Through a curated selection of poems, essays, digital artifacts, and annotated fragments—many framed as found texts—the dissertation constructs a meta-archive that blurs the boundaries between fiction and scholarship, challenging traditional notions of authorship, authenticity, and permanence. Rowan Black is neither wholly fictional nor entirely real; he is an emergent figure shaped by archival instability, media saturation, and algorithmic presence. His work—recovered, reconstructed, and interpreted by the fictional Corvids Collective—reflects the tension between digital ephemerality and the persistent human need to narrativize experience.

The dissertation is structured into four sections:

• Introduction: Establishes the theoretical foundation, tracing the evolution of identity in digital spaces and positioning Rowan Black within the traditions of postmodern literature, media theory, and experimental authorship.
• The Collected Works of Rowan Black: A creative-critical archive of Black's fragmented writings, presented as a curated assemblage of texts, marginalia, and digital remnants, annotated by the Corvids Collective.
• Personal Reflection: A metatextual examination of the author's own role in constructing and interpreting Black's archive, questioning the boundaries between creator, subject, and critic.
• Critical Analysis: Engages with existentialism, postmodernism, and digital culture studies, examining the implications of Black's work, focusing on technological mediation, archival instability, and the commodification of selfhood.

Ultimately, The Glitch Is the Machine argues that Rowan Black is not simply an individual but an evolving cultural construct—a ghost in the machine of digital authorship. His archive, unstable by design, mirrors the fragmented and transitory nature of identity in the 21st century. Rather than presenting a fixed theory of selfhood, the dissertation embraces an open-ended meditation on what it means to exist—and to be remembered—in a world increasingly mediated by technology.