Choreography of the “Coded Oracle” and the Hijacked Self | Gen Z Series – Part IV

Our consciousness is defined by the seamless connectivity and coherence between our past, present and the future. While we human beings live in the present moment, it’s the imagination that integrates all the three versions of the self. Imagination is the humanity’s first laboratory, a simulation of the possible or, better say a private theatre where we live, test-run possibilities, simulate the consequences, and rehearse futures. Long before we invented tools or built institutions, it was imagination that helped us survive and thrive by mirroring the constraints and approximating the outcomes. Inside that inner space, we stage versions of ourselves – who we are, who we might become, who we don’t want to be – and negotiate between them.

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Psychology has described the multiplicity of the self in many ways. William James distinguished the real self—the experiencing subject—from the many ‘Me’s’: the social, material, and spiritual selves—suggesting that the self is inherently multiple, and that the mind continually experiments with these versions before curating a coherent sense of self for optimal adaptation. Later, Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius’ notion of “possible selves” made this even more concrete: people hold cognitive representations of “the person I could become,” “the person I am afraid of becoming,” and “the person I would like to become.” These aren’t just fantasies but hold distinct utilitarian value as they organize motivation, emotion and goal pursuit.

Modern neuroscience provides the neural correlates of this internally experienced phenomenon. When the brain isn’t engaged in demanding external tasks, the default mode network (DMN) gets activated. This closely knit neural network includes medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and temporoparietal junction which consolidates autobiographical memory, mental time travel and the simulation of diverse social scenarios. Put differently, the brain is wired to stage inner simulations where the divergent selves and the convergent realities grapple with each other so that the mind could maintain a generative workspace where identities, strategies, and social outcomes can be tried out without cost.

This inner laboratory comes with a crucial evolutionary advantage: running simulations offline allows us to predict consequences, refine strategies and regulate impulses before acting on them. This capacity to think  about oneself and others in terms of thoughts, feelings, desires and intentions is called reflective functioning or mentalization. Self-reflection equips us to test different inner positions – the compliant self, the assertive self, the nurturant self – and decide which one to deploy in a real situation. Therefore, our imagination or the fantasy isn’t merely the escape from reality but a fertile ground for reflective functioning where the self experiments with multiple mental models to anticipate, adapt, and align its inner possibilities with the contingencies of the real world.

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Imagination by its very nature tends to be limitless whereas the environment has well defined limits. A healthy functioning of an individual requires imagined manoeuvres to be grounded in the realities of one’s actual capabilities, current developmental stage and constraints of the surroundings. Carl Rogers described the “fully functioning person” as the one who is open to experience, lives each moment authentically as it unfolds without being affected by the shadows of memory or the dreams of tomorrow, and values one’s own intuitive understanding of what feels genuinely life-enhancing against what feels alienating or false.

Similarly, Abraham Maslow’s notion of self-actualization requires one to have a fairly accurate perception of reality. He believed, progression to higher psychological growth occurs only after securing fundamental needs such as safety, belonging and esteem in grounded, realistic ways. Unrealistic, self-centric fantasies that ignore the structural limits of reality, undermine genuine self-actualization; instead, they harden into a form of pseudo-actualization, where the individual mistakes self-inflating illusions for authentic growth which eventually translates into frustration.

Furthermore, Albert Bandura’s agentic perspective of personal growth argues that people are self-organizing, proactive, self-reflective, and self-regulating. One key aspect of this agency is forethought – mentally rehearsing actions, predicting outcomes, and judging them against personal standards. But forethought works only when simulations are calibrated in terms of self-efficacy, realistic assessment of the environment and preferring actions that can actually bridge the gap between one’s “actual self” and the “aspired self”. This is precisely what constitutes a practical and pragmatic approach – what Carver and Scheier describe in self-regulation theory as a ‘control loop,’ wherein one compares the current state to the desired state, acts, receives feedback, and updates accordingly. Healthy imagination feeds that loop with feasible plans.

Therefore, we can say that imaginations that continuously cross-checks against personal capabilities and situational constraints, is a hallmark of psychological maturity. It equips one with better prediction, greater perceived control, and hence better emotional regulation. When people can imagine realistically and act effectively, they feel self-authored; when they can imagine only unreal, externally injected scenarios, they feel disappointed, dependent, and incoherent.

This is where complications start to arise: what happens when the raw material for inner simulation is no longer internally construed but continuously supplied by an external, algorithmic environment?

Modern social media platforms are meticulously engineered for attentional capture and preference-congruent delivery of the content. Deliberately crafted algorithms hooked with the smartphone sensors track every bit of the user engagement and nourishes the simmering computational fabrics in the background with what evokes interest, aspiration, envy, outrage as well as the carnal curiosities – and subsequently amplifies the attentional sink by feeding more of it.

Over time, the user’s stream becomes an externally curated mirror of their motivational landscape. It is important to understand that our imagination normally draws an autobiographical memory, culturally available narratives and our own evolving ventures to stay relevant in the environment, but if the platform keeps flooding our consciousness with salient, emotionally charged, socially modelled scenes, then the mind’s social-simulation systems are occupied by what others are doing, becoming, and displaying.

Social learning theories suggest, we learn by observing models, especially those seen as successful or high-status. On social media, these models are stylized, edited, and optimized for attention. The user thus repeatedly engages in vicarious rehearsal – “this is how to look, how to speak, how to succeed.” Neuroscientifically, the same neural and cognitive resources used for simulating real social partners are now activated for influencers and fictionalized micro-scenes. The brain treats them as socially relevant others, because they trigger the same systems for perspective-taking and emotional attunement.

Introspectively, we all wish to be known for what is most true in us, for the talents and capacities that unfold from our core. But when a digital culture glorifies influencers who ascend not through depth but through visibility, the inner horizon of ambition subtly shifts. What once called us toward self-realisation now pulls us toward imitation; the platform hijacks our motivational compass, urging us to walk the routes already trampled by those who mastered the art of being seen rather than the art of becoming. This could eventually rob us of self-reflection and the grounded sense of being, leaving us absorbed in a world of external cues rather than attuned to the quiet truth of our own experience.

Thereafter, what follows is a kind of colonization of the imaginative workspace. Instead of starting from “What can I do next in my concrete situation?” the mind starts from “What is the next compelling template I can replicate here?” Imagination becomes heteronomous – governed by others – rather than autonomous – self governed. In media theory, Guy Debord called this the society of the spectacle: representation displaces lived experience. Jean Baudrillard later sharpened it into simulacra — images with no original. When representation is abundant, the subject’s own capacity to generate representations atrophies through disuse and displacement.

Once the imaginational playground or the self anchored creative sandbox is drenched with the incessant flow of stimulus driven, short-cycle content, the style of conscious functioning starts drifting from reflective calibration to reactive autonomy.

Dual-process models proposed by Daniel Kahneman explain this with cognitive System 1, which is fast, automatic, associative, and triggered by stimuli and the System 2, a slow, effortful, mindful contemplation used for abstract reasoning as well as self monitoring. A strategic balance of both executive systems is required for adaptive aspirational pursuits whereas the social media governed digital spaces are optimized mainly for System 1: quick judgments, emotional tagging, instant social comparison, outrage, and amusement, which keeps one emotionally seized, barely spares a moment to reflect, and therefore becomes highly addictive through dopamine-driven reward loops that consolidates every impulsive engagement. The more time is spent in that mode, the less practice the person gets in System 2 operations such as reframing, autobiographical integration, and long-range planning.

Metacognitive and clinical literatures describe something similar as loss of decentering or self-as-context – the ability to observe thoughts and feelings without being fused with them. If attention is chronically gripped by algorithmic surprises, the person has fewer moments to ‘turn back’ toward their own grounded self, to assess and question what they are being drawn into. Over time, as predicted by Andrei Khrennikov’s social laser theory, this can look like a reactive personality configuration: actions follow stimuli without much intervening reflection, identity becomes episodic, and values, the enduring principles and priorities that guide our choices, become derivative of what is most frequently seen and rewarded.

When identity becomes episodic, the self is no longer experienced as a continuous, coherent unfolding of one’s being across time. Instead, it shatters into discrete moments, performances, or moods that fail to integrate with a self-consistent perspective. The person lives in a series of loosely connected “episodes” – each shaped by context, impulse, or external feedback – without an inner thread that binds them into a unified sense of self. In such a condition, identity is constantly reconstructed for each situation rather than anchored in enduring values, commitments, or self-understanding.

For adolescents and emerging adults, this is especially concerning. The developmental process of becoming a fully functioning individual requires trying out roles, integrating feedback, and gradually settling into a stable sense of self. If role exploration is confined to an environment that rewards only certain scripted, commodified versions of the self – attractive, witty, outraged, hyper-productive, provocative – then the identity that emerges is less the result of inner negotiation and more a product of market-driven platform contingencies. This shift has troubling developmental consequences: instead of using imagination to test authentic possibilities, the young user begins to test only platform-legible possibilities, resulting not in self-anchored activity but in reactive behaviour that’s externally anchored. The internal locus of control is quietly hijacked by the external ones.

What happens when self-reflection diminishes? How does it reshape our personality and the perspectives we rely on to interpret events, predict outcomes, and manage the situations we encounter? In Carver and Scheier’s control-process model, behavior is organized around feedback loops: set a goal, act, compare outcome to standard, adjust. Successful loops create a sense of efficacy and emotional stability; failed loops create negative affect. Now imagine a person whose goals are not self-selected but continually inflated by exposure to curated success, beauty, or influence online. Their imagined possibilities are high, but their real-world constraints (skills, socioeconomic context, geography) remain the same. This creates chronic discrepancy. If self-reflection were strong, the person could revise goals downward, reinterpret standards, or diversify sources of value. But if reactivity dominates, revision does not occur — the person just experiences looped failure signals.

Repeated, unresolvable discrepancy is experienced as frustration, and frustration is a well-known precursor of aggression. Add to this an external locus of control – the sense that outcomes depend on opaque algorithms, market tastes, virality, or “who the platform favors” – and one gets a psychological profile that is simultaneously ambitious, under-resourced, and other-controlled. That is a breeding ground for agitation, online hostility, scapegoating, and violent outbursts.

Furthermore, evolution has shaped the brain to continually strive to reduce prediction error. Yet when the mind is conditioned by the passive consumption of curated digital content, and one continues to aspire to recognition, belonging, and upward mobility while believing these desires will materialize on one’s own terms, even as reality keeps contradicting them, the prediction error persists, intensifying a chronic conflict between aspiration and the world’s refusal to comply. When prediction error cannot be reduced through action because of real-world constraints, the conditioned mind attempts to resolve it by changing affect, through anger, contempt, devaluation of others, or by changing reality abruptly through destructive acts, strategy-less protest, or impulsive lashing out.

Could all of this culminate in an existential crisis, a loss of authored self and even a thinner sense of consciousness? Under the influence of social media, our conscious state at any given moment can shift anywhere between authentic and inauthentic modes of being. Inauthenticity is when our aspirations, possibilities, judgements and interpretations are internalized from the faceless social choreography of the digital spaces. The imitated self talks as “one” talks, desires what “one” desires, fears what “one” fears. Social media, especially in algorithmic form, operates as the Coded Oracle, influencing identities that willingly submit to market forces even as they imagine themselves free. What feels volitional is often the expression of veiled algorithmic coercion. What is taken as free will is already pre-ordained by invisible systems of selection. The individual moves through a constantly updated sense of what they want to be, unaware that their surrender has preceded their awareness, and that the self they defend was shaped long before it was chosen. Once the imagination is taken hostage by the computational oligarchy, the projection of possibilities, the very act by which we disclose ourselves, is left no longer truly ours own. We start living in borrowed possibilities.

Viktor Frankl described something similar as existential vacuum, a deep sense of inner emptiness because one cannot discover, access, or commit to a meaningful purpose in life. In this state, the individual feels disconnected from authentic desires, uncertain about values, and unable to find a compelling “why” behind their actions, rendering them incapable of responding to the demands of a concrete situation with freedom and responsibility. If situations are constantly overlaid by pre-formatted scripts (“this is how to respond, this is how to express anger, this is what success looks like”), then instead of being guided by intrinsic meaning, the person becomes vulnerable to conformity, impulsivity, or external influences – filling the void with distractions, addictions, or borrowed identities.

Fromm, Debord, and later Baudrillard all warned that individuals in advanced media societies can become spectators of their own life – feeling one’s existence not as a participant rooted in lived experience, but as an observer watching oneself from the outside – almost as if life were a performance staged for an audience rather than a reality to be lived from the inside. If the social-simulation systems are persistently outward-facing, the person has fewer episodes of inward-facing self-reflection that anchor identity to the authentic self. Over long durations, this can produce a felt thinning of selfhood — not total loss of consciousness, but a fragility of “who I am,” rapid shifts in self-presentation, increased susceptibility to group emotions, and a hunger for intense experiences to feel real. That is an existential problem, not just a cognitive one.