Olga Goriunova is professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is author of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet and coauthor of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minnesota, 2019).

• ContentsIntroduction: The Uses and Kinds of SubjectsDigital Subjects Operate at a Distance ~ Subject, Person, Self, and Subjectivity ~ Legal Fictive Person and Fictional Persona ~ Different Kinds and Uses of Abstraction ~ Ideal as Mathematical Projection, Inhabiting Abstractions Through Desire ~ The Body as a Reality Setting for Subjects ~ Some Shortcuts Through the Chapters1. Subject at a Distance and the Politics of KnowingWhat Kinds of Digital Subjects Are There? ~ Probability Distributions and Predicted Subjects as Patterns ~ Indexical Capacities of Data ~ An Index, Icon, or Diagram ~ Indexicality Comes from Elsewhere ~ Distance in the Digital Subject ~ The Modern Subject at a Distance from Oneself ~ Transcendental Subjects and Ideal Objects of Calculus ~ Asking About the Potential of Abstract Subjects ~ Subjects' Useful Uselessness: Lots of Abstractions ~ Conundrums2. Ideals: Subjects Desire AbstractionsCorrelating Patterns and Profiling the Ideal Subject ~ Ideal as Abstraction: How to Desire a Top Percentile ~ Becoming Oneself: Desire to Be Known by Computation ~ Recognizability: Artificial Intelligence as Subjective and Objective Truth-Teller ~ Bayesian Prediction in the Quest for Truths ~ The Hegelian Mutual Realization of Subject and World ~ Gripping Subjects3. Struggles for RealitiesSingular Identity, Ground Truthing, Making the "Really True" ~ Nature Versus Biometrics: Data-Stitching and Aligning ~ Shaping Artificial Intelligence to Orchestrate a "Real World" ~ The Shifting Sands of New RealitiesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"Exciting and important, Ideal Subjects has been needed for a decade, if not longer. Olga Goriunova approaches the theory of the subject in the context of modernity and technology, answering a series of questions that has been both central to yet obfuscated by recent scholarship." - Justin Joque, University of Michigan"Olga Goriunova moves deftly between sociocultural analysis and theoretical inquiry to reveal how AI does not simply extract data from human experiences but produces 'ideal subjects' – abstractions of ideals, desires, and data patterns that change subject-making. This book is compelling reading for anyone seeking to understand how we become ourselves (and something other than ourselves) in the age of algorithmic prediction." - M. Beatrice Fazi, University of Sussex"What is a 'digital person,' and why should we care? Goriunova's answers prove as complex as they are fascinating." – Los Angeles Times