Broken Soul

A visual exploration of psychological collapse under surveillance capitalism. Through intentional camera movement, the series traces a journey from invisibility to eruption, then to exhausted resignation and tentative awakening.

What happens to the human soul when it becomes data?

"Broken Soul" investigates the psychological costs of living under surveillance capitalism, an economic system that feeds on the continuous extraction of human experience. As corporations harvest our behaviour as raw material for prediction markets, our clicks, pauses, and hesitations become commodities sold to those who seek to control our future. Through intentional camera movement (ICM) and long exposures (2-20 seconds), these images visualise the impossibility of maintaining a stable self when existence becomes data. Motion blur is not an aesthetic accident but a conceptual necessity - the only honest way to photograph a self that can no longer hold fixed form under constant algorithmic observation.

The series traces a psychological arc, from desperate attempts at invisibility through explosive rage to the hollow acceptance that follows total exhaustion. Surveillance capitalism wins not through violence, but it wins through fatigue. The horror lies not in brutality but in warm, golden tones: domination presented as progress, extraction as connection.

This work emerged from personal confrontation with digital burnout and the erosion of authentic privacy. I sought to make visible what we all feel but struggle to articulate - the fragmentation of selfhood under perpetual observation. Each photograph serves as a witness to a contemporary crisis: the cost of visibility in an age where to exist is to be processed. Yet the final image offers disruption: awakening. As Shoshana Zuboff insists in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this system is not inevitable; it's a "rogue variant" we can still refuse. The Polish idiom warns: "Licho nie śpi“ - the devil never sleeps. Will we wake in time to resist, or learn to inhabit the ruins of ourselves? I invite viewers to pause, reflect, and confront these uncomfortable truths about what it means to be human when humanity itself becomes raw material.