Curating the Self: Augmented Capitalism & the Ghost in Machine Intelligence.

We curate our lives for platforms. Platforms, in turn, curate us.

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Every post, search and photograph becomes data. From that data, systems build a model of who we are: a profile they retain, classify and act on, deciding what we see, what we are offered and how we are treated.

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We are no longer just consumers
We are content
We are data
We are the model they keep

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This research calls it augmented capitalism. Debord’s spectacle has mutated: we are no longer only performer, commodity and audience, but people a system can make decisions about.

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This PhD turns the platforms’ own methods back on the data they return.

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Persona in Machina, a twenty-minute essay film, is built from one person’s archive: sixteen years of Google searches, a Facebook account opened in 2007 and some fourteen thousand photographs. Edited with a set of open-source tools, it asks a simple question:

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Can a platform know a person from their data?

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The data can reconstruct routines, relationships and interests. It cannot hold grief, illness, or the reasons behind a gap in the record.

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This is the ghost in machine intelligence: the self the system generates, present and acting, but never seen.