Wearables-Mobile-IOT Tech creates Fourth Person Perspective

So far the individual has almost always existed in the context of a society of others. This could change in the farther future as individuals might be in the form of a variety of digital and physical copies in different stages of augmentation. It could become more difficult to find ‘like-others.’ My claim is that the function of alterity (an awareness of others that triggers subjectivation) would need to persist for individuals to fully become themselves, but it would not need to come from others that are like us.

All that is needed is some sort of external otherness that can show us ourselves in a new way to facilitate a moment of development. There is nothing in the function of alterity to suggest that it must be an ‘other’ that is like us. It is just that it has been this way historically, because other humans have been the ready form of ‘the other.’ It has been easiest and most noticeable when another human serves as a device like a mirror allowing us to see ourselves in a new way.

However, it is quite possible that the alterity function could be fulfilled in many other ways that do not involve a self-similar subject. One mechanism that is already allowing us to see ourselves in new ways is quantified self-tracking gadgetry. The ensemble of QS gadgets creates a fourth-person perspective, an objective means of seeing ourselves via exteriority and alterity that can trigger a moment of subjectivation. Now understanding the alterity function as such, there could be many alternative means of fulfilling it. 

Longer video on the topic: Posthuman Interpretation of Simondon's Individuation

Personhood Beyond the Human: the Subjectivation Scale of Future Persons

Philosophical concepts are useful for considering a potentially diverse landscape of future persons.

One important question is subjectivation – how individuals form and what constitutes an individual. The less helpful approach is focusing on classification and definition which is discriminatory and doomed to death by detail. A more fruitful approach is Simondon’s theory of individuation.

For Simondon, the current and future world is an environment of dynamic processes like individuation. Individuals participate in but do not cause individuation. Most importantly, individuals exist on a spectrum of capacity for action with other living beings including animals, human persons, and possibly a variety of future persons.

‘Capacity for action’ (a Spinoza-inspired concept) is crucial because it focuses on degrees of capability (related to a particular quality or skill) as opposed to underlying nature. Capacity for action has all of the possibility and mobility of a future-looking frame, and none of the fixity and discrimination of classification.