Every platform you use is already listening to the rhythm of your day so it can sell it back to you as an ad. I listen to mine, and what comes back is the work. Surveil Thyself is the name for that.
What gets tracked
Every day my computer logs my own life: the pages I browse, the videos I watch on YouTube, which notes I change (not what is in them), the photos I take on my phone, the pictures I save, my screen time and my calendar.
Each morning it turns that into a profile: interest clusters, a behavioral archetype, intent signals, affinity scores. It's built in the exact shape an ad company would build it, because that's the point.
The archetypes
The profile files every day under one of six archetypes, the kind of label ad platforms sort people into. Here is where it has put me, over the 153 days with a complete record since 13 April 2026:
Social networker never won a single day. Most days it decides I'm an information seeker.
Reading the rhythm
Then it looks for the pattern underneath. Days that keep landing on the same subject drift toward each other until they form a group. What counts is what the days are about, not when things happened. Right now 42 groups are holding, the biggest 24 days long. A group that lasts becomes a Spell.
What one day makes
CAST reads the day, then rereads its own reading. That reading becomes posters, collages and short videos. The words and counts on a poster are always from that date. The pictures are pulled from my own photographs and generated grounds, and the day's reading decides which ones surface.
The videos are made by an early AI video model that can't hold a picture together for long. Here is how one day became one video.
- 4 October 2026: the profileArchetype: art practitioner.
- CAST's second readingThe specimen NE-2026-10-04 fractures light into fragmented hours, a rigid diurnal hum. Art becomes chaotic foraging on institutional portals, where notes and finance blur into a dense contradictory ecosystem. Ambiguous classification resists the single niche, the organism dissolving into peak activity. The data drifts, the edges blur, the signal repeats without settling.
- The resultA short video with its own sound, posted to TikTok.