Qu Chen’s On-Chain Persona (2025) reveals how contemporary socio-economic systems process and sort human beings rather than value their psychobiological existence. He does so through an apparently cheerful digital version of postmodern pastiche: high-fidelity avatars; nostalgic audiovisual references to 1980s pop culture; colour-saturated virtual arcades made featuring pixelated urban architecture and tropical landscapes; buildings carrying a parodic reproduction of a corporation’s logo, associated with Ethereum L2 networks for gamified experiences and real-world crypto adoption; Super Mario Bros. question blocks popping out tokens; the blurring of labour and leisure.
His work points to how the world of blockchain, data authentication and AI marks the emergence of data colonialism. In this new era of exploitation and power relations, we are experiencing the erosion of autonomy, the monetisation of behavioural prediction, and the proletarianisation of emotions, memory, perception and attention — all forms of extractivism. Whilst we may not yet be ready to acknowledge that colonialism has merely changed its mode of operation, we are increasingly aware of our reduction to data, and On-Chain Persona proves so.
Chen’s video suggests that being ‘stuck on a chair’ in virtual existence is comfortable, yet reminds us that platform dependency is far more than a contemporary habit, harmless addiction, or means of creating work-from-home profit and ambient moods; it is a covert form of control that reduces us to beings as anonymous and disposable as virtual currency. Behind its jolly aesthetics, Chen’s On-Chain Persona conveys that, within data colonialism, a person’s identity and bodily profile becomes legible only as a set of verifiable data, and that the relationship between the subject and the system is therefore not only technological but also political. What is at stake here is both the subject’s relationship with the technological interface and with the elite that controls the infrastructures in a post-digital society.
Whilst Marx spoke of the ‘working class’, Chen refers to the ‘generic digital subject’: yesterday’s proletarian was oppressed inside a smoke-belching factory, today’s is subjected to digital extraction through algorithmic mediation. Both forms of exploitation are determined by hegemonic groups that reproduce their dominance through the alienation of the masses, progressively eroding individual autonomy and subsuming the self into the very systems on which it becomes increasingly dependent.
Yet, towards the end of his visual narrative, Chen questions today’s dependence on technology to also explore whether the digital persona constitutes a replacement and erasure of the real self, of if it extends the self into new forms of existence. Several CGI child figures in a cobalt-blue environment move the critical framework from the infrastructure to the subject it produces: the sequence conveys that pay-and-reward economy is a machine for generating subjectivities. Is this the birth or the minting of personas? The video suggests that the commodification of subjectivities does not necessarily confer an autonomous existence upon them: what remains of these digital selves once devices are switched off? Nothing: switch it on and insert the coin again!
