From Distorted Mirrors to Sovereign Reflections: Resisting the Grotesque Depiction of Our Digital Selves

2026-06-14

AI Summary

This study addresses how contemporary digital platforms, grounded in data extractivism and algorithmic monopolies, distort users’ digital identities, while existing legal frameworks fail to safeguard data sovereignty. Critiquing the alienation of human experience through digital infrastructures, the work draws on critical posthumanist theory and models four key domains—entertainment, e-commerce, fintech, and telematics—to propose a decolonial, portable architecture for algorithmic identity. Its primary innovation lies in moving beyond conventional defensive paradigms of data rights by foregrounding functional transferability as a core principle of algorithmic identity. The research exposes how data silos engender cognitive amputation, ontological violence, and self-censorship, and offers a theoretical pathway toward empowering digital infrastructures that enable the emancipation of the digital self and the realization of identity sovereignty.

Abstract

As Ambient Intelligence weaves computing into everyday life, human existence has become inextricably linked to ubiquitous digital infrastructures, triggering a crisis of personal data sovereignty. Driven by extractivism and data colonialism, platforms exploit human experience as a terra nullius, enclosing proprietary user models within isolated silos. We argue that legal frameworks like the EU Digital Rights and GDPR fail to counter this power asymmetry because they regulate inert raw data while leaving monopolies over algorithmic inferences unchallenged. Consequently, current architectures act as funhouse mirrors, creating a grotesque, distorted depiction of our digital selves. Through critical posthumanism and four contemporary scenarios (entertainment, e-commerce, fintech, and telematics), this paper illustrates how data siloing inflicts cognitive amputation, ontological violence, and self-censorship. We argue that securing digital rights requires moving beyond defensive regulation toward a decolonial infrastructure that guarantees the functional transferability of algorithmic identities, reclaiming technology for the emancipation of the posthuman self.

Problem

• data sovereignty
• algorithmic inference
• digital self
• data colonialism
• ontological violence

Innovation

• algorithmic identity
• data sovereignty
• decolonial infrastructure
• functional transferability
• posthumanism