The Profile is a Failed Design Experiment
on the weaponisation of the archival impulse, the profile as effigy, designing for archival disambiguation, and why this is all Freud's fault.
Criticism of digital culture almost entirely focuses on the Doomscroll, and the extent to which our individual willpower should allow us to overcome its draw. This hyperfocus is limiting, focusing on the experience of the individual and doesn’t allow us to ask the deeper, more structural questions about what the deeper source of our digital malaise may be.
Where does the structure of social media start?
The whole idea of the profile as a representation of the self is the cornerstone of public social media platforms as we know them today, but it often flies under the radar. It is rarely questioned — but is it an effective way to represent ourselves online? I dont think so.
I believe the profile is a failed design experiment. Why on earth would this continue to be the way we think of presenting ourselves online? Why are all profiles, more or less, the same?
How the Machine Works
Rule #1: You Must Always Be Producing.
Recognition Theory is the field of study that examines how we recognise ourselves and others, the extent to which this enables us to become good members of society, and how various sociopolitical and economic factors contribute to these processes of recognition. These processes are key to the formation of self-identity and contribute significantly to our overall well-being.
Many recognition theorists posit that social media has improved this process of recognition by allowing a wider diversity of people to “see themselves in the other” (the key mechanism by which recognition processes work). Bruno Campanella, however, takes an alternative view — and one that might aid our understanding of the profile and its role in our lives. He posits that the neoliberal, individualised nature of social media leads to far more damage to our processes of recognition than it does to diversity.
The design of platforms rewards constant production, self-disclosure, and generally rewards the person who conforms more closely to neoliberal ideals of the individual. Our ability to “see ourselves in the other” is dictated by our conformity to these ideals, creating increasingly frantic individualism as more and more of our lives get consumed by social media.
The idea of social media as a confessional machine is widely discussed. This is one of the key processes that disrupts our recognition processes, where “authenticity” is the ultimate cultural value. This notion of authenticity is a deeply flawed one, resting on (1) the idea that a fixed self exists and (2) that we are more moral for exposing our deepest, darkest secrets to our followers on social media. Social media is meant to be “real” - this is intended to improve our recognition.
But, as Campanella argues, what it does instead is incentivise us to build a more and more powerful target for the short-circuiting of our recognition processes. This recognition rests on our ability to tell people we hardly know about our deepest traumas. The rewards that come from the mighty algorithm when we do this short-circuit our recognition processes, creating identities based on a need to validate our difficult experiences by seeing others disclose similar experiences.
We call them brave — but this is no bravery, when we develop a dependency on gaining social rewards for our traumas. We are, in effect, rewarded for increasing our own vulnerability.
Rule #2: Everything is Permanent, Nothing is Forgotten.
Being able to see 1000 other facts about a person — their fears, their desires, what they ate for breakfast — when you come across one idea by them is not normal, nor helpful. Social media is often accused of being decontextualising, but is also guilty of overcontextualisation.
In “The Age of Disruption,” Bernard Stiegler outlines how this happened as part of the broader disruption of memory functions in the modern age. He argues that this memory disruption, as part of a wider sociopolitical affect, has led to a generation unable to engage in “future imagining.” To Steigler, personal computing is a key part of this process of memory disruption.
Steigler argues that platforms function as a perfect, external memory (a “tertiary memory,” in Stiegler’s terms), disrupting the human process of psychic individuation. This process of psychic individuation is that through which identity is formed, through a narrative process of remembering and, crucially, forgetting. It is the forgetting that platforms — and the profile — prevent us from doing.
The profile flattens our personal history into a single, searchable present. We cannot imagine a future self because we are perpetually confronted with and held accountable for all past selves. The construction of the profile as a social object creates a second body — an effigy — of ourselves, allowing us to externalise our tertiary memories onto platforms and normalising the constant referencing of a person’s social media profiles as a secondary version of themselves.
The history of effigy protests is fascinating. They have existed for about as long as humans have had hierarchal dominance-based social structures. We take a representation of a political leader and burn or destroy it in a way that exudes collective anger, turning this into a symbolic collective experience.
The effigy becomes a “second body” in this sense, representing the “first body.” Systemic reviews of the history of effigy protests suggest a deep link between the destruction of an effigy and the decline in power (often death) of the person the effigy is designed to represent.
Digital mediation, naturally, changes this dynamic. This is true for how we interpret actual on-the-ground effigy protests, which become mediated and presented to us through algorithmised media. But it also creates a new effigy, with the profile becoming our effigy - our “second body”- and is punished accordingly.
The Ghost in the Machine
Most of UX design is based on Heidegger’s idea of “being,” as described in “Being In Time” (or so it thinks). This is meant to provide a philosophical grounding for understanding what “experience” means in user experience on a deeper level. This is presented to budding designers as the ultimate way to understand your users.
For Heidegger, we do not ‘have’ a fixed self; instead, we are a process of relating, caring, and projecting into the future, but we do have a need for authenticity. He stresses pulling back from the crowd (”the they”) to listen to your inner call of conscience. That sounds, on the surface, like a good way to view the notion of designing technology for user wellbeing. It might allow the creation of technology that acknowledges shifting user contexts and appeals to one’s “inner conscience” rather than unsustainable hype.
But Heidegger’s own position is already invested in an individualised, almost mystical drama of “authentic” selfhood. He is remarkably uninterested in collective life, institutions, or material structures. His suspicion of “the masses” and his attraction to solitary, heroic authenticity create a picture of being that is inward-looking, and ultimately compatible with a politics that treats ordinary people as a faceless crowd to be led or managed rather than as co-authors of the world.
Suppose you start from being-in-the-world as an individualised process, and end in an advertising stack. In that case, you get a philosophy that says ‘the self is a process conducted by the individual’ welded to a business need that says ‘we must capture and model this self as stable data.’ To reconcile those demands is to freeze the process into a manipulable object. The profile is the compromise. A static, datafied stand-in for these ideas of being that platforms can store, rank, and sell against.
behavioural design as propaganda
Most of the interface design in social media, including the construction of profiles, is based on behavioural design. Primarily, this is the Fogg Model & The Hook Cycle, which I won’t go into detail on as I have many times before. There are two key points often missed in conversations about the nature of behavioural design.
Firstly, it has historical roots. Behaviour-based advertising dates back to Edward Bernays. He was considered “the father of PR,” and he was also Sigmund Freud’s nephew. He made a career out of applying his uncle’s ideas to develop advertising approaches that leveraged human psychology (or so he thought). This changed the nature of advertising as a field, building a lineage of increasingly advanced behavioural approaches that claimed to allow business owners to “hack” their customers’ brains and desires, ultimately leading to persuasive design and social media as we know them today.
If you’re following - yes, the Doomscroll is Freud’s fault, yes, it’s based on Freudian ideas of human nature and psychology. And yes, that is why it is Like That.
Secondly, if you haven’t picked up already — behavioural design doesn’t really work. As most of you will be aware, Freud’s ideas are deeply flawed. These perspectives treat humans as if we are entirely programmable inputs, almost entirely disregarding complexity, collectivity, and any number of other f
So what does that mean for behavioural design that is a descendent of these ideas? It is widely regarded as pseudoscience, but there is no widespread understanding of this within the design field.
Dr Fogg himself, creator of the Fogg Model, claims on his own website that his model “The Fogg Behavior Model is universal. It applies to human behavior for people of all ages and in all cultures.”, — which is an absolutely bonkers claim to anyone with a lick of critical thinking skills. But we remain attached to our devices, so it’s easy to assume this is an accurate description of our digital experiences.
devotion to the machine
As I outline in my essay “You’re not addicted, you’re devout,” the lack of consistent impact from these behavioural devices is precisely why they do work, causing humans to construct elaborate social rituals in the hopes of evoking the pleasure of the mighty algorithm. We like to believe the rewards in our brains from using social media are consistently achievable, and that if we do X, Y, or Z, we will evoke them.
We used to believe that if we just prayed enough, the rains would come - then the one time they did, we all used that as evidence for the God we so desperately wanted to exist. We want our digital experiences to make sense, be trackable, individual, and easy to tackle.
For some years now, it has been observed that paganism is once again on the rise. Whilst not all of these observations stand up to scrutiny, there is a general pattern of a rise in ritualised, paganistic behaviours that has accompanied the rise of social media.
The profile is symbolic of this. It represents an idea of what the “self” is, exploiting a pre-existing human desire for permanence in a fleeting digital world. Our profile is, to an extent, controllable — so we focus on it, and we construct cautionary tales of cancellation and the weaponisation of old posts, constantly made available by the nature of memory online.
designing for archival disambiguation
The profile can be thought of as an archive of the self. Online, archiving is a topic of hot debate. The fleeting nature of the internet exists alongside its permanence and context collapse, creating a constant contradiction that turns us all into self-obsessed social actors who are far too aware of ourselves and those around us for our own good.
A social phenomenon that results from this is the recent obsession with “archiving” online, where young people across the world remind each other that “the digital isn’t forever,” encouraging practices like scrapbooking and junk journalling. But archival practices that actually work are not about obsessive collecting; they are systematic and created with purpose. The obsession with archiving the digital is representative of the yearning for control over the archive, but it is a futile exercise, without systemic change towards new paradigms of understanding how we represent ourselves, organisations, and institutions online.
Archiving, as a field, can shed light on the historical nature of the institutional power held by those who control archives, and on how archives can be presented well.
Archives are generally more conducive to collective wellbeing when they are community-owned, provided there is some expert intervention around the organisation of information. Archives controlled by the 1% — whether that be colonising forces controlling the archive of those communities they have destroyed, or big tech controlling the archive of our very selves — are often tools of violence.
Historically, this violence is about control of the historical narrative and the ability to justify systemic murder. Today, this violence is the ability to control and dictate our perceptions of ourselves and those around us through a weaponisation of the archival impulse.
Secondly, archival disambiguation is the process of clarifying the identity of a person, place, or thing within a collection by resolving ambiguities in names and other information. This is achieved by using metadata, linked data, and other corroborating details to link different mentions of the same entity together and distinguish them from other entities with similar names.
The next frontier is about making the archive more intelligent, more humane, and context-aware. Creating UX patterns that visually and functionally distinguish between different temporal and contextual layers of a person’s history is not rocket science.
Contextual clues should enable the narrative process of remembering and forgetting that Steigler describes as so necessary. Imagine a profile where posts visibly “age,” fading in opacity or becoming harder to access over time. Or a UX that automatically flags content being viewed outside of its original conversational or temporal context.
A profile should allow the presentation of the individual self in a more customisable, humane manner, aligned with newer philosophies of being that reflect the complexities of human needs.
Profiles should be more flexible for groups of people, whether for-profit companies, news organisations, charities, or community groups.
The central question becomes “How might designing for archival disambiguation through alternative presentations of the digital self decrease the sense of vulnerability caused by social media through control of tertiary memory and systemic rewarding of constant self-production?”
How might we! Lets find out. Again keep your eyes peeled on that one. If any of this sparked your interest, do get in touch with me. I’d love to