Abstract
The Over-the-Top (OTT) streaming platform is not, as its infrastructure might suggest, a neutral technology of content delivery. It is, this paper argues, a technology of the self colonised: a governance architecture that produces the platformed subject as simulacrum, returns that simulacrum to the subject as authentic identity, and extracts behavioural surplus from the misrecognition. Drawing on Baudrillard's (1994) theory of simulacra and hyperreality, Foucault's (1977; 1988) analytics of disciplinary power and self-formation, Zuboff's (2019) surveillance capitalism, Grassé's (1959) principle of stigmergy, and Camus's (1955) philosophical absurdism, this paper develops a transdisciplinary account of what is theorised here as algorithmic subjectivation: the process by which behavioural data is computationally transmuted into a predictive identity model, which is then re-presented to the subject as personalised care. The paper further introduces the concepts of simulacral trending, algorithmic stigmergy, hyperreal murmuration, and ontological arbitrage to map the structural conditions under which OTT platforms generate collective cultural formations of unprecedented scale without producing commensurate cultural meaning. The paper concludes on an irresolvable structural irony: that the platform's perfection of individual personalisation constitutes, simultaneously, the most complete form of civilisational solitude yet engineered.