The User and The Beast is a performative lecture by Joana Moll critically and poetically examining the commodification of personal user data by the Ad Tech industry.

The performative lecture examines how the commodification of personal data creates an increasingly asymmetric exchange between users’ bodies and host servers. Enabled by sustained online interactions and the mechanisation of gestures, Internet users’ bodies become subtly yet incisively compressed, while their presence in the virtual realm expands. Since the first online ad in 1994 and the invention of HTTP cookies, the Ad Tech industry has enabled mass surveillance by tracking, storing, and capitalizing on nearly every user action, forming the core business model of corporations like Google and Facebook. Moll’s research, part of a broader project, seeks to expose and reframe these dynamics through an extended map of Ad Tech embodied in performance, addressing not only its techno-economic structures but also its affective, political, and material dimensions, with the aim of fostering more democratic and sustainable ways of inhabiting digital systems.

Commissioned by Disruption Network Lab.
Performed at Disruption Network Lab’s conference Investigating the Kill Cloud in Berlin on 29 November 2024.
This work is available for touring.
Further enquiries: info@disruptionlab.org