In a sincerity-based society, the social persona of an individual is determined by available social roles. Once one is born into the role of daughter, it is expected that one will develop a persona in accordance with this gender role. Multiple personas are possible—daughter, mother, Christian, shopkeeper—but they all ought to correspond to patterned roles. In an authenticity-based society, everyone is expected to find or create their own original self. Again, multiple personas are possible, for instance, one may have an especially creative self and be capable of being original in different ways—as both landscaper and Olympic figure skater—but these personas are all supposed to be rooted in the same true self.

In a highly diverse society, it is important to be able to curate different personas that work in various and often unrelated social spheres. In a highly accelerated society, it is important to make identity flexible. Profiles can easily do this: we can have several at the same time, and they can all be constantly “fed”—that is, changed, updated, or deleted. Profilicity corresponds to today’s “transparency society” and “surveillance society” where we are constantly monitored. Profiles are intended for exhibition to the general peer and are subject to the categories and labels that algorithms and artificial intelligence impose. But because they are intentionally curated and made to be shown, it is a misconception to regard them as lethal threats to privacy or autonomy. They do not reveal any innermost core, nor do they abolish agency altogether.

ZigZag offers a fundamental new kind of structure where encoding new structures is simple because the coherence of the underlying simple flexible structure is guaranteed.

The two simplest rasters useful for the rectangular views are the row and column rasters, which are actually the same raster but placed on the screen rotated 90 degrees from each other. These rasters are genuinely two-dimensional: they only use two dimensions in the ZigZag structure to find cells to display.

The row/column raster starts from the cursor and moves along one ZigZag dimension and place cells on the center column/row of the grid. After that column/row is full, the raster starts from the cells placed and from each, moves along the other dimension and places the cells found along the other dimension there.

These rasters are called hard rasters: the arrangement of cells is fixed so that there is only one possible path from the cursor to a cell to be placed in a given position on the screen. If there is no cell in the structure along such a path, then that location is left empty.

The converse of hard rasters are the soft rasters where there can be several different paths for each cell of the on-screen grid. The point of soft rasters is that since ZigZag structures are often relatively sparse in terms of connections, the hard row and column rasters may show relatively few cells at a time. Soft rasters are able to show more of the structure at the same time.

There are many different ways to define soft rasters for the rectangular grid. One fairly useful way is to specify the soft raster so that all the cells that a certain hard raster would show are shown, but additionally, if there is space left, more cells are shown along the dimensions.

Locally, from the perspective of one or two cells in the ZigZag structure, this will still look like the spreadsheet: each cell has its neighbors and you go from it to one direction and then turn around and come back in the opposite direction, you end up in the same cell. So locally this structure is logical and simple — like a spreadsheet — but globally it is paradoxical: you can just keep going into one direction and arrive back where you came from, for example, or you can go left, down, right and up, and not come back where you started from in the end.

ZigZag guarantees that there are no dangling pointers: all links are two-directional. You can always find which cells refer to a given cell.