02-Digital self and power online (following May's thoughts)

last edited : 10/19/25

"I am just some code in digital spaces, just written words on your screen and informations exchanged. Internet is beyond the flesh. I guess you could say my material-self is human, but here online my digital-selves are nowhere near human. Online, Human doesn't exist, only consciousness."

Online, in digital spaces, the flesh doesn't matter anymore, the material self becomes the digital self, and as the flesh disappears, only stays consciousness, our condition as human is erased and reduced as a simple interpretation that another consciousness is projecting on us. More largely we could consider that online users are detaching from their own humanity since they're kind of transferring their consciousness into the computer, online. Which gives us a very different visual from what we are used to associate with transferring our consciousness in the machine, which are often stupidly futuristic and more or less dystopian. In those digital spaces the notions of gender, sex, class, race, identity don't really exist anymore. But even with the erasure of these notions, the notion of Power still exists, to cite April's reflections, "Yet power still exists. It's still given, still taken, still craved". But despite the paradoxical aspect of this analysis, since power is historically anchored in physicality and social dynamics, it's undeniable that power is still omnipresent online, but in a version more deconstructed where the actors of digital spaces are disconnected from any material determinism (race, class alongside with sex and gender, which are way more mouldable than what society would like us to believe, but this would need another paper about transexuality and transness) and can then perform another identity (making us wonder if identity isn’t a whole performance), letting go their forced human condition.