Writing Life in the Age of Generative AI and Surveillance Capitalism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21716559 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aaron Greenberg (Lake Forest College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-14 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-18 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Life Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1448-4528 • E-ISSN: 1751-2964 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14484528.2026.2685137 |
| OpenAlex | W7165188289 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
This essay experiments with a life-writing practice composed through hundreds of thousands of handwritten words—‘illuminated manuscripts’ that function as materialised attention and analog self-fashioning technologies. Produced in the shadow of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, these pages stage a counter-practice to extractive, predictive autobiographical automation. By theorising practice, the essay articulates an ethics and aesthetics of bricolage: a method that splices internalised language models, reworks public discourse, and produces countermemory rather than compliant data. In charting how handwriting becomes both method and refusal, I call for generative autobiography whose authority is authenticated by experience; a mode of life writing that resists extraction, embraces regeneration, and treats autobiographical practice as an unpredictable site of future authorship
Biography · Capitalism · Generative grammar · Handwriting · Life writing · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Race, Genetics, and Society
| Highly cited | No |
|---|