>[W]e explore this [[they know about cellphones|surveillance architecture]] as the shadowy back-end of personal branding and identity performance culture. The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything – liking, loathing, sharing – and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies are able to hoover up about us. And with that data, ==they create our real digital doppelgangers==–not the aspirational avatars many of us consciously create with those carefully curated and filtered photos and those posts with the perfectly calibrated tone, but the doubles that countless machines create with the data trails we leave behind every time we click, or view, or fail to disable location tracking, or ask a “smart” device for anything at all. Every data point scraped from our online life makes our double more vivid, more complex, more able to nudge our behavior in the real world. > >This machine-made doppelganger–or perhaps we should call it a digital golem since it is cobbled together from bits of inanimate data–is not made by us. It is made by exterior perceptions, interpretations, and predictions about us. In this way, ==it has a great deal in common with a human doppelganger: a person whom the world confuses with you but who is not actually you== and yet can impact your life in profound ways.