christopher

It's easier for me to think of identity as a byproduct of anonymity. We all start out with anonymity and inherit an identity.

If we start with identity from the frame of anonymity, we get very different questions about autonomy. Instead of asking "who am I?" we start asking, "what do you know about me?"

My existence isn't just defined by my internal landscape but by how much of my anonymity I've surrendered to others — to governments, corporations, friends, and family.

Identity is not just something we discover within ourselves, but as something we negotiate through varying degrees of recognition and surveillance from the external world.

The parts of "me" that remain anonymous are something we can reserve as self-sovereign power over our lives.

Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish), Emmanuel Levinas (Totality and Infinity), Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition), Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), and Helen Nissenbaum (Privacy in Context), etc.

Our relationship with others and systems becomes the focal point rather than introspection alone. 

The question "what do you know about me?" places power dynamics at the center of our identity formation.

Totally Agreed C , Our identity isn’t fixed its shaped by how people understand or judge us