A dear friend of mine has found himself today in a situation that is authentically “Pirandellian” (as in Luigi Pirandello, 1934 Literature Nobel Laureate).
A cyber-attack has caused him to lose his main social media account, the one through which he used to speak to the world. That account was tied to an alias, and the social platform now refuses to recognise his ownership of the profile, because there is no official way to prove that such a digital identity truly corresponds to a real person.
After all, there is no identity card for aliases.
And yet, in that account my friend recognised himself. And others recognised him. Through that profile he communicated, reflected, and exposed himself. He was not hiding: his real name was well known to those who interacted with him. But that account, that form, that mask, felt like his own.
Now that mask has fallen. And he is suffering.
My friend is a gentle, thoughtful, wise person, and I cannot help but read all of this through the lens of Pirandello: he has lost his mask and, with it, a part of his usual connection to the world.
Pirandello taught us that we wear different masks depending on the situations and the relationships in which we are immersed.
We often do so without realising it, driven by the expectations of others, by conventions, by roles that settle upon us like garments already tailored.
We constantly adapt our behaviour. We believe ourselves to be a single, coherent person, yet we are perceived in countless different ways.
Each individual interprets us through their own story, their own sensibility, their own filters.
And each of these images contains a fragment of truth.
Yet none of them is more “real” than the others.
Today my friend suddenly finds himself without the mask he felt was his own. And in the new one he does not feel at ease. For this reason, he has the sensation of having become, all at once, “one, no one and one hundred thousand” (this is the title of one of the main novels of Pirandello).
With this awareness come solitude and that deep unease that is born from feeling fundamentally misunderstood. And, in this case, even exposed, wounded, attacked on the digital plane as well.
In the novel “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand”, Pirandello tells the tragedy of a man who desperately attempts to reconstruct a coherent identity in a world that, by its very nature, shatters it.
Vitangelo Moscarda discovers, almost by chance, that the image others have of him does not at all coincide with the one he has of himself.
From that moment begins a series of attempts, experiments, and shocks delivered to reality, in an effort to save at least a stable core of his own identity.
The story of Vitangelo Moscarda is set in a pre-digital age, yet today that fragmentation has multiplied.
Social networks make public and simultaneous different, often incompatible, parts of the same person.
Identity becomes a flow, an unstable projection, continuously exposed to the gaze and the judgement of others. Defending a coherent image of oneself becomes increasingly difficult.
My friend’s crisis is not merely technical. It is not only the loss of an account. It is the loss of a form through which he had recognised himself and been recognised by others. It is an identity fracture. It is, in the deepest sense, a Pirandellian story transplanted into the present day.
And perhaps it is also a reminder for all of us: masks are fragile, and the face, the authentic one, lives elsewhere.
It lies in the substance of relationships, not in their containers. It lies in the voice, not in the profile. It lies in being, not in projection.