Surveillance data creates machine-made doubles distinct from our curated self-images

Evidence

In my Corporate Self course, we explore this surveillance architecture as the shadowy back end of personal branding and identity performance culture. The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything—liking, loathing, sharing—and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies are able to hoover up about us. And with that data, they create our real digital doppelgangers—not the aspirational avatars many of us consciously create with those carefully curated and filtered photos and those posts with the perfectly calibrated tone, but the doubles that countless machines create with the data trails we leave behind every time we click, or view, or fail to disable location tracking, or ask a “smart” device for anything at all. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 272

Categorization

• DEFINE: Klein distinguishes the aspirational avatar (the curated online self) from the machine-built double assembled from raw data trails — a core distinction underlying her whole doppelganger device.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s central doubling device and to earlier discussion of personal branding and Corporate Self — the double is not just an enemy it’s made of our own data exhaust. — connects to: Surveillance itself is ancient; data appropriation of life is the novelty — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 151