In this archival episode of The Future of You, host Tracey Follows explores how personal identity is increasingly becoming machine‑readable and searchable. The conversation weaves together insights from four guests. Holly Herndon explains that any captured media—photos, video, voice, gestures—becomes legible to AI models, turning identity into data that can be inferred, a process she calls digital phenotyping, including novel concepts like motion prints. Kashmir Hill recounts the secretive rise of Clearview AI and how facial‑recognition databases are being weaponised, illustrating how security tools morph into identity‑control mechanisms that can discriminate, as seen in the Madison Square Garden incident. Andrew Budd argues that a digital identity is a folder of facts that must be bound to a physical human, positioning the face as the core root of trust in the digital economy, especially amid deepfakes. Byron Tau maps the evolution of data brokers—from traditional credit and public‑record aggregators, to social‑media and location brokers, to “gray data” such as Bluetooth signals—showing how ever‑more granular digital exhaust fuels identity inference. The host ties these threads together, asserting that the machine‑readable self is already here, and reframes the fundamental question from “who are you?” to “who or what gets to interpret you?”.
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What happens when your identity stops being something that you declare and starts becoming something that's inferred? Not by other people, but by machines. That's what we're here to investigate in The Machine-Readable Self, a compilation episode of archive conversations from the last few years of The Future of You, the podcast. Here's Holly Herndon.
As soon as something is captured in media, or as soon as you take a photograph or a video of anything, then it becomes machine legible. And then it can become part of a training canon, you know, to train a model that you may never even interact with.
Holly's point is deceptively simple. Once something is captured, it can be read by machines. A photograph, a voice, a gesture, a fragment of media, all of it becomes potential training data. So identity is no longer just what we say about ourselves, it's what the system can extract from us. But all this kind of digital phenotyping, treating us almost like patients, capturing some of the atmospheric or environmental data around us, the way we move, the way— I was talking to somebody about, you know, motion prints in VR, for example, the way in which our gesture with our head and our hands, you know, it's so individual that it's like a fingerprint and they call it motion print.
I think it all depends on kind of where we end up in terms of who's using this data and for what purpose. I like to think of AI as, as us in aggregate, as a collective human accomplishment rather than a kind of like alien other that's here to just replace us.
That is the first shift. The self becomes data.. But once the self is readable, it can also become searchable. And that is where the consequences become much harder to contain. Here's Kashmir Hill.
When I first discovered Clearview AI, what it was doing was a secret. It was not known by the general public. People found it really shocking that their photos had been collected by this random company. And honestly, people were upset What Clearview is doing is, you know, they built this database. They wanted to make money off of it. They would end up selling it to police departments, law enforcement officials, thousands of agencies. And it was tried by police departments around the world, including in the UK. There is an events venue here called Madison Square Garden. It's a really iconic venue for concert shows. And they started using facial recognition technology, not Clearview AI, a different company. A few years back to address security threats. But in the last year, the billionaire James Dolan, who owns that venue, decided to ban lawyers that worked at firms that have sued his company. I went with a lawyer. I watched it happen. She got pulled aside. They said, you're not allowed in here. You work at a firm that's banned. And she said, I'm not on that case. You know, I'm not working on anything related to this. They said, it doesn't matter. You're banned until your firm drops its lawsuit against us. And so that is just, oh, you know, a very striking way that this technology can be used to discriminate against people in new ways, even based on the work that you do. The other risk is just that you get slippage, that it starts out with, we don't want you coming in here because you're a threat. But then you realize there's other ways you can wield the superpower. Once you get this infrastructure in place, it might be used in a way that wasn't originally envisioned.
Kashmir's example is so powerful because it shows how quickly a security technology becomes an identity technology. The face is no longer simply something people recognize. It becomes an access point, a filter, a permission system, a way of deciding who gets in and who's kept out, and on what grounds. Here's Andrew Budd.
To me, a digital identity is a set of facts about me. But a person is not the same as a set of facts in a folder. So there comes a moment in the life of every digital identity when that folder has to be bound to a real-life physical human being. And that's our job. So our job is to bind that buff folder full of facts about you to a genuinely present human being who is the owner of that folder. I'm sometimes asked, you know, what's so special about the face? You know, why not the iris? Or the voice? And the answer is, well, frankly, when the government creates credentials of my identity, they don't put my iris into it. The only thing that binds this passport that I'm invisibly waving at you at this moment, Tracey, The thing that shows that it's mine is my face on page 2. The face will continue to become— be the core root of trust in the digital economy, and ensuring the genuine presence of that face will become fundamental to the stability of society.
Andrew gives us the other side of the problem. In an age of deepfakes, bots, and synthetic media, we do need ways to know that a real human being is present. So the face becomes the root of trust. But the paradox is obvious: to prove we are human, we increasingly have to submit ourselves to machine reading. Here's Byron Tau.
The first era is the traditional data broker, and these are companies who are kind of sort of household names if you pay attention to tech and to advertising. They're companies like Thomson Reuters, Axiom, credit bureaus like TransUnion eventually got into this kind of market. And what they have historically done is gone out and taken either credit data from banks, commercial data from things like magazine subscriptions, public data from things like courthouses, marriage records, hunting licenses, driver's licenses, and created essentially lists of where people live in the world, what assets they own, and some basic demographic information, right? The second generation is social data brokers. So when social media became a big part of the way we communicate and the way we express ourselves in the early 2000s, there started to be these data brokers that began monitoring the social conversation. Governments also increasingly became interested in acquiring social media data and analyzing it and looking at people's connections with each other and who they talk to and what they say. Then there's location brokers. So these are brokers that started collecting information off of mobile phones. And then the weirdest kind of data I write about is what I call in the book gray data. You called it esoteric data, but, you know, it is data that we do not normally associate with— we don't even really think about. It's this kind of weird digital exhaust. So I'm talking to you through a pair of Bluetooth headphones. Well, Bluetooth headphones are constantly pinging out a signal, and if you know how to collect that signal, you can say Byron's Bluetooth headphones were at this particular address. There's just all manner of datasets that you really need to be a technologist to understand, and governments are moving to collect that kind of data as well.
The machine-readable self is not a future scenario, it is already here. Our faces, our voices and movements, transactions, preferences and behaviours are becoming part of a larger identity layer. One interpreted less by people and more by systems. This is the shift I've been exploring through my work on Everything in the Future of You, through to the Database Self and the Database Brand. How people and organisations are increasingly understood through data, signals, relationships, and inference. The question now is not simply, who are you? It is, who or what gets to interpret you? Thanks for listening. And please do join us next time for another archive essay taken from the conversations we've had on The Future Review. And please do subscribe and like and share. Thanks for listening.
