Michael spent his summers in both Crete and Greece and worked as a photographer on his father's excavation at Pseira.

He approaches the motion picture as a series of distinct, but related domains of aesthetic manipulation: camera, image, editing, projection, screen, and sound.

His construction of formalist motion pictures argues against a medium-specific definition and chooses a broad description of formal potentials instead.

José Manuel García Perera, a Universidad de Sevilla painting professor, criticized Betancourt's work with glitch, stating: Michael Betancourt's video work, part of the so-called glitch art, which focuses on the failure that can occur within the digital realm, has been here the basis for a comparative study between different concepts of movement in art, as well as between a current and a past art, a comparison that allows us to see clearly how technological advances have produced radical changes in the physical, spatial and mobile nature of the artwork.

[7] David Finkelstein, in writing about his glitch video series Going Somewhere on Film International, stated: In Betancourt's hands, data moshing becomes a form of cultural resistance.

[8]In a series of articles collected as The Critique of Digital Capitalism, Betancourt criticized what he called the "immaterialism" of digital technology, specifically the claims that digital technology ends scarcity through being able to create value without expenditure, unlike the reality of limited resources, time, and expenses; it is based on denying the actual costs of access, creation, production, and maintenance of computer networks and technologies.

[10] In "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism", Betancourt proposed that the illusion of a rupture between physical and virtual production posed by the aura of the digital can be observed in the political economy of the United States, most especially in the Housing Bubble that burst in 2008.

His analysis states that "Financial 'bubbles' are an inevitable result of a systemic shift focused on the generation of value through the semiotic exchange and transfer of immaterial assets.

Affective labor is the enabler for the creation of the bubbles that are characteristic of the digital capitalist economy, Where the reduction of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent.

In his discussion of the New Aesthetic, he argued that the transformations of production being created by computers and automated assembly lines belong to a larger shift in the digital capitalist economy: The various artifacts brought together as the 'new aesthetic' are united by their orientation not towards human observation or functional utility, but rather by their invocation of productive values without human action -- the aura of the digital's separation of product from all that is required to produce it: labor, capital, resources.

This transition point marks a shift from the fragmentation of the assembly-line where tasks are organized around the repetitive action of masses of human labor (itself an organization that implies semiotic disassembly and standardization) to an automated fabrication where the design is generated on digital machines and then implemented by other digital machines without human labor in the fracture process; the necessity of human-as-designer thus comes into question as it is the only aspect of non-machine agency remaining, an element whose necessity is challenged by evolutionary algorithms and automated design.

It adopts an abstract form precisely because what is represented has no direct physical form... instead of our electronic intermediaries, satellite and deep-space probes, send back numerical data we interpret intellectually to understand what it is like in those places we cannot go, what those things we cannot see look like.