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...
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:
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.