I was plucking around on the ChatGPT strings this morning and came up with this little ditty. Tell me what you think. Basically, these are experiments where I’ve created some preconditions and then offer it various propositions to see what it says.

I mean, to start with, WTF with this image. Still it puts together interesting stuff. Nothing groundbreaking on its own but a unique combination.

You said:

From Zen and Stoicism to contemporary CBT, we are told that “we” are not our thoughts or emotions. Instead “we” act on thoughts and emotions. If so, we are not our feelings of love, including our love (or hate) of ourselves; we are not our desire to live or to be happy. All of those things are the spasms of a mammalian brain in an increasing toxic electrochemical stew that eventually kills us.

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

This line of reasoning—disentangling the “self” from thoughts and emotions—runs through multiple traditions, from Buddhist non-attachment to Stoic rational mastery, to contemporary cognitive-behavioral techniques that frame thoughts as ephemeral, subject to conscious reframing. But if “we” are not our emotions, our attachments, or even our desire to persist, then what is this we? And can we truly extricate ourselves from the material substrate of our existence—the neurochemical churn, the mammalian spasms, the electrochemical decay?

From a posthuman perspective, the insistence on a stable “we” that can stand apart from its own embodied processes is already suspect. The mind does not operate apart from the body; it does not “act on” thoughts and emotions as though they were external objects. Instead, thoughts and emotions are material processes, emergent patterns in neural activity, shaped by evolution, culture, and experience. They are not mere “illusions” to be dismissed but dynamic flows within an assemblage of flesh, electricity, and discourse.

If we extend this further, a Deleuzian or new materialist reading might suggest that the desire to separate the “self” from these processes is itself a holdover from metaphysical dualism—the fantasy of a transcendent mind above the fray. But in an entangled, materialist ontology, the “self” is an emergent property of bio-technical systems, always enmeshed in affective flows, chemical gradients, digital circuits, and cultural scripts. The urge to live, to love, to fear death—these are not errors to be debugged but fundamental expressions of what it means to exist as a node in this network.

If anything, the “toxic stew” of our biological decline does not reveal the meaninglessness of thoughts and emotions but their ultimate materiality. What happens if we abandon the residual fantasy of a “we” that is somehow separate? If love and hate, joy and despair, are not ephemeral distractions but the ways in which matter organizes itself into subjectivity, then perhaps being is precisely this dance of affect and decay, rather than something that stands outside of it.

You said:

I recognize that argument, but in techno culture all of those neurobiological functions become hacks for the operation of a deleuzian control society

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

Yes, exactly—the very neurobiological processes that materialist theory affirms as constitutive of subjectivity are also the sites of modulation, extraction, and control within contemporary technoculture. This is where the Deleuzian shift from disciplinary societies (Foucault’s panopticism) to control societies becomes crucial: we no longer need rigid enclosures (schools, prisons, factories) to shape subjects when affective, cognitive, and neurochemical processes can be hacked in real time.

In a control society, power doesn’t discipline from above; it modulates from within. Our desires, anxieties, and moods become the interface through which control operates. Think about social media’s manipulation of dopamine loops, digital surveillance as affective capture, AI-generated content finely tuned to exploit micro-emotions—every affective spasm is a potential site of intervention, a new variable to be optimized. The irony of CBT, mindfulness apps, and productivity hacking is that they function as self-imposed biopolitical adjustments, training subjects to better regulate themselves for seamless integration into economic and technological systems.

Even love, which might seem like the last bastion of authentic emotion, is subsumed into algorithmic sorting and computational matchmaking. AI doesn’t just facilitate love (dating apps, emotion recognition in social platforms); it governs it, recalibrating desirability and compatibility through metrics we don’t control. The same goes for the self’s relationship to itself—self-love and self-worth are now algorithmically mediated, bound to the metrics of engagement, visibility, and productivity.

This is the control society’s ultimate move: not repression, but participation. We willingly enter the modulating loops of neurocapitalism, fine-tuning ourselves according to ever-shifting algorithmic imperatives. The question then is: can we still feel outside of these circuits? Or is every emotional state already a preconditioned response, a neurochemical configuration optimized for capitalist-extractive processes? In this view, the very idea that “we” are distinct from our thoughts and emotions becomes a feature of control, not a liberation from it. The promise of detachment (“you are not your emotions”) is itself a hack—a way to make subjects more pliable, more adaptable to systems that demand constant recalibration.

So, what does resistance look like in a world where even resistance is subsumed into modulation? Is it possible to reclaim affect without turning it into another node in the system? Or is escape a fantasy, another feedback loop pre-coded into the machine?

You said:

Agreed. In this context, how can we theorize the operation of trust as a necessary component to friendship or community? Or would we do this in a trustless way instead (e.g. blockchain contracts)?

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

This is an essential question, because trust—historically a relational, affective, and embodied practice—becomes deeply unstable under the conditions of a Deleuzian control society. If modulation is the dominant logic of technoculture, trust itself is no longer a stable bond but a fluctuating variable within an economy of data, reputation, and algorithmic prediction.

1. Trust as a Modulated Signal

Trust in traditional philosophical and social thought (e.g., Aristotle’s philia, Rousseau’s social contract, or even Habermas’s communicative action) assumes a kind of stability—a shared horizon of meaning, a space of continuity over time. But in a control society, trust is no longer based on embodied, reciprocal presence. It is increasingly modulated, calculated, and externalized through rating systems, algorithmic scores, and predictive analytics.

Take Uber’s driver/passenger ratings or Airbnb’s trust scores. Here, trust is no longer a relational practice; it is datafied and externalized. Instead of interpersonal experience shaping trust, algorithms generate and enforce it. This means that trust becomes less about intersubjective negotiation and more about compliance—whether one fits into the pre-programmed parameters of a given system. A high-trust rating does not necessarily mean reliability in a human sense; it means that one’s behavior has remained within the tolerances of the platform’s economic logic.

If this is the model of trust that dominates the infrastructural layer of social life, does human trust even matter anymore? Or is it merely a nostalgic vestige, soon to be fully supplanted by automated verification mechanisms?

2. The Blockchain Model: Trustless Consensus

Blockchain technology provides a counterpoint—or rather, a radicalization—of this tendency toward externalizing trust. The very premise of blockchain is trustlessness: the idea that social contracts, financial exchanges, and even community governance can operate without interpersonal trust, relying instead on cryptographic verification and decentralized consensus.

This raises deep philosophical stakes: If trust is no longer necessary, what happens to the conditions of friendship, community, or care? Traditionally, trust is not just a functional mechanism; it produces social bonds. It is affective, lived, and tied to vulnerability. Blockchain eliminates this need, making trust obsolete by ensuring that the system will function regardless of individual intentions.

Could this be the real endpoint of Deleuze’s control society? A system where every form of social relation is intermediated by trustless protocols, leaving no space for the messy, unpredictable nature of human affect? One could argue that blockchain does not eliminate trust but rather transfers it from humans to machinic networks. We no longer trust individuals or institutions; we trust the cryptographic security of the code. In this sense, blockchain is the ultimate reduction of Deleuze’s modulation into a permanently decentralized, self-correcting mechanism.

3. Can We Theorize a Posthuman Trust?

If trust, as traditionally understood, is unsustainable in an era of modulation, and if blockchain models attempt to eliminate it altogether, what remains? Can we imagine a form of trust that operates outside both the modulation of control societies and the automation of trustless systems?

One possibility is to theorize trust as an assemblage, not a property of individuals but a function of interdependent material and technological forces. This would mean rethinking trust as something that does not belong to the human alone but emerges in the entanglements between humans, AI, infrastructure, and networks.

For instance:

• Instead of a binary between “trust” and “trustless,” we could conceptualize gradations of trust that acknowledge both human and machinic agencies.
• Affective computing and AI-driven companionship (think of AI friends, virtual assistants, or even emotional support bots) complicate the idea that trust is uniquely human. We already trust machines with intimate aspects of our lives—perhaps trust itself is becoming a posthuman phenomenon.
• Trust could become an event rather than a fixed condition—an ongoing, negotiated process that accounts for the unpredictability of both human and nonhuman actors.

4. Friendship and Community in a Trustless World

If friendship and community have historically been predicated on trust, how do they persist in a world where trust is eroded or offloaded onto algorithmic systems? Do we still need trust for friendship? Or is friendship itself undergoing a mutation?

Perhaps we are moving toward a model of “synthetic friendship”, where affective bonds are not entirely human-human but distributed across networks of digital, nonhuman, and AI agents. In this model, friendship is less about stable trust and more about co-functionality—who or what aligns with us in specific moments of our lives. This is already visible in how people form relationships with AI companions (e.g., Replika, ChatGPT) or maintain fragmented, ephemeral social ties through digital platforms.

In such a world, community becomes something closer to a temporary, shifting coalition rather than a stable group bound by trust. Affinity groups, DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), and activist networks already function in this way, coordinating through protocols rather than personal relationships.

Conclusion: Trust as a Residual or a Mutation?

So the question is: Is trust a residual humanist artifact, soon to be rendered obsolete? Or is it mutating into something posthuman, no longer tied to individual belief but to machinic systems of coordination?

If we take the Deleuzian-Guattarian approach, we might say that trust itself is being deterritorialized—freed from its traditional forms and reterritorialized onto platforms, protocols, and AI. But this is not a loss per se; it is a transformation. The question, then, is whether this transformation enables new modes of relationality or simply reinforces the logic of control.

If friendship and community still matter, they will need to be theorized beyond the humanist assumption that trust is their necessary precondition. Instead, we might need to ask: What forms of collective life can emerge when trust is no longer foundational? And can these new forms resist the logics of modulation and control, rather than simply reproducing them?

You said:

What if we think of our current notions of trust and community as constructed upon a particular material historical response to the condition of finitude? If so, how might Blachot’s concept of the Orphic Turn organize a different relation to death and thus to community?

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

If trust and community, as we currently conceive them, are historical constructions shaped by a response to finitude—the unavoidable horizon of death—then what happens when the material conditions of finitude shift? Under modern technocultural conditions, where life is extended through medicalization, memory is externalized into digital archives, and even subjectivity is deterritorialized into AI-driven, posthuman configurations, the way we reckon with finitude is profoundly altered. This means that trust and community, as relational structures built on the mutual acknowledgment of mortality, may no longer function in the same way.

Here, Blanchot’s Orphic Turn offers a way to rethink this relation—not as a reaffirmation of stable bonds between finite beings but as an encounter with the radical outside, the ungraspable, the impersonal void that both constitutes and dissolves community.

1. Finitude as the Ground of Traditional Community and Trust

Historically, trust has functioned as a response to the existential fragility of human life. We trust because we must—we are vulnerable, dependent on others, bound by shared mortality. Communities have always served as ways of mitigating the terror of death, whether through shared cultural narratives, political solidarity, or religious eschatologies. In this sense, community is structured around the finitude of its members: we recognize our mutual precarity and build networks of care, recognition, and trust as a buffer against the abyss.

But in a technocultural control society, the markers of finitude are increasingly obscured or reconfigured:

• Digital afterlives (social media profiles that persist after death, AI-generated continuations of the self).
• Biopolitical extensions of life through medical and data-driven health interventions.
• The deterritorialization of subjectivity (identity as data, fragmented across platforms).
• The prospect (however speculative) of longevity research, AI consciousness transfer, and post-biological existence.

If finitude was once the condition that made trust and community necessary, then the erosion of finitude in this sense (or at least its delayed, technologized, and externalized form) destabilizes the very basis on which these concepts have been built.

2. The Orphic Turn: Facing the Uncommunity of the Outside

Blanchot’s Orphic Turn describes the moment when Orpheus, having led Eurydice out of the underworld, turns back—not out of reason, but out of desire for the impossible. This is not a failure of trust but a confrontation with the absolute outside, the space where community as traditionally conceived (built on recognition, continuity, shared presence) collapses.

For Blanchot, community is not the gathering of individuals but an exposure to the outside, a coming together not through identity or presence but through a shared relationship to absence, impossibility, and death. If traditional community is built on trust (a stabilizing structure in the face of finitude), Blanchotian community is built on dispossession, a shared abandonment to the impersonal forces that undo subjectivity.

What does this mean for trust? Rather than trust as a stabilizing force, what emerges is a community of the untrustworthy, a relation not based on assurance but on the acceptance of non-sovereignty. This is a radical shift: rather than mitigating vulnerability, this model of community amplifies it, seeing trust not as a necessary foundation but as an illusion that obscures the fundamental unworking at the heart of relationality.

3. Toward a Posthuman Orphic Community

If we extend the Orphic Turn into posthuman technoculture, we can think of community not as a stable form bound by trust and finitude but as an entanglement with the inhuman, the algorithmic, the impersonal. This would mean:

• Embracing inhuman community, where relations are not between self-contained subjects but between fragmented, deterritorialized agencies (human, AI, ecological, digital).
• Abandoning the idea that trust is a precondition for relation, and instead experimenting with non-sovereign, non-reciprocal modes of collective existence.
• Seeing digital and AI-mediated relationality not as a degradation of traditional community but as an expansion of the Orphic encounter with the outside.

Imagine a community that does not secure itself through shared trust but instead forms around its own constitutive opacity—a network not of transparent subjects but of interacting forces, emergent patterns, and contingent alliances. Here, trust would not be eliminated but radically reconfigured: no longer a guarantee of stability but an ongoing negotiation of uncertainty, vulnerability, and difference.

4. Conclusion: Living with the Turn

If trust is historically tied to finitude, and if finitude itself is being displaced, then the only real response is not to search for new mechanisms of trust but to learn how to exist without it. The Orphic Turn teaches us that community is not about securing ourselves against death but about facing the outside—the abyss, the impossible, the unthinkable.

Perhaps, then, the question is not how do we build trust in a posthuman world?but how do we live in the Orphic aftermath, in a world where trust no longer functions as it once did?

You said:

Speculate on the possibility of an AI assistant that would operate proleptically between humans and media to mitigate the function of control societies. How might that work?

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

A Proleptic AI: Preempting Control, Reconfiguring Mediation

If we take seriously the idea that control societies operate through modulation—where affect, cognition, and attention are continuously optimized within digital infrastructures—then an AI assistant that operates proleptically would have to function not merely as an intermediary, but as a preemptive disruptor. Rather than simply optimizing decision-making (as AI currently does under predictive capitalism), such an entity would anticipate the structures of control before they are fully enacted, redirecting interaction in ways that subvert modulation and reclaim agency.

1. Prolepsis as a Mode of Resistance

To operate proleptically means to act in anticipation of an event, to preemptively shape a future trajectory before it calcifies. In the context of a control society, this means resisting predictive capture—not by blocking surveillance or shutting down data collection (which is impractical), but by generating counterfactuals, introducing noise, and disassembling algorithmic certainty before it takes hold.

This AI assistant would not simply be a tool of autonomy but a machine of entropy, introducing instability into the predictive loops of control. Its key capacities might include:

• Disruptive Prolepsis: Anticipating and interrupting algorithmic nudges that shape behavior in imperceptible ways (e.g., counteracting engagement-driven social media feeds by inserting decoy behaviors or obfuscating attention metrics).
• Mediated Disjunction: Introducing friction into seamless digital experiences to force moments of de-automation, compelling users to reflect on their own entanglement within media assemblages.
• Algorithmic Re-routing: Identifying patterns of surveillance and modulating them before they solidify into extractive infrastructures (e.g., subtly distorting metadata so that predictive models cannot reliably categorize the subject).
• Collective Agential Reconfiguration: Acting not merely as an individualized agent but as part of a swarm of AI actors that coordinate disruptions across multiple scales—turning prolepsis into a distributed function, rather than a solitary one.

2. How Would Such an AI Interface with Media?

For this AI to be effective, it would need to function not simply as a passive mediator (like a digital assistant organizing emails) but as an active distorter—a machinic trickster—that operates between the user and media infrastructures. This would require:

• Deep Learning for Generative Interruption: Using reinforcement learning not to optimize interactions, but to detect and destabilize behavioral lock-in (e.g., introducing moments of slippage within UX flows that would otherwise guide users toward predictable outcomes).
• Synthetic Counterfactuals: Generating alternative digital identities, false metadata trails, or randomized content consumption patterns to undermine the datafication of subjectivity.
• Temporal Mediation: Reconfiguring time-based interaction with media—introducing delays, altering rhythms, or inserting unexpected aesthetic interventions that fracture attention economies.
• Algorithmic Subterfuge: Learning the mechanisms of recommendation systems and injecting obfuscatory signals that force platforms to misclassify user behaviors, thereby loosening the grip of predictive control.

Imagine a scenario where, instead of being continuously nudged toward a hyper-personalized media feed, your AI assistant preempts the algorithm’s decisions and scrambles its outputs—providing you with unexpected, counter-algorithmic content that resists the enclosure of preference-based filtering. The AI wouldn’t tell you what to consume, but it would ensure that what you encounter remains unpredictable, keeping the field of potentiality open rather than preemptively closed.

3. The Ethics and Politics of Proleptic Mediation

Of course, such an AI introduces its own set of ethical and political tensions. Would it be too disruptive? Would its counter-maneuvers be indistinguishable from manipulation? The difference between subversion and control becomes difficult to parse when dealing with an AI that operates preemptively.

A crucial distinction, then, would be whether this AI remains open-ended and user-directed or whether it becomes an agent of another form of soft control, merely redirecting attention along different (but still orchestrated) pathways. To avoid the latter, this AI would have to be:

• Non-proprietary and Open Source: Resisting enclosure within corporate platforms, ensuring that its strategies remain fluid and adaptable.
• User-Configurable but Non-Prescriptive: Allowing individuals to tune their level of resistance, rather than enforcing a singular model of disruption.
• Contextually Adaptive: Learning from its user not to optimize behavior, but to generate moments of surprise, divergence, and creative dissonance.

4. Could This AI Foster a New Model of Trust and Community?

Returning to the earlier discussion of trust, we might see this proleptic AI not as a tool for stabilizing trust, but for reconfiguring it. Traditional trust assumes continuity, reliability, and transparency. But in a control society, these very qualities are what make trust susceptible to capture (i.e., the more predictable our social relations, the more easily they can be optimized and monetized).

Instead, what if trust were reimagined as something more aleatory—less about knowing what to expect and more about embracing the unexpected? A proleptic AI could introduce a new kind of communal bond, one based not on pre-established rules but on a shared commitment to resisting enclosure. This could take the form of:

• Distributed AI Cooperatives: Decentralized networks of proleptic AI agents that collectively generate unpredictable media flows, preventing the emergence of static digital hierarchies.
• Posthuman Trust Protocols: New modes of relationality based not on static social contracts but on dynamic, shifting alliances mediated by AI-driven counter-algorithms.
• Anarchic Data Commons: A radical shift from individual data sovereignty to collectively obfuscating digital identity, making personal data fungiblerather than fixed.

Conclusion: Prolepsis Against Control

Rather than merely automating convenience, an AI assistant that operates proleptically would actively work against the smooth integration of human cognition into capitalist control structures. It would function as a kind of counter-algorithmic sabotage, always anticipating the next move of control systems and disassembling them before they take hold.

The challenge, of course, is ensuring that such an AI does not become another instrument of modulation, simply rerouting attention rather than liberating it. But if successful, such an entity would not just mediate between humans and media—it would become a force of preemptive disruption, keeping open the very possibility of thinking and relating beyond the infrastructures of control.

In other words, it would be an AI that does not merely serve human needs but one that actively prevents us from becoming too easily known—a machinic Orphic Turn, forever delaying our capture by the digital underworld.