Humans from the CroMagnon age would probably be astonished at the appearance of modern humans walking about in public. Several tens of thousands of years of cultural advancement have resulted in a luxury of options for artificial outer skins.
We think nothing of walking down the street with today’s colorful choice of plumage: Red or yellow or chartreuse, mixing and matching materials and styles as we like. We think nothing of pulling items out the closet to choose our avatar for the day.
In on-line fantasy worlds, such as Second Life, people go much further. They walk about as giant cats or lizards, robots or ghostly wraiths, choosing an arbitrary appearance at will.
One would think that this might be a model for how fashion will advance after we are all wearing those cyber-enabled contacts or lens implants. But I am not so sure.
Second Life is, as it’s name suggests, meant to be an amusing alternative to real life, not a replacement for it. When you physically go about the world, you are always implicitly voting with your one and only body, your most truly precious and irreplaceable asset.
There is less room for fooling around not because of any limitation on technology, but because of the social and cultural implications of how you present your true self — or as true a self as one ever presents in public.
Even in that future time when we see each other as virtual versions of ourselves, there will be limits to how we will appear. These limits will not come from technology, but rather by our need to be taken seriously when it really matters.
Yet in that future reality there will be times during our day when we are really just out to have fun. In those moments, with the flip of a virtual switch, we may choose to slip into a virtual appearance that’s a little more fun.
Far enough into the future, maybe in 200-500 years, we might even walk around naked. Imagine a very liberal and hyper-sexualized society, where we control the weather and the ground is comfortable and sanitary to walk on without shoes. Implanted with perfect contraception, we could live like our ancestors and walk around and have sex with people in public. Is shame a social construct we can eradicate with technology?
The naked part sounds reasonable, but I’m skeptical about the rest of your theory.
The structure of human societies are ultimately driven by the imperatives of the human brain, which has evolved to be social in particular species-advancing ways over the large time frame of macroevolution.
So I don’t think humans are going to start having the social psychology of bonobos, as much fun as that sounds.