"... I've been doing some reading, and some reading between the lines based on my previous models of reality. As best as I can tell, while I was dead, technology advanced to where it solved a social problem that wasn't even thought of in terms of a 'solvable problem' before I died. Simplifying a whole lot, then a lot of deep patterns of North American culture are the long-lasting results of a founder effect. Specifically, four particular waves of immigration from England - two of them, the Pilgrims and Quakers, influenced the American 'north', including English Canada, while the other two, the Cavaliers and Borderers, merged into the American 'south'. It's the Cavaliers in particular I'm thinking of - in the English Civil War, they fought on the monarchy's side, and lost, and came to America with all sorts of notions about the proper order of the universe and the chain of being, and how some people are inherently superior to others. They settled around Virginia - and there's a reason that the fictional John Carter of Mars, one of the classic heroes, always claimed to be a Virginian rather than a mere American. Anyway, this led, in the South, to a particular sort of awareness about which groups you were better than, which, when given the economic incentives of the Black Belt of cotton-producing soil, led to chattel slavery being seen as the obvious way to go about things. And just because they over-reached and lost the American Civil War didn't mean that internalized set of mental patterns, of knowing who's socially below you, went away. Jim Crow laws were implemented, and later on, when those were gotten rid of, then in many cases 'immigrants' were seen as the new low rung on the ladder.

"Welp, while I was dead, various clever groups gradually put together robots that were lifelike enough to trigger various deep neural structures that recognized them as being 'people', while also not having AI anywhere near capable enough to count as full-fledged persons - and so this new class of entities was able to fill the social role of people-like things that any real human could see was of a lower status, removing much of the instinctive desire to find some other recognizable out-group to force into that slot. And with that, then all sorts of knock-on positive effects seem to have resulted - I'm guessing that now that the north's moralistic Puritan scolding, applying Quaker-based rules of equality against the Cavalier-based instincts that didn't seem like instincts at all but were just the way the world was, no longer raised the Borderlanders' clannish defensiveness against outsiders meddling in their affairs to quite the same degree.

"Of course, that's all guesswork about astonishingly large and near-invisibly subtle social patterns. I can't say that, as someone with the body of a robot, I've experienced any particular amount of being slotted into low-status positions, beyond what I'd expect from not being a member of any particular social cliques and having to build my reputation from scratch. It's possible that the invisible social infrastructure is clever enough to route people who would be particularly disagreeable to me and myself away from each other. Or maybe my particular chassis is inhuman enough that it doesn't register as a 'person' in the first place, to the primate-hierarchy neural structures I mentioned.

"I will admit that this model explains a few things about what I thought of as my culture that I didn't previously understand, from, say, how I could find so little interest in sporting events that other people found so much entertainment and fulfillment in, to what actually led to Canadian culture developing in the directions it did.

"I'm still trying to figure out which, if any, of the citizenships I'm currently eligible for to register my acceptance of. The top three contenders are the city I was originally born in, now apparently part of the nearly-ignored, low-population-density region that covers a lot of what I think of as 'Canada'; there's the city I spent nearly all of my life in, now part of the 'Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Regional Water Authority', though it seems nobody bothers calling it much of anything besides 'Great Lakes' these days, much to the annoyance of the mostly-French-speaking St. Lawrence portion; and BosWash, the megacity I was resurrected in. To be honest, until such time as I have even a vague idea of what the various sides on the various political issues being debated are, and am therefore sufficiently competent to start being an informed voter, then I don't see much difference - they're all Future-istic liberal democracies with reasonably good human rights charters. In fact, in the short-term, about the only difference in my life would be which flag I slap onto any flag-shaped personal group-membership advertising I do.

"Not that I've done much of that, even before I died. I knew I was 'supposed' to root for the sportsball teams of the nearest large city, but I only knew a few of the team names, let alone ever watched a game of anything. My preferred hat: white. Sure, sometimes I wore a t-shirt with a picture of a mash-up between two entertainment programs, like Star Wars drawn in the style of Calvin and Hobbes, but that was at least in part because they were just plain decent t-shirts, material- and production-wise. Hm, was there /anything/ I was willing to wear, specifically that indicated I was part of some group? ... Actually, now that I think about it - there was a series of lapel pins of various colours, of the logo of an eye-in-the-pyramid, supposedly indicating membership in one branch or another of the Illuminati, but actually indicated the fandom of a particular gaming publisher. By the time I died, I was still willing to put one of those on the breast pocket of a button-up collared shirt. Not that I went anywhere anyone would recognize it - and I suppose 'giving off signals that nobody else will understand' sums up a reasonably large part of my identity and life. Lives, maybe.

"And now I have a few new choices to try to make: which clothes, if any, to wear. Even before I died, I was practically a hermit. And now that some people seem to acting like bonobos, even though I have even less relevant anatomy than a Ken doll, I've occasionally been mistaken for some kind of walking vibrator and have had to dodge being grabbed by people in the middle of their personal activities. Since /people/ wear clothes, I should start wearing /something/ to avoid being mistaken for a self-propelled appliance. One approach could be to take advantage of offers by some of the second-economy groups I've started joining, and let them subsidize my wardrobe in exchange for advertising them... which is pretty much the opposite of how I /want/ to present myself. Anything that represents some other group I may or may not entirely agree with, that's larger than a lapel pin or cufflinks, isn't what I want. As a further complication, what I'd consider to be 'weekend casual' is generally perceived to be on the level I'd associate with 'business formal'. Which, yes, means that serious people gathering together to discuss serious business often do so in shorts and t-shirts.

"Hm... maybe instead of external group-identity, I should start looking into /personal/ branding. I invented a logo or two for myself before I died, and with proof to whatever modern logo-designers may have copied it since then that I came up with it first, and with The Future's custom 3D printing, I could probably get modern outfits branded with it, with whatever level of in-your-face-ness I like. Might be worth my while to see if there's anything like a personal branding consultant I can hire... what am I saying, this is The Future, of course there is, I just have to find one in my price range."