There’s definitely a ‘divide and conquer’ aspect to it imho — you’ll notice that ‘working class’ never makes it into the list of liberal ‘identities’, apart from as shorthand for ‘low-information reactionary’ — but you have to be careful, because people often use ‘class first’ politics as a fig leaf for actual reactionary positions.

It’s something I’ve wrestled with a lot over the years, and what I’ve settled on is:

• Class must come first. The prime ‘identity’ must be ‘worker’
• But this should cash out as e.g. “I believe that workers have the right to express their gender identity however they damned well please.”
• And the concept of work needs to be expanded beyond that which is rewarded under capitalism: caring for children is work, living with disability is work etc

i mean, we all have identities related to our experiences: with production, with consumption, and with interacting with other humans. i think there are two primary ways that liberalism mangles the concept of identity:

• liberalism encourages identities to be primarily based on consumption at the expense of production. think someone whose entire identity is disney, but their job is office work. the latter is not glamorized, and is in fact encouraged by liberalism to be seen as some sort of failure, in contrast to the apparent success of the bourgeoisie under capitalism. consumption is often used an escape from the bulk of people’s lives, they productive work. this is one way that class consciousness is discouraged

• in the instances where liberalism embraces identity, it does so at the expense of the material conditions that led to the identity in the first place. in fact, it sometimes proposes that identity is not only dominant over material conditions, but is self-reinforcing, pretending that there is not a fundamental relationship between the two. think how right-wing liberals claim that being trans is “just in your head,” but when left liberals are asked to define gender the word “patriarchy” will never even occur to them. this is another way that class consciousness is discouraged

in each dialectic, productive identities are primary over consumptive ones, and material conditions are primary over the identities that they foster. neglect of this fact results in deep, deep alienation.

under the global capitalist system that we live in, those categorizations are most definitely influenced by liberalism.

No, these things predate Capitalism, but Capitalism creates a link between these “hobbies” and capital. So these activies are not something you enjoy but rather commodities that define you based on your purchase power. Add to this the cult like mentality of corporations and branding and you get a perfect combo for making something we could like in a healthy way be something totally toxic.

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.

https://redsails.org/on-identitarianism-a-defense-of-a-strawman/

Labels are, imo, mostly a shorthand that help identify people with common interests, experiences, goals, etc. I don’t think most people solely identify with a label so much as use them as a means to find people who they’re more likely to find interesting (or not).

Identifying as a g*mer certainly lacks nuance - there’s many genres of games and different people are going to be interested in different ones. People who primarily play sports games or board games probably aren’t as likely to choose that label as people who play shooters, sure, so there’s some implicit nuance about the types of games someone plays when they label themselves that way, but it still provides a jumping off point for someone to determine a level of overlap exists with someone else.

I think that people who identify as one thing are actually pretty rare - people don’t really define their entire selves from a single label, they collect the ones that somewhat fit well enough to make sense to most other people, while signaling to the people who share a given one that there are common interests that could be fun to delve into further together and figure out to what extent they truly are or aren’t shared interests.

I do think labels can be harmful and thought-terminating, but I don’t think they’re inherently so. They can be used to other or marginalize a group of people, yes, but IMO that’s not behavior that’s driven by the people who find that label resonates with them.

Immature black-and-white thinking is separate from the self-identification you’re talking about. I don’t think a statement like “I’m a gamer” is liberal. It’s natural for humans to try to understand themselves and their purpose and identify this way. I think any ruling class does use this natural characteristic for its own ends though.

I think it depends on what the label is and how it gets used. My personal experience with labels often hasn’t felt great. I will proudly call myself a nerd insofar as I’m saying “yeah, I ‘act nerdy’, so what? I’m proud of those characteristics in myself.” But I won’t go around calling myself a “gamer”, not only because of stigma attached to it but because it seems to be a label largely developed out of taking pride in being a consumerist fan of video games who craves all the latest titles, no matter how expensive, and elevates video games to a place way beyond where they are deserving of value.

I also have just long been disengaged from the mainstream. Not in the beard-wearing hipster meaning of trying hard to avoid the mainstream so I can say I avoid it, but in the older meaning of hipster, of it being more incidental. I guess partly because of upbringing, partly because of not really having money or the right kind of friends that would drag me along/into mainstream stuff a whole lot. So in that way, labels can be weird for me because I don’t feel like there’s a lot I belong to as category in the ways that other people do. This is probably not uncommon for people who are neurodivergent though, this sense of “not quite fitting” with the mold, and I’m 99% sure I’m ADHD (that or it must be something that is virtually identical to it).

But then, I don’t go around proudly proclaiming “I have ADHD.” It’s more just something I use to explain when it feels necessary. I guess to me labels are something to be used for a specific purpose when they are needed. There have been times I got more into self-labeling as a sense of pride, such as in years I was more into MBTI and related theory, but the end result of that was I used a label of introvert to explain away anxiety and avoidance to myself as “just me.” So sometimes a label, even when largely only used on yourself by yourself, can still be damaging.

I will end with a quote from a character in Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams:

“In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”

I definitely believe labels can be and are misused some of the time, but they can also serve a purpose as a way to talk about a thing that is otherwise vague and difficult to communicate about. But as with any worldview that sees things as static rather than in motion, labels can cause us to stagnate in circumstances where change is needed. On the other hand, labels can deceive us into embracing change that is for the worse, believing that we are abandoning an important part of identity if we don’t. So working out material conditions beyond abstract labels is important. The reason two people can think communism sounds good in the abstract with only one supporting AES states is because the AES state supporter has information on the material successes of those states and the other is operating on false information, believing in narratives of destitution and reproduction of oppression.