PhronesisContemporary digital platforms have engendered a distinctive behavioral regime we term chronic digital-curation: the compulsive, near-continuous management of one's online presentation as a primary mode of identity construction. Drawing on dynamical systems theory, identity psychology, and media studies, this paper formalizes chronic digital-curation as a wrong attractor in the state space of self-representation—a locally stable basin that captures the agent away from calibrated self-representation, the ground state we denote S^0.
We introduce the Personal-Brand Architecture (PBA) as the structural mechanism sustaining this attractor, characterized by feedback loops of social validation, metric surveillance, and performative consistency. We identify the Authentic-Expression Foreclosure Basin (AEFB) as the region of state space from which spontaneous, uncurated expression becomes dynamically inaccessible without deliberate perturbation.
Nine propositions (P1–P9) develop the formal argument: from the conditions under which the wrong attractor forms, through the mechanisms of foreclosure, to the conditions and trajectory of return to S^0. We close by characterizing calibrated self-representation as a recoverable attractor distinguished from both chronic curation and naive expressionism, and by sketching practical implications for individuals navigating digital identity environments.