[24] Avatars: Our Digital Self

Dear Readers,

Hope you had a fun July 4th!

One of the themes we explored this past week was the idea of online personas in an increasingly digital world. We are spending more time behind screens than ever and who we are online will also evolve. Perhaps our IRL self and online self can be decoupled.

Check out: Life in Color Twitter for summary threads of our our pieces there. 🧵🪡

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As we spend more time online, we all have an emerging “online persona” alongside our real identity.

Depending on the platform, these two personas might be really different. And in Web 3, they might not even be related at all.

Your identity IRL (in real life) is comprised of many factors…

• Some you can influence directly (e.g., working out to achieve a certain physique)

• Some you can influence indirectly (e.g., your behavior affecting other’s perception of you)

• And some you can't affect at all (e.g., height and things you’re born with)

But in Web 3 and largely online, who you are is a whole other story that renders all three of the above examples moot.

Because in Web 3 and the increasingly pseudonymous digital world, it doesn't have to be related to who you are in real life. What you look like, your job history, where you went to school… none of it needs to be connected to you — your real self.

Your online persona can exist in a void where your “user name” doesn’t have to be connected to your real name and everything associated with you IRL.

You can be whoever you want and design yourself to be however you want in the digital world / online / metaverse… whatever you want to call your non-IRL life.

While this concept isn’t entirely new (we’ve had anonymous chat rooms online for decades now), what is new is the scale, social acceptance and sheer volume of channels this concept is impacting: crypto, NFTs, DAOs, gaming, social media and so on and so forth.

It’s not just a fringe thing anymore… you can actually cement yourself into a digital brand that you choose to create and often times from scratch.

For the gamers out there… this is like being able to create your character in any way you see fit, but the game environment is the digital world that happens exists as part our real world.

As the concept of the digital self takes shape in more and more channels… more of us will subscribe and accept the idea that online, we just may represent ourselves as a cartoon JPEG of a fun animal.

After all, what is real? (See out article on Conformity)

Communication and the ways we are judged online are changing dramatically.

Welcome to the world of Avatars!

The evolution of online “You” 🦄 🐲 👹

Because Web 3 wants to focus more on what you do versus who you are IRL, avatars are the vehicle by which our online personas get communicated.

How did we get here?

Well whether we want to or not, we are spending more and more time behind a screen… and that’s only become more true in the wake of the Pandemic.

From grocery shopping to working remotely, we find ways to personalize our time online... and as social creatures, we also try to bring more of our personality in non-obvious ways to our digital space. Think of the popularity of Zoom backgrounds.

Humans love personalization.

If we think back to the platforms that defined our youth / in high school, we used to talk about our screen name on AIM. Platforms like Omegle and Chatroulette connected you with strangers that could hide behind screen names. Then we had Facebook and Instagram that encouraged (some) degree of reality to put your life on display for friends and followers.

So it seems there are two kinds of online platforms today. For the sake of this discussion, let's say there are platforms that want to define the IRL you on the internet. We’ll call them “Real.” Then there are platforms that give you the space to showcase the self you want to through more personalization, outside of just IRL factors. We’ll call them “Creative.”

🤳 Real: Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn optimize for showing the “real” you. These platforms have chosen to depict “you” based on all the traditional IRL factors… what you look like physically, where you went to school, what jobs you have, etc.

And of course there is nothing wrong with this, but they do not allow for personalization and/or creative expression without limits. On LinkedIn, it’s probably not socially acceptable to have your profile picture (PFP) be of a cartoon character when everyone else has a professional picture. Even if you feel more connected and better represented by a PFP of a cartoon character.

🦄 Creative: Gaming platforms and now Web 3 platforms completely break the relationship between your digital self and real self. You can be totally be whoever you want via avatars that can change on a whim and don’t represent the real you in the traditional sense.

Part of this is to be pseudo-anonymous and part of this is to allow you to represent yourself in ways you see fit. This means it’s perfectly acceptable (and often encouraged) for you to represent yourself as anything other than your real life persona.

The shift to avatars is interesting and opens up many possibilities… let’s explore.

The new “in” crowd 😎 💁

Beyond representing our digital selves, avatars have a lot of power in shaping others’ perceptions of us.

Take the Bored Ape NFT, for example. Essentially an avatar for Twitter / Discord profile pics, this is an “elite” NFT where only 10,000 were launched originally. Every ape is unique (different accessories, background, fur), with a single owner, recorded on blockchain technology.

Okay, so what?

As of March 2022, the least expensive Bored Ape was ~$260K. So if you own one, you’re part of an exclusive club alongside the likes of Eminem and Tom Brady. It’s the new status symbol.

Pre-Web 3, clothes, cars and vacation homes were prized status symbols. Today NFTs are no different… the ability to pay for them signals some level of financial comfort or that you were smart enough to buy into the club before others saw the promise.

Same with our networks: our college pedigrees, workplace and volunteer groups defined our social circles. Now add the status conferred by your online identity to the cliques that define us. That one profile pic may be saying more about you than it ever has.

In 2022… is our online identity really just another social circle?

Because if we spend more time online, who we are online becomes increasingly important… but who we are online is way more fungible and transient than who we are in real life… for many of us, the ability to change and more importantly customize who we are is fundamental to us.

This is why NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are interesting. Having a unique avatar that can’t be replicated means you can preserve customizability and your identity at the same time.

When others see your NFT, they associate the NFT with your actions, behaviors, sayings, actions online, etc. Because NFTs are verifiable on a blockchain, it’s hard for someone to pretend to be your Avatar without getting called out.

Now, of course you can sell your NFT, so under new ownership, the persona behind that particular NFT will obviously change. So this begs the question, are they really that special if someone else can wear the avatar after you? Doesn’t this sort of diminish the token’s role in signaling reputation…

It’s obvious we haven’t figured out every little detail in digital personas and reputation online yet. Remember everything in Web 3 is a big experiment at this point. For now, Web 3 avatars give us the flexibility to adopt a digital persona with less constraints than our IRL persona has.

The promise of NFT as Avatars

We think NFTs and the use / ownership of digital avatars in a verifiable way is one of the most important, yet early, primitives being built out in Web 3.

We are spending more time online than over.

We love personalization and customization.

We like the freedom to escape who we are or shed parts of our IRL persona we may not love.

We want to be pseudonymous and be able to participate without the baggage or constraints of our IRL self.

All of these habits, behaviors and characteristics of humans pave the way for NFTs and Avatars to take front and center.

Ultimately, this is about asking one of the most foundational questions: who is the “real” you?

NFTs and Avatars coupled with our digital personas throw yet another wrench in figuring that out.

But figuring out who we are was never easy.

👤 👀 👩‍💻