№ 2026.Aug.21-001
Jacobin says AI is a weapon of class war from above, and nationalization cannot save it. That claim unsettles every proposal that amounts to "just change the owner." But its conclusion — refusing AI — is equally suspect. Power lies not only in the owners' hands, but in the architecture itself. The question was never whether it is owned, but who designs it.
№ 2026.Aug.21-002
OpenAI cut its cheapest model by 80 percent, and the official blog calls it "advancing the price-performance frontier." But this site said it once before: when the leader itself starts a price war, it has admitted that frontier migration can no longer open a wide enough gap. This is not progress. It is the sound of the treadmill accelerating.
№ 2026.Aug.21-003
Twenty years of craft, one screwdriver, three furniture jobs, eleven hours, about $120 net. Algorithmic dispatch, customer ratings, the platform's cut — the platform did not invent gig work. What it invented was a system that makes gig work measurable and exploitable.
№ 2026.Aug.21-004
Sam Altman invited Dave Eggers into OpenAI headquarters, before some two hundred employees. Eggers did not bring compliments. ChatGPT, he said, is stealing the voice of an entire generation. This is not another warning about jobs — it is a warning about whether people will still think.
№ 2026.Jul.25-001
In a single week, Kimi K3 matched Anthropic's flagship, and Anthropic itself launched Opus 5, a model marketed on cost-efficiency. A chaser became a leader. A leader started a price war. This is not coincidence. The treadmill is accelerating.
№ 2026.Jul.18-001
Compute, data, and model weights constitute the "means of cognitive production" of the AI era. Upon crossing a functional transition zone, these three carriers shift from tools of training and inference into control variables that constrain the feasible sets of others, producing a three-class structure of "compute lords—cognitive serfs—cognitively excluded," which constitutes a pro tanto injustice and escalates into a violation of basic rights when it reaches cognitive exclusion. Diagnosis only, no prescription.
№ 2026.Jul.18-002
The previous article diagnosed the concentrated structure of the means of cognitive production. This article asks how the dispossessed can act: individual technological exit is a dead end, and liberal action theory loses force under deep capture. The article formalizes the "Cognitive Coordination Trap" as a structure of multiple binding constraints, and organizes resistance into two tiers—intra-structure strategies hit an unbreakable ceiling; alternative production entities aim to change the property-rights structure itself.
№ 2026.Jul.18-003
After collective action breaks the old concentrated structure of the means of cognitive production, how do we prevent it from re-forming? The lesson of the Soviet Union is that revolution replaces people but not structure. Starting from the pathological diagnosis, this article builds a normative framework that symmetrically covers the three complementary bottlenecks—the Compute Principle, the Data Principle, the Weight Principle—and confronts the core paradox: any anti-capture institution can itself become an object of capture.
№ 2026.Jul.18-004
Facebook admitted it cannot distinguish between anger-inducing content and genuinely interesting content: their data patterns look too similar. This is not an algorithmic flaw. It is a structural problem, locked in place by commercial incentives, sitting at the intersection of human neurology. And the most unsettling part: we may be actively seeking to be angered.
№ 2026.Jul.18-005
Weber said modern humans are trapped in the iron cage of instrumental rationality. But if AGI renders humanity entirely "useless" in the dimension of efficiency, would the cage unlock itself? A seductive deduction, but upon closer examination, the cage's structure is more complex than it appears. And the real question may be: once all uncertainty is smoothed away by AI, will humans still *want* freedom?
№ 2026.Jul.18-006
Academia has an almost instinctive aversion to outsiders. This isn't pure arrogance. An insider's identity is a form of "credit credential," anchored in institutional titles, peer review, and citation networks. AI is disrupting this credit system: it produces formally professional texts without an accountable "author." This is not a crisis for academia. It is a stress test.
№ 2026.Jul.14-001
Timothy Mitchell says that capital is not saved out of the past but captured from the future. In NLR 159, Copley takes this thesis apart for you — Uber lives not on innovation but on the expectation of monopoly; the valuations of the stock market are not an index of productivity but a plan for the plunder of the future.