The Prism of the Crowd: Hatsune Miku, Crowdsourced Identity, and the Limits of Self-Authorship

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In the spring of 2024, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival featuring hundreds of musical artists from a wide range of genres in California, witnessed a performance that defied the traditional logic of celebrity. Amidst a lineup of flesh-and-blood musicians, the stage was taken by a sixteen-year-old girl with neon-teal hair tied in floor-length twin-tails. She moved with a precision impossible for human physiology, her voice ringing out with a pitch-perfect, synthetic timbre. This was Hatsune Miku. She has opened for Lady Gaga, starred in thousands of songs, and commands a global fanbase that treats her with the reverence usually reserved for living pop icons. Yet Hatsune Miku is nothing—biologically speaking. She is a Vocaloid, voice synthesizer software designed by the Japanese company Crypton Future Media, and her voice is produced by typing lyrics and producing sound waves on a computer interface, and her body is projected onto a three-dimensional glass screen.

This phenomenon presents a destabilizing moment for our traditional understanding of identity. To grasp the magnitude of this disruption, we must look to the work of the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. In his text, The Lies that Bind, Appiah outlines a liberal humanist model of how we construct ourselves. For Appiah, identity is a project of self-authorship. Society provides us with "labels"—categories like race, gender, nationality, or religion (Appiah 8). These labels, in turn, come with what Appiah calls "norms of identification: rules about how you should behave, given your identity" (Appiah 10). The ethical task of the individual is to negotiate these norms: we accept some, resist others, and reinterpret the rest to craft a coherent life-plan. In this framework, the "person" is the indispensable center of gravity. There must be a conscious, psychological subject who navigates the social world and owns the narrative of their life.

Hatsune Miku shatters this status quo. She possesses all the external markers of an identity: a name, a gender, an age, a visual image, and a public history. She performs a life-plan of pop stardom. Yet, at the center of this identity, there is no Appian subject. There is no "she" to negotiate the scripts. There is no psychological interiority to accept or resist the labels society places upon her. If the Appian model presumes that a person owns their story, Miku is a story without an owner. This creates a scholarly problem regarding definition: What kind of identity do we encounter when a coherent, globally recognized persona is continuously produced and performed without a central, authenticating self?

My claim is that Hatsune Miku does not invalidate Appiah’s ethics, but rather reveals the historical and ontological boundaries of his human-centric model. Miku necessitates the recognition of a new category I call Crowdsourced Identity. This is a form of identity that is not authored by a single self, but is instead assembled by a network of distributed creators using a database of traits. To prove this, I will place Appiah’s ethics into a sustained conversation with the economic theories of Yochai Benkler, the postmodern sociology of Hiroki Azuma, the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the Actor-Network-Theory of Bruno Latour.

To understand the disruption Miku causes, we must first unpack the status quo of identity as presented by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah’s work is rooted in the tradition of liberal individualism. For Appiah, the "self" is not a static object found in nature; it is an achievement constructed through a dialectic between internal desires and the external social world (Appiah 18). The core mechanism of this construction is the engagement with social expectations. As he explains, collective identities provide narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans (Appiah 9). For example, if one identifies as a "musician," society offers a set of expectations: one practices an instrument, performs for audiences, perhaps adopts a certain bohemian style of dress. The individual’s agency lies in how they engage with these "norms of identification," following or subverting them (Appiah 10). Crucially, for Appiah, this negotiation requires a negotiator. It requires a consciousness capable of irony, resistance, and choice. The authenticity of a life depends on the fact that someone is steering the ship.

When we look at Hatsune Miku, we see the scripts without the negotiator. Miku performs the script of the "Idol." She waves to the crowd; she sings about love and loss. But Miku herself has never chosen to do these things. She is, as the Crypton Future Media product page describes her, a "virtual singer... a vocal android = VOCALOID" (Crypton Future Media). This absence forces us to look for the author elsewhere. A traditional reading might suggest that the "author" is simply the software developer, Crypton. But Crypton did not write Miku’s most famous songs or animate her videos. They merely provided the tool. The content is created by thousands of independent users.

Here, we bring in Yochai Benkler to explain the mechanics of this creation. In The Wealth of Networks, Benkler describes a mode of production he calls "commons-based peer production" (Benkler 197). In the industrial model, a central authority manages resources. In peer production, "centralized management" is replaced by "radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary" individual action (Benkler 115). Benkler argues that for peer production to work, the task must be broken down into small pieces. He calls this "modularity" and "granularity" (Benkler 186-187). Modularity means the project can be separated into independent components; granularity refers to the size of those components.

Miku is the ultimate modular identity. One fan writes a song; another illustrates a costume; a third creates a dance routine. These modules are "fine-grained"—an individual can contribute a single drawing without funding a concert tour (Benkler 188). When we read Appiah through Benkler, we see a transformation of the ethical subject. For Appiah, the life-plan is a unified arc managed by one person. Benkler shows us how a life-plan can be assembled from thousands of tiny, disconnected contributions. Miku’s autobiography is not written by a self; it is an emergent property of the network. She is a vessel into which thousands of users pour their own scripts. The negotiator Appiah seeks is not missing; it has exploded into a legion of micro-negotiators.

If Miku is constructed by thousands of people, how does she remain coherent? Why doesn't she dissolve into chaos? To answer this, we turn to the Japanese cultural critic Hiroki Azuma. In his book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Azuma proposes that we have moved from an era of "narrative" to an era of "database" (Azuma 31). In the modern era, people consumed "grand narratives"—unifying stories or ideologies that gave meaning to the world (Azuma 28). However, in our current postmodern era, these grand narratives have collapsed. We no longer look for one single, unifying truth. Instead, we consume "databases."

Azuma explains that contemporary characters are not organic wholes, but collections of what he calls "moe-elements" (Azuma 42). Moe is a Japanese term for a strong affection or attraction to fictional characters. Moe-elements are the specific building blocks that trigger this affection: things like cat ears, maid costumes, or in Miku's case, teal twin-tails and the digital timbre of her voice. Azuma writes, "The ‘characters’ circulating in these stores are not unique designs created by the individual talent of the author but an output generated from preregistered elements" (Azuma 42).

When we apply this to Miku, we see that she is the quintessential database entity. She was not born; she was designed as a collection of visual and auditory elements. She is defined by specific moe-elements: the color teal, the detached sleeves, the thigh-high boots. These are entries in a database. When a fan creates a new song or video for Miku, they "read up" these elements from the database and recombine them (Azuma 31). As long as the creation includes the teal twin-tails and the digital voice, it is recognizable as Miku.

This creates a friction with Appiah’s model. Appiah assumes a psychological self that possesses a history and continuity. But Azuma argues that for the database animal, "there is no longer any connection between small narratives and grand nonnarrative" (Azuma 95). Miku does not have a single narrative arc. In one song she is a bratty princess; in another, she is a tragic software program. An Appian subject cannot be both simultaneously without suffering a psychological breakdown. But Miku is not an organism; she is a database. Crowdsourced Identity is database-driven rather than narrative-driven. It relies on a stability of characteristics rather than on narrative continuity.

We have established that Miku is a modular creation (Benkler) drawn from a database of traits (Azuma). But what is the nature of the "body" that holds these traits? To understand the ontology of Miku, we turn to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, they introduce the "Body without Organs" (BwO). We typically think of a body as an "organism"—a structured system where the heart does one thing, the brain another, all working toward a unified goal. The "organism" is a body that has been disciplined and given a fixed identity.

The BwO, conversely, is "what remains when you take everything away" (Deleuze and Guattari 2). Imagine a blank canvas or a surface of pure potential. It is an unformed, intense surface upon which forces flow freely. They write: "The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism" (Deleuze and Guattari 7).

Hatsune Miku is a digital Body without Organs. She literally has no organs, but more importantly, she lacks the organization of a fixed identity. She is a pure surface. Deleuze and Guattari describe the BwO as a surface where "intensities" flow. In Miku's case, these intensities are the desires, creativity, and projections of her fanbase. Because she is empty, she can be filled with anything.

Consider the "Ievan Polkka" phenomenon mentioned in the Reddit thread (tamacheez). In 2007, a user uploaded a video of a deformed Miku waving a spring onion (a leek). It went viral, and the leek became an intrinsic part of Miku’s identity. If Miku were an Appian subject, she might have resisted being associated with vegetables to maintain her dignity. But Miku, as a BwO, offers no resistance. She is "nonstratified, unformed, intense matter" (Deleuze and Guattari 3). She accepts the leek, the princess costume, and the tragedy equally. This helps us understand why Miku is so powerful as a canvas for identity. Appiah argues that meaningful human life involves a process of actively engaging with and shaping the social scripts associated with one's identities. But Miku represents a liberation from the burden of authenticity. She is a channel. Miku is the zero-point of identity—a void that craves content.

So far, we have looked at Miku as a collection of modules and a database entry. However, Miku is also a product of technology and law. To understand how this identity is sustained, we bring in Bruno Latour and his Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). In Reassembling the Social, Latour argues that the "social" is a constant movement of associations between "actants." Crucially, actants can be human or non-human. A door-closer or a computer program are actants because they modify behavior. (Latour 22)

Latour distinguishes between "intermediaries" and "mediators." An intermediary transports meaning without changing it. A mediator, however, "transform[s], translate[s], distort[s], and modif[ies] the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry" (Latour 62). Hatsune Miku is a network of mediators. The most important non-human mediator is the Vocaloid software itself. When a producer inputs lyrics, the software imposes a specific timbre and "glitch" specific to the Miku voicebank. The software mediates the producer's intent, forcing collaboration with the machine.

Furthermore, the network includes legal mediators. Crypton Future Media clarifies that the Creative Commons license applies only to the original character illustrations and not to derivative works like music or videos created by fans, which are protected by their own creators' copyrights (Crypton Future Media). This legal document is an actant. It actively encouraged the explosion of fan art by removing the fear of copyright strikes. If Miku were owned by a restrictive legal actant like Disney, the network would look completely different—smaller and more controlled. Latour helps us correct a potential misunderstanding of Crowdsourced Identity. It is not just a "cloud" of people thinking about Miku. It is a material network involving servers, screens, copyright laws, and code.

This brings us back to the Reddit thread. One user, im-uncreative1, states they discovered Miku through "Project diva f 2nd"; another user, through "Just Dance lol" (tamacheez). These games are mediators. The identity of Miku is not located in any single one of these nodes; it is the network itself. As Latour puts it, "the social is not a place... but a movement of re-association" (Latour 22). Miku’s identity exists only in the movement between the software, the producer, the video platform, and the fan.

To see how these theories collide in practice, let us examine Miku’s appearance at the 2024 Coachella festival. The status quo of a pop concert, the "Appian" expectation, is that the artist on stage is the author of the performance. When Lana Del Rey performs, we assume she selected the songs and is expressing her internal self.

Miku’s Coachella setlist, however, is a ledger of distributed authorship (Setlist.fm). The setlist includes songs by producers like ryo, wowaka, and kz. These are real human beings. They are the Appian subjects here—they are the ones with life-plans and creative visions. But they are using Miku as the interface for their agency. In an interview regarding the tour, Crypton representative Riki Tsuji explicitly stated, "Miku, first and foremost, is a piece of software... Miku is made by the fans for the fans" (King). This is a radical admission. The star is a tool. The identity is a mirror.

Benkler’s theory explains the production: these songs were created through peer production and vetted by the community. Azuma’s theory explains the reception: The audience recognizes Miku not as a human telling her story, but as a database of moe-elements performing a database of songs. Deleuze and Guattari explain the affect: The hologram is a Body without Organs, a glowing surface that allows the crowd to project their collective joy. Latour explains the network: The concert is only possible because of the alignment of diverse actants—the projection technology, the backing band, the software, and the licensing agreements.

What, then, does Hatsune Miku teach us about Appiah’s ethics? Appiah’s model of identity relies on the liberal ideal of autonomy: the individual negotiating with society to craft a self (Appiah 18). Miku demonstrates that in the digital age, we can generate identities that possess immense social power and emotional weight without that central autonomous core.

I proposed the term Crowdsourced Identity to describe this phenomenon. Based on our theorists, we can define this category as Modular and Granular (Benkler), constructed from independent contributions; Database-Driven (Azuma), based on shared traits rather than biography; a Body without Organs (Deleuze and Guattari), a surface for projecting intensity; and Networked (Latour), sustained by software and law rather than biology.

Does this invalidate Appiah? No. In fact, it makes his ethics more necessary, but relocates them. Miku herself has no ethical responsibilities because she does not live. The ethical burden migrates to the network. The producers become the moral agents. They are the ones who must negotiate the scripts. They use Miku to express their identities or challenge norms. Miku is not the author; she is the prism through which the crowd authors itself. This collective authorship is the reason why Hatsune Miku is attractive and famous. Miku's artificiality is not a barrier to connection but its precondition. Because she is an empty vessel, the emotions, struggles, and triumphs poured into her songs by countless creators are universally human. An audience does not connect with a fictional character. It connects with the vast, creative community she represents.

However, Miku serves as a premonition. We are increasingly living in a world of Crowdsourced Identities. We see it in "VTubers," where a human actor animates an anime avatar, and VTubers blurs the line between the actor's self and the character's database. We also see it in AI influencers like Lil Miquela. We even see it in ourselves, as we curate our online personas, allowing the "likes" of the crowd to shape the narrative of who we are. In the future, identity is no longer just a solitary memoir written by a single soul. It is a wiki, a song sung by a thousand voices, a prism that refracts the light of the crowd.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity—Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018.

Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono, U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale UP, 2006.

Crypton Future Media. “VOCALOID2 初音ミク（HATSUNE MIKU）.” Crypton, ec.crypton.co.jp/pages/prod/virtualsinger/cv01. Accessed 31 Oct. 2025.
Crypton Future Media, INC. "For Creators." https://piapro.net/intl/en_for_creators.html

Deleuze Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987.

King, Matt. “Software Superstar: Hatsune Miku’s Coachella Set Will Celebrate Japanese Culture—and Empower Aspiring Musicians Worldwide.” Coachella Valley Independent, 4 Apr. 2024, www.cvindependent.com/2024/04/04/software-superstar-hatsune-mikus-coachella-set-will-celebrate-japanese-culture-and-empower-aspiring-musicians-worldwide/.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor‑Network‑Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.

Setlist.fm. “Hatsune Miku Concert Setlist at Coachella Festival 2024 on April 19, 2024.” setlist.fm, www.setlist.fm/setlist/hatsune-miku/2024/empire-polo-club-indio-ca-1bab3964.html. Accessed 31 Oct. 2025.

tamacheez. “How did you first discover Hatsune miku? I’ll go first.” Reddit, 2023, https://www.reddit.com/r/hatsune/comments/16g2klu/how_did_you_first_discover_hatsune_miku_ill_go/.