Tracey Follows argues that digital technologies pose a bigger existential threat than climate change or AI: corporations and governments use biometric data and neurotechnology to monitor and manipulate identity itself. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan's media theories, she contends that authenticity is dead and the self has become multiple, data-driven versions controlled by platform-states.
Chapters
What are the existential issues of our time? Are they climate change, nuclear disaster and obliteration, or artificial intelligence? Well, they're all continuously in the news today, but they mask the most important existential issue of our time, and that is identity. It's the biggest, the most dangerous, the most adventurous, and most exciting issue Identity is the defining issue of this generation, but we're all missing it. As our personal identity is being eroded by technologies, digital technologies primarily, we think we're being really clever, really smart, using these technologies to craft and create and explore our own personal identities, but we haven't really realised that we're We're not in control. In fact, corporations and governments are in control. We've got nation-states acting like technology platforms and technology platforms acting like nation-states, and between them, they're bringing in things like neurotech to measure and monitor our brain data and its performance, possibly to alter and modify our memories. They're polarising us through propaganda. They're even inviting us to monetise the self, ourselves, and even hand over ownership of our identity through biometrics: our eyes, our fingertips, our face, our gestures. When are we going to notice this? When it's too late? Well, do not worry, because myself, Tracey Follows, and my colleague Andrew McLuhan We are here to help explain all this and help us resolve it. Building on the arguments of this book, In the Future of You, and the very famous foundational theories by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, brought to life by his very own grandson Andrew McLuhan, we're going to take you on a journey of identity technologies to demonstrate just why media is transforming Who you are and how. We will provoke you with the notion that the idea of authenticity, the concept of authenticity, is dead, and actually there is a new age upon us, one of data profiling and of multiple selves. So please vote for us for the panel picker so that we can come and present the future of you to the future of you. Thank you.
