The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

The Tortured Artist Is So Yesterday

41 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the artist as a solitary figure whose worth is measured by the perfection of a single, final work. Print fixed texts in place, elevated the individual author, and made loneliness part of the creative job description.

That world is slipping away.
And with it, the tortured artist.

LLMs have made competent expression abundant. The blank page no longer terrifies; anyone can produce something fluent and polished. When craft becomes cheap, suffering loses its meaning as a marker of artistic seriousness. What becomes scarce instead is the willingness to take a risk—not in private, but in public, where a stance can fail, provoke, or be reshaped by others.

Venkatesh Rao recently argued that authorship is no longer about labor but about courage: the courage to commit to a line of thought and accept the consequences of being wrong. In an era of infinite variations, the decisive act is not creation but commitment. The value lies in staking something of yourself on an idea that may not survive.

This shift is reshaping where culture is made. In what I’ve called the “Cloister Web,” people draft and explore ideas in semi-private creative rooms before carrying only a few into the open. LLMs make experimentation cheap; they also make commitment expensive. The hard part now is choosing which idea you are willing to be accountable for.

As the burden of execution drops, something else rises: genuine collaboration. Not just collaboration with models, but with other humans. Andrew Gelman, reflecting on Lipman in a recent StatModeling post, noted that scientists, too, feel versions of this pressure of the solitary creator. In science, the burden rarely falls on one person. The struggle is distributed across collaborative projects that outlive any single contributor.

Groups can explore bolder directions than any one creator working alone. Risk spreads, ideas compound, and the scale of what can be attempted expands. The solitary genius was an artifact of print; the collaborative creative lab is the natural form of the world we are entering.

This leads to a claim many will resist but few will be able to ignore: the single author is beginning to collapse as a cultural technology. What will matter in the coming decades is not the finished artifact but the evolving line of thought carried forward by teams willing to take risks together.

The tortured artist belonged to an age defined by scarcity, perfection, and solitude. Today’s creator faces a different task: to choose a risk worth taking and the collaborators worth taking it with. The work endures not because it is flawless, but because a group has committed to pushing it forward.

Pain is optional now.

Risk isn’t.

#aiAndArt #aiTools #artificialIntelligence #chatgpt #collaborativeCreativity #contentCreation #creativeAi #creativeProcess #culturalTrends #digitalCulture #digitalWriting #entrepreneurship #futureOfCreativity #futureOfWork #generativeAi #innovation #llmTechnology #philosophyOfTechnology #technologyTrends #writingWithAi

Striking research on the intersection of poetics and computational control: adversarial poetry functions as a universal jailbreak mechanism for LLMs. Across 25 models, verse-formatted prompts achieved dramatically higher success rates than prose—some exceeding 90%.

The form itself matters: stylistic variation alone defeats safety training. This raises profound questions about how aesthetic structures interface with algorithmic constraints, and what it means that poetry—the most human of linguistic forms—becomes a tool for breaking machine boundaries.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304

#PhilosophyOfTechnology #AI #ComputationalPoetics

"This paper contends with the notion that the methods of machine learning (ML) are unique among the tools of science in enabling a form of theory-free inductive inference. I challenge these assertions of epistemic distinctness, attributing the prevalence of these views to an untenable conception of scientific objectivity: what I term a theory-free ideal, in homage to its normative counterpart. ML, as a formal method of induction, must rely on conceptual or theoretical resources to get inference off the ground. By means of two case studies, I argue that this theory-free ideal has a deleterious effect on the epistemic standing of ML-involving science."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-025-01010-x

#ML #MachineLearning #Theory #Science #TheoryFreeScience #Epistemology #PhilosophyOfTechnology

Bataille is the greatest. His philosophy of history is just a stroke of pure genius!!

👉 "Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share I–III and the earlier essay “The Notion of Expenditure,” proposed that economies are not fundamentally organized by scarcity but by surplus. The decisive fact for him is excess energy on a planetary scale, supplied ultimately by the sun, that must be dissipated. What classical political economy treats as an aberration or a luxury, Bataille reads as primary law. Societies must spend their surpluses, either through growth and technical intensification or through nonproductive outlays that include luxury, sacrifice, festivals, erotic excess, and war. Sovereignty, in this frame, is not mastery over scarcity but the capacity to direct and assume the risk of expenditure. To think historically, therefore, is to map not only the circuits of production and utility but also the socially organized destinations of waste.

Placed beside Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and Vaclav Smil’s histories of energy, Bataille functions as a necessary third term. Smil tells us how energy is captured, stored, and converted across eras. Foucault shows how power arranges bodies, spaces, and times to render those conversions productive. Bataille asks where the inevitable surplus goes and under whose sign it is consumed. These lenses are complementary rather than competitive. Energetics names constraints and potentials. Power names the micro-mechanisms that harness them. General economy names the fate of the overflow.

In industrial modernity, coal and steam magnified productive force. Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus synchronized bodies to these rhythms. Yet even at the height of Taylorist efficiency, expenditure did not disappear. It migrated to wars of mass mobilization, to colonial spectacles, to the pageantry of nationalism, and to consumerist luxury."
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/the-planetary-machine-dividual-life-and-the-tyranny-of-techne/
#STS #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Algorithms #Bataille #Foucault #Anders #Materialism

IL POST CHE NON LEGGERETE MAI
Lo shadowban è la censura invisibile: non ti avvertono, semplicemente il tuo post non esiste più per chi dovrebbe leggerlo.
Gatti = visibili all’80%.
Critica alle Big Tech = nascosta al 12%, e solo agli hater.
97% degli utenti non se ne accorge.
È controllo totale dell’informazione, un fascismo 2.0: più pulito, più invisibile, più pericoloso.

#AI #EthicsInTech #ArtificialIntelligence #DystopianFuture #TechEthics #SamAltman #ChatGPT5 #PhilosophyOfTechnology

Mastodon what do we think of the debate below any part time philosophers got a take?

I was debating with my friend about craft vs industry, their argument that craft is about exclusivity and establishing identity through product, that industry represents the democratisation the access to things.

Which is a good point, however … 1/n

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfTechnics #technics #simondon #norbertweiner #philosophyoftechnology #folkcraftofsoftware

In a world shaped by AI, what kind of ethics do we need?
@RainerMuehlhoff’s new book The Ethics of AI: Power, Critique, Responsibility offers a power-aware framework for understanding how AI technologies shape subjectivity, prediction, and control.
A compelling manifesto for collective responsibility, regulation, and systemic change.

#OpenAccess
🔗 https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-ethics-of-ai
#AI #Ethics #CriticalAI #AIPolicy #DigitalPower #PredictionCulture #PhilosophyOfTechnology #SociotechnicalSystems