Abolition-Drift

People You May Know#

The dead keep arriving in the interfaces. A profile surfaces under People You May Know; a birthday reminder fires for someone buried in the spring; a subscription renews against a card nobody thought to cancel; a playlist refreshes itself for no one. The systems are not being callous. Callousness would require that the death had registered somewhere and been overruled. Nothing registered. The addressee was never the one who died. It was the profile, the behavioral surface assembled from years of signals, and the profile is in perfect health.

The living are addressed in the same form; death simply makes the separation easier to see. A feed does not meet a whole life. It meets signals, then rewards whatever performances it can classify. Users learn the lesson without needing to formulate it: some versions travel, some stall, some disappear. Over time this creates pressure towards a self that can revise itself at the system’s speed.

That training takes place inside an infrastructure—platforms, models, attention routes, finance, law—and the infrastructure is owned. No one has to command the trajectory. Platforms set out to maximize engagement, predict conduct, and make users addressable at scale. Because some forms of subjectivity are easier to measure and route than others, optimization selects for them almost as a side effect.

Abolition-drift names a tendency in these conditions, not a uniform lived state. People still sustain durable relationships, long projects, practices of attention, and coherent accounts of themselves while using digital systems. The pressure operates at the level of what dominant infrastructures make legible, rewardable, and reproducible. It selects for forms of agency that remain locally active while becoming harder to compose across time.

The capacity at risk is not stable identity. People can change radically, refuse an inheritance, and take up conflicting roles without becoming temporally incoherent. What matters is the slower work of connecting those changes: deciding which ones count as one’s own, carrying obligations through revision, noticing when roles collide, projecting forward from a past that cannot simply be swapped out.

Posthumanism was right to reject the bounded liberal subject as a natural fact. Cognition was always distributed, embodiment porous, identity relational, and technics constitutive rather than external. The disagreement begins with the temporal organization of that distribution. Reconfigurability, boundary dissolution, modularity, and substrate mobility can open new forms of life. Under infrastructures organized around prediction and optimization, the same operations can loosen the relations through which transformations become inhabitable as a life.

The Profile as Operational Subject#

The dead profile persists because it was never merely a portrait waiting for confirmation by the person it represented. It was an operational object within other systems. Its age, associations, purchases, images, and patterns remained available for recommendation, billing, ranking, and retrieval after the life from which they had been drawn was no longer there to receive the result.

Two kinds of uptake are involved. Operational uptake occurs when an output enters another process: a score changes a price, a classification routes content, one model’s response becomes context for the next. Registration is different because an event has entered a lived horizon. Something has become a loss, possibility, obligation, or constraint, and a person or form of life must answer for its force.

A locus of registration need not be a private interior. A family, workplace, court, ritual, or political community can register an event by incorporating it into memory and action. What matters is that the event becomes more than a causal transition. It becomes part of a world in which something can matter.

Machine subjectivity can remain an open question. Present systems do not need it. A ranking determines a queue; a fraud signal suspends an account; one model hands its result to another. The sequence can close without becoming a world for anyone while it runs. Human beings remain at the edges as designers, sources of objectives, and bearers of consequence.

Impersonal coordination is old. Markets and bureaucracies have always exceeded individual comprehension, and actuarial systems acted on abstractions long before machine learning. What has changed is the reach and recursive speed of the representation, especially near the formation of conduct itself. Profiles now mediate employment, intimacy, cultural visibility, health, and consumption; their outputs feed back quickly enough to shape the behavior later cited as evidence for the profile.

The profile becomes an operational subject only in an administrative sense: it is the entity the system recognizes and acts upon, not necessarily the entity for whom a world matters. A person’s embodied history may remain decisive to them while becoming secondary to the model governing access, visibility, or opportunity. The profile can be updated, segmented, recombined, and tested against populations. The system increasingly meets the person through the layer it can version.

The asymmetry is institutional, not metaphysical. Profiles are hardly perfectly reversible: data lingers, errors harden, classifications follow people. Human beings, meanwhile, can break with inherited identities. Still, operators treat the profile as modular and revisable for their purposes, while the embodied losses produced through it remain stubbornly difficult to undo.

Versioning can therefore coexist with captivity. A user may alter a biography, delete a post, or retrain a recommendation stream while remaining unable to inspect the inferences built from earlier conduct or carry a legible history into another system. The profile is reconfigurable from the operator’s side and often stubborn from the subject’s. Flexibility at the interface can conceal a deeper asymmetry over whose revisions count.

The contemporary shift is not a migration of registration from human to machine. It is coordination becoming less dependent on registration as such. The machine need not experience loss for a dead profile to remain active, and it need not inhabit a world for a classification to organize the world available to someone else.

The Friction That Constitutes#

The bounded subject of liberal humanism was a construction. That does not settle the value of the capacities assembled within it. Institutions can produce a capacity without making it false; a contingent form of life can have something to lose.

Heidegger’s thrownness, being-toward-death, and care offer one vocabulary for the temporal binding at issue. They need not define a human essence. Other traditions would emphasize recognition, responsibility, or disciplined forms of non-self. Their differences matter, but they converge on a point sometimes lost in celebrations of dissolution: loosening a self is not politically or existentially equivalent in every setting.

Meditation can loosen a self. So can political discipline, an artistic experiment, grief, or a relation that changes what someone can answer for. These are not the same loosening. They take place inside forms of life able, at least sometimes, to interpret the transformation. Algorithmic dispersion differs when the terms of adjustment arrive from systems whose purposes the subject does not set.

Thrownness is more than causal history. Every system has antecedent states. Inheritance begins where a past one did not choose must nevertheless be taken up, interpreted, refused, or carried as part of an answerable life. It is not valuable because it cannot change. It matters because change remains related to a history for which the person or community can be held, and can hold itself, responsible.

Literal non-transferability is the wrong test. Languages, traditions, names, and obligations can be adopted or refused; migration and conversion reorganize inheritance without making it unreal. The relevant friction is answerability. A past has force when revising it changes relations among persons and commitments rather than merely replacing a state. A profile preserves sequence while tending to strip this friction away, returning the past as a variable available for present optimization.

Profiles keep histories and quietly change what kind of thing a history is. An old confession becomes a reusable signal. Illness becomes a risk feature; political affiliation, a targeting variable. The record may be more complete than memory and less capable of sustaining inheritance, because what returns has been selected for prediction rather than interpretation.

Death sharpens the distinction. Digital media do not necessarily weaken mortality. Memorial archives, saved messages, and recurring images can intensify grief and obligation. The narrower point is that a profile can continue after death without death registering as a transformation of the world that profile inhabited. The birthday reminder does not mourn, revise its expectations, or reclassify the relation as ended. Operational continuity persists independently of mortal continuity.

For the bereaved, the same reminder may reopen the world the death altered. Interface and mourner receive an identical signal under radically different temporal conditions. One treats it as another scheduled event; the other encounters a relation that can no longer be continued in the same form. The gap is not between data and emotion in the abstract. It is between a sequence that can continue unchanged and a life in which continuation has become impossible.

Being-toward-death matters here not as a doctrine of authenticity but as a name for the way finitude can gather possibilities into a non-substitutable arc. A life acquires urgency because its possibilities cannot all be realized and some choices foreclose others. Systems organized around indefinite updating do not abolish that finitude. They can assign greater operational weight to the versionable representation than to the mortal history beneath it. Death remains real while its significance is absent from the layer where coordination proceeds.

Care binds inheritance to projection through involvement in a world. It does not mean affection alone. Some possibilities solicit us as worth maintaining, often for reasons that remain silent and difficult to measure. Recommendation can support this. Trouble begins when measurable relevance acquires practical priority over lived significance.

A feed privileges what can be refreshed. A dashboard privileges what can be counted within a reporting period. A queue privileges what can be completed next. These measures are not unreal. They become destructive when they supply the practical horizon within which other commitments must fit. A friendship may be sustained by years of unremarkable presence; a vocation by long intervals in which the relevant achievement is not yet visible. Systems that cannot register such intervals reward the substitute that can be made legible now.

The capacity at risk is best described without nostalgia for stable identity. It is the ability to take up change as part of a life: to connect a present alteration to an inherited past, judge whether a transformation expresses or violates a commitment, and sustain projects whose reasons exceed the cycle in which a system evaluates them. Temporal binding is not resistance to change. It is what allows change to become more than replacement.

Fractal Subjectivity#

A creator notices that a confession, aesthetic, injury, or intimacy pays in visibility. The platform is not simply rewarding an identity that was already there; it teaches which variants travel. Past statements become signals to resurface or recombine. The person remains continuous. The operational self is whichever version the system can measure and circulate now.

Work produces a rougher version of the same sorting. Responsiveness, availability, and attention become dashboards and traces. The worker still chooses, except the larger project can yield one postponed appointment at a time. Sleep moves. Debt acquires its own schedule. Planning that once reached towards a lease or qualification contracts towards the next payout.

Dating and health systems produce quieter variants. A dating profile is revised in response to matches until the account learns how to solicit attention more effectively than the person learns what kind of relation they want. A health dashboard turns sleep, movement, mood, and fertility into separate streams, each with its own baseline and alert. These tools can disclose patterns and support care. They can also return the person to themselves as a collection of locally optimized problems whose relations remain uncomposed.

The body remains the site of consequence; the profile becomes the site of address.

These are more than roles, because roles can still be interpreted together. A parent, worker, lover, citizen, and artist may remain multiple without becoming fragmented. Fractal subjectivity begins when each operational identity develops its own memory, incentives, feedback, and projected future while no durable practice composes the conflicts among them.

The term fractal is not a claim that the profiles are geometrically identical. It names a recursion in their operating grammar. At the level of a post, prior response predicts future visibility. At the level of an account, accumulated response becomes an inferred identity. At the level of a platform, identities are grouped into audience and risk segments. Across platforms, those segments return as employment, dating, consumer, and health profiles. At each level the same loop recurs: traces are retained, preferences inferred, responses rewarded, and the updated model fed into the next round. Self-similarity lies in the recursion, not in the content.

Anna Longo’s account of brand subjectivity explains how a person becomes a surface designed for recognition, valuation, and continuous rebranding. Fractal subjectivity describes a different temporal consequence: several such surfaces acquire local continuity while the relations among them become harder to inhabit as one life.

Nor is it Deleuze’s dividual under a new name. The dividual describes synchronic decomposition, the person parsed into samples, codes, and controllable fragments. Fractal subjectivity is the diachronic sequel: each fragment acquires continuity of its own while the relations among them weaken. The user may possess more local agency than before and less practical authority over how the local agencies fit together.

The concept does not describe every platform user. Some move among profiles without difficulty, preserve long commitments, and use digital systems instrumentally. The claim concerns selection pressure. Infrastructures reward what they can recognize, and what they recognize most easily are identities capable of rapid adjustment, clean segmentation, and measurable response. Forms of selfhood requiring long silence, ambiguous loyalty, or obligations invisible to the system become harder to sustain within the same field of incentives.

No single metric dissolves a self. The drift is quieter. A creator anticipates the audience model, a worker the score, and each adaptation may be intelligent in isolation. Their accumulation matters because local optimization repeatedly wins practical priority, until a life is composed increasingly from the outside.

Abolition-drift is the limiting tendency. Abolition refers not to the disappearance of identity or agency but to the cancellation of the temporal work through which identities could be appropriated and composed. Drift names the manner of the cancellation: ambient, incremental, carried by adjustments that rarely appear catastrophic in isolation. Fractal subjectivity is the form that appears along the way, the apparatus of selfhood repeated across profiles, each locally coherent, none reliably binding the others into a past and future that can be owned together.

Posthumanism After Distribution#

Haraway and Hayles make the necessary first move. The bounded liberal subject was never natural, cognition was never confined to the skull, and human-machine boundaries were never as secure as the inherited philosophical picture required.

Haraway’s cyborg is not a naive celebration of technology. It is an illegitimate child of militarism, technoscience, and patriarchy that refuses the purity of its origins. The Cyborg Manifesto also names an informatics of domination: a regime of communications, biotechnologies, and integrated circuits through which bodies and labor are reorganized. Its irreverence is a political strategy inside compromised conditions, not a denial of capture.

The limitation appears elsewhere. A cyborg has to stabilize long enough to remember an alliance, recognize an antagonist, and refuse the purposes built into its components. Boundary crossing opens possibilities; it does not secure the duration political action needs.

Hayles is the more exact interlocutor. How We Became Posthuman resists the fantasy that a self can be preserved as disembodied information. Her distributed cognition remains embodied, materially situated, and environmentally extended. This is not the account of posthumanism the present argument opposes.

The disagreement begins when presence is treated as sufficient. An embodied participant can remain inside a distributed assemblage while practical authority migrates toward the profile through which institutions recognize them. The body supplies sensation, labor, desire, and consequence; the model supplies the categories through which access and visibility are organized. Distribution extends cognition, but it does not decide which component sets the terms of action.

Hayles could reply that no single component needs to set the terms. Cognition emerges from the relation, and the relation changes with every interaction. That reply is strongest where the assemblage permits reciprocal adaptation. It weakens when one component owns the infrastructure, controls the archive, and can revise the operative model without the embodied participant possessing comparable reach. A distributed system can remain materially interactive while being politically one-sided.

Stiegler’s account of technical retention and anticipation helps specify the issue. Technics always carries memory outside the organism and shapes the futures available to it. There is no unmediated temporal self to recover. Rouvroy and Berns’s algorithmic governmentality and Cheney-Lippold’s algorithmic identity likewise show how statistical profiles govern before a reflective subject is summoned. Abolition-drift proposes a possible temporal consequence of that regime: the operational histories of profiles can become more institutionally effective while the capacity to compose them as a life weakens.

Posthumanism therefore leaves the prognosis open. Distribution can support memory, solidarity, and action, although it can also organize authority around whatever component is easiest to predict and alter. Ontological impurity guarantees no political openness. A cyborg still needs enough continuity to ally, refuse, and remember what the refusal was for.

Coordination Without a Locus#

AI systems may intensify abolition-drift without extending the feed in its familiar form. They can operate upstream of attention, filtering options, setting prices, routing work, selecting candidates, and preparing defaults before a person encounters a visible field. Machine-to-machine coordination may reduce direct solicitation. Less time spent scrolling does not mean the surrounding field has become less structured.

One model can consume another’s output, revise a plan, and trigger an action without anything in the sequence becoming significant to the systems involved. No machine subject has to replace the human one. The more immediate possibility is architectural: loops close through operational uptake, while registration remains at the edges where goals are supplied, law enforced, and consequences lived.

Land’s teleoplexy gives the recursive direction a name: products of the process feed back into the conditions of its continuation, direction without a director. In Land’s idiom, capital discovers that its human relays were latency and compiles them out of the loop. The idiom earns its speed. I take the description and refuse the verdict. Teleoplexy explains how a trajectory can form without a sovereign author; it does not decide whether the capacities displaced by the trajectory mattered.

Capitalism gives the formal tendencies of algorithmic coordination scale and compulsion. Systems built for prediction privilege legibility, modularity, feedback, and reconfiguration. Ownership determines whose purposes organize those capacities and how difficult refusal becomes. It does not mechanically determine the phenomenology of a medium. An open-source model can still reduce a person to a manipulable profile; a private system can sometimes preserve memory and extend agency. Ownership determines who can impose and scale the abstraction, and who absorbs its failures.

Baudrillard’s hyperreal is useful at this level. The model does not merely represent the user after the fact. It precedes the user as an operational hypothesis, organizing the field in which later conduct becomes available. The recommendation helps produce the horizon within which desire is expressed; the score helps produce the conduct later cited as evidence for the score. The predictive double becomes more socially efficacious than the empirical account it claims to summarize.

The asymmetry hides most effectively when the model works. An apt recommendation or a schedule that really does save time can make the profile seem more truthful than the person’s own account. Accuracy earns prestige, and prestige travels. Before long, success at forecasting conduct is treated as if it were an understanding of the life in which that conduct occurs.

No single company authors abolition-drift. Operators, advertisers, regulators, employers, and users all modify the environment, often for defensible local reasons. Fraud detection can protect people. Recommendation can save time. Profiles can preserve histories institutions would otherwise erase. The trajectory emerges because systems optimized for local performance repeatedly privilege the layer most amenable to intervention.

Agents may also return time and protect long projects. That possibility matters. The risk is upstream: an agent can free a person from the feed while composing the options to which the recovered time will later be applied. If machine outputs increasingly become inputs to other systems, if profiles travel across domains, and if institutions adapt around them, coordination can become less dependent on the temporality of any person it affects. The agentic escalation belongs to another argument. Here it marks the limit toward which the profile regime may move.

At the Asymptote#

Digital infrastructures already carry practices that resist the tendency. Collaborations last for years. Religious and political communities sustain obligation across distance; correspondence becomes a shared history. Some of these practices generate forms of inheritance and care that would not exist without the network.

A dispersed group may remember through an archive no member could hold alone. Persistent pseudonyms can sustain recognition unavailable elsewhere. A forum or long-running game can bind strangers into obligations that outlast the platform’s intended use. These cases matter because technical distribution is sometimes a medium of temporal composition, not merely its enemy.

The thesis weakens where participants can preserve the archive through which a practice remembers, where metrics remain subordinate to contestable purposes, and where obligations survive interface changes. The real question is whether people can interpret and govern the transformations a medium introduces into their lives.

No medium guarantees either result. A platform can carry a durable practice while threatening its continuity through ranking, moderation, or commercial change. A community can reproduce domination under cooperative ownership. An archive can preserve memory and freeze an exclusion. The distinction is not digital against nondigital, nor fluidity against stability. It concerns whether transformations made possible by a medium can be interpreted and governed by the lives they reorganize.

This is why the dead profile should remain in view. When the birthday reminder arrives, the system has not failed to feel grief. It was never organized around grief. It has preserved an operational continuity that did not depend on death registering as a change in the world. The profile remains active because the relation between its signals persists after the relation between the people has ended.

Among the living the separation is less absolute, which makes it harder to notice. People continue to remember, promise, and project while infrastructures of visibility act on modular representations that need not preserve the coherence of the life beneath them. The operational histories remain healthy. Composing them is left to the person, under conditions those histories increasingly shape.

Posthumanism correctly dissolved the fiction of a self-contained subject. What follows depends on how the resulting assemblage is organized. Distribution can widen agency or fracture it; technical memory can deepen inheritance or reduce it to prediction; reconfigurability can enable transformation or make continuity subordinate to optimization. The diagnosis does not decide the prognosis.

Abolition-drift names the darker tendency: the widening gap between an apparatus that continues to know how to address us and lives that find it harder to compose those addresses into a past and future of their own. The dead profile is not a metaphor for a world without subjects. It is evidence that the formal continuity of a person can survive after the world in which that continuity mattered has gone. The drift begins when the same separation becomes ordinary among the living.

References#

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press, 1994 [1981].

Cheney-Lippold, John. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York University Press, 2017.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, 1991 [1985].

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Press, 2010 [1927].

Land, Nick. “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration.” In #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic, 2014.

Longo, Anna. “Post-Neoliberalism & the Rise of Brand Subjectivity.” TripleAmpersand, 6 March 2026.

Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Thomas Berns. “Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation.” Réseaux 177 (2013): 163–196.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Stanford University Press, 2009.