Stumbled on someone decrying TikTok "multiplicity kids" on twitter, but not sure how I feel about this thing and there's no wikipedia article which is usually the limit of my research.
On one hand DID and OSDD are real things, though some people say it's a culture specific disorder.
On the other kids having calling themselves "we", claiming to be piloted by Harry Potter characters, real-life serial killer and Minecraft YouTubers seems to silly to not be just good clean fun.
On the third hand is you told someone thirty years ago about gender spectrum, genderfluidity, xenogenders, bi lesbians, autism spectrum, they'll probably think you're insane. Maybe there is a subclinical version of DID, like Asperger's to autism, so to speak? I dunno...
This honestly feels like where I draw the line with identity discourse. It seems something that could be genuinely harmful to certain people's mental health if it's normalized or encouraged. Someone needs to remind these tiktok kids that some things are just normal parts of your mind maturing (ie: feeling disconnected from yourself, having changing personalities) and not something special that you should expand upon and turn into an aspect of your identity.
Like "shifting," for example (another weird TikTok thing I've seen), isn't some special magical power that white girls can do - it's literally just your imagination. You can close your eyes and "go" places and feel like different people in your mind if you're creative enough. Everyone can. That doesn't mean it has any social significance and should be made into some big deal.
Idk, I'm honestly kind of losing my mind now at the starting line of my 20s and this shit just makes me anxious that the younger half of my generation is gonna psy-op each other into Antonin Artaud levels of insanity by worshipping the same kind of identity void I feel now. Feeling like you've lost your identity fucking sucks and I wouldn't wish it on anyone with a passion for living because it can honestly erase it. I just don't want to see another wave of microplastic-poisoned hikikomori adults who've scolded and gaslit themselves and their online communities into barely grasping reality and living in a simple, childlike dream world. We already have the Boomers.
Apologies for the cringe unwoke stream-of-consciousness rant, I'm coming down from a high that's lasted way too long, and I unironically feel like the internets made us all insane. Me included. Peace and Love.
I've decided I'm too old for whatever the fuck "TikTok multiplicity kids" is.
I dunno. A lot of stuff that was tumblr memes ten years ago is considered common sense in leftist spaces nowadays. Kids be pushing the envelope.
And a loooooooot of weird fringe crap got filtered out along the way.
Sure, I agree. I'mma let them sort this one out, and then I'll learn by the usual mechanism: getting my posts dunked on
Having weird cringey ideas about your self-identity is part of being a kid. They'll grow out of it. And if they don't, we can just be like "oh whoops my bad" and respect whatever they end up with.
That's my take as well. Some of them are surely just being silly, but all attempts to scold weird kids for cosplaying a serious illness are bound to fail anyway.
Anyway if it's mostly The Kids These Days that are doing this there's a decent chance that 80% of them are participating in an activity that's charitably called mutual social expression and uncharitably called clout-chasing/attention grabbing. They'll eventually hit the age where small, non-internet peer approval becomes much more important to them and they'll grow out of it, or they won't and end up either here or on 4chan.
don't kid yourself we don't attract as much attention, nor produce as much content, as 4chan. They can go to reddit or tumblr or any other social media and get that same fix way more efficiently than here.
Also, from LGBT wiki :
Rainbowgenic: Rainbowgenic is a term to describe when the core's parents had a previous miscarriage, stillbirth, or death during infancy, and the spirit and/or soul of the previous lost child/children stuck onto the next child. The body is shared between the previous sibling/siblings and the current sibling. This may be protogenic, spirigenic, and/or metagenic
Some truly powerful stuff.
Okay, I'm not down with taking this seriously at all. I can humor a lot of dumb shit but this crosses the line
The problem here is that it's a fairly diverse community, with some people pushing incredibly out there stuff and more "conservative" elements that try to invalidate the former and out fakers. There is probably a conservative version of the headmate thing many people here would find plausible.
I'm saying that kids who think they're sharing their body with the soul of their aborted siblings are a laughing stock even among the people who have Minecraft YouTubers living in their heads.
One is a bit less dark. Also the stillborn sibling thing seems like it could be a bi-product of parental behavior regarding such a loss. Minecraft YouTuber imaginary friends is a little more innocent and less likely to be harmful/the result of something harmful
This is literally the plot of a David Cage video game called Beyond Two Souls
idk leave people alone and dont bother them, no need to say smug superior shit like "Oh they're just dumb idiot kids" either.
Google isn't giving me anything useful when I look up "multiplicity kids". Is this, like, kids/teenagers claiming to contain multiple personalities?
If so, this strikes me as the kind of thing where, yeah, there will probably be some unhealthy things resulting from people taking things too far, but there might also be valuable insights into it. We have this idea that we each have a single, unified "soul" or "mind", but what we think of as our conscious experience really contains a lot of systems that interact and sometimes conflict with each other. I've read books by therapists (because I'm too broke to get actual therapy) even suggesting that, when you notice a pattern of intrusive thoughts of a particular kind, it can be useful to give the source of those thoughts a label, as though it's a person living in your mind. If there's a movement to make it more mainstream to talk about human minds like this and to develop a vocabulary for talking about ourselves that goes beyond treating people as singular, unified selves, that might be a positive thing.
That's being charitable and based on what little understanding I have from this context, because again, nothing useful comes up when I look up "multiplicity kids".
We have this idea that we each have a single, unified “soul” or “mind”, but what we think of as our conscious experience really contains a lot of systems that interact and sometimes conflict with each other.
Very true, and to add to this there's a fair bit of research suggesting that our conscious awareness (in the moment, at least. Harder to design experiments for long term planning, learning, and behavior changes.) is more of an apologist for deeper neural decision-making processes, separately perceiving what we seem to be doing and creating rationalizations out of whole cloth for what we're doing and why we're doing it. I don't have references off-hand, but I'm thinking of studies on split-brain subjects (subjects who have had the main structure connecting the right and left hemispheres of the brain severed, often as a last resort procedure for severe epilepsy or sometimes via brain injury) and studies investigating brain signals that immediately precede motor behavior.
If there’s a movement to make it more mainstream to talk about human minds like this and to develop a vocabulary for talking about ourselves that goes beyond treating people as singular, unified selves, that might be a positive thing.
That would be a very cool and interesting result.
Yeah, the whole headmates thing seems to be mostly kids on social media self-diagnosing themselves with "multiple personality" disorder of some sort and forming a culture with it's own therminology and a whole bunch with progressively more granular microlabels. I've seen kids do this with asexuality, but asexuality seems to be a not to uncommon phenomenon either way.
Our ancestors made religions based on shit like this. It's always been here it'll always be here, let the kids have fun.
The fun thing about language is that it is always fleeting, always failing to grasp its object whole. When trying to write yourself down wild things tend to happen. But that's not all. It is, in my opinion, not as simple as people 'making up nonsense' about themselves as there is another side to this coin. You have, on the one hand, the inscribing and creation of identity into language that includes all the errors and aberrant connection inherent to language, and on the other hand, the identification with something through the medium of language which also includes the aforementioned excesses of meaning. Quite simply, you cannot understand any part of yourself beyond that irreducible pure phenomenon of 'Being-there' akin to the Buddhistic annihilation of the self without going through this process of language. It is only through attempting to approximate our shared sensory experience of nature that language can even begin to be useful--otherwise we each develop our own private languages, unable to communicate anything. In 'writing ourselves down' new social phenomena emerge, like a performance that becomes reality.
Okay, so if that is the underlying, probably universal, dynamic at play then why this specifically? Moreover, why does this thing stick out as a problem at all? There is an element of acceleration here. Previously social phenomena emerging across a strata of society would be a) gradual due to the speed of information propagation, and b) not that frequent due to A and an infrequent change of the material basis of society. Today we see both an increase in stratification through atomization, and a relative acceleration of information propagation through both technological progress and the tightening of the libidinal circuits of social media & advertising. The algorithms of social media & advertising continually divide people up into data, and mashes it together into ahuman aggregates, constantly mixing and remixing social configurations, effectively creating a factory of identity creation. New peoples are created every day. One immediate consequence of this that came to my mind is that it is no longer the case that advertisers try to 'reach an audience', but rather that advertisers manufacture their consumers.
Also the only 'Party Line' is a line of :crab-party:
What too much Deleuze does to a MFer :(
By the way with regards to the discussion of social construction, and the emergence of DID as a subject of mental illness discourse, I highly recommend the paper Making Up People by Ian Hacking: https://serendipstudio.org/oneworld/system/files/Hacking_making-up-people.pdf
Haha, I was thinking "what has this MFer been reading, must be Deleuze or something." Imagine my surprise.
On your point about the manufacturing of identities: You may have heard of Jonah Peretti, founder of Buzzfeed. It was posted here before, but before he went into business he was really into critical theory. He wrote this essay on Deleuze, Jameson, and a variety of other big-names. One of its theses is this:
Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities
That seems similar to what you're getting at.
What's also so significant about that essay is that Peretti took this theory and capitalized on it through Buzzfeed. It reminds me of the bourgeoisie of the late 19th century who used Marx's Capital as a guide to business.
Here's a short article on Peretti. He seems to have disavowed his previous writings but a part of me wonders if he hasn't adopted some sort of accelerationist ideology.
There's something I'm surprised I forgot to mention and somehow haven't thought about for years, which affected my opinion on the issue.
My best friend had a tulpa when we were in our yearly twenties way before it became a 4chan thing. One day after being kicked out of the university and before reapplying he got sort kicked in the ribs by anime girl that appeared inside his head. Since then she was a big part of his life until started appearing less and less when he settled down with a girl.
Sounds like an extremely cringe thing only the most unhinged anime nerd would come up with, right? But here is a kicker, he was one of the most well-adjusted people I've know. Intelligent, athletic, attractive, popular among both the dudes and the girls and more importantly humble, so not the type that would lie about the kind of thing. The few of us that he told about it just took it on faith...
Does what he had come off as DID/OSDD? He only heard the voice and felt the presence, outside of very rare somatic things like feeling being pushed. The "alter" never actually "fronted" so to speak. My cursory look at the community on twitter seems to reveal that many people with headmates are rather "hearing voices" than something closer to DID...
