Identity in the Modern Web
I logged into YouTube Studio today and checked on the EposVox YouTube channel for the first time in 3 weeks.
Three weeks. No metrics, no view counts, no subscriber growth, ad revenue, no comments. I didn’t look at any of it.
For plenty of YouTubers, this might not be a big deal. It was Christmas and New Years, after all. But for me? Basically unheard of. Every weekend, holiday, virtually every day in the past 12 years (it’ll be 13 this spring!) has been spent obsessed with this YouTube channel. Not just the YouTube channel – for the past 12+ years I have been EposVox. (And D3M0L1SH3R before that. And MindFreaks13 before that.) It wasn’t just a YouTube channel, it was the entirety of my online presence – personal and professional – and a deeply-rooted, core part of my own identity.
But what does “identity” even mean in the modern, terminally online era?
I’ve put my everything into my work over the past 15 years. Every ounce of my interests, my passion, my intelligence and troubleshooting skills, my trained professional skills, the direction of my education, trying to overcome my weaknesses, and every possible minute I could squeeze in. For most of my school-age life, I had no clear path or certainty about “what I wanted to be when I grew up” – but once I found “my thing”? I locked in and never let go.
Like a pit bull who refuses to let go, I bit the leg of being a YouTuber - even in the face of repeated failures, a constantly changing landscape, tight finances, zero mentors, weird looks from my parents and university advisors, and taking whatever odd jobs I needed to make ends meet.
And I made it happen. In 2014, I quit my retail job to focus entirely on YouTube and my YouTube-adjacent work. A year later, I moved out on my own, supported by that work. Two years after that, I went 100% independent, sustained entirely by my own directed work and not the secondary YouTube MCN job that had initially paid the bills. A mere three years after that I bought a house for my wife, my kid, and I to live in. I did it.
Something that became apparent in recent years, however, is that I’ve changed a lot across those 15 years. I started taking YouTube seriously when I was 16. I’ve now spent more years of my life being a YouTuber than I have spent not being a YouTuber.
The person I was at 16 is a very different person than who I was at 19 when I switched to primarily making tech content. And that person was very different from the 22-year-old who moved out as a full-time YouTuber. And that person was an entirely different person than the 27-year-old who bought a house while being a YouTuber and started a family. And even he is a different person than I am now, 4 years later, writing this. Looking back at myself some 15+ years ago, reflecting on my goals, aspirations, hopes, dreams, and priorities… the only things that have stayed the same are my love for games and tech, and my job.
Who I am, my relationship with my online “avatar” or brand, and what I want out of this entire phenomenon is completely different today than when I locked-in with it 15 years ago.
While out of my control, it’s also pertinent to note that the entire “online landscape” has changed in that time, too. The early 2000s was a wonderful time full of optimism for how technology and the internet might change and improve our lives – with much of the web’s services and communications platforms being community-driven, decentralized utilities. The early 2010s saw the introduction of more centralized social media, and by the end of the late 2010s, the internet had become far more centralized, monetized, corporate, and locked down. Instead of the internet being this open, incredible place we “logged into” to escape the real world, it’s a place we’re forced to always be connected to – and going “offline” is now considered an escape from the internet.
This, unavoidably, has tainted, shifted, altered in some way, my connection to my online persona and brand. My connection to the internet and its supporting technology has changed, so of course the life I’ve built on top of it has changed, too.
Most of us have a general idea of what a person’s identity consists of. As FacingHistory.org explains, our identity consists of labels we apply to ourselves (class, ethnicity, religion, region, sexuality, gender, height, interests, fandoms) as well as social memberships.
For a long time, this was the most core way I understood my own identity. I was a gamer, a geek, a tech nerd, a photographer, a writer, and (eventually) a YouTuber. I was male(ish), bisexual, from somewhere in the middle class, educated through a college bachelor’s degree. I loved Halo and RuneScape and House, M.D. and Dexter and Back to the Future and every ‘80s movie my parents would make me watch growing up. I also ate tons of pizza, drank lots of Sunkist Orange Soda, and loved Twizzlers.
I wore my heart on my sleeve and my “personal brand” was simply a giant casserole of everything I believed myself to be, topped with a refusal to compromise on any of it or be silenced.
Over time, that sense of identity expanded to make room for my new “thing.” Something that quickly became my biggest hobby and soon, my job. YouTube. I was “that guy” in high school that was filming everything, making YouTube videos, and eventually gained some notoriety for it. My identity now took on a new form: YouTuber. Gaming YouTuber at first, eventually Tech YouTuber.
There wasn’t a huge problem with this for a long time. As I previously mentioned, I was obsessed with everything to do with being a YouTuber. Writing scripts, editing videos, shooting thumbnails. I learned every relevant skill I could manage, practiced every day – sometimes every hour – and spent way too much money on gear. At first, YouTube was just a novel, new way to share my gaming interests with other people, but before long gaming was just a subject matter to be exploited. YouTube was all I cared about.
Thing is, I had been so obsessed with figuring out my “path” or career and homing in on this as being it (as one naturally does as they wrap up high school and college) that I forgot to develop my own principles and values.
At the time, I couldn’t tell you what I cared about other than having fun and doing what I loved for a living. Everything was all about quotes like “Can you really be satisfied with all you’ve done in a day, if you didn’t work your fingers to the bone?”, pundits like Gary Vee hawking the #hustleporn culture, and other similarly toxic things that captured a young, ADHD-ridden mind and focused it like a laser.
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” ~Mark Twain
Turns out, if you “do what you love” you’ll wind up working every day of your life.
I guess it worked. I got what I wanted. I got my dream job. I twisted, angled, targeted every aspect of my life towards this one goal, and I achieved it. I built a box that felt good to put myself in. I failed many times, but I did succeed in the end. I also failed to consider that my identity would change along the way. That the things I wanted might shift as I progressed towards this goal. That the box might be too small.
Jerome Bruner wrote much about the self-narrative, an encapsulation of our identity which we can only ever convey through the stories we tell about our lives. “We seem to have no other way of describing “lived time” save in the form of a narrative.” “In the end, it is a narrative achievement. There is no such thing psychologically as “life itself.” At the very least, it is a selective achievement of memory recall.” [social research - Vol 71 : No 3 : Fall 2004]
Looking back, it’s easy to argue that most or all of the pieces that make up my identity today were present in my younger years. My values of family were present in different ways as a teenager than as a father myself, but they were there. Gender and sexuality had hardly begun to be explored back then (barely have now, to be honest) but those elements were present. My passion for art was buried under years of tech education tracking, but still very much there. It was vented through my video editing work and explorations in 3D modeling/rendering – still artistic processes, even if I treated them as technical ones.
Funny thing about our lives and identity being narratives we tell ourselves and the world: We’re unreliable narrators. Critic Paul de Man even considers someone trying to tell their own narrative - or create “a monument” to oneself - to be “defacement” of the monument itself.
The identity I constructed around myself – both that I conveyed to others (directly or indirectly) and the identity that I told myself – was limited in scope and tailored towards a concise summary of the life I wanted to live, or the path I wanted to stay on at the time, not a truthful assembly of all of the facets of my life and myself as a person.
In his autobiography, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “a man is always a teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he sees everything that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.” [Sartre, 1964] This was absolutely me throughout most of my career.
As I unpacked my identity before, my identity now, and what I want my identity to be I realized those “stories” were always something other people would hear. My identity was too rigid in its basis on how other people saw me. On what my value was to other people.
Before this recent identity crisis began, I struggled with feeling like a “tool” for people to use, get value out of, and then drop. With my primary job being making technical education content, I was often on the receiving end of much gratitude from viewers of my videos and readers of my guides (and other creators) – but I struggled to keep them around beyond that. I’ve always struggled to convert viewers to “fans” or to push them to my own personal work – my value only extended as far as their need for my guidance went. I have helped millions of people set up their tech to make their own art, but convinced a mere fraction of a percent to ever give a damn about my art.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with parasocial relationships and the lengths to which other creators in my space were willing to go to exploit such relationships for profit. Naturally, that means the profit leans much further in their direction than mine. I’ve been at peace with that – principles and integrity over money – but that doesn’t make the challenge any easier, nor does it close the cracks in my identity that form over time as a result.
But building a personal identity based on stories meant for other people never works. It can’t work. That’s a great idea for a personal brand, but your personal identity and brand should be unique entities. These stories aren’t directly identity at all, but more so a characteristic of your reputation instead.
“Opposite to your internal personal identity your reputation is the way people around you actually see you. It is the way people perceive how you act and how they think you are. There is always a gap between how you see yourself (self-image) and how people see you (public image). Therefore, constant self-reflection based on honest feedback from friends and family is so important. Or go a step further and collect opinions from strangers or people you are working with.”
Now, maybe it’s the YouTuber in me – you know, where I absolutely drown in constant “feedback” in the form of YouTube comments, social media replies, Discord messages, emails, forum posts and so on, 24/7 365 – but I’m not sure taking in feedback from friends and family should influence your identity in any significant way compared to your own self-reflection. Regardless, the point stands that your reputation sits opposite to your identity.
I was so focused on living up to this image I had in my head of a YouTuber that I only saw my identity in that context. As a result, I warped my reputation – how others see me, use my work, my role in their lives – into my identity, and kind of shut out the other parts of me that were required to be whole.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe that’s just what I needed to do to thrive and survive at the time. Maybe that’s okay. I honestly don’t know.
British neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote:
“We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a “narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our identities.” [The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat]
Early in my career, the aspiring YouTuber was my “self.” If it was all I cared about and obsessed over, then limiting my (internal or projected) identity to that self was not untruthful.
I feel like a nice expansion of this comes from philosopher Amelie Rorty: “humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves.”
Perhaps my identity was this specific, static thing for a few years, and it just evolves as my priorities change.
And ooh boy, did my priorities change.
In the spring of 2020, at the height of pandemic lockdowns, my wife and I had a baby. And then in the late fall, we bought a house. Add in my wife finishing up grad school right before giving birth and we had a hurricane of life changes crammed into a tiny amount of time.
The impact these major life changes had on my values, priorities, and (apparently) my identity were enormous.
Over time, I became less and less content to be stuck under a single label (ironically right as I had finally just accepted the branding of “Stream Professor” after years of viewers calling me that). I wasn’t content being stuck with a single genre, medium, outlet, perhaps even a single identity. These changes, combined with a drastically shifting post-pandemic streaming scene had me disillusioned with the focus of my primary job. I wanted to pursue other interests, to “spread my wings” as it were, and to be taken seriously within the spaces for the other art forms I’d always wanted to pursue, but never prioritized it within my self-identity.
To others, this shift feels sudden. I’ve adopted a new nickname, I’ve focused a lot more on my art and actually give myself room to focus on making it now, I’ve put a lot more of my time into my secondary channels (lost saves grew +10,000 subscribers in 2024 thanks to my renewed focus on making videos there and making them the best they could be, I launched my first ever – very experimental – music album and started making more art videos on analog_dreams, and I finally launched a portfolio site). To me, however, this shift was long overdue, and the writing was on the wall that it was coming for a few years now.
According to Sacks:
“To be ourselves we must have ourselves — possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.” [The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat]
Too often it feels like our identity needs to be consistent and unchanging. Especially in the modern web era – everything you publicly do, say, or interact with is taken at face value and stripped of all possible nuance, context, personal status, etc. The you that got snippy with someone on Twitter at 11pm when you couldn’t sleep is the same you that is working with a brand sponsor at a professional event, who is also the same you that is perhaps struggling with identity or falling out of love with your niche or grieving the loss of a loved one.
Online, it doesn’t matter what you’re feeling, thinking, or what your intentions are; all that matters is that you fit the image of what people expect of you.
This is where that reputation versus identity issue comes in. Online, everything you say or do is applied to (or considered against) your outward-facing identity. You get the first word in as to “who you are” but after that you have zero control over it.
This is where Rorty notes:
“A person’s roles and his place in the narrative devolve from the choices that place him in a structural system related to others. The person thus comes to stand behind his roles, to select them and to be judged by his choices and his capacities to act out his personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama.
The idea of a person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable. It is in the idea of action that the legal and the theatrical sources of the concept of person come together.”
So how do you maintain your own personal identity in this scenario?
I’m not going to pretend to have the answer here. I’m not entirely confident there even is an answer. It’s easy for those in the more business role with their creative work (on YouTube, social media, etc.) be it part of a bigger team or with a role that has little to do with themselves as a person. It’s also easier for those who haven’t found much success with YouTube or streaming and just treat it as some disconnected thing they can log in to and log out of (like the good ol’ internet days). But for those of us who grew up with it, had to spend years and years putting our souls into it to get to where we are? How can we possibly separate ourselves from things that much?
The only solution I’ve seen anyone have success with in relation to this is via anonymity. Sacrificing their existing following/notoriety/whatever associated with their existing public identity to do things in secret. Playing games, releasing art, or just being a normal read-only internet user. Alternate accounts, secret usernames, zero cross promotion.
I’ve tried this. I’ve failed at this. There are always friends I want to bring along the way, inevitable crossing-over of interests. I make my living by turning my hobbies into new facets of my job, and my hobbies all blend together. Having a secret profile doesn’t do anything for me, except add annoyance to switching accounts.
So I’m going to do a thing that isn’t, at all, remotely proven to work: I’m just going to retire my identity.
EposVox is dead. I am not EposVox anymore. I’m just Addie. EposVox is a channel I run for tech and streaming education. It’s a username I have on a variety of platforms. But that’s the extent of it. It’s not an identity anymore.
This is the End of EposVox.
I’m Addie. I make tech videos and gaming videos and art and music videos. I’m an artist, a photographer, an educator, a gamer, a streamer, a YouTuber, a writer, a dad, a husband, a personal cook, an enjoyer of movies and TV shows, a filthy Apple user, a Windows user, a nerdy Linux user, a pleb console gamer, a 1337 PC gamer – too many things to contain in any sort of social media-friendly blurb. I’m just me. My identity is my own, and I’m not going to remain beholden to what people expect of me.
While I’ve failed many, many times in my career (and my life in general) the success I have found came from being relentless in my pursuit of what interests me (consistent or not) and sharing that with others, and being 100% unapologetically, unequivocally myself.
Even on my earlier (but not first, that one is sadly gone) gaming channel, my most popular videos were not the ones I made trying to imitate other gaming channels at the time. Instead they were random ideas, like reacting to this Nyan Cat website, trying to pick up the End Dragon Egg when it was first introduced and no one knew anything about it, or showing an absolutely terrible HDMI splitting solution for Xbox 360 for my capture card.
These videos weren’t scripted, planned, not even necessarily relevant to the “channel” I was attempting to build. They were just videos of me playing around with the things I like in a unique way that wasn’t common on the site at the time. This trend also showed some of the earliest signs of my transition to the tech niche, as I found similar results with my random videos experimenting with video editing in Photoshop CS6, or learning how to customize Windows 8.
This is significant, as it reflects advice that we’ve started hearing from “YouTube Gurus” and YouTube itself for a few years now; channels themselves aren’t factored into a video’s success, just the video. Switching to my newer “main channel” and my most popular videos are a one-off playing with the PUBG Mobile emulator (not at all directly relevant to my tech/streaming niche at the time) and one of my first OBS tutorials when I started covering that while EposVox was still a gaming channel.
To me, this shows that the strategy I’m going to implement has a chance of working. Which is all I need. I’m not doing this because I think it’ll bring me more “success” in terms of views, subscribers, or dollars. I’m doing it because I think it’ll bring me more success in terms of fulfillment, reduced stress, and better work-life balance.
The strategy is simple. I just abandon the idea of a consistent, public identity in the first place. Simple to write, less simple to implement, but a basic idea nonetheless.
I was comfortable in my role as the “Stream Professor” – but it was a box too small to find fulfillment. It let me lose years in my work and de-prioritize everything else I might want, but as the world itself changes and shifts around me, my own priorities and wants change with it (with or without my knowledge or input).
I’m Addie. I’m a person of many interests, wearer of many hats, skilled at many jobs, passionate about many things, and one who holds many different relationships to different people. (I’m deliberately not putting a neat label-bow on this.) That’s me. I’ll worry about me.
To the world, I can be Addie/EposVox on the EposVox YouTube channel where I primary cover my tech interests (which include but will not be limited to streaming). On the lost saves YouTube channel, I can be Addie/lost saves where I share my passion for gaming, retro gaming, and the gadgets that make it tick. On analog_dreams I can be Addie, the constantly-shifting-hyperfocuses creative who might do glitch art one day, spraypaint art the next, photography the next, and experimental synth music the next. On social media, I can just be me and the amalgamation of all these interests and if that’s not consistent enough for someone, they can just not follow me, then.
You don’t need to follow everyone on every platform. You don’t need social media at all. I gain literally nothing from censoring and sanitizing myself to make a handful of more people less annoyed by my presence in their social media feeds. (Hell, I’d feel better about my efforts online if I happened to be the one who annoyed someone enough that they just didn’t bother with social media altogether. At this point, that would be bettering their life.)
The way to keep your identity on the modern web is to not have one, or to expose so very little of it to the web that most of it is kept to yourself. Which feels like an impossible scenario given most of the ways you might engage with or socialize around your interests, passions, and hobbies would be through the internet. Social online identity is a societal problem. We preserve identities by accepting that (in social spaces) people are human beings, not brands or cartoon characters, and that it’s okay to separate out the videos (podcasts, art, whatever) you consume from the human being working on them, and to let people be.
It will also require content platforms to not rely so heavily on recommendation algorithms that sanitize every ounce of personality out of both the creators and the viewers. The one-track-mind nature of them make it impossible to embrace variety or nuance.
But that’s probably too much to ask. So in the meantime, I’ll just continuing to carve out my own corner of this space just for me, and not stress the small stuff anymore.
I may never know who I am, because the person I am changes often – and the very act of looking inward for an answer to that question almost always comes at an inflection point when things are changing most. But I do know that I won’t allow myself to keep blocking out parts of who I am just to appease an algorithm, or a generation of viewers trained to only enjoy things fed to them by algorithms. And maybe that’s okay.