June 13, 2025

Your Past Is Performing Without You : Identity, Memory, and the Algorithmic Sel

19 minutes

Your Past Is Performing Without You

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

For those living through the strange persistence of their own archive.

What happens when the digital versions of ourselves continue to exist—and perform—long after we’ve emotionally, ethically, or ideologically moved on? In this episode, we confront the eerie automation of the past self: not preserved as memory, but reactivated as metric. With quiet references to the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Bernard Stiegler, and Erving Goffman, we explore what it means for identity to become an output, a residue, a cached result no longer under our authorship.

This is not a lament for privacy, nor a call for deletion. It is an inquiry into presence: who is performing our identity when we are no longer there? And what does it mean when systems remember us with greater fidelity than we remember ourselves?

Reflections

Here are some provocations that surfaced during the episode:

The past no longer decays. It performs.

We aren’t haunted. We’re indexed.

The system doesn’t care what we meant. Only what worked.

The most visible versions of ourselves are often the least alive.

The archive doesn’t remember you. It reruns you.

To not refresh may be the most human act left.

Our silences are now as searchable as our words.

There is no final post. There is only the loop.

The past isn’t over. It’s scheduled.

What we forget might be the only thing that still belongs to us.

Why Listen?

Reframe identity as algorithmic performance

Explore the eerie ethics of automated memory

Engage with Foucault, Butler, Stiegler, and Goffman on visibility, performance, and the self

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Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.

Bibliography Relevance

Foucault: On power, visibility, and the mechanisms of surveillance that persist beyond intent.

Butler: On the self as performed, iterated, and vulnerable to being fixed in visibility.

Stiegler: On memory technologies and the loss of individual temporal sovereignty.

Goffman: On the dramaturgy of identity and the disjunction between presentation and authenticity.

Your archive still smiles. But you didn’t refresh.

#DigitalSelf #MemoryPerformance #Foucault #Butler #Stiegler #Goffman #AlgorithmicIdentity #PostHumanism #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #EpistemicEthics #ArchivedSelf #MediaPhilosophy

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