The Next Frontier is The Self

A decade of thinking about technology, identity and who we become

For most of the digital era, we have talked about technology as though it sat somewhere outside us: devices, networks, platforms, virtual worlds, and now artificial intelligence. We asked what it would do to work, business, media, cities, politics and society. The person appeared somewhere downstream, adapting to whatever came next.

I have never really seen it that way.

For at least a decade, the question that has held my attention is a different one: what is technology doing to who we are? Not just what new tools let us do, but how technological systems change identity, perception and agency, and our sense of the people we might become.

Looking back, I can see a progression in that work that I did not consciously plan. It runs:

prospection → identity → distribution → reassembly → relation → dialogue

The public chronology overlaps in places. This is the conceptual progression I can see looking back.

It began with our capacity to imagine futures and act towards them. Then the question became identity itself. Digital networks distributed the self, and databases reassembled it in forms machines could understand. System & Self made the relationship between that machine-readable self and the lived self the object of inquiry. And Me:chine recognises that the relationship has become an active, recursive dialogue.

The vocabulary changed because the technology changed. But the underlying concern has stayed remarkably constant:

How does the self remain capable of taking part in its own future?

That question feels more urgent now than ever, because the technological story is moving towards the self.

Before The Future of You: data and dreams

On 15 November 2016, I gave a talk called "Timing Is Everything" at TEDxWhitehallWomen, held at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London. It was about time, decision-making and our relationship with the future. The self was not yet the explicit subject of my work in the way it is today, but the shape of the problem was already there.

I opened with the proposition that "the future is one of the best decision-making tools we've got."

What worried me was our growing obsession with the now. The acceleration of technological culture seemed to be compressing our horizons. Everything was immediate, on demand and increasingly automatic. And under that kind of time pressure, I argued, people tend to do one of two things. We act on impulse, or we outsource the decision. More and more, I suggested, we would outsource it not to somebody else but to something else, like an algorithm.

That was 2016.

Even then, I was less interested in whether machines could make decisions more efficiently than in whether efficiency was the same thing as effectiveness. I drew on prospective psychology and the evidence that people decide better when they keep considering what might happen next. My argument was not that we needed to slow everything down. It was that we needed to see more time: to hold several horizons in view at once, and to bring the future consciously into the decisions we make now.

I ended with a distinction that has stayed with me ever since:

"The past can give us data, but only the future can give us our dreams."

And finally: "Not just to rely on big data for our big decisions, but to rely on our big dreams too."

From where my work stands now, that distinction feels more significant than I understood at the time. Data tells us what has happened. It finds patterns, produces evidence and can be used to infer what might happen next. Dreams belong to a different category altogether. They are about possibility, imagination and desire, about what has not happened yet.

So the issue was already one of agency. If we come to depend on machines trained on patterns from the past, what happens to our capacity to imagine what does not yet exist?

That was not yet Me:chine, or System & Self, or the Database Self. But the tension is recognisable. Data and dreams: what can be inferred from what has been, and what can still be imagined into being. The patterned past and the possible future. The system and the self.

The language would change. The question would deepen.

From prospection to identity

By the time I wrote The Future of You in 2021, the inquiry had moved explicitly into identity. The question was no longer only how people think about the future. It was what happens to the person doing the thinking once identity itself becomes technological.

One of the first changes I was trying to describe was distribution. Technology had begun to loosen the idea that identity sat neatly inside a single person and travelled with them as one coherent unit.

Social media made this immediately visible: a professional self here, a social self there, a romantic self somewhere else. Images, purchases, searches, credentials and relationships were scattered across networks. In the book's introduction, Distributing You, I wrote that digital technologies were making it possible to present different personas through different media and distribute our "self". The book was already asking what that multiplicity did to the idea of one coherent identity.

The self was becoming networked……

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