Maybe, given the social and technological developments of recent decades, it no longer makes much sense to speak of human beings as “autonomous individuals”; and maybe we must realize that we exist in a highly complex society and are embedded deeply in its social networks. Therein control, especially by the single individual, is limited. How we look and what we think and feel are highly contingent upon the lifeworld we inhabit, and it seems much of these aspects of life are simply not up to us. Maybe they never were.

As Elena Esposito rightly highlights, the algorithms at the center of today’s surveillance or transparency mechanisms are “themselves part of the world in which they operate. They observe the world, they view the world from within, not from the out- side.”

Frank Pasquale and David Lyon, use the term “reputation” to describe what emerges from data analyses of people’s behavior. Pasquale writes, “In ever more settings, reputation is determined by secret algorithms processing inaccessible data”. However, the term “reputation” is misleading. It connotes a sincerity context where an individual has a more or less coherent and stable reputation and is known in a similar way to all members of a community. In profilicity, however, specific contexts or “settings” produce very different profiles.

Korean German author Byung-Chul Han published a short treatise titled The Transparency Society (2015), advertised as a “manifesto” that “denounces transparency as a false ideal."

Shoshana Zuboff. She expresses a widespread concern when she warns against the use of algorithms to “nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behavior in specific directions” and denounces such practices as “unacceptable threats to individual autonomy.

Since profilic identity relies heavily on public appearance, knowing who we are involves knowing how others see us. We do not find identity merely by looking inward or at our own face. We must look at the faces of others and figure out what they see, and on this basis present ourselves accordingly. In profilicity, moreover, these others are often not present and even unknown—or, as in the case of algorithms and AI, not even human. We curate, assemble, and display profilic identity by entering into social validation feedback loops with such observers.