:

• I’m not being patronizing or condescending here.

• I’m a huge fan of Reese Witherspoon, but she doesn’t intersect with the show very often.

• There are a number of high-profile actor-entrepreneurs. Especially in the digital space.

• Ashton Kutcher. Gwyneth Paltrow. Reese Witherspoon may be lower profile as an entrepreneur but arguably is more successful than either.

• According to Forbes she’s the world’s richest female actor, worth around USD$400m.

• After producing movies like Gone Girl, Witherspoon founded her production company Hello Sunshine which has proved to have way more hits than misses,

• Including bank making shows like The Morning Show and Big Little Lies, not to mention the forthcoming Zoe Saldana starring series From Scratch.

• Last year she sold a majority stake in that production company Hello Sunshine to a hedge fund backed media group for $900m.

• Hence that USD$400m net worth.

Richard Bradbury: Any more Reese Witherspoon factoids?

Matt Armitage:

• Her literacy and book discussion service, Reese’s Book Club has over 2m members worldwide.

• More than 40 of the books it’s recommended have made it into the New York Times bestsellers list.

• She is quietly powerful. And increasingly influential.

• So when she tweeted on 12 January that:

• “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity. Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?”

• People who might not give Mark Zuckerberg or Meta a second thought started to think about the metaverse.

Richard Bradbury: Do you think she’s paving the way for her own NFTs or even a ReeseCoin?

Matt Armitage:

• That wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened in the crypto space over the last 12 months, but I’d say no.

• This isn’t Kanye’s Coinye West.

• Ashton Kutcher has scored some big successes with his investments, getting in early on companies like Uber and Airbnb.

• But investing early means those companies aren’t household names when he makes his move.

• As for Gwyneth, Goop is still considered a bit weird and fringe,

• Probably because the media has seized on the more gynecologically themed products that the site sometimes champions.

• But this is Reese Witherspoon. We’re watching mainstreaming at work.

• So if she’s asking if people are planning for their lives to go Meta, then that is the direction we’re heading in.

Richard Bradbury: How does this relate to, how did you phrase it: Smushing?

Matt Armitage:

• I can’t take credit for the term the Great Smushing. Though I’d like to.

• In the Wired piece Zak Jason’s central point was that the combination of digitization and the pandemic…

• …has pushed our lives and the identities we use in different parts of them together.

• That statement seems like a lot so let me unpack it.

• We all have different selves. For example, you and I have personas we use for this show.

• If you talk to me in real life – without a script – I have nothing to say.

• Ask me a question I’m not going to expect…

Richard Bradbury: Richard replies…

Matt Armitage:

• Genuinely, the only thing my brain is thinking about right now is French onion soup.

• And that’s kinda the point - The format of this show lets me seem a lot smarter than I am.

• I’m lying of course. I’m really much smarter than this show.

• I’m designing my own French onion soup at an atomic level as we speak.

• But we all have those different sides to ourselves that we show with different people.

• When I’m talking to clients, I can’t be the person I am on these shows.

• Which some new clients can find a little bit unsettling.

• Because they often know me from the show – so they expect me to go into the room and talk.

• Whereas I see my role – at least to begin with – as one where I listen to them.

• So, there’s this juxtaposition. they may assume I’m introspective because I’ll be sitting there, being dead quiet.

• I’m not – I’m watching and listening and finding out what it is that they need.

Richard Bradbury: Is being introspective a bad thing?

Matt Armitage:

• It’s not really about the good or bad aspect. It’s that expectation.

• They’ve been exposed to a part of my personality before meeting me.

• And in that initial meeting, they don’t get the part of the personality they’re expecting.

• Zak Jason had his eureka moment about smushing when there was a medical emergency with his kid while he was in a Zoom meeting.

• He was put in the position of responding to his child’s needs with his Zoom still broadcasting to his colleagues in the background.

• Normally, these would be part of our lives that are intimate and separate.

• But in a WFH world Zak’s professional and personal lives had completely merged.

• The two had become one.

Richard Bradbury: Why is it an issue if those different identities roll into each other?

Matt Armitage:

• It goes back to what I was saying about myself.

• Not only are we different people in those roles, we have different sets of behaviour, too.

• In Zak Jason’s case, he was in work mode, but he was suddenly called on to be a father.

• Now, in normal times, you’d get the call at work and you’d rush to the emergency room.

• You’d have the chance Clark Kent style to slip off your glasses and put on your hero dad cape.

• Jason found that he was stuck between the two. He was both Clark Kent and Superdad,

• And he realised wasn’t doing a very good job at either.

Richard Bradbury: Was his kid alright?

Matt Armitage:

• Thankfully yes. His baby apparently had one of those non-responsive moments that can be quite common.

• And an EMT on the emergency line was able to give him advice to stabilize his child until the paramedics turned up.

• All was well in the end.

• But later on, when he looked at what his life had become, he saw this convergence of all his identities,

• A convergence he calls smushing.

Richard Bradbury: Isn’t convergence in digital culture always a good thing?

Matt Armitage:

• Well, with digital devices, that’s often the case.

• Smartphone, phone, internet, camera, music player, work, entertainment.

• Blah blah blah. I don’t need to explain that bit.

• With people it’s a different story.

• We’re not this singularity you can represent through a digital device.

• As much as I often make it sound like we are, we aren’t devices:

• you can’t really improve on our hardware and software in a big or quick way.

• I’m not going to go into the whole transhuman thing as that will take us on a really long detour.

• We can learn. We can reskill. But there’s no Moore’s law for people.

• Our processing power, if you will, doesn’t improve in that way.

• We aren’t made to a specification.

Richard Bradbury: How does this shrinking or ‘smushing’ limit our individuality?

Matt Armitage:

• I guess that’s part of what I want to get into after the break.

• We’ve seen this movement across the 20th century to treat workers more like machines.

• So we have 100 years at least of technology that tries to treat us like machines and then replaces us with machines when we fall short.

• And we have this new reality – the impending metaverse – which we know is happening because Reese Witherspoon is telling us it’s coming.

• And this time, we have to filter our personality through a machine.

Richard Bradbury: When we come back. Are we our avatars? Or will our avatars be us?

BREAK

Richard Bradbury: We’re looking at the split personalities of our digital existence and the forces that are pushing us to choose a single identity to represent ourselves. Before the break we left you with the question: is your avatar you, or are you your avatar?

Matt Armitage:

• I know that sounds like it has an obvious answer.

• In most of the science fiction portrayals, avatars are more dungeons and dragons than IRL.

• You can be whatever you want. And certainly on the gaming side of the developing metaverse, that’s also part of the attraction.

• Your identity is only limited by your imagination. That’s always been the case, even in early open worlds like Second Life.

• The person you are doesn’t have to have anything to do with the person you become online.

• That may work with these fractured and fragmented metaverses and play environments.

• But that might change if it becomes The Metaverse. The place where you spend most of your work and leisure time.

Richard Bradbury: Because you’ll need one unified sign-on?

Matt Armitage:

• Partly. How many people are heading into their 30s or even approaching middle age with social media profile names they chose when they were teens?

• Signing up as piratenobeard might have seemed hilarious when you were 14

• but it might not represent you in quite the same way when potential employers are checking out your profiles for that senior management position.

• Have you ever changed the names on any of your social profiles?

Richard Bradbury: replies

Matt Armitage:

• I changed the name of my twitter account.

• Originally it was a company account but the content was getting to be more my own comments and opinions

• so I changed it to @kulturmatt to make it clear that it is me and not the company making all the bad puns.

• And that’s without getting into the trend of finstas – fake Instagram accounts that are maintained to keep up appearances

• or paint a whitewashed image of your life for family members and peers

• while sharing the more raw and truthful stuff with your close friends under a pseudonym.

e writer David Kirkpatrick in: 2009

• "You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

• Obviously, Facebook has always had a vested interest in us having that singular identity.

• We don’t know that this is still a view that Zuckerberg holds today

• but given what we’ve seen to date of Meta’s plans to create virtual workspaces within its ecosystem.

• I think it’s reasonable to assume that a unified or universal sign on linked to your real-world identity will be part of the package.

Richard Bradbury: What about that part of the question that says ‘your avatar becomes you”.

Matt Armitage:

• Going back to the finsta. The fake Instagram accounts.

• The effect that carefully curated social media profiles have on people has been widely reported.

• And the pressure it puts on people – particularly younger people – who think this is the kind of life they should be outwardly portraying.

• In a sense that’s already you becoming the avatar. The idea of living your best life.

• I don’t live my best life. I live a sloppy life cos I’m a normal person.

• I had a smoothie for breakfast and a not inconsiderable amount of it slopped onto my tee shirt.

• There was no artfully lit photo of my blended beverage. Largely because it resembles liquid green concrete.

• And if I was living my best life, I wouldn’t still be wearing the same smoothie stained shirt as we record this.

• Or maybe that not caring is me living my best life.

Richard Bradbury: If that seems to be the direction we’re heading in: what harm will it do? It will simply be the norm.

Matt Armitage:

• But we aren’t these unified selves. Look at the influencer burnout trend over the past few years.

• The pressure of being always on.

• Creating engaging content every minute of the day.

• Those pressures are some of the reason that platforms like Instagram are rethinking their policies to publicly show how many likes a post gets.

• As I mentioned earlier – we are different people in different situations.

• You might be the teddy bear at work and the tiger at home with the kids.

• Or vice versa. I’m sure most people have been in those situations where we’ve erroneously brought together different groups of friends.

• Only for everything to fall flat. You may be the connecting piece between those different groups.

• But it may not be the same you. So the sparks that make those different groups function may not spark in the same way in that wider context.

Richard Bradbury: Is there a quantifiable benefit in terms of maintaining those distinct identities?

Matt Armitage:

• I got this example from Zak Jason’s piece and it seems that there may be.

• Studies by Sarah Gaither, an assistant professor in the psychology and neuroscience department at Duke University,

• Have shown that having these different identities – they might be grouped around our job, interests, our age, gender, race.

• All the multiple touchpoints that help to define us as individuals.

• These different identities can helps us approach and solve problems creatively.

• Having that ability to look above and beyond yourself – or your current self – and to bring in the experiences or the learnings you’ve made in those other personas.

• So, I definitely think we’ll be losing something if the smushing persists.

• If we do allow ourselves to become these single cell avatar based personalities.

Richard Bradbury: Can we do anything to stop this slide?

Matt Armitage:

• Stopping it is probably the wrong way to look at it.

• It’s about the design of the Metaverse itself and what we are prepared to demand and / or accept.

• I would be quite happy to have the dungeons and dragonsesque fragmented multiverses.

• I don’t want to see a one stop shop controlled by a mega corporation.

• Because I think it will lead to us being treated ever more like machines.

• I got this example from a book by Cal Newport but I can’t remember if it’s from A world without email.

• Or one of his earlier texts, Deep Work. It’s a summary of an idea we’ve used on the show pretty frequently.

• In the 20th century, the production lines in factories were designed on the principle that human workers are like robots.

• Processes were broken down into smaller and less expert chunks, with the human staff working in tandem with machines.

• As the machines have gotten more capable, fewer people are needed to operate those production processes.

• Or people are removed from those processes completely.

• Over the pandemic we’ve seen that process accelerate and reach into the knowledge economy as well.

• With the adoption of all kinds of business and process automation service solutions.

Richard Bradbury: Do you worry that our avatars will be training neural networks to take over from us?

Matt Armitage:

• I think that’s a very real fear.

• And it comes back to the idea that our avatars may do a better job of being us than we do.

• If we’re sharing all of this information in virtual environments.

• Making decisions, problem-solving, team interactions – this is just on the work side.

• But just as important are our social behaviours.

• We’re feeding all of this information into these environments, where it can be logged, stored, tracked and analysed.

• Imagine the power of that as a centralized database for a company like Meta or Microsoft or whoever?

• You’re talking about the greatest data pool in history. Billions of people.

• Hundreds of cultures and languages. All being used to train machines to make better or more human-like decisions.

• And I do think it will speed up that process of making us irrelevant in a lot of business settings.

• And that brings us back to those questions of how we earn a living

Richard Bradbury: And making us irrelevant in the process?

Matt Armitage:

• We all love to think that what we do at work is incredibly hard and irreplaceable.

• And it’s that belief that is – in a sense – part of our reluctance to accept that machines can replace the thinkers as well as the doers.

• Yet we have no problem accepting that autonomous cars will one day fill our roads.

• The sad truth is that most of what we do all day is far less complex and requires a lot less computing power than navigating a self-driving vehicle through our streets.

• Venture capital has bet heavily on automation over the past decade. And delays to technologies like self-driving vehicles are likely to see a pivot, especially towards automation within the metaverse.

• We’ve seen companies like Uber and Lyft, and by proxy local companies like Grab,

• Branching out, diversifying if you will, as the likelihood of automated cars on the roads is constantly delayed.

• Their original model isn’t necessarily sustainable over the long term with people as drivers.

• So we’ve seen them enter the food delivery and grocery supply space.

• Take on ewallet and finance related roles, even providing credit, and expanding into other areas of retail.

• The jobs of knowledge workers may be a much lower hanging fruit for them to target.

• And if they do, you may find that your singular, smushed personality, isn’t up to the task of dealing with these new threats.