Gramsci's Nightmare – AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony
Online talk by Ethan Zuckerman.
Large language models – the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT – work by ingesting a civilization's worth of texts and calculating the relationships between these words. Within these relationships is a great deal of knowledge about the world, which allows LLMs to generate text that is frequently accurate, helpful and useful. Also embedded in those word relationships are countless biases and presumptions associated with the civilization that produced them. In the case of LLMs, the producers of these texts are disproportionately contributors to the early 21st century open internet, particularly Wikipedians, bloggers and other online writers, whose values and worldviews are now deeply embedded in opaque piles of linear algebra.
Political philosopher Antonio Gramsci believed that overcoming unfair economic and political systems required not just physical struggle (war of maneuver) but the longer work of transforming culture and the institutions that shape it (war of position.) But the rising power of LLMs and the platform companies behind them present a serious challenge for neo-Gramscians (and, frankly, for anyone seeking social transformation). LLMs are inherently conservative technologies, instantiating the historic bloc that created LLMs into code that is difficult to modify, even for ideologically motivated tech billionaires. We will consider the possibility of alternative LLMs, built around sharply different cultural values, as an approach to undermining the cultural hegemony of existing LLMs and the powerful platforms behind them.
Registration
Link for registration will follow shortly (Nov 26, 2025)
Contact
Contact about the event: Joachim Wiewiura.
Event series
DEMOCRACY & AI is a series of online talks exploring the political thought, theory, and philosophy of artificial intelligence. Envisioned as an international platform for the politics-and-AI research community, the series aims to bring voices together to examine how AI is shaping democracy, both positively and negatively.