THE VALIDATION JUNKY BOOK
ARTBOOK PUBLICATION - IN PROGRESS
LONDON, 2025
LONDON, 2025
THE VALIDATION JUNKY is a graphic book about identity in a world saturated with technology. Across 300 pages, layered drawings slowly build up a picture of one fictional character shaped by algorithms, platform economies, and the politics of being seen.
Each page adds a new symbol or structural element, gradually accumulating visual and conceptual density. These layers render visible the usually hidden systems shaping the world that THE VALIDATION JUNKY has to navigate—an emergent landscape shaped by optimisation, feedback loops, and neurochemical validation.
The book unfolds like a slow reveal. THE VALIDATION JUNKY is a speculative design project, not a character study in the usual sense. It doesn’t ask how they might return to some pre-digital, “authentic” self; it explores how an individual might navigate platform capitalism with a sense of agency, without giving in entirely.
Humour, contradiction, and exaggeration are used as tools. The book invites readers to reflect on what it means to live in a world where desirability is engineered, identity is data, and algorithmic visibility is survival. In this world, THE VALIDATION JUNKY, as a designed experiment, examines the very real architectures of selfhood in a hyper-mediated age.
Keywords - Digital Identity, Algorithmic Desirability, Platform Capitalism, Speculative Publishing, Post-Ontology, Selfhood, Social Metrics, Networked Subjectivity, Feedback Systems, Performativity, Identity Capital, Media Aesthetics, Designed Fiction, Cybernetic Intimacies, Validation Culture.
Each page adds a new symbol or structural element, gradually accumulating visual and conceptual density. These layers render visible the usually hidden systems shaping the world that THE VALIDATION JUNKY has to navigate—an emergent landscape shaped by optimisation, feedback loops, and neurochemical validation.
The book unfolds like a slow reveal. THE VALIDATION JUNKY is a speculative design project, not a character study in the usual sense. It doesn’t ask how they might return to some pre-digital, “authentic” self; it explores how an individual might navigate platform capitalism with a sense of agency, without giving in entirely.
Humour, contradiction, and exaggeration are used as tools. The book invites readers to reflect on what it means to live in a world where desirability is engineered, identity is data, and algorithmic visibility is survival. In this world, THE VALIDATION JUNKY, as a designed experiment, examines the very real architectures of selfhood in a hyper-mediated age.
Keywords - Digital Identity, Algorithmic Desirability, Platform Capitalism, Speculative Publishing, Post-Ontology, Selfhood, Social Metrics, Networked Subjectivity, Feedback Systems, Performativity, Identity Capital, Media Aesthetics, Designed Fiction, Cybernetic Intimacies, Validation Culture.
THE VALIDATION JUNKY BOOK
IN PROGRESS
Creative Direction & Concept, Adam Peacock
Supported by Goldsmiths University of London UK, UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK South and East Network for Social Sciences (SeNSS)