Reflecting on Identity and Autonomy in a Datafied Society with Paul Ricœur

Embodied subjects of experience in the physical world, we inhabit cyberspace as “dividuals” composed of fragmented and dispersed data as a result of the operations performed by algorithms. Within the context of an “algorithmic society” (Balkin, 2017) the intersubjective process of identity building is replaced by algorithmic processes. This leads to a “mortification of the self” since this is not just a computational operation but also a moral experience. In order to react to this situation some authors invoked the fundamental incomputable nature of the self explicitly relying on Ricoeur’s distinction between identity-idem and identity-ipse, and further arguing that this shall represent the core understanding of privacy (Hildebrandt, 2019). Other authors proposed a performative theory of digital citizenship centered on the idea of claiming rights: here I argue that Ricoeur’s reflection on the Self constituted as a subject of rights may complement this theory and that, in its turn, the latter may provide a valuable reference for reading and integrating Ricoeur’s analysis.