The Doubt Machine
How AI Decides Who Deserves to Be Believed
A new audit measures how a language model assigns different burdens of proof to identical claims depending on the institution attributed to them.
Archive
All essays and working notes
A complete chronological index of essays and working notes.
Views expressed in these essays are my own.
Labor Will Not Become Inconsequential
Why David Harvey’s own theory contradicts his prediction about artificial intelligence
David Harvey predicts that artificial intelligence will make labor almost inconsequential, but his own history of technological change and his own value theory refuse that conclusion.
Against Criti-Hype: Artificial Intelligence, Marxism, and the Politics of Deskilling
Why the divestment from American human capital was a political choice, not a technological necessity
Critics who inherit Silicon Valley’s claims and reverse only the valuation end up arguing that machines deskilled American workers, when the record points instead to collapsed employer training, fissured firms, deunionization, and public disinvestment.
The Real AI War Is Over Monopoly, Not Intelligence
Open-source models, artificial scarcity, and the political economy of technological enclosure
Why the politics around artificial intelligence intensify not because models are too powerful to circulate, but because they are becoming too cheap to sustain the monopoly rents the investment boom depends on.
Coal Use Is Falling While China Builds Coal Plants
Why combined and uneven development is still credible development
China is adding coal capacity even though coal-fired electricity generation fell in absolute terms in 2025, revealing a real energy transition advancing through national-security reserves, uneven institutions, and inherited infrastructure.
Status Jockeying as a Mode of Societization
Regulation theory, distinction, and the subjects of post-Fordist accumulation
A regulation-theory account of status competition as the mode of societization of post-Fordist accumulation, traced from makerspaces to social platforms.
Stochastic Interpellation
Althusser after desocietization, and subject formation without the ensemble
Why contemporary subject formation remains relentless but loses coordination as schools, families, workplaces, and algorithmic feeds cease to form a coherent ideological ensemble.
Artificial Intelligence Needs Intelligent Societies
Cheap AI, human capital, and the political economy of collective intelligence
Why cheap computational intelligence increases the value of universities, expertise, organizational memory, and the collective institutions that American capitalism has spent decades weakening.
The Law of Zeus After Legitimacy
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and the collapse of the social contract
A reading of Nolan's Odyssey through post-legitimacy, the laws of Zeus, sovereign exemption, public trust, and the return of might makes right.
The Four-Day Work Week Needs a Theory of Production
Reducing working time is a socialist goal. Managerial goodwill is not a strategy.
Why the four-day week cannot become a general social right through boutique pilot programs, productivity appeals, or selective perk culture, and why reducing socially necessary labor requires collective control over production.
Beyond Basic Income
Aaron Benanav, organizations, and the politics of production
Why post-work politics mistakes a crisis of production for a crisis of distribution, and why collective control of finance and production must replace dependence on capitalist profits.
The Backrooms After the Zone
Stalker, trauma, simulation, and the horror of liquid modernity
An essay comparing Backrooms and Tarkovsky’s Stalker through liquid modernity, post-bureaucracy, trauma, simulation, and the collapse of solid institutional forms.
The Two Control Regimes of Post-Bureaucratic Capitalism
Normative control for elite workers, technical control for everyone else
An essay on post-bureaucratic capitalism’s classed division of labor control: lifestyle, authenticity, and normative discipline above; metrics, platforms, and technical discipline below.
The AI Stranded Asset Problem
Data centers, overcapacity, and the bubble that may not leave an infrastructure legacy
An essay on AI data centers, fixed capital, energy demand, overcapacity, and why an AI crash may leave a different kind of stranded infrastructure than earlier bubbles.
David Lynch Was Not an Ironist
Twin Peaks, Dostoevsky, and the embarrassment of goodness
An essay on David Lynch’s non-ironic moral seriousness, Twin Peaks, Dostoevsky, Major Briggs, the Log Lady, Albert Rosenfield, and the difference between postmodern form and ironic evasion.
All That Is Solid Melts Into Search
Capitalist dissolution, conservative idolatry, and democratic formation
An essay on Marx, Feuerbach, G. A. Cohen, Mill, AI retrieval, and the reconstruction of culture as democratic formation rather than content or idol.
Externalized Culture and the Permanent Present
AI, objectified memory, and the erosion of embodied discernment
An essay on objectified culture, embodied memory, AI-mediated retrieval, monopoly over cultural access, and the democratic conditions of discernment.
AI and the Crisis of the Wage Form
Automation, socialized intelligence, and the politics of post-wage capitalism
An essay on Paul Adler, artificial intelligence, commodity fetishism, and the wage-form crisis produced by the intensified socialization of production.
Political Capitalism and the Afterlife of Monopoly Capital
Dylan Riley, Baran and Sweezy, and the political forms of surplus absorption
An essay on Dylan Riley, political capitalism, Baran and Sweezy, and why state-backed rent extraction belongs within the afterlife of monopoly capital.
The Token Budget Problem
AI compute costs, workslop, subsidized tokens, and the false simplicity of replacing payroll with compute
A follow-up essay on AI substitution, token budgets, model costs, gig-economy subsidy logic, and why compute is not a substitute for judgment.
The AI Substitution Trap
Labor, vendor dependence, and the cost of losing the ability to leave
A work-in-progress essay on AI labor substitution, organizational dependence, credible exit capacity, and capture without ownership.
Historical Genres of Anxiety
Popular culture and the partial confrontation with social fear
A working essay on film history, collective anxiety, popular culture, and the partial ways movies confront institutional change.
When Disaster Arrives Already Mediated
Movies, post-legitimacy, and the cultural scripts of crisis
A working essay on movies, popular culture, institutional erosion, and the frames publics use when official explanation loses authority.
Skinwalker Ranch and the Religion of Instruments
Technology, spiritual eclecticism, and modern re-enchantment
An essay on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, David Noble, technical rationality, spiritual eclecticism, and instruments as modern divining rods.
Against the Politics of Pure Opposition
Moralism as status practice and the loss of consequential judgment
An essay on moralized refusal, mock horizontality, and the need to judge oppositional politics by what it builds, alters, and makes possible.
Muskism and the Myth of Productive Revolution
On production, accumulation, and value capture
Muskism as a politics of technological spectacle, regulatory monetization, platform control, and accumulation by capture.
After Legitimacy
On desocietization and its discontents
Post-legitimacy, desocietization, and the substitute forms of belonging that appear when institutions stop persuading.