Writing Life in the Age of Generative AI and Surveillance Capitalism

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.