The Rise & Fall Of Every Version Of You: When The Internet Becomes A Prison Of Identity

Picture me: 21-years-old, sprawled on my bed, scrolling past thirty Reels in a row. In ten minutes, I’ve been minimalist, grunge, clean-girl, dark feminine, cottagecore, divine masculine, ADHD-coded, Type-A-coded, and — briefly, rebelliously — clowncore. Each version is both sincere and fleeting. Each new identity is a 'me' trying to happen. None of them sticks.

The internet has turned identity into a loop, formation, dissolution, re-formation, so fast it resembles not evolution but animation. In India, where identities have historically been rigid, inherited, often violently enforced, from caste to community to surname, this speed feels at once liberating and disorienting. We are a nation built on ascribed identity now colliding head-on with performative, elective identity. The old script said: become what you were born as. The new script says: become anything you can signal fast enough.

Jonah Peretti saw this coming. In 1996, years before founding BuzzFeed, he wrote a paper titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution. His thesis: that late capitalism has moved from selling us products to selling us selves. To keep us consuming, it must keep us becoming. Capitalism first erodes traditional codes and communities, then sells us new identities to replace them. As Peretti put it, it deterritorialises the self, disorients, atomises, isolates, and then reterritorialises it via commodities, micro-communities, and mirror-stage identifications.

This model now underpins the architecture of the Indian internet. Look at how young Indians today narrativise themselves: through twenty-slide Instagram posts about their anxious attachment style; through Tumblr-esque reblogs of BPD memes; through Spotify wraps that become avatars of personality. From being people who listen to rock, we’re now 'rock kids', until next week, when we’re 'techno girlies' or 'Carnaticcore'. The internet offers subculture without the culture.

Once, if you liked rock and roll, it meant spending late nights at blueFROG, negotiating a scene with real people. There was investment, friction, contradiction. Now, subcultures are aestheticised, and turned into exportable units. Living punk becomes posting punk. Subculture becomes sub-content.

BuzzFeed understood this instinctively. Their quizzes ('What Kind of Introvert Are You?' or 'Are You More South Delhi or Bandra West?') were intimacy hacks. The most viral posts were 'identity' ones. Not just because they named something the reader might feel but because they did so in a format that allowed easy sharing: “Look, this is me.” The viral loop wasn’t “I am this” but “I am this, and I need you to know.”

Identity that moves too quickly collapses meaning. What begins as naming becomes flattening. When you are Dalit, queer, mentally ill, neurodivergent, trauma-informed, upper-class, agnostic, all at once, what remains intact? Indian identities already carry historical weight: caste names signal centuries of social sorting, surnames double as coordinates. The internet promises to make these boundaries porous. But in practice, it often replaces one rigidity with another. Where earlier identities were fixed, now they are compulsory and monetisable.

Platforms reward hyper-visibility. And visibility, in turn, requires legibility. So you become your adjectives: a hetero, Punjabi, child-of-immigrants, INFJ with commitment issues and a skincare routine. You say it before they ask. You say it so the algorithm knows. You say it so you won’t be misread. And in saying it, you often begin to believe it.

This is the danger: that labels become scripts, and scripts become prisons. P.E. Moskowitz, reflecting on the ADHD discourse online, notes that we are no longer just diagnosed. We are “enacting” the label, reinforcing it through content and community. You follow the meme pages, join the Reddit groups, say “my dopamine is broken” in jest until it’s true. You think you’re healing, but often you’re rehearsing a version of yourself that platforms have taught you to want.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the internet’s relationship with mental health in India. In a country where psychiatric language was once elite, inaccessible, or taboo, Instagram has democratised it, but also commodified it. Therapy-speak now sits alongside skincare hauls. “Unlearn, reparent, set boundaries” becomes a kind of linguistic balm, as if correct vocabulary alone can undo decades of trauma. There is relief in this vocabulary, especially for marginalised people, but there is also risk. When language ossifies into identity, healing can turn into stagnation.

Which brings us to community. The internet promised new forms of belonging. For queer kids in Nagaland or Ambedkarite students in Pune, digital space offered connections where none existed offline. But even these communities, once resistant, are now policed by the logic of platforms. Belonging is too often contingent on performance: how well you speak the code, post the right infographic, use the right label. Subcultures are no longer spaces of becoming. They are categories in a drop-down menu.

In the Indian music scene, for instance, 'alt' has become a look, not a sound. 'Independent' has become branding, not autonomy. You don’t have to go to a concert; you just need to post a Spotify screenshot at the right time. The rock community in India, which once built itself through bootleg gigs and word-of-mouth tapes, now competes for attention with algorithm-boosted 'vibe' playlists. You don’t need to play guitar to be a rock fan — you just need a tote bag with a Sonic Youth logo.

This collapse of effort into aesthetic is not accidental. It’s the outcome of the internet’s demand for speed. As Nausicaa Renner writes, the internet erodes our ability to, “edit memories, cull what needs to be culled, and move on.” In India, where many are actively trying to escape the identities forced upon them, be it caste, patriarchy, religious dogma, this inability to forget is stifling. Tagging, tracking, re-surfacing are structural limitations on self-reinvention.

Yet here lies the paradox: the internet both enables and disables transformation. You can be a hundred people in a day, but never quite forget any of them. The self becomes a breadcrumb trail. And while Peretti’s capitalism once needed new selves to sell new things, it now sells the feeling of self itself: a curated, captured, archived self. Your Spotify wrap, your Reddit flair, your relationship status, all work as proof of life. You exist because the interface says so.

But what if you want to unbecome? What if the identities that once saved you now bore you? What if the label no longer fits?

These are hard questions, especially online, where deviation from identity orthodoxy can feel like betrayal. But they are vital ones. In India, where historical identities have been both violent and vital — where caste, for instance, cannot simply be discarded, where queerness is still criminalised in many ways — the internet offers a promise it cannot keep: that you can self-fashion without consequence.

So what now? Perhaps we return to what Peretti hinted at but did not pursue: a rhythm of identity that is neither fixed nor frenzied. Something slower. More lived. More offline. Identity not as a BuzzFeed quiz, but as a friendship circle that evolves with you. Not as a 'Which Personality Disorder Are You?' meme, but as a hard conversation that ends in trust. Not as Spotify core, but as someone at the gig who recognises your face.

We need this slowness. Because our identities carry historical debris. Because subcultures still fight for oxygen. Because some of us cannot afford to keep becoming. And because in a country where so much has been inherited, the right to remake yourself should feel like breath, not performance.

So go ahead. Take the quiz. Write your bio. Post the meme. But remember: you are allowed to change. You are allowed to leave the label behind. You are allowed to be un-Instagrammable, messy, incoherent. Because beyond the algorithmic imperative to become, there is the human desire simply to be. And in that desire lies the only identity worth defending.

I am ________. And tomorrow, I might not be.

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