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Economic anthropology and AI

The self as a mine: Appadurai in Bielefeld

Arjun Appadurai against a visual composition linking profiles, human networks and an open-pit mine.

Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘mineable self’ a new commodity made of relationships, stories, profiles and data. A reading of his 2026 work on personhood, affect and artificial intelligence.

·Martín González Senosiain

On 17 June 2026, in room X-E0-001 at Bielefeld University, Arjun Appadurai gave a lecture whose title reads almost like a manifesto, The Next New Commodity: Mining the Self in the Era of Digital Personhood. The next new commodity would not necessarily be a thing. The mine would be the self.

During the summer semester, Appadurai held the Niklas Luhmann Visiting Professorship at the Faculty of Sociology and also led the doctoral seminar Circulation and Comparison in Global Socio-Cultural Flows. But the idea of the mineable self did not suddenly appear in that room. On 10 February he had published The next big commodity is the mineable self in The Hindu. On 16 April, in Amsterdam, he developed another relevant piece of the puzzle in the lecture Affect in Times of AI: Emotion, Technology, and Democratic Imagination. In May, he returned to the mineable self in a conversation with Reset DOC about the university and self-branding.

From things to the self

It matters that this formulation comes from Appadurai. In 1986, The Social Life of Things proposed studying commodities by following the social conditions that allow them to acquire value, circulate and move into or out of commodity states. Modernity at Large later shifted attention towards the global circulation of people, technologies, capital, images and ideas. In Banking on Words, published in 2015, Appadurai examined how derivative finance turns uncertainties and promises about the future into value.

There is even an older Maussian intuition behind this trajectory. Things never circulate entirely detached from the people and relationships that produced them. In the BielefeldANTHRO Book Podcast episode, Appadurai returns to Marcel Mauss to recall that objects carry something of the people who handle them and to connect the gift with the modern contract. The digital economy now seems to invert the problem. Parts of people and their relationships can themselves become circulating things.

Forty years after The Social Life of Things, the person appears to be entering that trajectory. The issue is not simply that we produce data that other organisations exploit. Appadurai’s formulation shifts attention from the data to what those data come from.

What self is being mined?

It is worth pausing over the word self. The self Appadurai is talking about is not simply a digital identity, a psychological interiority or a set of personal data waiting to be collected.

For decades, his work has described a person constituted socially. In Modernity at Large, imagination ceases to be a private faculty and becomes a social practice through which people construct possible worlds and versions of who they are. Media, migration, images and stories do not merely act upon a pre-existing identity. They participate in its formation.

Later, in his work on the capacity to aspire, Appadurai argued that even the ability to imagine and navigate futures is cultural and relational. Aspirations do not emerge in isolation. They are formed in social life and distributed unequally.

The most direct precursor to the mineable self appears in Banking on Words. There, the person ceases to appear as an indivisible unit and instead becomes dividual, capable of being separated into attributes, risks and relationships. In the BielefeldANTHRO Book Podcast conversation recorded during his stay, Appadurai returns to this problem in especially clear terms. Modern systems, he argues, have ‘sliced us up’. We are simultaneously the person who works, borrows money, receives a pension, owns a vehicle or has a particular health status. Each domain generates different profiles and scores, yet no operation ultimately puts them back together into a complete person.

In the same conversation, he goes as far as saying that ‘there is no such thing as me’ if by me we mean a final sum capable of recomposing all those profiles into a stable unity. For these infrastructures, what exists instead are partial, operational versions.

The Amsterdam lecture adds another layer. There, Appadurai speaks of the algorithmic self, a self increasingly binarised, arranged through oppositions and rendered logical and calculable. His immediate question is what then happens to affect and to those dimensions of experience that are not readily susceptible to quantification.

Understood in this way, the mineable self is not an essence hidden inside each person. It is something closer to sociality made narratable, visible and calculable. Relationships, stories, consumption, risks, aspirations, trajectories and forms of self-presentation can be detached from the experiences that produced them, compared with others and made valuable within infrastructures that do not need to represent a person in all their complexity.

Appadurai also presents the self as an infinitely renewable resource. The mine replenishes itself as we live. Every new relationship, story, decision or interaction can produce fresh material available for extraction.

The question, then, is not only what platforms know about a person. It is what version of that person they need to manufacture in order to calculate them, and what is left out in the process.

The mine is sociality

In his February article, Appadurai mentions our friendships, love lives, family connections, classmates, children, people we work with, neighbours, digital lives, political alliances and even those who supply us with food and medicines. He calls this capacity to map both deep affinities and fleeting ties ‘profiling on steroids’.

The choice of mining breaks with the friendly language of platforms. Sharing, connecting, recommending or personalising describe actions. Mining introduces an economic relationship. There is something that can be extracted, an infrastructure capable of extracting it and actors who concentrate the resulting value.

The formulation brings Appadurai close to debates such as Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias’s ‘data colonialism’, or to the questions raised by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein in Data Feminism about who creates categories, who counts and who benefits from what becomes data.

Amsterdam adds a further paradox. The same platforms capable of capturing and valorising our relationships can intensify the sense of connection without requiring genuine solidarity or shared interests. Appadurai speaks there of networks of emotions that circulate faster than classical forms of assembly, organisation or protest. Connectivity, in that sense, does not guarantee community.

Stories are the access code

Stories occupy another central place. In the February article, they function as routes into the mine. Streaming, media, networks, branding and forms of self-presentation have expanded the global market for stories about people. The promise appears democratic. Everyone has a story and, potentially, every story can find an audience. That democratisation can also become extractive infrastructure.

Hence Appadurai’s play on Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self becomes the ‘sources of the selfie’.

We do not merely leave data behind through our actions. We also learn to narrate ourselves in forms that can circulate. Profiles, photographs, videos, CVs, opinions, experiences, professional trajectories or political identities turn the narration of a life into both personal expression and material available for classification and valuation.

Amsterdam reinforces the centrality of narrative from a different problem. Appadurai argues there that affective politics cannot be contested through rational argument alone, and he uses Netflix as an example of a remarkably effective machine for finding, packaging and circulating stories from very different contexts. It is not the same argument as the mineable self, but both share an intuition. Narration is one of the ways through which people and collectives become legible, memorable and circulable.

The interview published by Reset DOC in May carries the concern into the university. Appadurai criticises a higher education system permeated by market logic and by the cultivation of the mineable self, the person turned into a resource that can be profiled, monetised and optimised. The mine is not only inside platforms. We can also learn to construct ourselves as a mine.

The calculable person

The problem then reaches the very notion of the individual. Appadurai describes a person distributed across credit scores, actuarial calculations, algorithmic repositories of information and consumer profiles. Those representations do not need to form a complete and coherent portrait.

For one system we may be a financial risk and for another a purchase history. For another, a patient, an audience or a mobility pattern. They matter because they do not merely describe us. They return to the world as decisions.

A score can determine access to credit. A profile can change the opportunities that appear. A prediction can shape how someone is treated. In the BielefeldANTHRO Book Podcast, Appadurai identifies banks, insurers and hospitals as agents of this actuarial impulse and asks a decisive question. How does a score that did not exist twenty years ago become normalised until it appears to express an obvious truth about a person?

The operation runs in two directions. Something qualitative is extracted from a life, converted into quantity, processed numerically and then returned to the world translated back into a qualitative decision. The person receives an individual response, but that response has been produced by a machinery of fragmentation and calculation.

This is where the digital personhood of the Bielefeld title becomes especially suggestive. The digital person need not be a complete double of the individual. It is enough for different calculable versions of the same life to be capable of acting upon it.

And then artificial intelligence appears

Appadurai makes a fundamental clarification in the February article. The new commodity is not artificial intelligence. It is the self.

AI expands the capacity to connect, classify and recombine those fragments, but Appadurai distrusts both celebration and apocalyptic certainty. In the Amsterdam lecture and the Bielefeld podcast, he argues that claims of expertise about such a recent technology are exaggerated. Its effects remain poorly understood, although that does not allow us to wait passively for a definitive theory.

His most fertile concern lies elsewhere. While we seek machines capable of becoming more like people, he argues, we are also making people more like machines.

In the podcast he formulates this through an everyday example. Learning to produce the right prompt also means learning to behave in a way that is more suitable for the machine to understand us. In Amsterdam, he takes that intuition towards the algorithmic self, a binarised, logical and formalised version of the person.

The question is no longer only how far AI can come to resemble a human being.

We can also ask what part of the human must be left out in order for a person to become computable.

Whose self?

Here Appadurai’s description becomes our question.

Mines are never distributed symmetrically. Neither are their rights, benefits or harms. To speak of the self as a mine means asking which people become extractable first, who can refuse, who can demand explanations, who is misrepresented by the available categories and who performs the work that keeps these infrastructures running.

Digital extraction has a geography, regulation, class, gender, language and colonial history. Not everyone has the same capacity to preserve spaces of opacity or to contest an algorithmic classification.

This is why saying that ‘data is the new oil’ begins to feel insufficient. Appadurai’s formulation is more unsettling. The mine is made of the relationships that constitute us, the people we know, the stories we tell, the institutions that classify us and the ways in which we learn to present ourselves to other people and to technical systems.

In 1986, Appadurai invited us to follow things in order to understand how they acquired value. Forty years later, we can follow the fragments that leave a life: where they circulate, who combines them, when their value changes and what happens when they return as a decision about the person from whom they were extracted.

Here an older question of fetishism also comes into view. A profile, a score or a prediction can appear to be an evident property of a person when in fact it condenses social relations, institutional decisions, categories, labour and infrastructures that disappear from view. Perhaps the problem is not only that life becomes a commodity, but that what calculates it comes to seem capable of speaking for itself.

The mine does not merely produce data. It produces objects that return to our lives with the authority of truth.

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