Profilicity: Relating to Humans in a Digital World

The digital world is officially the real world. Everyone lives online, whether they know it or not. As a result, we have developed a new technology for forming our identities: profilicity. Under the rule of profilicity, we form our identity by creating online profiles and having them validated by the "general peer". Ironically, giving human beings more ways to express themselves is destroying their ability to be authentic. To escape your goon cave, you must understand that likes are more important than being liked. And like all things in the digital world, likes are governed by winner-take-all effects.

The Rise of the Personal Brand

In a world governed by profilicity, the concept of a "personal brand" has evolved from a marketing tactic to a fundamental aspect of modern existence. The boundary between public and private life has been erased, turning every online and offline interaction into a performance. Healthy self-esteem and survival depend on creating a brand that can withstand public scrutiny. To effectively manage public perception, you must think like a brand manager. There is one problem with this: brands can't form real personal relationships with humans.

There are too many potential customers for a brand to build a personal relationship with each of them. To deal with the sheer volume of customers, they create statistical constructs that represent the average of the people they want to speak to. In other words, brands don't have friends or family; they have market segments. By forcing people to operate as brands, profilicity is slowly eroding the possibility of authentic human connection. The dopamine hits gained from likes, comments, and shares on posts meticulously curated for consumption provide temporary respite from the gnawing loneliness that defines our new atomized digital age.

Cancel Culture and the Eternal Workday

Not only has the internet merged public and private life, but it has also fused our personal and professional lives. In a world where every online or even offline social interaction a person has is legible to their coworkers, employees, employers, or customers, there is no leisure time. Employers are no longer satisfied with enforcing professional standards of conduct during standard working hours. The HR guidelines meant to govern professional settings have been extended to every social interaction. This is what we call cancel culture, an unfortunate side effect of the eternal workday.

Because of the low margin for error that cancel culture allows, our interactions have become more high-stakes and explosive. If the dopamine drip from a popular personal brand is the carrot, then cancel culture is the stick. Digital profiles are far more fragile than reputations forged exclusively from physical interactions. This makes nuanced discussion and expressing genuine ideas impossible for people who want to participate in polite society. The rise of profilicity has turned the world into a panopticon, an inescapable prison that forces the suppression of the self. It is no surprise that cancellations are often based on allegations of racial insensitivity, as racial gangs govern all prisons. 

Tinder and OnlyFans: Commodified Connection

Profilicity has reshaped how we seek connection, intimacy, and love. The behavior of men and women on dating apps is a twisted perversion of human courtship that resembles ordering takeout more than romance. On platforms like Tinder, people meticulously optimize their photos, bios, hobbies, and interests to get the maximum number of matches. The platform forces users to craft effective profiles, not accurate ones. Not only is the curation necessary for practical reasons, but it is also necessary for psychological ones. Turning dating into a market has made sexual attraction extremely legible. Sexual attraction can be objectively measured and compared to others by the number of matches. A side effect of turning dating into a market is that unattractive people are given definitive proof that they do not qualify for romantic attention. Unable to rely on the historical cope of being too busy with careers, hobbies, or enjoying their single life, they become extremely susceptible to the pull of incel ideology.

Those who can qualify for romantic attention must still deal with the psychological strain of disposability. With an algorithmically generated, seemingly endless supply of "options," users are conditioned to view potential partners as interchangeable commodities. Parties who attempt to push for investment often telegraph "low value", with the assumption being that only a "loser" with no options needs such assurances. This environment normalizes talking to multiple people at once, not as a means to explore genuine connections, but as a hedging strategy in a market saturated with choice. Why invest deeply in one person when the next, potentially "better" option is just a tap away? The lack of investment in specific sex partners and the relentless search for more sex partners are identical to the behaviors of a prostitute. The only difference is the payment method: time instead of money. The normalization of sex work is the natural progression of the commodification of romance.

OnlyFans is Tinder for men who are unattractive short-term partners and women who are unattractive long-term partners. For men deemed too unattractive for the short-term casual encounters the culture venerates, OnlyFans offers a direct, transactional pathway to simulated intimacy and sexual contact. They can bypass the endless rejections and reclaim their sense of agency and access the sexual variety of successful men by outright buying women's services. If they hire the women, then they are the boss. Conversely, for women who might struggle to find committed "long-term partners" in a dating market increasingly skewed towards casual encounters or who are deemed less desirable by traditional metrics for enduring relationships, OnlyFans presents an alternative avenue. They can get long-term provisioning by commodifying their sexuality without being attached to a man who isn't conventionally attractive.

OnlyFans is a prime example of how profilicity pushes us into atomization, where the authentic self is sacrificed for a profitable or simply effective digital persona. The very essence of profilicity is captured in its name. In the regime of profilicity, there are no friends. There are no lovers. There are no families. There are only fans.

Thriving in a World Ruled by Profiles: Durable Visibility

Profilicity is the inevitable result of living in a digital world. The only way to deal with it is by understanding its mechanics and leveraging them for your benefit. While you cannot avoid the performative aspect of profilicity, you can avoid its biggest pitfalls: fragility and obscurity. Building durable, visible profiles begins with understanding niches and audiences.

In the digital world, high visibility usually doesn't happen by accident; it's engineered. Brands employ teams of marketing experts to study market segments, algorithms, and trends to create content optimized specifically for virality. You don't have those resources, but you do have access to something far more valuable: a niche. Since personal relationships have become commodities, there is a market for them. Meaning you can use the logic of niches to find specialized markets that are especially suited for you to take advantage of.

We've mentioned that niches are so powerful because they insulate you from competition, standardization, and scale, the scourges of the digital world, while giving you access to the winner-take-all effects the digital world produces. Because niches exist at the fringe of society, they are not governed by "polite society's" rules: they're immune to cancel culture. You're free to explore ideas, people, places, and things that the standard system would penalize, filtering out people who are looking for shallow validation while ensuring those drawn to you are fiercely loyal due to limited options. Once we have figured out the niche for our profile, we need to focus on making it visible. We need to get an audience to validate it. 

To be rewarded by this system, you need to understand it. In a world where social interactions are digital, they are quantified. When social interactions become quantified, they become gamified. Social media rewards users who successfully please the "general peer" with their performance with likes, shares, comments, and matches. In this system, the quality of the content is less important than strategically manipulating the algorithms that govern visibility. It is difficult to manipulate these algorithms perfectly because they are constantly evolving to avoid exploitation, and each platform uses different algorithms to promote or suppress content. However, six things are universally rewarded by algorithms: engagement, originality, keywords, timing, consistency, and rich media.

This is our philosophy on connecting people in this new digital world. We hope you can implement our philosophy in your personal and professional life. If you would like to learn how you can use this to build a business, please download our playbook to get started.