It’s the End of Identity As We Know It (And I Feel Fine…?)
Why media consumption may become more predictive than race, gender, or party — and what to do about it
A few weeks ago, I ran into a reader of this Substack at a conference. We started talking about audience behavior and what feels newly unpredictable about this moment. When I asked what she thought I should write about next, she didn’t hesitate: “How audiences are being shaped more by affinity than by demographics, right?”
It stuck with me—not just because it was a sharp observation, but because it names something I’ve been grappling with for the last few years.
I’ve spent my career in movements rooted in identity. I still believe it matters. But I’ve also watched how the categories we once relied on—race, gender, class, political affiliation—no longer tell us enough about what people believe, how they behave, or what moves them.
Because identity hasn’t disappeared. But it has changed. And much of that change is being driven by what people consume.
A New Signal
We’re still shaped by the families, histories, and communities we come from. But how we understand those things—what they mean to us and how we express them—has become deeply influenced by the media we absorb.
The autoplay podcast. The YouTube rabbit hole. The TikTok loop. These aren’t just side distractions or guilty pleasures. They are immersive environments. And increasingly, they’re where identity is being made.
If you were designing a voter persuasion campaign targeting a single individual, which of these two audience descriptions would give you more to work with?
A: The voter is a 45-year-old Black woman, Democrat, living in Texas
B: The voter listened to 16 hours of Candace Owens last month
One gives you a demographic profile.
The other gives you insight into their worldview.
This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s a reflection of how we still build strategy. We continue to treat demographic identity as predictive, while media consumption—arguably the stronger signal—remains underused or misunderstood.
When my team published Beyond Demography in 2020, it was our first attempt to name this shift. At the time, the argument—that media behavior was becoming more predictive than traditional identity markers—felt like a provocation. Now it feels foundational.
The Problem With Our Tools
This shift hasn’t been easy to fully embrace. I helped build one of the largest Black-led organizations in the country, and I’ve spent years designing work rooted in racial and cultural identity. That legacy still informs everything I do.
But part of that legacy is knowing when the terrain has changed.
What it means to be Black, Southern, queer, or working-class isn’t eroding. It’s multiplying. Fragmenting. Speeding up. And that complexity is interacting with digital culture in ways our strategies haven’t caught up to.
A few years ago, my team developed a practice we call identity-powered design. It focuses on how people see themselves inside a story, not just how they show up on a voter file or grant report. It was our response to what I often call “lazy multiculturalism”—checking the box on race or representation, without understanding what really drives belief and behavior.
But even identity-powered design had to evolve.
Because increasingly, identity is expressed through culture. And culture, now, is delivered through algorithmic media. What we consume is shaping not just what we know, but who we become.
In the book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier warned us that the digital systems we rely on would gradually reduce people into fixed categories for the sake of efficiency. He called it “lock-in”—the idea that early software decisions become ideology. And he was right.
We see that same lock-in in our data models. In our messaging segmentation. In how we define “Black voters,” “Gen Z men,” or “persuadables.” Even our most sophisticated models are only as good as the questions they ask. And most are still asking questions from another era.
Lanier once wrote that “information is alienated experience.” That’s the paradox we live with now: our data is more accurate than ever, but it may be telling us less about how people actually make meaning.
What Comes Next
This isn’t about rejecting data. Behavioral analytics, machine learning, real-time modeling—these tools are essential. But they need to be paired with better frameworks.
At NewWorld, we’re working with partners to build a media intelligence engine that maps audience affinity—what people consume, where they spend time, and who they trust. We still believe identity matters. But we believe it needs to be understood in motion, not in static traits.
When we start building strategy around affinity, we will see new kinds of audiences emerge. People who don’t sit neatly in our boxes—but who are real, reachable, and shaping culture in ways that demand attention.
We’ll be sharing more of that work soon, starting with our upcoming white paper, Everything’s on Fire: A New Era of Mistrust, Influence, & the Struggle for Public Imagination based on the results on our national trust survey—a project that explores how people’s trust in industries like healthcare, finance, and media are shifting (read: tanking) and how that shapes their behavior around major life events like becoming a parent, starting a business, or buying a car.
But the real urgency is this: the right already understands what we’re only beginning to act on. That’s why they’ve built vast entertainment-forward media ecosystems—from The Daily Wire to PragerU to Rumble—that attract audiences across race, class, and geography. They lead with content that entertains and engages, tapping into interests and anxieties, and only then deliver ideology. They’ve made cultural affinity their targeting strategy—and built infrastructure to match.
Meanwhile, too many of us are still organizing around categories instead of cultures. We are building campaigns to speak to who people used to be, while they are busy shaping who people are becoming.
If we want to reach audiences that are real, not theoretical—audiences that are moving and mattering in new ways—we need to stop treating identity like a fixed attribute and start treating it like a dynamic force, shaped by culture and revealed through media.
Because the next frontier of strategy isn’t just knowing what people believe.
It’s understanding how they come to believe it—and building systems that can meet them there, again and again..
Would love to read the white paper!
Fascinating work! I’d love to read the white paper.