ABSTRACT
Generative AI, rounding an nth hype-cycle victory lap, promises to revolutionize virtually every application against which it’s roughly patched. To a giddy mob of LinkedIn para-journalists it represents a step-change in efficiency, a rip-and-replace solution for content generation, an oracle squeezed from Wikipedia’s digestive tract. To the techno-optimists, Generative AI holds emancipatory potential: a perpetual motion machine of free labor, a tool for decentralized operations, a clamorous alarm signaling the end of intellectual property.
This chapter argues that Generative AI, an assemblage of technology platforms and techno-ideologies, calls forth little substance in terms of social reorganization. Instead of enacting a new society, Generative AI emerges concurrently with an adolescent social order – a subtle, automatic social transformation that carries the through-line of postmodernity all the way to its conclusion. The postmodern subject’s tendency toward atomization accelerates and completes as its atoms approach infinitesimal scale. A new social physics emerges, a dark world of vaporous non-beings who interrelate through ambience, pressure, diffusion, and asynchronous commingling. This social vaporreality exists prior to AI in every sense, functioning as the latter’s socioeconomic preconditions, its technical substrate, and its placental subsistence medium.
Here lies both true emancipatory potential and existential threat: the twilight of the postmodern subject and the terminus of memory.
This chapter tweaks at lightning-speed, manically careening through a half-century of subject construction in order to aggregate the flows and systems through which contemporary vaporreality emerges. It then articulates the dynamics of vapor space within the context of the computational structures that harness vapor as a medium. The chapter culminates with the sociopolitics of the vaporous, including its aesthetics, endemic fascisms, performativities, and reproductive arrangements. It concludes by returning to the utopian energy of the AI hype cycle, channeling it toward the desubjective: heaven.
