Contaminazioni tecnologiche dell'identità. Complicità digitale e soggettività virtuale in due esempi di cyberfiction

American literature in the 2000s, generally defined as cyber-fiction, has grappled with the extreme challenges of the Web. Among the concerns that characterize the relationship human vs machine is the notion of virtual identity, or rather, the creation of artificial versions of the Self re-located and re-elaborated through digital multiplicity. In this sense, the three-dimensional environment of Internet platforms inevitably creates an identity wavering between the binary oppositions of physical vs virtual and real vs artificial. The aim of this contribution is to analyze the literary and technological contaminations of personal identity performed through human interaction with the machine, which in turn leads to a need to develop an artificial form of subjectivity. These hybridizations of identity will be analyzed in two examples of cyber-fiction, Dave Egger’s dystopian classic The Circle (2013) and Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Bleeding Edge (2013). Both texts illustrate current contaminations of identity, re-defined through its contact with the digital domain and represented by the blurred boundary between realism and artifact. As both novels show, through a performance of selfhood, virtual identity becomes the literary trope that represents the point of contact between technology and the human in the digital age. Contaminations of the Self in contemporary dystopian fiction, less realistic and essentially rooted in artificial domains through the “platformativity” of social media represent the liquidity of identity deprived of its meaning through the pervasiveness of technology.