On May 4 and 5, Data & Society gathered researchers, academics, creatives, and technologists to reflect on the issues raised by various forms of digital doubling. Our “Digital Doppelgangers” workshop explored questions that are at the core of what it means to have a doppelganger in a digital world: How do our digital doubles allow us to know ourselves and each other? What questions do they raise about representation, authenticity, and impersonation? How might we construct our doubles in desirable ways, and how might we perform them for algorithms? How are digital doppelgangers involved in the ways power, surveillance, and control are exercised?

In a piece for Points, co-host and researcher Livia Garofalo reflects on some of the workshop’s central themes, and what might come next.