This is a very complex discussion that I like a lot. And a very philosophical one.
For starters, we cannot separate the process of making groups (cinephile, gamer, etc.) from the concrete conditions where these groups are made. I would say that categorization is not a liberal agenda per se, but inside social media dynamics it’s a compliance dispositive.
I like this article a lot and will put some quotes,
The categorization today, under social media is mostly a performative act, where you declare your conformity to the group, not some sort of self discovery process.
Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it’s the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. “Being yourself” is inherently limiting. It is liberatory only in the sense of freeing one temporarily from existential doubts. (Not a small thing!) So the social order is protected not by preventing “self-expression” and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage. Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control.
This is a product of how these platforms works, as they are neoliberal tools to promote neoliberal subjectivation.
Social media’s quantifying metrics aggravate the problem, making expression into a series of discrete items to be counted, ranked. It serves as the infrastructure for a feedback loop that orients expression toward the anxiety of what the numbers will be and accelerates it, as we try to better those numbers, and thereby demonstrate that the self-monitoring is teaching us something about how to become more “relevant.”
What is odd is that the connectivity of the internet exacerbates that sort of neoliberal ideology rather than mitigating it. Connectivity atomizes rather than collectivizes. But that is because most people’s experience of the internet is mediated by capitalist entities, or rather, for the sake of simplicity, by capitalism itself.
They do this by transforming ourselves in commodities. The categorization in neoliberal material conditions is the process to adapt the multiplicity of the human being to a market niche in a optimization process that take away all pieces that don’t fit that market niche, don’t generate value,
Social media offer a single profile for our singular identity, but our consciousness comprises multiple forms of identity simultaneously: We are at once a unique bundle of sense impressions and memories, and a social individual imbued with a collectively constructed sense of value and possibility. Things like Facebook give the impression that these different, contestable and often contradictory identities (and their different contexts) can be conveniently flattened out, with users suddenly having more control and autonomy in their piloting through everyday life. That is not only what for-profit companies like Facebook want, but it is also what will feel natural to subjects already accustomed to capitalist values of convenience, capitalist imperatives for efficiency, and so on.
For everyone that don’t is Latvian.
https://rees.sas.upenn.edu/about/spotlight/freedom-monument-riga-latvia