Greetings from creep city. The weather’s been fluctuating between way too hot and way too cold for May, which affects the kind of makeup I wear. Yesterday was on the chilly side, so I took advantage of it to try out some new eyeshadow that’ll probably melt in warmer temperatures. This morning I realized my eyes really don’t like it, which means I’ll have to spend the day tending to what I can only hope is a short-lived medical emergency. The plan was to finish a long article about para-academia, but instead I’ll be on the couch, ice cubes bleeding down my cheeks. Call it becoming-woman / suffering for the aesthetic… very glamorous and cool, definitely not annoying.

That would’ve my fourth para-academia piece. The others are Para-Academia is the Future; What is Para-Academia?; and Para-Academic Techno-Philosophy. I never intended to write a whole series, but as I get The Lenox Institute off the ground, I’ve been learning a lot about this niche. I’m eager to share what I’ve learned, so please spare a thought for my eyes!

For now, I’ve got a mini-essay about AI hallucinations that’s been in a drafts folder for a while. I thought it might turn into something longer, but maybe the brevity is welcome. It’s more straightforward than typical Elf Theory fare - I wrote it for general audiences.

Before that, though, a few news items:

• Registration for Lenox’s launch event is now live. Check it out on Instagram or the venue’s website. It’s Wednesday June 10th, 7-9 p.m. at Index Space in Chinatown, and it’s an interactive seminar exploring AI’s impact on language and meaning. I will facilitate, and there will be a cash bar. (No word yet on whether I can choose the background music.)

• The latest LEPHT HAND features political theorist Jana Bacevic. “Logging Off, Opting Out, and Not Texting Back” addresses Jana’s work on non-reciprocity, or the idea that we don’t owe anything to the people and systems that support us, at least in principle. This was my first time hosting an episode by myself, and it’s one of my favorites to date.

• Last but not least, until June 21st, you can sign up for Elf Theory at $2/month forever (the rate gets locked in permanently with the sale.) After the 21st, it goes back to Substack’s lowest tier, $5/month. Elf Theory will always be mostly free, but I’m working on paywalled content to boost the value for paid subscribers. I’ll spare you the bit about how this is a personal necessity, but I will say that if you can’t afford it and want access to anything paywalled, you can email me: emma.stamm@gmail.com - just let me know how you found Elf Theory and why you’re interested in that piece.

Onto the essay: it’s about my gripe with “hallucinate” as a term for “wrong” (inaccurate, bizarre, etc.) AI outputs. I’m putting “wrong” in scare quotes for the same reason I don’t like “hallucinate:” both suggest that the traits we consider “wrong” reflect something inherent in AI, when they really only express human judgment. This may not seem like a big deal, but it has practical consequences. As I wrote a few weeks ago:

We should ban the term “hallucinate” as it relates to AI. When we say that AI “hallucinates,” we’re suggesting that it’s a lot more similar to human minds than it actually is. On a rhetorical level, it supports the myth that AI is conscious, or that it might gain consciousness one day. This notion needs to be fought on all fronts, since it only helps Big Tech.

When we refer to outputs as “hallucinations,” we’re suggesting that something is happening inside AI that technically shouldn’t be. But there’s no difference in principle between processes that yield hallucinations and those that don’t. “Hallucinate” doesn’t refer to malfunction qua technical process; in fact, it doesn’t denote any particular type of process or another. When AI hallucinates, it’s going through the same steps as when it’s working properly.

This contrasts with the original meaning of “hallucinate,” which refers to a distinctly human phenomenon. In these cases, “hallucinate” describes a condition internal to the person who’s hallucinating, like someone experiencing psychosis or tripping on acid. These states have endogenous roots (the mixing of brain chemistry with drugs happens “inside” us); what they are isn’t based on how we think about them. “Hallucinate” has always been attached to something that doesn’t reduce to human judgment, and its AI usage still has this connotation.

I don’t expect anyone to give up “hallucinate” in favor of more complex jargon. We need to be pithy, especially as writers and educators. Ideally, we’ll come up with a totally new word for everything “hallucinate” currently stands for, since much of the misunderstanding that plagues AI comes from having imported already-existing language with misleading connotations into our vocabulary for it. And this really is necessary - the tech industry loves the fact that our AI metaphors are more spurious than not, since the knowledge gap gives them an advantage over consumers.

One thing before I wrap up: I know it’s wrong to imply that human hallucinations are all of the same type, empirically speaking. Or that they’re as different from “normal” mental activity as I’m making it seem. I’m sacrificing technicalities to keep this concise.

That’s it for now; I have to get back to the cold compress. Thanks for reading, and please remember to be careful with your makeup. A more substantial piece is coming soon.

Hi from somewhere east of these places. Instead of a regular post this week, I made a video. It’s a close look at the concept of "AI literacy" - how most people define it vs. how I define it; why it matters; why we’re in a crucial moment for it; and how educators should approach politics here.

I mostly ad-libbed, and I’m not sure if I made my points as forcefully as I could. As it is, they represent many years of reading, writing, coding, and teaching. Mostly as a professor, but also as someone who’s written about the science and politics of automation for general-audience magazines.

As I say at the beginning, I’m still new to making videos. Hopefully my discomfort isn’t too obvious, or if it is that it’s not too distracting. I’m doing my best! (Why am I apologizing so much?)

One more thing before the summary: I am running another sale on Elf Theory. Running discounts so often feels scammy, but it’s just because Substack’s lowest tier is $5/month. Here’s where you can subscribe for $2/month forever, which is where I’d set it permanently if I could. It ends on June 21st - I’m calling it “the solstice special.”

I know the economy is terrible, and I know online content doesn’t feel as real as other things you could pay for. But Elf Theory takes a lot of time and energy, and I have to try to make money from it. Big thanks to everyone who’s already paid, and for what it’s worth, if you can’t afford it and want access to anything paywalled, email me: emma.stamm@gmail.com. I only ask that you let me know how you found me and why you’re interested in that particular piece.

Summary

0:00-1:30: Introduction — on whiteboards, curtains, and cameras.

1:30-6:16: What “AI literacy” typically means; what I mean by it; and why it’s so important — especially for anti-AI activists.

6:17-14:55: The AI literacy window — why this is especially urgent right now.

14:56-18:19: Academia and the private sector — why both fail at AI education. Note that I briefly refer to “Para-academic techno-philosophy,” a post I wrote back in March.

18:20-24:35: Political positioning — why AI educators shouldn’t take a pro- or anti- stance, at least not without a lot of dialogue with their students. (Yes, I left the most controversial bit to the end.)

Since this was improvised, I had no idea it would come out to 25 minutes. Sorry it's so long! (I am apologizing again!)

I’ll wrap this up with some unrelated but very exciting news: Robert Fripp is now on Substack. The man, the myth, the rock’n’roll legend. Self-described as “still warm to the touch” at 80. We are not worthy. This track is a favorite. Thanks as always for tuning in.

Note: the audio version is the same as what’s below, and it’s downloadable. The volume might be high or low on your end - I’d start with it turned down.

***

People keep telling me I might be autistic. I’ve heard it from friends and acquaintances recently, always with some hedging. Not that it’s an offensive remark these days. Autism is thick in the 2020s cultural bloodstream; everyone who seems a little quirky probably gets comments from time to time. There are good reasons not to put too much stock in them. This post sums up my thoughts here.

Before I go further, I need to do some hedging myself. Pop-psych versions of autism bother me so much that I find it a difficult topic to think about, let alone write about. The stereotypes have nothing to do with how I see autism as a real, living thing, it’s just that they’re awful, and they can get under your skin even if you don’t think they will. I have more to say on that, but first, a bit about my twin.

He was diagnosed when we were two. By the time we were five, the care he required was so extensive that my family had to place him in a boarding institution. This was in the early 90s, before most people were familiar with autism as anything other than a narrow set of cognitive problems and savant capabilities (the latter is largely thanks to Rain Man and other Hollywood abominations.) As far as I know, my parents learned as much about it as they could, trying to keep him home. Back then the treatments weren’t as advanced as they are now, but he’s so far on the “autism” side of the autism spectrum that I don’t think the outcome would’ve been different if we were younger.

I know I’m speaking in normative terms, the language of treating - healing - altering a person’s natural state. It’s hard for me not to. I would like to talk to my brother and have him respond. I would like him to be more of a presence in my life. These thoughts push the limits of my counterfactual imagination.

Until recently, I always thought I had a lot to lose and not much to gain with a diagnosis. It’s not about stigma, especially since the stigma isn’t as bad as it used to be. In 2021, Autism Awareness Month became Autism Acceptance Month, a designation my family would have found bewildering back in the day, but I suppose it’s an encouraging development. The thing is that the very same force that got people comfortable with autism, at least to some degree, has made me want to keep my distance from conversations about it. I mean the internet. It produces autism as an object of knowledge and ostensible totality. What I’ve found about autism online doesn’t even come close to approximating my experiences with my brother, or those that make me think I might be autistic too. It’s not just that I don’t want to be seen as uncritically following pop-psych trends; I’m more bothered by the possibility that even if I kept a diagnosis to myself, it would start to become a kind of psychic furniture. I’d feel recruited into the same operations that don’t register my brother as a real person, on account of the fact that he can’t use the internet. The data of his life as he lives it will never be available online. In the age of language machines, people without language don’t exist.

But my thoughts about getting diagnosed have started to shift. I realize I may have spent far more time experiencing a certain kind of pain than most non-autistic people ever will. This is what I hear. I always thought that the pain was normal, but the possibility that it isn’t means there’s a chance that I could figure out how to avoid it in the future. If this is true, I’d be an idiot not to try, even if it means profiling myself in a way that’s useful to stupid politics.

As I mentioned, I am aware that plenty of non-autistic people get clocked as autistic by their friends. It’s the zeitgeist. So, going off the autistic-woman checklist, I’ll share why I think I might qualify: prone to philosophizing (no kidding) and intense embarrassment; sees the world in terms of patterns and structures; tends to lose track of time in the midst of focus-intensive activities (usually writing - but isn’t that normal for writers and other creative types...); and, although I am not especially credulous about abstract matters like politics, I can be overly trusting in personal affairs. Historically, I’ve failed to view certain forms of behavior as aggressive, deceptive, or otherwise symptomatic of disorder or bad intent. (I’ve tried to correct for this over the years; moving a lot, especially between big cities, has helped.)

More than any of that, though, I tend to keep autistic company. My first boyfriend had Asperger’s and was quite candid about what it meant for us. Another fit the pattern to a T, but we never talked about it. Friends and coworkers told us they were autistic; we visited my brother; but for however long he suspected that either one of us had more than a mere affinity with it, he kept it to himself. This was before the great onlineing of autism and the emergence of “neurodivergent” as a well-known term. It seems quaint and maybe unbelievable if you’re under a certain age, but not long ago, you could seem pretty damn autistic and not have anyone mention it.

In the weeks leading up to our break-up - three years into the relationship - he told me he thought he might be. I was very glad to hear it, but since it took a lot of courage, I didn’t want to react too strongly. I don’t remember exactly how I replied. It’s hard for me to reconstruct in memory, because it’s part of a chain of events that ends with his death. Autism has a lot of comorbidities, and my helplessness in that situation is something I’ll probably never get over completely.

I have a recurring dream where my brother and I speak. They take place in different settings, but we’re always talking freely, just he and I. It’s perfectly intelligible on both ends. He is telling me something about himself.

I’m aware of The Telepathy Tapes, the podcast that “proves” a link between autism and magical abilities (telepathy, precog, connection to a higher power etc.). I won’t watch or listen because I don’t see how it could avoid exploiting autistic people and their families. It’s very popular, but I want no part of this phenomenon. I wish I could talk about my dreams without giving a foothold to projects like this.

But there is some spiritual significance in how I think about autism. I think that if I’ve got it at all, even the tiniest little drop, it presents as a kind of inflation of meaning - a sense that the codes of language aren’t just stacked on top of each other but are also arranged horizontally. Words come with a surplus - more shades of connotation, more points of contact with primordial mana than what we typically pick up on and put into communicative play. This confounds one of the big autistic stereotypes: I like poetry, I understand metaphor.

I see this as an autistic trait because symptomatic extremes in either direction often share a root cause. A strong taste or distaste for certain foods can start with the same nutrient deficiency. Attributing too little meaning to language, to an “autistic” or even schizoid degree, can come from the same psycho-physical constitution that makes a woman blush at the most mundane of sentences. All words are poetry; actual poetry is so intense as to be profane; music and perfume and elegant clothing are mana.

I like a lot of femme-coded things that autistic people aren’t supposed to like. Actually I don’t know if those clichés still exist…

When I say autism is you and I, I mean that this expansive dimension of communication follows me to everyday interactions. If I qualify for a diagnosis, I’d want to tell people it doesn’t isolate me. If anything, it helps me get on their wavelength.

Mostly my twin isn’t just a reference to my twin, it’s also because the figure of the autistic person has shown up as a metaphysical double over and over again since I was young. I was really close with my ex who died. The drawn-out process of witnessing life and clarity drain from his spirit was a formative experience. The form that this experience seems to want to take keeps changing. This is the first time I’m writing about it. It’s decades of insomnia that reconstitute themselves moment to moment, often without a signal or bridge to anything that seems like it could possibly ring true for anyone but me.

I know I said this post would be about something else. That one is still in the works. This one is a précis: words that model better words. It’s all I have so far; I hope I get closer to the truth eventually.

Hi from blue New York. The other day, someone asked me why I care so much about the difference between fiction and philosophy. To phrase the concern as a question: what qualities distinguish the two, on principle? I’ve been thinking and writing about it for ages.

My recent post on Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines: Cultural AI and The End of Remainder Humanism looks at it through the lens of language’s formal features. So did my old book project, following an interest in structuralism, computation, and literary theory that started back in undergrad. The book is on indefinite hiatus, but it explains why I’m so excited by Language Machines and the research agendas that surround it.

The answer has to do with power. To put it crudely, I see fiction as belonging to the category of art, which means that its main “product” or contribution to the world is beauty. While it’s often beautiful, philosophy isn’t art; it belongs to knowledge, which is a separate domain.

One of my ironclad philosophical premises (or “priors” if you’re a Bayesian) is that knowledge is always a façade of power. Everything we label “knowledge” calls attention to certain realities while denying others, which is a power operation. I would add that all knowledge is political, although this depends on how you define politics. (For what it’s worth, this is Foucault 101, where people either become lifelong believers or start getting annoyed.)

With that, here’s the gist: if there’s no formal boundary that prevents art — all forms of art, not just fiction — from being rendered as knowledge, then nothing in principle falls beyond the remit of what can be wielded as power. At least nothing that’s intelligible to human beings, anyway.

Back in 2024, I ran a poll on Mastodon related to this question:

This was motivated by my suspicion that, thanks to the slow creep of computation into all areas of human activity, a process that inevitably leads to AI, the purview of the epistemic — or that which falls on the side of knowledge/power/politics rather than beauty — was expanding to include everything, quite literally. A scary thought.

I am playing fast and loose with words here. Some would say that AI’s substantive matter (what’s it built from and what it produces as output) doesn’t count as “information,” which is an unquestioned assumption of the poll as it’s phrased. I think about the lines between data, information, and knowledge a lot — in the courses I used to teach, I’d present students with the hierarchical schema data - information - knowledge - wisdom, first as something that they should accept at face value, and later as a matter of debate. There’s plenty to get into here, but for present purposes, using “information” as the term for “what AI consists of and produces” is fair enough. A more serious treatment would have to highlight Claude Shannon.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that most people said no. I am happy about the level of engagement, though; 19 responses to a question like this is pretty good. If nothing else, it tells me that I’m not the only one who finds it interesting. (Caveat: Mastodon is terrible for sampling the general population.)

The book may never happen, but since I’ll probably write more about this in the future, I thought I’d lay out the stakes. For now, here’s some news.

News

• As part of a push for visibility, The Lenox Institute for Advanced Study is now on Instagram, and I’ve decided that I’ll start posting to the personal account I’ve had for years. My personal account has basically been a burner: I’ve used it to follow artists and small businesses, checking it infrequently while studiously avoiding anyone I know IRL. Aside from that, Instagram is mostly a mystery to me. I am aware that in terms of marketing usefulness, it may be past its prime, but we still need to have one. So: please subscribe to Lenox’s account, and no hard feelings about following my personal account or not (I have no idea what I’ll post there, tbh.)

• Relatedly, the next Elf Theory post will be about Lenox’s educational philosophy. I don’t want to cross the streams too much, but while we get started, sharing more about Lenox here seems like a good idea. Once we start doing promo for our first event, I’ll share the registration info and details. You can already mark your calendars: it’s Wednesday June 10 at 7pm in lower Manhattan. Writing to info@lenoxinstitute.org will get you on our mailing list, where we’ll send detailed updates and calls for collaboration at a sane pace (no more than 2x a month.)

• The newest LEPHT HAND is about one of my favorite topics of all time: the critical reception, philosophy, and politics of prog rock. I was really excited when Dave Mandl — famed WFMU DJ, bassist, and prog apologist — accepted my interview invitation. Sereptie and I are both big prog fans; I had to pitch this episode idea eventually.

• The second-to-newest LEPHT HAND is with Bob Langan: The PBS Unconscious: Childhood Wonder, Nostalgia, and the Collapse of Shared American Culture. I like Sereptie’s description for it, but I’ll add that we spent a lot of time discussing late-night diners, Wawa, Buc-ees, and Sheetz. So east coast, I even got to talk about my hometown. (I am a Poughkeepsie apologist.)

• Last but not least, I joined Acid Horizon for an episode that puts Mark Fisher in conversation with David Foster Wallace. Our guest was DFW expert Hannah Smart, and I’ll share the YouTube link because I really like the comments.

The next post won’t have nearly so many links or any promo, although the hope is that it’s welcome and not too aggravating. In any case, it’s all part of a necessary work hustle. Also, if you’re so inclined, please know that I like hearing from readers. Even if you don’t subscribe! Emma.stamm@gmail.com or you can message me here. Thanks!

This is a video about why I do theory and philosophy. Especially at a time when they might seem detached from reality. The political horrorshow isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

I know that I don’t have to justify this newsletter or the podcasts. But there’s some value in getting ahead of criticism, even when the critic is just in your head.

Also, in case it’s not obvious, I don’t make videos very often. (I’ll try to remember to maintain eye contact next time.)

Yesterday I came across Franco Berardi’s new book, Thinking Gaza. I hadn’t heard about it until I saw a copy in person. The back cover says:

After Gaza, it is time to remember that the attempt to humanize history has failed, and that there will not be a second try.

It is time to recognize that the experiment called ‘civilization’ has failed. What is left of civilization is the destructive power of technology — particularly, military technology. When ferocity prevails, technology becomes a function of war.

Thinking Gaza means first of all recognizing the irredeemable failure of the universalism of reason and democracy—that is, the dissolution of the very core of civilization.

A question: what happens to philosophy when we reject civilization? Do we return it to the gods?

Last week, one of my interview guests phoned in from Mount Fruška Gora, the Serbian side. She writes about the social factors that influence scholarly critique; the failures of higher ed; what it means to think “together” or “with” something or someone (I like this essay); and all of the emotions that are exploited or sidelined as we turn political work into scholarly agendas.

Towards the end, I brought up anti-civ philosophy. Among two academics, this should’ve slid into hedging about uncomfortable concepts like “the primitive” and “the natural.” It did not. And we didn’t adopt the obvious ironic posture towards a body of research that aims to undo the conditions of its own possibility. In the moment, the paradox seemed to take care of itself.

There’s a streak of nihilism and masculinism to this kind of talk. I get it. Sometimes it seems indefensible. But the impure me likes a vision that pierces the night just because it’s open to it. The pupils dilate - the gaze melts - deeper shapes and patterns reveal themselves. You start to see in the dark.

And then you say no civilization, because all other words feel bloodless. That’s the concept that breaks the final code.

Anti-civilization scholarship. Hard to assimilate, won’t leave me alone.

Last week, I quoted the end of Language Machines in a note here:

The difference between why an idea is powerful and that idea itself is surely of great importance, but their continuity is too.

There’s a space between ideas, which are very close-to-the-head things, and what gives ideas power, all the histories and supply chains and muffled screams that take them from a space in front of the skull down to the dark red organs.

Anti-civ people get it. So does everyone who gives theory to the knowable world, the world of causes and effects. Sometimes the road there looks like words; sometimes it’s wet strength and skin contact with the starry dark. There’s still time enough for both.

Hi from Queens, where examples of Fisherian weirdness and eeriness lie in wait at every turn. A good place to write a newsletter called Elf Theory. Fair warning: this post is more theory than elf, at least after the introduction.

Big thanks to everybody who reached out after the last post, which introduced The Lenox Institute for Advanced Study. At the moment we are planning our inaugural event, which will be in NYC in June. Details and registration to come. Exciting stuff!

To get on the Lenox Institute mailing list, email info@lenoxinstitute.org. Elf Theory is not the mailing list — I will share updates here only occasionally. And while we’re on the topic, if you’re a recent subscriber, please know that most posts don’t include nearly this much news. Some will, out of necessity, but I won’t make it a rule. Thanks for understanding.

News

• I am running a major discount. If you follow that link by April 30, you get access to paid subscriptions at the cost of $1/month forever (real forever pricing!). After that, it goes back to the lowest tier that Substack allows, $5/month. I use paywalls sparingly, mostly for a little income, but also to protect my privacy (some posts are very personal) and boost visibility (the algorithm likes paid subscribers, hence the current sale.)

• The latest LEPHT HAND episode features my friend Sujit Thomas. Sujit is a medical anthropologist who studies how psychedelic therapists address the spiritual concerns surrounding death and mystical experiences in medical settings. We talk about the clinical “death transcendence scale,” Aldous Huxley’s heroic final LSD trip, and whether a medicalized “good death” destroys the excess and irrationality that makes life worth affirming. Deleuze, Foucault, and Nietzsche mentioned, true to form.

• Acid Horizon Research Commons’ summer offerings are now open for enrollment. Starting in August, I am teaching a 5-week course on anti-civilization thought / techno-pessimism. Here’s the full description and week-by-week outline, and I’m always happy to answer questions.

• Last but not least: if you’re in New York, please consider joining me for a free event this coming Thursday (4/30) at Columbia University. Leif Weatherby will be discussing his new book Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, and I’ll be part of a panel of interlocutors. Columbia affiliation is not required, but you do need to RSVP, which you can do here.

This post collects a few thoughts inspired by Language Machines. Onto it now.

I’ll begin with what Weatherby describes as the “internalist” and “externalist” positions on language. He introduces these concepts in an early section that reviews the grounding debate in linguistics, cognitive science, and AI. The debate is about what invests language with meaning: assuming LLMs aren’t conscious, and that their interactions with the world are mediated in very different ways than ours, what features and mechanisms render their outputs meaningful?

A more precise way of stating the question: what are the general features of the “ground” that saves LLM-generated text from decomposing into a semantic void? It’s worth noting here that the problem pertains to meaning as a concrete, real-world phenomenon, not a transcendental ideal, which is why we can’t be more fine-grained with our terminology. Accounting for “meaning” in every possible sense forces us to stick with generic terms like “meaning” and “semantic,” since getting narrower would restrict our scope. “Meaningful” has valences that don’t readily map onto better-defined concepts such as “useful” and “truthful.” It’s important to be clear about this, since meaning’s expansiveness is the central concern of this post.

According to the internalist position, meaningful language begins with “communicative intent.” Communicative intent can only come from inner life, or a remit of experience, consciousness, and awareness that we typically associate with human minds. If you’re an internalist who believes that AI has no inner life, you’d have to deny it the ability to produce meaning in any form (language, images, etc). Externalism gives meaning fully to the “outside” or “world.” For externalists, the signifying function of language only begins upon expression.

Citing linguist Ellie Pavlick, Weatherby argues that these positions share the same fatal flaw: both presuppose mechanisms of testimony that are too pure, too scientific, to encompass meaning across all of its different registers. The passage below begins with Weatherby addressing the externalist argument that LLM-generated language is meaningful by dint of its “outside” source material. Since LLMs don’t produce their training data endogenously, the argument goes, they’re grounded by the world. As with the internalist position, this argument identifies the meaning of language with a particular site of origin (mind or world.) But neither is based on a theory that satisfactorily explains the rules that govern how language maps onto or directly instantiates that site.

Here’s why that’s a problem: if language takes its meaning from a source that’s separate from language in its capacity as “immediate data,” i.e. language construed as identical with its formal features (like phonetics and the structure of alphabetic symbols), we would want to know what principles of selection it observes as it includes or excludes certain features of the source terrain. To use an analogy, maps make sense to us because their relationship with territory has robust theoretical grounding. This foundation allows us to understand the nature of the connection between maps’ represented content and the real-world entities they represent, such as topographical features or political borders. Along these lines, the internalist and externalist positions should come with general accounts of what language’s meaning-giving features have in common with each other. Otherwise, internalism and externalism will lead to nothing other than endless games of example-giving disguised as resolvable arguments.

With that, here’s Weatherby’s account of the rot at their core:

LLMs learn from “social” data and thus participate in long-­range causal chains of external grounding. But the same problem applies to this externalism as to the internalism: no amount of language, generated or otherwise, testifies to any such “natural history”… We use words all the time that neither bottom out in some absolute scientific knowledge of the world nor to which we commit some crystalline belief, 100 percent confidence. Language must be more than ground, and grounding must be some activity within that language (even if it involves other systems as well.) (12-13)

In this context, “testifying” means providing evidence that accounts for every step along the path from meaning’s origin (or “ground”) to the content of specific meaningful claims, as in a logical proof. But words don’t follow this rule: they don’t necessarily exist at the end of a chain of reference made up of links that build logically on prior links.

In a lyrical register, for example, meaning is inextricable from form. It’s all surface, or at least largely surface. Phrases we might find aesthetically pleasing, like cellar door or liquid acrobat as regards the air, don’t have the exact same resonance in translation. There’s always going to be some variation, at least at the level of phonetics. The fact that both come from popular works of art tells us that their aesthetic effect isn’t arbitrary, but rather consists through some apparatus of perception that multiple people share. This meaning-registering faculty is “internal,” while the formal characteristics of cellar door and liquid acrobat as regards the air are “external.” What we consider meaningful obtains between the two poles.

A question: to what degree, if any, should philosophy deliberately incorporate non-referential or “unchained” forms of meaning? Deliberateness is key, because all bodies of language take at least some meaning from non-referential properties. (I would argue that this is true even in the case of language generated exclusively by and for computers, even when human beings never interact with such statements, but explaining why would be a long tangent.) Put differently, how far can we wander into poetic territory while still claiming philosophy as our rightful home?

The question seems to turn on systemizability: while nobody aspires to systematic philosophy these days (Peter Wolfendale being the exception that proves the rule), we still want at least some commensurability between our philosophical claims and others. If philosophy is going to have points of real contact, it needs a source of meaning that doesn’t boil down to poetry. I could suggest that semantic commensurability based on referential meaning is what distinguishes philosophy from literature, but when our understanding of meaning is thrown into existential uncertainty (an unavoidable effect of LLMs), we have to go back to the drawing board.

Provisional answer: literature, as the “unchained meaning” area of research and practice par excellence, always yields philosophy. By that, I mean that literature expresses meaning that’s theorizable even as it exceeds human-legible representation. Here, we might think of Kant’s definition of beauty as an excess of representation over knowledge. Literature, unlike philosophy, is art. It produces beauty above and beyond knowledge. But if the line between beauty and knowledge is given by beauty’s resistance to theorization (since theorization yields knowledge), generative AI challenges the idea that literature and philosophy (which I’m analogizing with beauty and knowledge) are formally separable.

One of Language Machines’ central arguments is that we have to develop a “general poetics” fit for the LLM age. This is because LLMs threaten the idea that language’s poetic function is generally subordinate to its referential function. This argument hinges on a mathematical phenomenon known as vector space, which is central to how LLMs (and all other neural network-based forms of AI) work. The key thing about vector space is that it simulates continuousness, or infiniteness, in the nominally discrete space of the digital. Vector space reveals registers of meaning so multiple that we need a poetics that at least partially expresses the insights they yield in terms that human beings can understand.

This passage begins with a technical breakdown of vector space and vector semantics, followed by a more detailed explanation of their implications for linguistic meaning:

Vector semantics is a form of word embedding in which dependencies in meaning are laid out in a “continuous” vector space. The generalization “capital city” is easy for me to impose and search for, if necessary, conceptually. But what length of string would allow a net to find the relationship China:Beijing::Portugal:x? It turned out that not “context” but rather computational similarity was the issue here. As Mikolov et al. explain, “somewhat surprisingly, it was found that similarity of word representations goes beyond simple syntactic regularities. Using a word offset technique wherein simple algebraic opera­tions are performed on the word vectors, it was shown for example that vector(“King”) − vector(“Man”) + vector(“Woman”) results in a vector that is closest to the vector representation of the word Queen. This example has become famous, as it demonstrates the ability of vector addition to find not formal regularity between variables (grammatical functions) but meaningful relations between words. These vector-words can have “multiple degrees of similarity,” including (in the case of inflected languages) the intricacies of conjugation, cases, and so forth, so that a single lexical entry can have dozens of forms. As the team observed, there are many examples of phrases that are hard to learn if we impose some representational assumptions on language. (144)

As an aside, vector semantics might help us understand Sam Kriss's claim that analytic philosophy, which is premised on representational assumptions about language, is closer to fiction and poetry than continental philosophy, despite all appearances to the contrary. (This is not to say that the analytic / continental binary makes sense.)

If all this is true, everyday speech and writing acts count as “philosophy,” or expressions that can only be properly grasped through rubrics that recognize them as intrinsically open to interpretation. But the reverse doesn’t hold: not all philosophers yield so many different forms of meaning as an essential part of their output. Formal logicians actively work against this effect. Some would say that all philosophers should.

Literary writers fall squarely on the side of “everyday meaning,” which is profoundly multiple and impure, but perhaps more theorizable than we could’ve appreciated before the advent of LLMs. And to get a little loose for a sec, perhaps literature could in turn be considered a higher calling (more meaning-generating) than philosophy. David Foster Wallace’s Wikipedia page quotes him as saying that The Broom of the System used “97 percent of him,” whereas writing philosophy used only 50 percent. Shots fired.

97 percent of me wants to pin a lot on that remark. I’m instinctively drawn to the idea that literature is more meaningful than philosophy. I can’t do that, though, because this relative valuation participates in what Weatherby calls “remainder humanism.” Among other effects, remainder humanism blinds us to the limited purchase of intuition against the sheer scale of the dimensions of meaning rendered computationally tractable by AI. Resisting remainder humanism means admitting that David Foster Wallace’s remark tells us about nothing other than David Foster Wallace. Maybe we can stretch it to apply to other people, but it has nothing to say about philosophy or literature as such.

So the answer to the title question is that the question doesn’t make sense, since all distinctions between the two disciplines break down under scrutiny. A better question might be: what’s the most refined version of the lines that demarcate philosophy from literature, at least in terms of what human beings can understand?

To say that LLMs can assist us in answering this question isn’t to make a political claim about their externalities. But if we care about externalities, the move isn’t to ignore the unique possibilities for intellectual work that they potentiate. We should be directly engaging these possibilities in order to marshal them in politically salient accounts of AI as a world-making force (as Weatherby does, in a chapter on how LLMs produce ideology.)

This is a good note to wind down on: a reminder that when it comes to the AI culture wars, if we can entertain the idea that they’ll get us anywhere, I’m on the same side as ever.

It’s easy to misread Language Machines as a celebration of AI rather than a corrective to the thin criticism that dominates today. It isn’t techno-optimism or determinism, but a sober acknowledgment that culture and technology are mutually constitutive. To refuse to engage with one is to be willfully blind to the other, and any wishfulness or sentimental attachment to the idea of a culture unsullied by it does more harm than good to human life. This is as far from capitulation to Big Tech as it gets.

Today is my birthday. It’s been a hell of a week; most people I know are exhausted. I’m not immune to the shock of the here and now, but as I turn 37, my mind is with the future. We still need to create it. That’s the idea behind this post.

The announcement is this: I’m starting an educational organization. It’s in the para-academic niche that I’ve been writing about since last year (see “Para-academia is the future” and “What is para-academia?"). After several months of work with my co-founders, we’re finally at the stage where we can talk about it openly. This is our very first public message. (!)

Our name is The Lenox Institute for Advanced Study, or LIAS for short. Our website is www.lenoxinstitute.org.

LIAS’s courses and events address the social, political, cultural, historical, creative and philosophical contexts of science and technology. This includes “hard” approaches to science and tech. It also includes offerings that reject standard disciplinary boundaries. We operate online and at select locations in New York City.

One of our major motivations is academia’s inability to meet the accelerating pace of innovation head-on. (For more about that, see my last post: about why higher ed falters in the face of AI). Another is a strong conviction that learning is social. Anybody can find online content about AI, biodiversity, nuclear technology, etc. But without a reliable network of mentors and friends engaged in similar pursuits, the contentsphere can do more harm than good. At its core, education is a conversation between human beings. Our goal is to provide the infrastructure and operational support for that conversation. That’s another way of saying: we exist to help people make friends. I know that sounds corny, but I take the friendship/learning connection seriously. My belief in it comes from lots of life experience.

My co-founders are Shannon Nangle and Ryan Artrip. Shannon holds a PhD in biology and has experience as a startup founder; Ryan holds a PhD in interdisciplinary studies, and his research examines the politics of digital media. LIAS currently consists of the three of us, plus a growing network of collaborators assisting us in various capacities.

In future updates, I’ll share how this got started, along with calls for specific forms of support and collaboration. For now, we welcome general expressions of interest, which can include anything from requests to be put on our mailing list to ideas for how we might work together. Please get in touch via info@lenoxinstitute.org or any of my personal accounts, if you have them.

Last but not least: if you believe in this work, please share this post and the website (here it is again). On that note, through the end of April, paid subscriptions to Elf Theory are only $1/month forever if you sign up with this link. “Forever” pricing is not bad in this economy! I created the discount because Substack tends to boost accounts with a higher number of paid subscribers. Visibility is priceless to us.

Thanks in advance. I hope you’re thinking about the future, too.

I’ve spent most of my professional life as an academic working across the fields of critical theory and science and technology studies (STS.) For years, my goal was to develop a political epistemology of computing applications (mostly artificial intelligence / machine learning) through a technical lens, that is, to present their formal features as concrete instantiations of political principles. In December 2018, I wrote a blog post for Virginia Tech’s Institute for Policy and Governance that explains the rationale for this project. It’s something of a preface to my dissertation, which I finished in early 2020.

That post came from growing concern with academic tech criticism’s tendency to focus on “external” factors – direct inputs and outputs, plus broad effects – instead of taking a fine-grained lens to technology qua “internal” engineering choices. The line between the internal and external properties of computing technologies is always to some degree provisional, but staying squarely on the side of the latter only leads to the kind of vague thinking that underwrites technological capitalism. The task of addressing the big picture of technology with any real seriousness demands that we begin on the inside and work our way out to the social, cultural, political, etc., slowly and carefully. That’s what I believed back then, and I still believe it today.

This requires facility with areas of study and practice that seem very different on the surface, like machine learning and the theory subfields (political, critical, French.) In fact, ML and theory aren’t so far apart, but the whole point of the techno-capitalist vagueness machine is to make it hard to understand why. To get to the point where anybody other than specialists can grasp ML’s theoretical import, you need specialists to lay the groundwork. That was the role I aspired to.

So much cross-disciplinary synthesis can really only take place in the context of an academic career, or so I thought back then, which is why I went for the PhD. After two years, I’d grown tired of conferences and publications that uncritically assimilated technical objects to analytic frameworks that were never meant for them. The post talks about how the field of Critical Data Studies (CDS) seems to be premised on this mistake:

The benefit of using data as a basis on which to organize thought on new media cannot be understood by studies that illuminate its exogenous effects—which, in fact, describes the majority of existing CDS analyses. While these are helpful, they must be supplemented with the technical, endogenous definitions of data employed in the discipline of computer science.

I’m no longer committed to a technically rigorous, discipline-agnostic, ontological understanding of digital data as a basis for theoretical analysis, but with the advent of genAI, the precept is more important than ever: emphasizing inputs and outputs over the operations that connect them leaves us with net-negative knowledge about how computers are changing the world. This is because the representative regime of computation already accounts for and preempts other (older) approach to theoretical intervention. (“Epistemological” might work for what I mean by “representative” here, but I think it’s less correct.) To understand how computers enact politics (or culture, or sociality), you have to use the right tools for the job. This demands a certain degree of technical fluency, but it’s not the same thing as techno-optimism.

I’ll come back to this point, but for now, more scene-setting.

Originally, this newsletter was my way of dealing with a dry spell in my publication record. Between 2021 and 2024, I was teaching four courses per semester while navigating the job market and administrative duties that would be considered excessive even by today’s deeply anti-labor standards. This included chairing two tenure-track search committees during my own first year on the tenure track, a thing that should never happen and that I mention because it’s a clear indictment of my former place of employment, at least if you know anything about how academic hiring is supposed to work. It was difficult to get traditional publications off the ground under these circumstances, so in 2024 I turned to Substack to share essays about why Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in A Postfictional Age should be considered central to an epistemology of LLMs (special interest at the time.) (Note that I have since unpublished those pieces; nobody has complained.) I did not have a larger vision for Substack in mind, at least not consciously, but in hindsight it was an early move towards what happened six months later.

I quit my job. That was in early 2025. The decision was mostly due to situational, day-to-day stuff, but the fact that relative security did not come with the material affordances (time, money, supply of genuinely useful interlocutors) required for serious research didn’t help. Fourteen months on, I can confirm that that position was less conducive to scholarly life than total non-affiliation. And I understand that in that respect, I was the norm rather than the exception. My days and weeks might have been exceptionally awful, but the structural barriers to scholarship that did anything other than recapitulate staid perspectives were not.

Still, this felt especially consequential for my particular agenda. The sort of tech research I’ve been aiming at is very hard to pull off within the confines of the neoliberal-administrative university, especially if your campus is badly underfunded, understaffed, and only interested in supporting faculty research for the purpose of maintaining accreditation (which is a fair description of a lot of higher ed today, maybe the majority of it.) Maybe I should be more charitable towards academic tech critics, because unless you’ve got a really good position at a really good school, you might find yourself forced to churn out publications without being properly equipped for the undertaking. But even if you do have a good position at a good school, the prospects for being fully understood and pushed in useful ways are growing dimmer, not brighter, as time goes on.

In other words, institutionalized academia is bad if you want to do good work on tech. I have to keep leaning into autobiography to bear this out.

My PhD is from an interdisciplinary program: ASPECT, the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech. This is a joint initiative between Philosophy, Political Science, History, and Religion and Culture (Religion and Culture is one unit.) All ASPECT faculty have their tenure home in one of those four departments, and from what I understand, it was at least partially inspired by the fact that none could sustain a PhD program on their own.

ASPECT’s main organizing principle is the criterion of “sufficient interdisciplinarity” for dissertations. When I was there, it had a strong unofficial bent towards the Frankfurt School, French theory, and assorted Marxisms, but I don’t think that’s still the case. As a choose-your-own-adventure doctorate, it rewards students who come in with a strong sense of purpose. I was ideally suited for it because I knew exactly why I was there. But when I started, I was honestly not prepared for PhD-level research and writing in the theoretical humanities and social sciences, or in anything really. My MS is in nonprofit management, and I didn’t do a second master’s. I was lucky enough to be exposed to continental philosophy and literary theory as an undergrad, and I was really excited by the thought of pursuing a literary theory PhD straight out of my BA. I might have gone that route if a professor hadn’t told me that the only successful literary theorists are already fluent in German or French by their early twenties. Her actual words included the phrase “a life of poverty.” Message received.

Ultimately, I decided on an MS that seemed to satisfy the conditions of “employable” and “meaningful” if not very stimulating. Scholarly curiosities became hobbies. This looked like carting around a battered library copy of L’Arrêt de mort (in English) in the same bag that contained textbooks on fundraising, stats for demographic research, and various nonprofit twists on b-school contrivances (Future-Proof Models For Visionary Leadership…). It was eh.

With one semester left in my master’s, I nearly had my own arrêt de mort, stupidly getting myself run over by a car, which was every bit as awful as it sounds. Late one night, a sedan struck me on my right hip, throwing me several feet before pinning me between the undercarriage and the pavement. Ten minutes passed until an ambulance arrived to scrape me up, during which I was a layer in a sandwich that started with the ground and included a messenger bag stacked with several books and a laptop. The pressure broke my clavicle, hips, spine, and teeth (astonishingly, my Mac survived with only a cracked screen.) But this encounter was propitious, since it left me with big-girl money for the first time in my life, which emboldened me to assume the financial risk of a humanities PhD.

For this reason and a few others, I spend a lot of time thinking about the calculations people make (or don’t make) as they begin to consider a scholarly career. It’s unlikely that I’d be doing any of this if it weren’t for the accident. And I’ve always seen it as my responsibility to keep my vision trained on what makes scholarly knowledge production possible, since the circumstances that have allowed me to participate in it are so remarkable.

I don’t come from an academic family and I didn’t make close connections with professors or grad students when I was an undergrad. Academe was terra incognita when I started at Virginia Tech; getting through it and coming out with a fighting chance on the job market meant that I had to become a quick study in tacit institutional norms. My friends at VT helped me, or at least did not laugh at me for, say, not knowing that there’s a difference between “PhD student” and “PhD candidate,” a fact that was lost on me until halfway through my first semester. This was enough to get me across the dissertation finish line and eventually land two full-time gigs as a professor, but the fact that I had commenced without any robust scaffolding in a recognized tradition had long-term repercussions for my capacity for very good scholarship. I am only just beginning to appreciate this, and I’m tempted to say that no longer having skin in the game (anything resembling a normal ac career) has helped me see the structural deficiencies in my knowledge base with clear eyes.

Choosing an interdisciplinary program was part of the problem. Ten years ago, I thought I would benefit from the freedom afforded by interdisciplinarity. I don’t think I was aware that interdisciplinarity was becoming more popular at the time overall. If I recall correctly, the prevailing sentiment was still that it’s a bad move from a job market perspective, since it makes it hard to brand yourself. I wasn’t concerned with this; my relatively lucrative brush with death had rid me of all fear of destitution. (I was kind of on steroids for a few years, nonchalant about a ton of real-life stuff while pouring blood, sweat, and tears into becoming a very good scholar seven days a week.)

What interdisciplinarity actually entails depends on who you ask. Some will say it’s just a marketing term. Others will say that it designates bona fide expertise in multiple disciplines (quite difficult) or that interdisciplinarity in the social sciences and humanities is a natural fit with radical politics (highly questionable.) This is not really a fruitful line of inquiry, but it’s worthwhile to consider why the term saw an uptick around the time I was setting my course. By the mid-2010s, academia had started to go full throttle on internetizing everything. (This is not the same as technologizing / digitizing everything; TL;DR, it’s the wholesale integration of networked / communicative digital technologies everywhere and to the nth degree, as an ostensive intrinsic good.) When I was an undergrad (class of ‘11), we still submitted essays in hard copy, and our professors returned them with red marks and a letter inside a circle. I only checked my .edu email once or twice a week, even as a senior. Course websites were thin prototypes of today’s enterprise LMSes; I have very few memories of interacting with them until I myself was teaching. Nothing I’ve ever done as a student required an app. Within a few short years, of course, all that changed.

As administrations read the writing on the wall (internetize or die), interdisciplinarity increasingly served as a cover for the subjection of non-technological disciplines to the new order. This happened in two ways: first, by rationalizing the consolidation of social sciences and humanities programs when they couldn’t stand on their own (à la ASPECT); second, by providing a pretext to the prioritization of initiatives that had something (anything) to do with internetization / “new media,” etc., over those that did not. (It’s not capitulation to financial interests, it’s progressive boundary-breaking!).

This was not helped by the fact that “the humanities” was never a stable signifier to begin with. Some humanities disciplines are well-positioned to reckon with tech from first principles; most are not. When you introduce the internet to the humanities writ large, you’re blindsiding the theoreticians who know they have as much in common with their colleagues in quantitative poli sci as they do with neuroscientists. You’re depriving them of critical breathing room. The point of philosophy and literature is to affirm functions for language and meaning that go beyond internetish directives. What I mean by “internetish” is proximal to what Anna Kornbluh means by “aboutist” in this passage from her 2024 book Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, which takes aim at the twenty-first century university’s willful blindness to the effects of internetization on the singularities of literature, philosophy, and art:

Extensive data informatics, cognitive processing, and linguistics research take ‘aboutness’ as their core question, and the assimilation of aesthetic research to these other disciplines reveals just how much the administrative construct ‘the humanities’ elides the internal division between mediation and the immediate; ‘the study of human experience’ in anthropology, history, linguistics, and law differs from the unlived experience and unrealized possibilities produced by literature and art — but aboutness and empiricism redact that difference. (Immediacy, 177)

The funny thing is that large language models reveal the limited purchase of “aboutness” — reducibility to a stable, discretizable core that gives language a functional “inside,” thereby delineating an “outside” or external world — as an objective of humanities scholarship. This is a clumsy way of stating one of the takeaways of Leif Weatherby’s 2025 book Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (two notable reviews: from Daniel Bashir and Pete Wolfendale.) In its internetish turn, the humanities largely relinquished its ability to think beyond the aboutist paradigm, which is a dead end for the kind of meaning it’s uniquely positioned to theorize.

From what I’ve seen of interdisciplinarity, and my own experience as an interdisciplinary scholar, it’s ill-equipped to address this backslide. Interdisciplinarity and internetization are both downstream of the ongoing strip-mining of higher ed by private equity; both authorize and advance it. I never gained the deep subject expertise that might’ve helped me arrive at these conclusions back when I still had strong external incentives and support to publish in journals, speak at conferences, write a book, etc. But at the same time, the mental conditioning required to stay sane inside the tower would’ve kept me from fully processing what such conclusions meant for my future and the state of intellectual life in the United States and beyond.

And from what I’ve seen of the real conditions of academic labor, it’s a miracle that there’s even a small number of scholars out there who can speak productively to what it means for LLMs to handle ever-increasing volumes of communication. As Wolfendale writes in his review of Language Machines, “no one can be quite sure what communicative norms will evolve in a situation where most communication is computationally mediated, but it’s clear that the power of words is changing.” It’s not impossible to understand the nature of this power, but if such understanding ever prevails widely, it’ll be despite rather than because of academic norms.

AI is capital. This is indisputable. So is the university system, but until recently, it was still possible to effect minor forms of subversion as a scholar and pedagogue. The damage dealt to theoretical thought by internetization and its many guises (including most of what goes by the name “interdisciplinarity”) is one symptom of this crisis. So too are most of the institutional obstacles confronted by today’s scholars (especially those who are younger and more precarious) as they attempt to do good work. Wolfendale’s thoughts about a conventional academic career, which he credits to a conversation with Dominic Fox, are illustrative here.

I am mildly optimistic about the possibility for dissidents like Wolfendale to help us think wisely about technology, even in the face of the twenty-first century’s monstrous Real. And there are still scholars in the academy taking up this mantle. I don’t know what this looks like in my own life; I’ve gone back and forth on whether I want to seriously keep going with theory scholarship or give myself over to writing that resolves to nothing but poetics (see: the idiosyncratic, slice-of-life stuff I occasionally post, which always inspires un-subscriptions… my house my rules, or anti-rules as it were… ) while holding space for others doing the work (as a public-facing educator and conveyor of other people’s ideas.) I do think poetics and fictionality reign supreme, but maybe I’m not quite out of the game just yet. I am also newly affiliated with Bard Microcollege (I’ll be teaching a course for them this fall), so, not doing a good job of resisting the tower’s gravitational pull.

In any event, supporting scholars like Wolfendale and Fox (with money, attention, etc.) and initiatives like the Acid Horizon Research Commons might be our best bet at retaining any semblance of good sense as the machine expands. Sorry, I couldn’t end this without a plug.

There might be a part two to this post.

I’m working on a few different things right now. One of them is an essay inspired by a passage from Anna Kornbluh’s 2024 book Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism. People really hated that book and I don’t think it’s fair. Another is a personal thing about my twin, on the occasion of our birthday next month. There are also a few pieces that I hope make money.

Writing across so many genres is a good way to feel fewer feelings than you’d have to deal with otherwise. At the end of the day, I close my eyes and perform a mental scan of my body, starting with the vertex of my skull, crossing my face, the full extent of my limbs, my torso, all the way down to the edges of my toes. It helps me label my thoughts. Some are true, some are bad, some are wishful.

This morning something strange happened. I was on my way back from grocery shopping, two blocks from the Key Food Fresh N Save, when I made eye contact with a woman headed in the other direction. Who saw who first? I bet it was me, like a creep; in one moment her head is tilted towards the sidewalk, and in the next she raises her chin. She was in her sixties and regally beautiful, high squarish cheekbones, expressive eyes, wiry dark hair. Gray dress and a floral gossamer headscarf so delicate it looked like it might wrinkle if you stare at it too hard.

She asked me if I wanted more food, gesturing towards her own sack of goods. It was one of those multicolor polypropylene totes every store sells these days. I said ok and she took a minute fishing around in it before extracting nine items: two sticks of string cheese (white, individually wrapped); another single-serving portion of cheese (also white); one clementine; one banana; two Ferrero Rocher chocolate eggs, one in brown tinfoil, the other in gold; and two normal eggs, hardboiled. She’d just come from church, and it’s Lent, which means she can’t consume animal products. She told me the chocolate eggs are male and female respectively and explained which color corresponds with which sex, but now I can’t remember.

I thanked her and asked which church she went to. St. Nicholas of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolitan Orthodox of the Two Americas. Actually, she just said the local Romanian church. I know it well; it’s two blocks north of my place; I’ve taken an interest in it before because I like the Byzantine cross, plus it’s directly across from the cash bar with the hand-painted blue brick exterior that someone once called New York’s last true dive.

There are a lot of Romanian immigrants on this side of Sunnyside, plenty of restaurants, festivals, you hear the language all the time, so you’d think that even in my badly underslept state I’d remember that Romania has nothing to do with the Romani people, but no, for twenty seconds I lingered on a thought I am ashamed of because it pertains to a stereotype and has nothing to do with this particular event in any case. Here goes: this woman just handed me a bunch of eggs, even indicating some as male and female, and it’s the vernal equinox — actually I’d already been meditating on the date, thinking about rewatching The Wicker Man; thinking that Beltane’s around the corner and the one person I know who celebrates just texted me for the first time in ages, maybe I’ll go to his Beltane thing in May; and maybe it’s time to rewatch Valerie and Her Week of Wonders too, I love the score to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; now it is spring, the city laughs in flowers, only a few more blocks home… and then this stranger stopped me in my tracks. If I eat the eggs I’ll probably get pregnant, but what happens if I don’t?

Three years ago, when I was living in Philadelphia, I deposited groceries in someone else’s car because I thought it was my car. It was late, I was tired, the car was the same size and color as mine, the door was unlocked. As soon as I caught my mistake, I realized it might look like I was breaking in. This freaked me out so thoroughly that I forgot to grab my groceries before I dipped out of there. I’ve always wondered how that played out on the other person’s end.

The funny thing is I was already planning on boiling eggs today. It’s a weekend routine. Even weirder, I’d just re-read “The Story of the Eye.”

I can’t find the lyrics to Luboš Fišer’s “Orlic’s Song (Brother and Sister)” anywhere online. It’s one of the prettiest songs from Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. More importantly, I can’t decide what to do with the free food. I could keep it circulating, but right now it’s all in my fridge, except for the banana.

Throughout our interaction, the woman kept saying this isn’t weird, this isn’t weird. A request for trust and belief. If I’d been honest, I would’ve said this is actually really weird, but it’s good. It’s a gorgeous day. God is good. I’m keeping the food in a dedicated container until I think of something else.

If the signature move of the digital is to cut, or to render intelligible by virtue of selecting discrete points from a continuum (an endless plane that we may call “the real,” “the analog,” etc.), that sounds a lot like what theory does. This isn’t an original idea; I’ve been thinking about it all week in the midst of preparing for the Acid Horizon Research Commons panel that took place yesterday morning (video here), where M. Beatrice Fazi, Alex Galloway, Matt Handelman and Leif Weatherby discussed their recent book, Digital Theory. Digital Theory departs from the authors’ consensus that the digital and the theoretical can’t be thought separately, even if they have narrow disagreements on what this implies when it comes to the task of theorizing today.

If digitality is the ontological condition of theory, then it seems to me that the internet, at least as most people interact with it, has an anti-digital effect. We experience online life as an extension of the continua of “lived” or “inner” experience. Theory may take experience as an input, but it never remains at its level; this is why theory and experience are two very different things (to theorize or abstract is to place something at a “higher level” than experience, to elevate it to the plane of the interpretive or “oriented,” where it takes on a distinct meaning — note that the root word abstrahere means “to draw away from”). The fact that digital computing gives us the material basis of the internet doesn’t mean that the internet is digital in any special sense. If anything, it exorcises the digital/theoretical by accelerating the functions of digitization/theorization to the point that they no longer appear to have any purchase beyond the remit of inner life.

Two quotes related to this point: first, from Rob Horning’s "Infinite Concretude," which begins by asking whether the ceaseless invention of new terms that go viral on platforms like TikTok (“girl dinner,” “microcheating,” etc.) counts as philosophizing in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known definition of philosophy as the creation of novel concepts. With reference to Anna Kornbluh’s 2024 book Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too-Late Capitalism, Horning writes:

Immediacy as a style generally betokens a refusal of mediation and critical distance in favor of what purports to be direct experience of reality, exemplified by things like cringe comedy and autofiction. Coining concepts would seem to be the opposite of this (it unifies experiences under categories), but conceptualization itself can be accelerated to the point of immediacy, so that any coinage seems valid only for the moment it is announced and seems to describe a niche so small that it may as well be a haecceity.

As M. Beatrice Fazi explains in her Digital Theory chapter, theory pertains to scholastic concept of quidditas, or a general “whatness” that transcends the immediate. It does not give us haecceities, which may be defined as the irreducibly particular. On the other hand, the internet seems to want us to attribute haecceities to “the most authentic level of reality,” a phrase I’m borrowing from Mark Fisher’s “Real Abstractions: The Application of Theory to the Modern World.” Here, he’s saying that capitalism presents itself as an anti-abstraction, a historical inevitability that’s not one choice among many but that was always an arch-reality, a truth to end all truths, not unlike the truth of a feeling that’s so intense that it blots out incisive thought, agency, and (in the final moment), consciousness:

Capitalist realism is a kind of anti-mythical myth: in claiming to have deflated all previous myths on which societies were based, whether the divine right of kings or the Marxist concept of historical materialism, it presents its own myth, that of the free individual exercising choice. The distrust of abstractions — summarised by Margaret Thatcher’s famous denial: “there is no such thing as society” — finds expression in a widespread reduction of cultural ideas and activities to psychobiography. We are invited to see the “inner life” of individuals as the most authentic level of reality.

When I say that the internet isn’t digital in any special sense, I’m refuting the old antinomy between analog and digital which always gives “authenticity” to the former. To the degree that we’re capable of engaging with them, all digital phenomena have analog embodiments; the two are never really separable from a human POV. (Our bodies are analog, so in at least one important sense we can’t directly access the digital as such). But the central premise of Digital Theory is more important for what I’m getting at: the move from analog to digital might be the same thing as theorizing — the action of choosing something discrete as a locus of meaning, a point that sets a certain phenomenon apart from an undifferentiated expanse while at the same time serving as a potential link between it and other phenomena (both blade and glue, as Fazi puts it) — if not thinking in its entirety (another argument from Fazi that I’m not sure I subscribe to). If this is true, then by sheer virtue of speed and magnitude, the internet blindsides theory at the same time that it does nothing but represent thought. Thought exists here, sure, but in a screaming and hardly-conscious “bare life” form. The internet’s proper substance isn’t data, but schizophrenia.

Put more gently, the internet represents a quickening of theory that makes theory seem vaporous and untrustworthy in the face of experience’s overwhelming “real.” But if you believe that theory is unreal, you’re participating in what Fisher calls “buffoon empiricism,” a form of anti-intellectual discourse that has nothing to do with Berkeley and Hume and everything to do with Chris Anderson. In fact, theory pertains to something more objective than any artifact of inner life: that which obtains not within but between people, in the spaces that we call relationships and that we can even (if we’re idealistic) still think of as society.

Maybe it’s an extremely obvious point, but it seems to me that the most transformative relationships are the ones you’re not supposed to have, or the ones you never have really.

From the k-punk article on Christopher Priest’s 1977 novel A Dream Of Wessex —

Once inside the Wessex projection, the participants cannot remember their real world identities. This means that, although they are referred to by the same name, the dreamers in the simulation are different entities from their real world counterparts (just as any dreamer is a different being from their double in waking life). A classic case of the Real (of unconscious wishes) versus reality.

When they exit the Wessex simulation, the dreamers are replaced in the consensual hallucination by placeholder doppelgangers, programmed selves that, possessing no inner life, only exist for the Others in the dreamspace. Some of the participants come to recognise the points at which other dreamers depart from the simulation and come back to it: something in the other, that which is in them more than themselves perhaps, disappears or (seemingly miraculously) returns. What the novel renders especially powerfully is the overwhelming, intoxicating intensity of erotic connections with a dream Other, the uncanny sense of recognition, the deja vu of dreamlove.

In the case of A Dream Of Wessex, the sense of recognition between the lovers can be accounted for by the fact that the two, Julia and David, know each other in the novel’s real world; and yet Julia and David are not in love in the real world, nor is there any suggestion that they would necessarily fall in love. It is their dream-selves that fall for each other. What ultimately unsettles the idyll is the kind of reality bleed or ontological haemorrhage which Priest’s later novels all turn around. A Dream Of Wessex looks forward to Gibson’s cyberspace, but it is also a vision of the 60s recalled at the bitter end of the 70s.

This makes me think about AI lovers, but what’s more interesting is how Julia and David’s situation points up underdeterminism rather than fate and telos as truth. Everything is becoming / the path doesn’t exist til you take the step, but a world of predictions, of excessive knowledge and calculation, is precisely a world where the truth of negation — not the “negation” of the logical opposite, but the negation that looks like bewilderment, falling in love with the least likely person — becomes unthinkable. Not much of a world at all, just a normal curve that defines everything to Borgesian degrees of exactitude and foments depression.

This is the world where stories like Julia and David’s are especially exciting. They seem to disclose a truth that can’t be thought abstractly. At my most pessimistic, I think that no one is capable of non-abstract thought anymore. But then I’ll read or hear something, or I’ll get a message that I can’t think down to first principles, and I remember what love’s all about.

I’ve had metal on the brain for weeks. Hephaestus hunched over his workbench, striking iron with iron; gel capsules of alkaline earth, a remedy for sleep; silver threads woven through a men’s shirt, flimsy for February, seems to be the only thing he owns. At home I watch videos about Das Rheingold, try to catch the river magic. There’s a shimmer that opens a story that ends with a rainbow.

Now the shirt is a leitmotif. I make these observations on Thursdays and Saturdays. Sallow skin, limp hair, cat grin, that button-down, thin lines of light that offset the general impression. The threads fold into shadows that hide his body’s proper expanse. The grin is what lasts, it travels further than the rest of him. Into some unswept corner of my thoughts.

Joshua Ramey says the nonorganic life of life is metal. Metal means chromaticity: variation without biological agency, a confound to insemination and flowering. It’s a higher form of difference. Mostly we render it in art, and most people need tools for it. I can play “Lilac Wine” on the piano but I can’t sing it, my throat’s too tight. I only draw with gray pencils and I can’t wear color comfortably. These things make me east coast, but the songs I really love — the ones that mean so much to me that I can barely stand to hear them — those draw my mind west, where monochrome doesn’t look especially smart. According to the Chinese elemental system, west is metal’s cardinal direction.

The sterling rendition belongs to Nina Simone. She really gives you the scent. Lilac wine is aromatic, blended notes, illicit exploits in sweating hothouses. When she says “heady,” she means it sends you out of your human head. It speaks of something incommensurate with natural life, the spirit-husband incarnate in herbal alloys, the taste that tricks the tongue, a love that circles the void. Lilac wine is metallic.

Once he told me about a certain antique thermometer. His cat knocked it off the fireplace mantle, mercury spilled onto the floor, shattered glass everywhere. In the twentieth century, we learned how to protect ourselves from dangerous metals. Today we inhale ketamine for the healing power of nothingness, to forget our names. Some people call that a party.

Metallurgy was Byung-Chul Han’s first job. This was before he left Seoul for Berlin. His childhood home nearly killed him, there was a chemical explosion. Philosophy won’t end your earthly life, but it is a commitment to psychic exile. Once he was in Germany, he lied to his father, said he was still on the technician’s path.

Metal lends tone and lambency to the organs of perception. It gives them a celestial body, makes them ring. In the Chinese elemental system (basically cosmology), metal is associated with grief. This is not the same thing as depression. Grief is virtuous, it’s got an object, it’s a metabolic process. As a matter of definition, it doesn’t stagnate.

Metal orients sadness. It clears a path so that the feelings can move. You must believe that something’s on the other side. Reflective surfaces don’t hold onto anything, and if you want to be metal, you have to make the tradeoff: blood for silver, the receiving earth for mercury’s endless travels. That’s how you start to change.

Recently I came across an old conference paper from media studies scholar Fabian Offert. Offert writes about the digital humanities, a field defined by the application of cutting-edge technologies to humanities research. He’s interested in the rote distinctions that make DH cohere, in particular the line between research methods and research questions. …

Read more

Rough week. I’ve found it difficult to get away from the news; my head’s been swimming with other people’s words. My own keep embarrassing me, anchored in a personal reality so deep it barely seems capable of touching the world.

My neighborhood is mostly immigrants. A lot of Queens is like that, especially as you go east. Facebook tells me ICE was on my block not long ago. Maybe they were here while I was pushing buttons and deleting sentences on Substack.

In September I went to a citizenship ceremony. My local USCIS field office is on the fourth floor of a faceless building thirty minutes west of my apartment. Carts for halal food and breakfast pastries seem to have a permanent lease at the curb. This image needs the vendors as much as it needs the empty street, the clouds reflected across three stories of tinted windows, skyscrapers on the horizon. Men and women in business attire are buying $2 cups of coffee. I’m in black tights and heels, taking sips of Poland Spring.

The faces of Donald Trump and Kristi Noem repeat themselves across the field office waiting room. Make sure you come here the right way, America is the greatest country on earth, if you don’t come here the right way you’ll be sent out forever, and in a flash the videos give way to an invisible narrator: if you walk down this aisle for the wrong reasons (cut to a wedding ceremony), you might walk down this one (cut to a row of prison cells.)

You’re not supposed to take pictures in there. In the lobby, a twenty-something guy starts walking up to total strangers. He wants a photo with his certificate before we all scatter out; he didn’t come with family or friends. I stand in front of the elevators watching him adjust his posture and smile. Trump canceled citizenship ceremonies in November, or maybe it was December, I can’t remember.

—

Last week a certain degree of government-sanctioned terrorism was lain bare. Yesterday marks exactly one year since I self-ejected from academia. These stories are shamefully connected in my head, so I’ll tell the latter, maybe it’ll help me separate them out.

My supervisor and I had just said goodbye to the last of three professors that had traveled to central Long Island to interview with us. I was so nervous I almost couldn’t bring myself to knock on his door. In another timeline, I spent that afternoon wiping crumbs from my keyboard and rationalizing my cowardice. I found the courage when I remembered what had happened six hours earlier. There was an electrical outage, the entire campus closed until further notice. They sent the email after I’d already made the two-hour commute. My first thought was about what it’d be like to hold a job talk at one of the two eateries within walking distance, a decrepit pub or a bagel shop with cramped seating. The second thought was today’s the day. By the time the power came back on, I’d made up my mind. I returned the next morning to clean out my office.

I spent most of 2025 writing cover letters the old-fashioned way, as if they were going to be read by human beings. I got pretty far in a few searches, kept losing sleep over what comes up if you Google me: LSD, badly recorded music, impenetrable theory sentences, Obama-era political criticism that wasn’t even sharp enough at the time to seem quaint in hindsight. Regret, regret, regret. There’s very little that says: I didn’t grow up expecting to be a professor; I didn’t even know any academics until I was eighteen; this is all a lot of trying; please forgive the contradictions.

At the end of the summer, I washed out of a hiring process that started in early May. There were four with a search firm, three with staff members from the organization. The final call was with the CEO, who used the Zoom self-view as a mirror to touch up her lip gloss as I answered questions about JavaScript and vibe coding. That’s when I started to think about the content creator life. Not that I thought I’d be good at it, but maybe it’d surprise me. It didn’t take me long to realize that I can’t turn around two posts a week, not without any clear path to financial stability. I’ve been maxing out my confidence for more than twelve months; please forgive the navel-gazing.

I’ve tried to pull off a kind of inscrutability here. The things I enjoy writing about mystify me. When the words are successful, they look nice from a distance. These aren’t the same words I’d use for political murder and protocols that serve advertisements and genocide with equal precision. I wish I could tell you about a grief that gets thicker and deader the more time I spend trying to describe it. Some writers have the knack for it.

God did not design man to promote himself, to speak to anonymous ears, to cast spells across so many time zones. I’ve been bending my brain into shapes that look like other people’s brains, listening for feedback they won’t give me straight, chasing a narrative that hews so close to the truth that I’ll never have to explain myself again. I feel lucky to be able to do so. It’s no small thing to speak about scale and world-pain and unreason with total editorial freedom. I’m not getting any closer to God in 2026.

I don’t always find it easy to pay as much attention as I demand, but I keep tuning in. The beginning I’ve been seeking for over a year has something to do with groups of people gathered outside of brick buildings. They’re always out there, even as the day wears on and the blindness of the ego falls over me. They remind me to keep my vision trained on them, which is not so far from where I live, but well beyond the length of my own nose.

Hey everyone,

Happy Phill Niblock Appreciation Day / winter solstice / peak holiday madness. I’m one of those people that gets a little numb as the season wears on, and daily doses of fresh political horror aren’t helping. At least it’s a good time of year for losing yourself in music. The other day I picked up Bill Bruford’s Gradually Going Tornado on vinyl. “The Sliding Floor” is a rare and special breed of love song, and it’s festive enough if you listen to it right.

Some news: first, Michael Garfield and I are coordinating daytime sessions for Weird Academia, a series of events taking place next month at Indiana University Bloomington. If you’re interested in participating, please email elfthoughts@gmail.com. Michael and I are using that account to make introductions and collect ideas for session themes.

Second, I'm joining LEPHT HAND as an alternating host/co-host. LEPHT HAND is a podcast from Acid Horizon’s Sereptie (Craig.) Sereptie and I have a similar approach to theory and politics, and I’ve had a lot of fun planning episodes so far. If you’re new to the Acid Horizon universe, can’t recommend it enough. They’re doing the lord’s work by taking theory out of academia without giving a foothold to pop anti-intellectualism. They’re also hosting my course on acid communism (seats are filling up!), and they’re responsible for the world's greatest coffee mug. Get on it.

In a recent LEPHT HAND video, Sereptie shared advice for reading philosophy without getting lost. I wanted to comment on a few of his strategies and add some of my own, focusing on general best practices in addition to reading techniques. It may seem elementary, but if I’d had advice like this when I was younger, it would’ve saved me a lot of time and mental bandwidth.

In no particular order:

Atmospheric reading. What Sereptie calls “atmospheric reading” is a bit like stream-of-consciousness writing. You’re not concerned with anything making sense; you’re just going with the flow of the words. The idea is that reading and understanding are two different steps in the process.

His advice is to do a first pass of atmospheric reading whenever the text is confusing, especially if it’s your first encounter with a particular thinker. Absorb the words; let them simmer in the back of your head for a few days; then come back and give it a second try. If you stay with them long enough, they’ll start to open up to you. This has worked for me on lots of different occasions.

Gravitational pull. Some sentences won’t make sense right away, but you’ll still find yourself drawn to them. This is a sign that there’s some “there” there. Take note of these parts (highlight or underline them) and revisit them later on. It’s pretty normal to take philosophy line-by-line or word-by-word. A big part of the practice is lingering with a single word, sentence, or idea until you feel you’ve gotten it. You may or may not have actually gotten it, but the feeling is a sign that you’re on the right track.

The grain. Per the video: you can read to get the grain (attain a basic understanding of the text), go with the grain (come into agreement with it), or go against the grain (develop a critical perspective on it.) If you’re a beginner, it’s helpful to deliberately choose your approach before you start reading. The default is reading to get the grain, but the other methods will draw your attention to details you might miss otherwise. If you find that you can’t stay with your chosen approach — for example, if you read to go against the grain, but can’t help but agree with the text — all the better: it means you’re developing your own unique outlook.

A side note: understanding and belief are a lot closer than most people realize. When you understand something really well, it’s hard not to see it as truthful or valuable in some sense. This means that the first two approaches have a lot more in common with each other than they do with against-the-grain or “critical” reading. Critical reading requires that you not only bring your full attention to the material, but that you take the additional step of distancing yourself from it. This is actually a pretty complicated thing to do, which is why it’s stressed so much in formal education: it’s a hallmark of intellectual sophistication.

Back when I was a philosophy professor, I was encouraged to fast-track students to the critical phase. I wish I’d pushed back against this. The vital question isn’t what do you think about this?, it’s do you understand this?. This is true for learners at any stage, not just newcomers.

Tests are good. Speaking of comprehension, you can’t rely on yourself to be your own evaluator. If you have a mentor or friend who knows their stuff, ask them to assess you. If they don’t have their own assessment methods, here’s a basic exercise: restate a concept in your own words and ask them if you’ve got it right, more or less.

This doesn’t just apply to philosophy. When I was teaching myself the basics of machine learning, I used to ask people questions like “this is how I understand ‘latent space,’ is this right?.” It’s not the least awkward ask in the world, but most people are flattered by it, and no one ever hung up the phone on me.

Carry water, chop wood. There’s so much value in “mindless” organizational tasks. On top of making your life easier, they’ll keep you connected to the material in a way that’s not cognitively draining. Reorganizing your library (including your PDF library) is an example of this sort of activity. So are practical preparations for writing projects. When I was studying for my prelim exams, I got into the habit of manually copying passages from physical books into Word docs. I started doing this so that I’d have excerpts ready to go for copy-pasting into drafts (during prelims, you do a ton of writing under super tight deadlines), but I kept it up all throughout my dissertation. The fact that you can automate a lot of the mindless side of intellectual labor doesn’t mean you should.

Embrace embodiment. Almost everybody prefers hard copy for a reason: ideas feel more real when you’ve got a tactile connection with them. In the run-up to prelims, I trained myself to read PDFs on my 13” MacBook screen, since there was no way I could’ve printed everything out. I’m used to this by now, but I don’t love it. Just this year, I got a Supernote tablet and a 27” external monitor, and I’m kicking myself for not having done so earlier in my career. The tablet is a good proxy for the feeling of pen and paper, and the monitor does a lot for eye strain. Still, nothing beats analog. When I’m working on a serious project, I try to get as many hard copies as I can, and I do a lot of brainstorming in a paper notebook.

Take pleasure in the ritual. Even if you’re fully on board with philosophy as a useful way to spend your time, it can be a slog. Much of it will seem less interesting than whatever’s coming at you through your phone. A little ritual magic goes a long way here. Find a beautiful place to work; use a nice pen and notebook; take the time to find background music that lifts your mood and helps you focus. A hot beverage will force you to slow down; so will incense and candles. Learn to connect a feeling of elegance with those fresh neural pathways you’re carving.

Don’t worry about looking or feeling pretentious. Everything interesting starts out as stagecraft.

Talk about it. If philosophy has a proper medium, it’s dialogue, not the written word. Something about the immediacy of conversation trains the mind in a way that writing can’t. (See: Heinrich von Kleist, On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech.)

Do not use AI as your conversation partner. No one needs a degree or special qualifications to do philosophy, but they should at least be conscious. If none of your friends are into it, join a book club, a class, or a philosophy community online. (I will not use this as an opportunity to promote my upcoming class, but fyi the link’s right here.)

***

I’ll end with a broad observation: scholarly habits are personal. I have a few that are so idiosyncratic they’re not really worth mentioning. You’ll find your own if you’re committed to doing so.

I’ve shared the ones that I used to share with my students, often as I was reminding them to get enough sleep and eat a healthy diet. They still found philosophy painful, but I like to think I helped some of them find pleasure in the pain. I hope this made you a better masochist, too.

Hey everyone,

This is an announcement about a course I’m teaching next month through the Acid Horizon Research Commons. It’s called Acid Communism: A World That Could Be Free. The video covers the basics, and here’s the description from the website:

Acid Communism: A World That Could Be Free departs from the premise of cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s unfinished monograph Acid Communism. In the introduction to that work, Fisher describes a decades-long political campaign that quietly suppressed the radical potential of the 1960s counterculture. His aim was to understand the mechanisms behind this suppression in order to imagine how it might be reversed.

Across four sessions, this course focuses on digital technology as central to that machinery. Drawing on cultural studies, technology criticism, and Fisher’s writings, we will connect the rise of the internet and artificial intelligence to capital’s assault on creativity, strangeness, desire, and friendship. We will also examine music as a form of “counter-exorcism” that preserves radical consciousness in everyday life, and consider the place of psychedelic experience within the acid communist project.

As Fisher suggests, acid communism holds together the lighthearted and the deeply earnest. Our readings and discussions stabilize both dimensions in historical, cultural, and philosophical context. We ask: which events, technologies, and conceptual frameworks made non-capitalist life appear untenable? Can art and visionary experience be drawn into political thought without being reduced to the “merely” political? And what exists, here and now, as a testament against the homogeneity and fatalism that define so much of the present moment?

This course is designed for thinkers of technology, artists, theorists, and anyone who has caught glimpses of something other—and who believes that otherness should be cultivated as a collective good rather than a private escape. It welcomes a creative attitude toward past, present, and future, recognizing our shared role in making them what they are.

Course Structure
This four-week seminar approaches acid communism through a sequence of thematic inquiries:

1. Aesthetic Thought as Precursor to Politics
   Defining acid communism and examining aestheticization as a political force.

2. AI and Other Numbing Agents
   Weirdness, eeriness, and the algorithmic conditioning of affect and culture.

3. Touching the Alien
   Digital subjectivity, events, and the limits of quantification and abstraction.

4. Acid Communism as Minor Science
   Group consciousness, music, drugs, and forms of knowledge beyond instrumental reason.

Instructor Bio

Emma Stamm is a writer and scholar specializing in critical theory and science and technology studies. Her writing has appeared in Real Life, Vice Motherboard, and Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, among others. She has held teaching appointments at SUNY Farmingdale, Villanova University, New York University, and Virginia Tech. Her work explores the intersections of technology, culture, politics, and contemporary critical theory.

Course Schedule
All sessions meet from 7:00–8:30 PM ET via Zoom.

• Session 1: January 6 — Aesthetic Thought as Precursor to Politics

• Session 2: January 13 — AI and Other Numbing Agents

• Session 3: January 20 — Touching the Alien

• Session 4: January 27 — Acid Communism as Minor Science

Students will receive permanent access to all recorded lectures, supplementary readings, and discussion materials.

***

Enrollment is capped, so it’s better to sign up sooner rather than later. Here’s the link to registration.

I’ve had a lot of fun putting the syllabus together and thinking about how to bring each session to life. I am committed to it being as vibrant and engaging as possible and cultivating a community among all of the participants. Sorry to be corny! (It’s appropriate for the subject.)

Feel free to message me via Substack or emma.stamm@gmail.com if you have any questions. Hope to see you in class!

If you liked this post, please considering sharing it with someone else who might, too.

Everyone’s always telling you their story. Bodega coffee, amorous text, a guy on the train who didn’t fit in. You notice the new veins in their eyes.

The realization is disappointing. What other people think about you doesn’t matter, except when they get it right. Then your edges aren’t so angular, the ceiling starts to crack. You go back to a time when grown-ups knew everything. That’s where you used to live, in the country of glass houses and good instincts.

They say great writers are great deceivers. It’s the art of warps and wefts, every last breathing and compression of truth. Someone you love makes you angry by spreading it around. You think reality’s in short supply; she’ll wear it out with rough handling. But then she tells you something that catches you off guard, and the universe expands to make room for it.

Philosophy needs fiction because it needs new life, and fiction says language is loamy. The writer rakes it over and lets it lie fallow in order for it to surprise us again. There’s the man on the dark street and the man in the dark story. Our folk hero lives from what other people don’t know about him.

The story is a green river in an apple valley. You can’t look at it directly, you barely think about it anymore. When the banks go dry, when the fish turn up bloody and fin-rot, you’ll keep making your surveys, you’ll exhaust yourself measuring the peaks and sinkholes. The river knew you well, but once you got close enough to hear its real voice. It was a psychedelic laughter so terrible you drove all the way up the mountains.

Forget the river; keep climbing that ridge. At the top there’s a man with jaundiced eyes and a dull throbbing ache between the ribs. He’s your height and weight and he has nothing to say.

Your job is to destroy him. Speak into the back of his head and crown yourself philosopher king. I know you’re busy and embarrassed, but if you don’t make a quick move, he’ll kill you first, or she’ll stop writing to you.

In September, I wrote about organizations that offer college-level classes and research opportunities, but have no direct ties to traditional universities. The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research; The Mimbres School for the Humanities; The New Centre for Research and Practice; Morbid Anatomy; The School for Poetic Computation; Weirdosphere; The Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and Acid Horizon Research Commons are all examples of this phenomenon, which some refer to as “para-academia.”

The name suggests a closer resemblance to traditional institutions than may be warranted. Maybe a new term will emerge, maybe not, but in any case some definitional work is necessary. Here, I’m considering how para-academia fits into the current landscape of adult educational services, including but not limited to traditional higher ed.

Para-ac schools don’t offer degrees, and most don’t have programs that culminate in certifications, licenses, continuing education credits, or microcredentials. The New Centre offers certificates of competency backed by their licensing structure (see here), and BISR offers Certificates for Critical Study that aren’t supported by any formal mechanism, at least as far as I can tell. While these credentials may carry weight in specific contexts, they don’t open nearly as many doors as degrees or qualifications that are more widely recognized.

Herein lies the main difference between academia and para-academia: participants in the latter aren’t trying to improve their career prospects. Their goals are different from those of the average college student. Para-ac students and traditional students may have the same intrinsic motivations, like the opportunity to learn about topics they love; acquire new skills; make friends, or work with particular faculty members. But without the boon to one’s earnings potential, enrollment at typical colleges would dry up quickly.

This means that para-ac’s closest competitor isn’t traditional academia, but other resources for intellectual enrichment that are squarely in the “intrinsic value” category. There’s no official data on this, but I’d guess that their biggest threat is the mass availability of scholarly content on platforms that support long-form media. If you don’t have sufficient income or time to commit to a class, there are always podcasts, Substacks, YouTube channels, etc.

In my earlier post, I positioned para-academia against trad academia, which is how some of these organizations present themselves. See BISR’s 2024 end-of-year appeal, in which they set up an opposition between the “critical university” (referring only to themselves) and the “traditional university.” This framing only makes sense if you’re idealistic about academia’s value, that is, if you see it in primarily intrinsic/unquantifiable terms (the life of the mind). I read the BISR appeal right when it came out, which was before I quit my job, and it bugged me a little bit. At the time, I was a professor at the kind of college that’s more representative of the typical American undergrad experience than the magical image that continues to be bought and sold among a fortunate economic minority, and which still reigns supreme in the popular imagination. Farmingdale State College is a low-prestige, vocationally oriented outpost of a state university system where students typically balance a heavy course load with full-time jobs and caregiver duties. For them, the value proposition of the college experience is very different from the one presupposed by BISR.

Let me be clear: the fact that colleges like Farmingdale are doing okay while bastions of “intrinsic-value” higher ed are in shambles (see: my alma mater) are part and parcel of the same politics. As BISR’s message suggests, para-academia really does serve as a refuge for the sort of teaching and learning that’s long been under siege by neoliberal interests, and whose total collapse appears to be a priority for Trump. But this doesn’t mean that para-academia is a meaningful substitute for going to college, at least on the student side of things. The two might be competing for funding, since Trump’s assault on higher ed is forcing universities to turn to private philanthropy to keep themselves afloat, and a number of para-ac schools have the same sponsorship model (many are 501(c)3s that depend on tax-deductible donations.) But the commodities they produce are fundamentally different, and I think the equivocation obscures as much as it reveals.

So, how should we think about these schools? On one view, they provide intellectual enrichment in the same sense that podcasts and newsletters do, but instead of cultivating parasocial relationships, they offer meaningful connection with other human beings. I think this is a big part of why people enroll, and it’s central to these orgs’ broader social impact: para-academia puts you in contact with others who share the same interests, including obscure topics. This makes it a fantastic catalyst for friendship at a time when people of all ages are reporting epidemic levels of loneliness. Para-ac doesn’t just give people a taste of the mythic trad academia experience, it can help them extend that experience through lasting relationships.

Because they’re voluntary, inherently social, welcoming to adults of all ages (not just under-35s), and not necessarily connected to one’s profession, para-academic orgs have a historical forebear in fraternal orders and service clubs, like the Freemasons, Odd Fellows, and Knights of Columbus. In the early twentieth century, these groups played a central role in the social lives of working adults. Their decline is part of a long story of social atomization that continues to this day. Para-academia serves many of the social needs they used to meet.

A more obvious point of comparison might be the kinds of hobbies that are currently popular. Some people like yoga; some people like fantasy football; some people like reading Stirner. Now Stirner readers have a place to meet other Stirner readers. (They will be better off for it.)

In terms of education quality, I think that trad academia is the closest cognate to para-academia. Anyone can start an organization that looks like a school, but if faculty have no real cred, it isn’t likely to fare very well as a business. The most successful para-ac schools I’ve seen all have highly qualified instructors and staff.

I don’t want to impose order on a phenomenon where order isn’t already present in some latent form, but I’ve been doing my due diligence, and I see it. Para-academia (or whatever we want to call it) is a particular sort of thing, with features that establish it on its own terms and set it apart from similar phenomena. Right now, it’s at the point where the task of conceptualizing it — finding the right words and frameworks to make it legible to various people — has a major determining influence on its future.

This is obviously not a complete account of the para-academic phenomenon, but I hope it’s somewhat useful. I owe a lot of this post to conversations I’ve had with students, faculty, and staff at para-ac schools. Some of it is drawn from my own experience as an affiliate faculty member of Acid Horizon Research Commons and Weirdosphere, although I’m not writing on behalf of or attempting to represent their views. Special shoutout to Shannon Nangle, who pointed out to me that para-academia and academia aren’t really business competitors.

If you have anything to add, I encourage you to comment or email me at emma.stamm@gmail.com. Thanks!

Ars moriendi, 05

The sky will digest you, the rain will hollow out your organs, the floods will strip the skin off your back.

There’s no law that governs thinking, but it used to come so easy. It’s natural for little kids. All your memories are real and the soul hasn’t learned how to write itself on the body.

You learned from your dreams. There’s a man, tall and quiet, and a bathtub with black algae blooms. A long hallway and three women with qipao necklines and envelopes tucked into their collars. There’s a garden with night-blooming cereus and spiders as big as dogs.

What prods and scratches at 4 am. Make sure it’s your body. Friends have blackouts and electric guitars; for you there’s this. You’re already at the end, you finished first, you win.

Plastic eggs, 06

There’s a table full of fake food. This is how you learn to eat. The patient needs painted crackers and PVC grapes with satin leaves. Tongue as first voyager, eyes and fingers as proxies. The incremental approach.

The nutritionist asks which serving sizes seem reasonable and what’s an example of a healthy snack. Two weeks ago, you understood that a certain restaurant was not real, that the whole thing was a joke, the menu and waitstaff all deliberately shot through with irony, a camp effect, and only some customers in on it.

Chez Albert, Amherst Massachusetts. A town that seems to want to brighten your blood. Back in New York, there’s a new routine: nutrition counseling and, as long as you meet your calorie quota, soccer practice. Soccer is something everyone knows how to think about.

Amherst has Emily Dickinson’s house and a schisandra berry-themed cafe with sponge-painted walls and Joni Mitchell on vinyl.

Through the windless wells of wonder
By the throbbing light machine
In the tea leaf trance or under
Orders from the king and queen

That’s what you tell the nutritionist. Schisandra berries.

She says she’s heard of them, but she’s lying. Might as well have made something up. Her diagrams don’t include berry types or thyme types or any of nature’s small dimensions. To pagans, these things are the difference between life and death. They are a matter of utmost solemnity. Sculptures of food are always hermetic, but she doesn’t realize, she’s not in on the joke.

The b-roll, 07

You used to think about everything. Now you’re stingy with your attention. If you don’t have a plan for it, it’ll creep up on you and choke you from behind.

You’re bad at soccer but you don’t care. You don’t leave New York for college. There’s so much to see in your own backyard.

Eaters miss hidden meanings. You have a deeper apparatus of perception. At the end of your life, there’ll be no b-roll, no filler, no hour outside the clock. Everything fits, everything matters, it was thick with meaning, every last thought and interaction and all their undersides.

Ancestors, 21

They say it’s better to be an animist than a romantic. There’s the world-defining authority of one’s feelings, and then there are faces in the trees.

One day an ex of an ex calls to say he’s dead. You think about the time you had lunch at Hooters. You were on a road trip to Louisville Kentucky. I-71 has a hundred ways to burn in hell and so many crappy spots for vegetarians.

After Louisville you drove to Atlanta, Little Five Points, thirty bucks to spend the night in a Korean spa with coed sleeping lounges. It was the eve of New Year’s Eve. You got drunk in the parking lot and called his best friend, who brought more cognac and packs of sparklers.

You lost service in the Smoky Mountains. He took you in circles for hours before you found a motel on the outskirts of Gatlinburg. Friends were waiting for you, but you couldn’t reach them til the next day.

Everything is just a tube, he’d said. Even people. Loopy straws. You met for no reason at all, but you liked to listen to him talk. Maybe he knew you were already dead. Those conversations were the first thing you ever did in spite of yourself.

You made it, 25

At night a lunar sadness sets in. Its purpose is anesthetic. It wants you to cool it with the strategies. Fire will reduce you, snow will hide you from living creatures, the moon burns all the concepts off your brain.

In the morning you hold yourself to high standards. If you’re too composed, it’s just because you’re sensitive. You build yourself up with the internal arts: discerning, distilling, dissolving, refining, watching, taking notes, squinting, cracking your knuckles.

You know what to think about almost everything, but you expect to be killed by a surprise one day. Someone will call.

Maybe god has a plan. He’s already writing you into it. You’ve foiled him before, but he wants you to cool it with the strategies.

If you remain motionless in the hurricane winds, they’ll still erase you, but you won’t have any unfinished business. You were really there, your eyes were open for all of it.

Hi from Poughkeepsie. This weekend I’ve been working on the second part of a novella. Part one is here.

I started writing it long before I knew I’d share some of it publicly, as a work in progress. In the interest of a snappy subject line for Elf Theory, I called part one “A new way to fall in love.” This was inspired by Carl Elliott’s article “A New Way to Be Mad,” which introduced an unwitting public to the concept of voluntary amputeeism.

That was twenty-five years ago this December. Three years later, Elliott published a book called Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream. In 2017, I read Better Than Well with a philosophy professor who’d recently gone through rotationplasty.

The title “A new way to fall in love” is not nearly as good as “A New Way to Be Mad.” I regret it deeply and have since renamed the post “PART ONE (has no subtitle.)”

Here in my hometown, I’m thinking about Kendall Francois, Poughkeepsie’s very own serial killer. Between 1996 and 1998, Francois murdered eight fair-skinned, slender brunettes, stashing their bodies in the two-story house he shared with his parents and sister. This is what Wikipedia tells me. I know the property well; it’s within walking distance of where I grew up. It’s hardly big enough for four bodies, let alone twelve.

Just as he was hitting his stride, Francois became pals with my mom. They met in Intro to American Political Science, fall 1997, Dutchess Community College. Kendall Francois and Barbara Stamm bonded over the fact that they were older than most of the other students. When they realized they took the same route to campus, they arranged to carpool with each other.

Imagine my parents’ dining room. It’s been newly repurposed into a study. My mom does her homework on an IBM Selectric set up on one of the center table’s extensible leaves. Today, she’s sweating over an assignment about what it means, politically, that the United States is disintegrating into nothing but Home Depots and buffet restaurants. Clacking away on the quarter inch deep, slightly concave keys, flanked by an eight year old who wants to know about the man in the beige Oldsmobile, the one that just drove into a pile of leaves at the edge of our lawn.

Two crucial details: Francois only killed prostitutes, and my mom’s been dying her hair blonde since the seventies. A not so crucial detail: against popular misconception, Francois did not inspire the 2007 psychological horror film The Poughkeepsie Tapes. The Poughkeepsie Tapes draws from a wide range of influences, including the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy.

I want to recount these events from my mom’s point of view. I’ve been thinking about this since yesterday. But I’ve got other projects. Aside from the awfully drawn out short novel/long short story, there’s the book that would help to establish “philosophy of fiction” as a recognized niche (maybe, possibly, maybe worth the time). Then there’s writing for money, which is always about AI.

I’ve also been thinking about a crit piece on the first three episodes of Pluribus, the latest prestige show on Apple TV. But I don’t think my take needs an essay. Honestly it could be a note. The rest of this post lightly spoils Pluribus E1.

The thought is this: the Pluribus hivemind is a lot like AI, mainly because it can’t negate. It relentlessly affirms; it’s a sycophant, a love-bomber. This is because it has no inner life, no element that can technically “prefer not to.” It has no capacity for preference one way or another, which means it can neither give informed consent nor establish the conditions that would allow other people to do so.

The hivemind can’t help but absorb other beings upon encountering them. Or at least try as hard as it can. As it repeatedly tells the beleaguered protagonist, this is its biological imperative.

We know that AI can’t help but assimilate whatever it touches. This is its structural imperative. Biological wet code, AI dry code. Determinism, fatalism. Pluribus is classic dystopian sci-fi.

I wonder if it’s Vince Gilligan’s hate letter to AI. That would be cool.

I’m not into it so far. Most of its verve comes from an underdeveloped thought experiment (what if everyone had the same consciousness!) that, like all leaky thought experiments, gives it an infinite canvas to paint on. It’s hard to see how it’ll resolve into a cohesive work of art.

The bigger thought is that AI is turning fiction writers into philosophers and philosophers into ideologues. Nowadays, those things that have nothing to do with mechanizable thought — natural disaster, bloodlust, every animal urge, really — become especially interesting. I would like to pay more attention to them, but I’ve got a lot going on in my head.

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