🫦 But also he addresses sthing most don't: genAI is a cheat code for avoiding the experience of vulnerability inherent in putting your own work out there on front street. That is a muscle you need to start building *as early as possible*, for the sake of your own mental health, if nothing else.
FactPost@factpostnews.bsky.social · 19h agoMayor Mamdani announces a ban on generative AI in schools through 8th grade: AI is not going to replace student-teacher interaction in NYC public schools. We have also heard the importance of protecting childhood—allowing students the opportunity to ask questions, to engage, to fail, to learn.
![Matthew Kirschenbaum
The Writing Lesson
Revisited: AI [and | in | is]
the Scriptural Economy
ABSTRACT. This essay uses Michel de Certeau’s framing of mo-
dernity as a scriptural economy—and that concept’s parafictional
deployment in Tom McCarthy’s 2015 novel Satin Island and the
novel’s debt to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous chapter “A Writing
Lesson”—to situate large language models (LLMs) in a tradition
of writing and textual production rooted in capitalism and trans-
actional practices. It argues that generative artificial intelligence
should be understood not as the disruption of writing or an aber-
ration but as the completion of the structural logic of the scriptural
economy and that LLMs are very likely the final word on a system
of production wherein writing is tokenized and transacted for ex-
traction of value in ways that render the technology’s current limi-
tations, such as a propensity for hallucinations, largely beside the
point. Lest there be any misunderstanding, this is not intended as
a salutary diagnosis.
friedrich kittler (1995) pronounced the last historical act of
writing as taking place in the early 1970s when engineers at Intel
leaned over their boards to draw up blueprints for the 4004 micro-
processor, the first ever for the commercial market. But Kittler might
have done better to declare a long goodbye. Consider a parallel episode
almost a half century later, sometime in early 2017, when an engineer
at Google used software to create a diagram for a machine learning
paper titled “Attention Is All You Need”: The diagram limned the novel
transformer architecture that became the basis for OpenAI’s ChatGPT
and many other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models (Vaswani
et al. 2017, 3).
© 2026 The New School
social research Vol. 93 : No. 2 : Summer 2026 285](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j3hiqh5g6il7vmphiyldeklv/bafkreiafofvipodolu23mltf6bk2tymsqgiy2v4uygvwknizsdun67776y)
