Ethnicity, Identity, and the Digital Age

Ethnicity, Identity, and the Digital Age: How Web-Internetisation Restored Organic Belonging Rather Than Erasing It

BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE

Introduction: Identity Before the State: Ethnicity as the Original Social Technology

Long before the emergence of modern States, passports, constitutions, or flags, human identity was organised through ethnicity. Ethnicity was not an abstract label but a lived system of belonging—anchored in shared ancestry, language, ritual memory, land stewardship, moral codes, and economic interdependence. It was through ethnicity that individuals understood who they were, where they belonged, what obligations they owed, and how they participated in collective life.

Ancient societies did not ask, “Which country are you from?” They asked, “Who are your people?” Identity was genealogical, territorial, and cultural. From African ethno-governed communities to Indian jatis, Chinese clans, Arab tribes, and European kinship networks, ethnicity functioned as the primary social operating system. Governance, economy, marriage, conflict resolution, and spirituality all flowed through this ethnopublic structure.

The modern republican State disrupted this organic system by attempting to flatten identity into legal homogeneity. Ethnic plurality was subordinated under abstract national identities, often imposed through colonial boundaries and centralised bureaucracies. Yet this suppression never erased ethnicity—it merely forced it underground.

1. The Myth of Digital Identity Fluidity

A dominant contemporary narrative claims that web-internetisation and digital socialisation have “reshaped identity,” producing fluid, hybrid, and post-ethnic individuals. This interpretation is fundamentally flawed. What digital expansion has reshaped is expression, not identity.

Ethnicity has not dissolved under digital modernity. Instead, it has been amplified, reasserted, and made visible. The internet did not create new identities—it provided a global stage upon which existing identities could speak freely, often beyond the constraints of republican States.

No phenomenon reveals this more clearly than social media. People do not gather online randomly. They cluster instinctively around:

• Cultural familiarity.
• Shared values.
• Linguistic comfort.
• Moral resonance.
• Emotional recognition.

These are all ethnopublic impulses.

2. Counter-Argument: The Liberal Identity Fallacy and the Myth of Post-Ethnic Humanity

A. The Liberal Claim: Identity as Fluid, Chosen, and Detachable

Liberal identity theory rests on a foundational assumption: that identity is primarily subjective, individually chosen, and increasingly fluid in modern society. Within this framework, ethnicity is treated as a residual category—an optional cultural accessory rather than a constitutive structure of being. The liberal subject is imagined as mobile, self-authoring, and abstracted from inherited belonging.

According to this view, digital connectivity, global migration, and cosmopolitan interaction are dissolving ethnic distinctions, giving rise to hybrid identities, post-national affiliation, and universal humanhood. Nationalism itself is expected to wither as individual autonomy replaces collective inheritance.

This theory is elegant—but empirically false.

B. The Category Error: Confusing Expression with Ontology

The central error of liberal identity theory lies in its category confusion. It mistakes expression for identity, and choice for formation. While individuals may choose how to express themselves in different contexts, identity itself is not chosen. Identity is formed through:

• Birth into a people.
• Linguistic inheritance.
• Cultural socialisation.
• Moral conditioning.
• Collective memory.

One does not select an ethnicity any more than one selects a mother tongue in infancy. Even when individuals migrate, adapt, or integrate elsewhere, their identity framework remains ethnopublic at its core. Digital platforms do not make identity fluid; they merely provide multiple stages upon which fixed identities can perform, and thus subtly influences one another’s expressions.

C. Liberal Individualism versus Anthropological Reality

Liberal theory privileges the individual as the primary unit of social reality. Ethnopublic anthropology demonstrates the opposite: the individual emerges from the group, not the other way around.

No society in human history has sustained itself on pure individualism. Even the most liberal societies rely on inherited cultural norms, moral expectations, and communal trust—none of which are individually generated.

Ethnicity is not an ideological construct; it is a biocultural system that predates the State and outlives political regimes. Liberal theory fails because it treats ethnicity as optional, when in reality it is structural.

D. The Digital Paradox Liberalism Cannot Explain

If liberal identity theory were correct, digital globalisation should produce:

• Declining ethnic consciousness.
• Weakening cultural affiliation.
• Homogenised global identity.

Instead, we observe the opposite:

• Ethnic revival movements.
• Cultural reassertion online.
• Language preservation through digital media.
• Intensified ethnic self-identification.

Social media platforms are not laboratories of post-identity—they are archives of difference. Algorithms do not erase ethnicity; they amplify it by responding to behavioural patterns rooted in cultural familiarity.

Liberalism predicted convergence. Reality delivered re-tribalisation without violence.

E. Republican Nationalism as Liberalism’s Institutional Expression

Liberal identity theory finds its political expression in republican nationalism—the attempt to bind diverse peoples into a single abstract citizenry, governed through uniform law and centralised authority.

This model presumes that ethnicity can be subordinated indefinitely without consequence. Africa proves otherwise. Despite decades of republican governance, ethnicity remains:

• Politically decisive.
• Socially organising.
• Economically networked.
• Culturally dominant.

Republican nationalism did not dissolve ethnicity; it merely forced it into informal spaces—markets, kinship networks, digital forums, and community structures. Liberal theory cannot explain why ethnicity persists even where States actively suppress it.

F. The Moral Contradiction of Liberal Universalism

Liberalism claims to celebrate diversity, yet its institutional logic demands homogenisation. It tolerates difference only insofar as difference does not challenge the authority of the State or the abstraction of citizenship.

This produces a contradiction:

• Diversity is praised rhetorically.
• Difference is suppressed structurally.

Ethnopublic nationalism resolves this contradiction by institutionalising difference rather than denying it. It recognises ethnicity as a legitimate unit of governance, economic coordination, and cultural continuity.

G. Identity Is Fixed; Interaction Is Fluid

The ethnopublic framework does not deny global interaction. It simply clarifies its structure:

• Identity remains fixed (ethnic inheritance).
• Economy is fluid (trade, migration, collaboration).
• Governance is participatory (populocracy).
• Organisation is horizontal (commicracy).
• Knowledge is shared (digital commons).

Liberal theory collapses all these domains into individual preference. Ethnopublic theory distinguishes them—and therefore governs them effectively.

H. Liberal Identity Theory Is Historically Exhausted

Liberal identity theory emerged in a specific historical moment—industrial modernity, imperial expansion, and State centralisation. That moment has passed. The digital age has exposed its limitations, its abstractions, and its anthropological blindness. Identity did not dissolve. It returned—louder, clearer, and globally connected.

The future does not belong to post-ethnic fantasies. It belongs to recognised peoples, organised through shared systems, governing themselves with technological precision and cultural coherence.

Ethnopublic nationalism is not a rejection of modernity. It is modernity finally reconciled with human reality.

3. Direct Rebuttal: Postmodern Identity Theory and the Collapse of Anthropological Grounding

A. The Postmodern Claim: Identity as Infinite Construction

Postmodern identity theory advances the claim that identity is endlessly constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through discourse, power relations, and subjective self-definition. In this view, ethnicity, culture, gender, and even nationhood are treated not as formative structures but as narratives—mutable, negotiable, and detachable from biological inheritance or collective memory.

Identity, according to postmodernism, has no fixed centre. It is said to be performative rather than inherited, fluid rather than anchored, and individual rather than communal.

This theory gained traction in late-20th-century Western academia as a reaction against rigid nationalism, racial essentialism, and authoritarian State identity. However, in rejecting rigidity, postmodernism committed a deeper error: it erased structure itself.

B. The Foundational Error: Denial of Human Patterning

Postmodern identity theory fails because it denies patterned human organisation. Human societies have never existed without:

• Kinship systems.
• Lineage inheritance.
• Language continuity.
• Cultural transmission.
• Collective memory.

These are not social “constructs” in the trivial sense; they are civilisational technologies developed over millennia to ensure survival, coherence, and meaning.

Ethnicity is not a story people tell themselves—it is a lived structure that organises marriage, naming, moral obligation, inheritance, belonging, social trust, and worldview. Postmodernism collapses all of this into discourse, thereby mistaking interpretation for ontology.

C. Performance Does Not Replace Belonging

Postmodern theory conflates performance with identity. While individuals may perform different aspects of self, depending on context—professional, digital, artistic—this does not erase their foundational belonging.

A Yoruba person may speak English online, work in London, or trade globally, but when kinship, marriage, burial, inheritance, or moral accountability arises, identity reverts to ethnopublic grounding. Performance is situational. Identity is structural. Postmodernism cannot explain why, in moments of crisis or ceremonies, humans retreat not to abstract humanity, but to peoplehood.

D. Digital Reality Refutes Postmodern Theory

If postmodern identity theory were correct, the rise of web-internetisation would produce identity dissolution. Instead, we observe:

• Stronger ethnic consciousness.
• Cultural revival movements.
• Language preservation online.
• Ethnic solidarity in digital spaces.

Social media has not produced post-identity humans; it has produced digitally networked tribes. Algorithms do not reward fluidity—they reward familiarity, resonance, and shared meaning, all of which are rooted in ethnopublic identity.

Postmodern theory predicted erasure. Reality delivered amplification.

E. The Political Consequence: Governance Without Ground

Postmodern identity theory is politically sterile. It offers no stable unit upon which governance can be organised. If identity is endlessly fluid, then:

• Representation becomes incoherent.
• Collective responsibility dissolves.
• Long-term planning collapses.
• Moral accountability erodes.

States governed on postmodern identity assumptions drift toward bureaucratic abstraction, elite technocracy, or cultural fragmentation. Africa’s experience with imported republican models illustrates this failure vividly.

Ethnopublic governance, by contrast, rests on recognised peoples, not abstract individuals or theoretical identities.

F. Ethnopublic Identity as the Corrective

Ethnopublic identity theory does not deny complexity or interaction. It simply restores order:

• Ethnic identity is inherited and fixed.
• Interaction is economic, social, and digital.
• Belonging is communal.
• Governance is collective.
• Difference is institutionalised, not erased.

Postmodernism dissolves identity in theory while humans reassert it in practice. Ethnopublic theory aligns governance with reality.

G. Postmodern Identity Is a Philosophical Luxury, Not a Civilisational Model

Postmodern identity theory emerged in stable, wealthy societies buffered by centuries of State continuity. It cannot guide societies undergoing reconstruction, decolonisation, or civilisational transition from micro-communities to macro-State.

Africa does not require identity deconstruction. Africa requires identity restoration and institutional recognition. Ethnopublic nationalism is not reactionary—it is post-postmodern: grounded, plural, structured, and future-oriented.

4. Social Media as Proof of Fixed Identity

On social media platforms, people follow influencers who reflect their sense of self, not abstract citizenship. They join forums and online communities that resonate with their worldview, humour, grievances, faith, history, or aspirations. Algorithms do not create these preferences—they detect and amplify them. Crucially, none of this erases ethnicity.

An Indian individual will comfortably introduce themselves online as “Indian” in global spaces, yet within culturally relevant contexts will specify Punjabi, Tamil, Gujarati, or Bengali identity without hesitation. The ethnopublic identity remains intact beneath the national label.

A Nigerian, similarly, rarely remains simply “Nigerian” once meaningful interaction begins. Ethnicity—Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa—emerges naturally, because identity is not State-manufactured but culturally inherited. This is not tribalism; it is anthropology.

Web-internetisation has not made identities fluid. It has exposed the artificiality of republican homogeneity.

5. Digital Space and the Collapse of Republican Statehood

Republican Statehood depends on three assumptions:

1. Identity can be abstracted into citizenship.
2. Cultural differences can be subordinated to law.
3. Power can be centralised without eroding legitimacy.

The digital age has shattered all three.

The internet decentralises authority, multiplies narratives, and restores horizontal association. People no longer wait for State institutions to validate their existence or organise their communities. They self-assemble—ethnically, culturally, ideologically, and economically.

This is why republican States increasingly struggle to:

• Control narratives.
• Manage legitimacy.
• Suppress ethnic and populist consciousness.
• Maintain centralised moral authority.

Digital connectivity undermines the illusion that the State is the primary container of identity. It reveals instead that the State is an overlay, while ethnicity is foundational.

6. Web-Internetisation as a Return to Organic Belonging

Rather than producing a “global human identity,” digital civilisation has re-emerged humanity into organic plurality. People now participate simultaneously in:

• Local ethnic belonging.
• Continental cultural exchange.
• Global economic interaction.

This is not hybridity—it is layered coherence.

Ethnicity remains fixed. Economy becomes fluid. Governance becomes participatory. Knowledge becomes shared. This structure mirrors ancient ethnopublic systems, where communities traded, migrated, intermarried, and collaborated economically without dissolving identity.

7. Populocracy, Commicracy, and Ethnopublic Order in Digital Society

Web-internetisation thrives on populocracy—the rule of the many through continuous participation. Likes, votes, comments, shares, and collective pressure shape digital outcomes daily. Authority flows from mass engagement, not imposed hierarchy.

It operates organisationally through commicracy—commissioning-rule. Online communities and groups self-moderate, delegate roles, appoint admins, establish norms, sanction behaviour, and regulate interaction horizontally. Emotional intelligence, social awareness, and reciprocity are learned not through State coercion but through communal consequence.

And what anchors this entire digital civilisation is ethnopublic belonging. Ethnopublic is the identity substrate of the digital age.

The term ethno does not refer exclusively to ethnicity as bloodline or race; rather, it denotes any shared organising identity through which people cohere—whether cultural, territorial, vocational, ideological, or even digital—such that an ethno may arise wherever humans gather around common purpose, meaning, and collective interest, including in non-ethnic spaces like online communities, where ethnopublics form without shared ancestry but through shared goals.

Social Media ethnopublic identity provides:

• Cultural grounding.
• Moral reference.
• Emotional familiarity.
• Collective memory.
• Ideological coherence.

Without ethnopublic identity, digital space becomes alienating and unstable. With it, diversity becomes sustainable rather than chaotic.

8. Comparative Table: Liberal / Postmodern Identity Versus Ethnopublic Identity Models

DIMENSION	LIBERAL / POSTMODERN IDENTITY MODEL	ETHNOPUBLIC IDENTITY MODEL
Nature of Identity	Fluid, constructed, self-defined	Inherited, structured, collective
Primary Unit	Individual	Ethnic peoplehood
Role of Ethnicity	Optional, symbolic, often suppressed	Foundational, institutionalised
View of Culture	Mutable expression	Transmitted inheritance
Kinship & Lineage	Private or irrelevant	Central to social order
Digital Interaction	Produces hybrid/post-identity	Amplifies ethnopublic identity
Economic Interaction	Individual mobility	Inter-ethnic collaboration
Governance Fit	Republican nationalism	Ethnopublican nationalism
Governing Stability	Low in diverse societies	High through recognition
Moral Accountability	Individualised	Collective-individualist
Approach to Diversity	Homogenise under abstraction	Integrate through structure
Historical Durability	Recent, context-specific	Beginning of time, universal
Outcome	Fragmentation or elite rule	Cohesion with pluralism

Conclusion: The Internet Did Not Kill Ethnicity—It Exposed the Lie of Its Suppression

Web-internetisation did not reshape identity. It revealed what identity always was. Ethnicity remains fixed, inherited, and culturally transmitted. What has changed is who gets to express it, how far it travels, and how freely it interacts.

The republican State attempted to suppress ethnicity in the name of unity. Digital civilisation has demonstrated that unity does not require sameness. It requires recognised difference organised through shared systems.

Ethnopublic nationalism is not a retreat into the past. It is the only framework capable of aligning ancient identity structures with modern technological reality. The future does not belong to abstract States. It belongs to people who know who they are—and now finally have the means to govern themselves accordingly.

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