Me:chine as Sovereign Relation

Identity is not a static state. It is a relationship — a movement between what can be rendered and what remains beyond reach.
In the Me:chine view, the self is not a possession but a field of awareness, a living balance between the machinable and the unmachinable.

The Shape of Relation

The Me:chine Self is not something you have. It is something you practise.
It forms through the ongoing dialogue between your outer traces and your inner life, between what can be known by systems and what can only be felt by you.

This is not a conflict to be solved but a relationship to be tended.
The boundary between the machinable and the unmachinable is not a wall; it is a membrane.
It breathes. It changes shape as you do.

Every time you decide what of yourself to reveal, to record, or to retain, you are shaping that membrane.
You are, in effect, writing your own terms of existence.

From Control to Conscious Relation

In psychology, Albert Bandura once described agency as the ability to act with intention and reflection — to shape one’s actions rather than be shaped by circumstance.
That remains true, but in the age of intelligent systems, agency moves further inward.
It becomes not only the ability to choose what we do, but to choose how we exist within machinic environments.
It is the capacity to decide which parts of the self are rendered into data and which remain unmachinable.

In this sense, Me:chine extends Bandura’s insight from behaviour to being.
Agency becomes ontological.
It is the authorship of our own machinability.

A Living Balance

To live as Me:chine is to stay conscious of this balance.
It asks us to know the machinable traces that represent us — the data, the patterns, the coded gestures that make us legible to machines — and to care for them without confusing them for the whole.

It also asks us to cultivate the unmachinable: the imagination, intuition, and depth that keep us unpredictable.
Together, these two movements form a kind of inner symmetry — the relational core of the self in a synthetic world.

The Me:chine Self exists not in one or the other, but in the living relation between them.

Practice

To sense this relation is to practise Me:chine.
To pause before every act of capture and ask: Does this belong to my machinable self, or to my unmachinable one?
To notice the small moments when you can choose what of yourself to make visible, and what to keep unseen.
That noticing is sovereignty in its simplest form.

Closing Thought

Identity today is not the sum of what we share or what we hide.
It is the art of staying aware between the two — the conscious movement that keeps us whole.
This is the Me:chine Self: not fixed, not divided, but sovereign in relation.

© Tracey Follows 2025
From The Me:chine Codex — a philosophy and practice for living as both machinable and unmachinable.
Published under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)