Как алгоритм определяет нашу идентичность

We upload our morning runs to Strava, keep track of films on Letterboxd, join book clubs to discuss Susan Sontag, Sylvia Plath, or Ottessa Moshfegh, and post carefully styled outfits from a new coffee shop that “hardly anyone knows about yet.” None of these details says much about a person on its own. Taken together, however, they create an image that others instantly recognize as the mark of an interesting person.

Why are we so determined to be interesting or, God forbid, “niche”? Every detail we share on social media is expected to reveal something about us, and this is no longer simply a matter of appearance. Trends once answered the question of what to wear or listen to. Increasingly, they answer the question of who to be. The internet offers us not only things and interests, but ready-made templates for identity. Clean girl, office siren, trad wife, looksmaxxer: these aesthetics rarely stop at appearance. Each one comes with a particular taste, lifestyle, set of interests, and even a system of values.

Algorithms contain a paradox. They promise each of us a personalized experience, yet they deliver it through the same underlying logic. Even niche culture is no longer truly niche. Supporting Argentina at the World Cup, taking up hiking in an Arc’teryx jacket, or travelling to Istanbul for a Ye concert have all become part of a mass pattern of behaviour. We try to distinguish ourselves from one another using exactly the same tools.

This is also changing what it means to find ourselves. Identity begins to look like something that can be assembled from the right cultural signifiers: Vibram FiveFingers, reformer Pilates, a road bike, a holiday in Japan, and wired headphones. Lived experience gradually gives way to the careful curation of an image.

There is very little dishonesty in this process. Most people genuinely enjoy their interests. The problem begins when those interests stop being an expression of who we are and become raw material for constructing an identity. Increasingly, we choose not only what we like, but what helps us tell a particular story about ourselves.

Perhaps this is why being interesting feels more difficult than ever. It is not because compelling people have disappeared, but because performing individuality has become a cultural norm. When everyone is constantly broadcasting their uniqueness, uniqueness itself stops being exceptional. A genuine sense of self is still formed through experience, chance, contradiction, and time, things that cannot be accelerated by an algorithm or assembled into a twenty-slide carousel.