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 149 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. Every day becomes one record, and the computer measures how much any two days have in common: the photos I took, what the language read in the day, what I wrote in my notes, the kinds of pages I browsed, what I searched for, what I watched. Days that keep landing on the same subject drift toward each other until they form a group.
The schedule barely counts. An earlier version leaned on things like time of day and lumped 83 of 100 days into one group, and every name it came up with was generic. A Spell is days that share subject matter, not days that share a schedule. Right now 37 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 with ModelScope, an early open text-to-video model from 2023. It works at 256 pixels square and 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 video prompt written from itArt practitioner, fragmented light, rigid hum, chaotic foraging, institutional portals, dense ecosystem, urban isolation, gritty documentary, desaturated, analog grain
- The sound prompttape hiss, fractured light hum, rigid diurnal drone, distorted institutional radio, blurred audio data, glitching signal loop, chaotic foraging noise, dense contradictory static, dissolving audio texture, fragmented hour repetitions, lo-fi tape hiss, distorted, noisy, glitchy texture, avant-garde drone, unsettling ambience, degraded recording, blown speaker, broken radio, experimental noise. Sound by AudioLDM, another open model.
- The resultEight clips of 24 frames each, joined into one video and posted to TikTok.