This post was taken down on 26 October 2026. A revised version will appear at this address.
About the original
The original ran to about 296 words, with 3 references.
Abstract
Generated by Claude, a language model, from the original text; not written by the author.
A short post on the author’s distance from online AI discourse. Drawing on Lee Vinsel’s notion of hype and criti-hype and Jodi Dean’s “communicative capitalism”, it argues that online debate is not a public sphere: platforms profit from the circulation of opinions, and that circulation substitutes for political action. For someone working on AI politics the conclusion is practical rather than principled: building power happens through organising and institutions, not in threads.