The Futuremade Dictionary brings together the concepts and language developed by futurist Tracey Follows to examine identity, agency, technology and selfhood in the synthetic age.
The terms emerge from her wider work across System & Self, Me:chine, The Future of You, the Database Condition and her research into the relationship between systems and selves.
They describe different aspects of a changing relationship: what machines can know about us, how systems interpret people and organisations, how artificial intelligence can participate in the construction of identity, how the production of futures affects our capacity to imagine our own, and which dimensions of human experience may remain resistant to computational capture.
These ideas are intended to travel. You are welcome to use and share the terms. When you do, please attribute the relevant concept or definition to Tracey Follows / Futuremade and link back to the Futuremade Dictionary where possible.
System & Self
System & Self is a framework developed by Tracey Follows for examining the relationship between external systems and individual agency.
Systems shape the conditions in which people live, work, decide and imagine the future. The self perceives, interprets, responds to and sometimes resists those conditions. System & Self focuses on what happens at the point where the two meet.
Rather than treating the future as something created only by large institutions, technologies or social systems, the framework asks what role remains for the individual within those systems. It places questions of agency, authorship, judgement and identity at the centre of futures thinking.
Its central proposition is:
Every future is written between the system and the self.
System & Self is not a binary. It is a figure–ground relationship: each makes aspects of the other perceptible.
The framework also forms the basis of the System & Self Card Deck, a foresight tool designed to help people perceive tensions between systems and individual agency and use those tensions to think differently about possible futures.
Related concepts: Me:chine, Machine-Readable Self, Unmachinability, Too Much Future.
Database Brand
Database Brand is a term coined and developed by Tracey Follows to describe the version of a brand assembled by machines from accumulated evidence.
Traditional brand management assumes that organisations largely determine how they present themselves through identity, communications, advertising and experience. In an AI-mediated environment, however, brands are increasingly interpreted by systems drawing information from many different sources.
Search engines, recommendation systems, generative AI models, databases, reviews, media coverage, corporate information and other digital traces can all contribute to a computational representation of an organisation.
Tracey Follows developed Database Brand to distinguish this machine-assembled identity from the Designed Branddeliberately created by an organisation.
In simple terms:
AI systems assemble a Database Brand from the evidence an organisation leaves behind.
The Database Brand may therefore diverge from the identity an organisation believes it is communicating.
The concept was developed in Futuremade's work on the Database Condition and explored at length in Tracey Follows' The Database Brand, first published as Futuremade View 01 in June 2026.
Related concepts: Designed Brand, Database Self, Database Culture, Database Condition.
Me:chine
Me:chine® is Tracey Follows' concept for what happens where machines and selves meet and begin to alter one another.
The word combines me and machine. The colon both separates and connects them.
Me. Machine. Me:chine.
Me:chine describes a condition in which machines no longer simply serve people from the outside. Intelligent systems increasingly participate in how people are represented, interpreted, predicted and potentially formed.
It therefore asks:
What happens when machines begin to participate in the making of the self?
Me:chine is concerned both with what can be made machinable — data, behaviours, preferences, patterns and representations — and with dimensions of human experience that may resist computational capture.
That relationship between the machinable and the unmachinable self sits at the centre of the Me:chine research programme.
It is not a war between human and machine, nor a story in which the distinction disappears. It is a meeting of selves.
Related concepts: Machine-Readable Self, Unmachinability, Synthetic Self, System & Self.
Database Self
Tracey Follows uses Database Self to describe the version of a person assembled by systems from data, classification and inference.
Individuals generate evidence across almost every area of life: searches, purchases, locations, communications, employment, health, media use, social networks, preferences, behaviours and countless other traces.
Computational systems can connect these traces and use them to classify, predict, recommend, rank or make decisions about a person.
The Database Self is therefore not necessarily the self someone consciously presents to the world.
It is the identity that emerges when systems assemble a person from the evidence available to them.
In Tracey Follows' work, the Database Self has been developed since 2024 as part of a wider inquiry into digital identity and machine-readability. It now sits within the broader Database Condition: a world in which selves, brands and culture can be dynamically assembled from attributes and relationships between data points.
The Database Self raises an important question about agency:
Who do the systems think I am?
And increasingly:
What happens when their version begins acting in the world before I do?
Related concepts: Database Brand, Machine-Readable Self, Synthetic Self, Database Condition.
Machine-Readable Self
The Machine-Readable Self is Tracey Follows' term for those aspects of a person that can be rendered legible to computational systems.
Digital systems cannot encounter the whole complexity of a human being. They work with representations: data points, categories, behavioural signals, patterns, images, text, biometrics and other forms of machine-readable evidence.
The Machine-Readable Self is therefore not the whole person.
It is the version of the person that a system can see and act upon.
Tracey Follows developed this territory through The Future of You, examining what happens when identity is increasingly translated into forms technological systems can interpret.
Machine-readability has enormous utility. It allows systems to recognise us, authenticate us, personalise services, make recommendations and automate decisions.
But it also creates a consequential gap:
the gap between the person and the computational representation of the person.
The more consequential that representation becomes, the more important that gap becomes too.
Related concepts: Database Self, Me:chine, Unmachinability, Synthetic Self.
Unmachinability
Unmachinability is a concept developed within Tracey Follows' Me:chine work to describe human capacities that resist capture, prediction, optimisation or automation.
Much technological development asks which human activities machines can reproduce, accelerate or replace.
Unmachinability reverses the question:
Which human capacities become more valuable precisely because they resist optimisation?
These may include dimensions of embodiment, intuition, imagination, meaning, timing, judgement and subjective experience that cannot be completely represented as machine-readable data.
Unmachinability is not a prediction that particular capabilities will remain permanently beyond technology.
It is a way of investigating the boundary itself: what becomes machinable, what remains difficult to capture, and what human capacities we may choose deliberately to cultivate rather than outsource.
Within the Me:chine research programme, this inquiry is currently exploring embodiment, imagination and our relationship with time as particularly important territories of the unmachinable self.
Related concepts: Me:chine, Machine-Readable Self, System & Self.
Premature Selfhood
Premature Selfhood is a concept developed by Tracey Follows to describe a condition in which artificial intelligence completes a thought, preference or possible version of the self before the person does.
Predictive and generative systems increasingly anticipate what someone may want to write, watch, buy, say, choose or become.
In doing so, they can make possibilities available before the individual has fully formed an intention of their own.
Premature Selfhood asks what happens when technological anticipation moves beyond predicting behaviour and begins participating in identity formation.
In Tracey Follows' formulation:
Premature Selfhood occurs when the machine gets to who you might become before you do.
The concept raises a fundamental question of agency.
If systems continually anticipate and generate possibilities for us, how do we distinguish between a future we authored and a future that was pre-assembled for us?
Related concepts: Machine-Readable Self, System & Self, Me:chine, Too Much Future, agency.
Synthetic Self
Tracey Follows uses Synthetic Self to describe a machine-generated version of a person that can represent, resemble or increasingly act as them.
Synthetic selves may be created through combinations of artificial intelligence, generated text, cloned or synthetic voice, avatars, images, behavioural models and other forms of digital representation.
Unlike an ordinary digital profile, a Synthetic Self can become active.
It may communicate, appear, answer questions or perform tasks in circumstances where the individual once had to be personally present.
In that sense:
A Synthetic Self can speak, appear and act where once the person had to be present.
This creates new questions about identity, authenticity, authorship, consent and continuity.
If a synthetic representation can increasingly act for a person, where does the boundary of the self begin and end?
Related concepts: Database Self, Machine-Readable Self, Me:chine.
Database Culture
Database Culture is Tracey Follows' extension of the Database Condition into the cultural environment: shared cultural material that can be assembled, filtered and interpreted differently for different people or groups.
In mass-media culture, large audiences were often exposed to broadly shared cultural objects: the same programmes, publications, advertisements or public narratives.
Database Culture operates differently.
Platforms and algorithmic systems can select, rank, recombine and personalise cultural material according to accumulated data.
The event may still be shared, while its constituent elements, interpretation and meaning increasingly are not.
In simple terms:
We can share the same moment without sharing the same meaning.
The concept has intellectual connections to Hiroki Azuma's work on database consumption and database animals. In Tracey Follows' wider Database Condition, that logic is extended to a world in which machines increasingly assemble not only representations of people and brands but also the cultural environments through which those representations acquire meaning.
Related concepts: Database Self, Database Brand, Database Condition.
Big Futurity
Big Futurity is a concept developed by Tracey Follows to describe the large-scale production and circulation of authoritative accounts of what comes next.
Governments, corporations, consultancies, think tanks, technology companies, media organisations, forecasters and foresight institutions continually produce scenarios, predictions, projections, promises and warnings about the future.
Taken individually, each may be useful.
Taken together, they constitute an increasingly dense environment of futurity: a system continuously telling people what is coming, what is likely, what is inevitable, what they should prepare for and what they should fear or desire.
Big Futurity crowds the future with forecasts, scenarios, promises and warnings.
Its significance lies not simply in whether particular predictions prove accurate.
Futurity acts in the present.
Accounts of the future influence investment, policy, behaviour, expectation and imagination before the events they describe ever arrive.
Big Futurity therefore asks who gets to produce the futures that circulate most widely — and what happens to our own capacity to imagine when so much of the future has already been imagined for us.
Related concepts: Too Much Future, System & Self, temporal agency, authorship.
Too Much Future
Too Much Future is a concept developed by Tracey Follows to describe the condition in which excessive futurity creates pressure rather than possibility.
The contemporary problem is not simply uncertainty about what comes next.
It is also saturation by predictions, scenarios, forecasts, simulations, roadmaps, warnings and promises about what the future will be.
We can become overfed on other people's futures and starved of our own.
Too Much Future describes the lived condition downstream of Big Futurity.
Where Big Futurity is the system of production, Too Much Future is what that system can do to the self.
As predictions accumulate, possibility can begin to acquire the texture of probability. The future starts to feel less like an open field that might be authored and more like a succession of developments one must prepare to receive.
In Tracey Follows' formulation:
When the future stops feeling like possibility and starts feeling like pressure, we have Too Much Future.
The result is a paradox: an excess of declared possibilities alongside a deficit of personally imagined ones.
Too Much Future therefore argues not for less thinking about the future, but for recovering our agency within it.
We are drowning in predictions and starving for possibility.
Related concepts: Big Futurity, System & Self, Premature Selfhood, temporal agency, authorship.
How the concepts connect
Together, these concepts form a connected body of work about systems, identity, agency and selfhood in the synthetic age.
System & Self provides the underlying orientation: every future emerges through the relationship between the systems shaping possibility and the selves living within them.
Me:chine moves further into that relationship, asking what happens when machines themselves begin participating in the making of the self.
Machine-Readable Self, Database Self and Synthetic Self describe different forms through which identity becomes computationally visible, assembled or enacted.
Database Brand and Database Culture extend the same logic from individuals into organisations and the wider cultural environment.
Premature Selfhood examines what happens when technological systems reach forward into possibility and participate in who a person may become.
Big Futurity and Too Much Future examine another form of anticipation: the industrial production of futures and its effects on the people who have to inhabit them.
And Unmachinability turns the inquiry around, asking which human capacities become more significant as more of life becomes computationally legible, predictable and optimisable.
Different concepts. One underlying question: Where is the self in this future?
The Futuremade Dictionary is developed by Tracey Follows. Please credit Tracey Follows / Futuremade when using or reproducing its original concepts and definitions.
Language helps us perceive reality.
Definitions help us navigate it.
EVERY FUTURE IS WRITTEN BETWEEN THE SYSTEM & THE SELF