0-Degree Plane of Neuroelectronic Continuity: AI & Psychosocial Evaporation

Generative AI, rounding an nth hype-cycle victory lap, promises to revolutionize virtually every application against which it’s roughly patched. To a giddy mob of LinkedIn para-journalists it represents a step-change in efficiency, a rip-and-replace solution for content generation, an oracle squeezed from Wikipedia’s digestive tract. To the techno-optimists, Generative AI holds emancipatory potential: a perpetual motion machine of free labor, a tool for decentralized operations, a clamorous alarm signaling the end of intellectual property.

This chapter argues that Generative AI, an assemblage of technology platforms and techno-ideologies, calls forth little substance in terms of social reorganization. Instead of enacting a new society, Generative AI emerges concurrently with an adolescent social order – a subtle, automatic social transformation that carries the through-line of postmodernity all the way to its conclusion. The postmodern subject’s tendency toward atomization accelerates and completes as its atoms approach infinitesimal scale. A new social physics emerges, a dark world of vaporous non-beings who interrelate through ambience, pressure, diffusion, and asynchronous commingling. This social vaporreality exists prior to AI in every sense, functioning as the latter’s socioeconomic preconditions, its technical substrate, and its placental subsistence medium.