"Descartes’ introspective epistemology and correlate mechanical philosophy of nature are best understood as a response to the printing press. Print intensified the visual bias of Western thought, stabilizing homogeneous, continuous, pictorial space as a seemingly natural field of knowledge.^[2] The reproducibility of diagrams, maps, figures, and geometrical constructions helped make space available as a standardized object of inspection and calculation. In Bruno Latour’s terms, printed diagrams became “immutable mobiles”: transportable visual forms whose relations could be preserved, compared, and recombined across distance.^[3] Descartes’ analytical geometry belongs to this new media ecology of printed visual exactitude. Magnifying the effects of the phonetic alphabet on consciousness—which did not simply record speech but abstracted the spoken word from the breathing body and communal memory—the printing press democratized Theuth’s art, training the masses in the new capacity for linear, decontextualized, ego-centric thought. The printing press not only multiplied the number of manuscripts in circulation but helped midwife a new mode of consciousness: the private, silently reading, self-certifying interiority upon which the whole modern conception of the individual knower would come to rest.

In each case a new media technology intended to expand the power of thought ended up transforming the very nature of the thinker who invented it. Each new medium furnishes the very terms in which we come to understand ourselves. This is why the philosophical response is always an emergency response: by the time anyone has noticed what is happening, what may be lost and what gained, the mutation has already done half of its work.

We are presently living through yet another mutation, the consequences of which may dwarf those of prior media technologies. The alphabet and printing press reshaped us profoundly. They already did more than reshape the products of thought—allowing us to store, transmit, and reproduce words in ways unavailable to oral cultures. They also reorganized the sensorium of the producer. But the act of producing text remained the work of a living mind. LLMs have changed that by mechanizing, or convincingly appearing to mechanize, the act of composition itself. Now the text talks back, generating plausible arguments and the simulacrum of a thinking interlocuter with a “memory” far exceeding any individual human being. The appearance of wisdom King Thamus feared is now mass-produced on demand. The invention of the printing press also invented the private reader sealed inside its skull; the large language model now tempts us to adopt an even stranger self-image: that human minds are no different than machines, our thoughts just the statistical echoes of our training data. The creators of this latest technological upgrade are encouraging us to downgrade our estimate of human consciousness, thus narrowing the distance between ourselves and the machines built to imitate us.

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^[1] 275a-b. Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.

^[2] See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and William M. Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).

^[3] Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking With Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 ( JAI Press, Inc., 1986), 24.

Part III: Resisting Cognitive Enclosure

There is yet another reason this latest cognitive mutation dwarfs those upon which it builds. It is true, as A. J. Liebling once wrote, that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”^[1] But the alphabet and the printing press, for all their literally revolutionary disruptions, tended to democratize literacy, creating an intellectual commons open to all who learned to enter it. LLMs, on the other hand, recall the land enclosures that inaugurated capitalism.^[2] In a process that peaked in the mid-18^th century, millions of acres of pasture, woodland, and field held in common and worked by all for a thousand years were divided and privatized. The people who had lived off these commons were driven off, forced to sell the only thing they had left: their labor time. Thus, as Ivan Illich suggested, with the invention of enclosure came also the invention of poverty. “Computers,” Illich said nearly fifty years ago, “are doing to communication what fences did to pastures”; that is, they are threatening to impoverish thought itself.^[3]

Karl Marx referred to land enclosure as “primitive accumulation,” theorizing it as the founding expropriation upon which the power of modern capital was based, a social theft that afterward came to be dressed up as the natural order of things: “[It] is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.”^[4] Our contemporary situation is analogous, with corporations having secured an enormous head start at harvesting the cognitive commons before anyone noticed—extracting the expression of countless generations of human artists, scientists, philosophers, and mystics, and claiming the digital distillate as their own intellectual property. Our cognitive commons—the semantic sediment formed over thousands of years that raised us and to which each of adds our small donation in turn—has been siphoned off and transformed into a commodity. Marx’s analysis of alienated material labor here finds application to the cognitive sphere: the collective expressions of human intelligence have been gathered up, repackaged, and made to confront its creators as a privately owned alien power to be metered on a subscription basis. Every writer, artist, coder, and ordinary speaker whose words and images were part of the training corpus are like dispossessed commoners, forced off a land we barely knew we held in common until we found it fenced off.

There is a dark parody of the Eucharistic logic in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s proposal to make intelligence into a privatized utility.^[5] In the sacrament, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ: the fruits of earthly and human labor are gathered into a living communion of flesh and spirit. After Big Tech’s cognitive enclosure, the miracle is demonically inverted. Exhausted bodies—the miners, including children in some supply chains, data annotators, and engineers (though many may be well paid)—and the earthly matter of lithium, cobalt, copper, and water are joined to the accumulated literary, philosophical, religious, and scientific expressions of the human spirit. Together they are transubstantiated into streams of information processed by models with proprietary weights housed in gigantic privately owned, military protected data centers. Their outputs are then sold back to us in exchange for a monthly tithe, “gifts” from the new machine god^[6] meant to make whatever remains of human life run more efficiently. Body and spirit alike are converted into instruments of capital accumulation.

Yet language is sacramental before it is instrumental, a participation in communion rather than commodity exchange. The memories and insights of our human and more-than-human ancestors—all the cultural and natural commons enclosed to train the digital demiurges driving the latest stock market bubble—are neither honored nor properly recollected by being compressed into tokenized strings of text. A statistical echo is not living memory. It is not intelligent. It has no breath of its own. The stale air of the mouthless machine gods is suffocating us.

To resist cognitive enclosure is not to refuse the fact that human evolution has always been a coevolution with technology. It is rather to refuse the reduction of the human mind to a manufacturable and metered commodity. Philosophy’s history of emergency responses to new media technologies only begins to scratch the surface of our species’ entanglement with technē. It would be a mistake to meet our moment with technophobia, as if the human mind were an untouchable inner spirit now being defiled by heartless transistors. Human intelligence has always been artificial, technical, artisanal: made by hand and by mouth. Speech was already a mind-manifesting artifact, thought externalized into sonic vibration. The first scripts, the alphabet, the printing press, the radio, the television, the Internet: each is a prosthesis of mind, not only transmitting thought but reshaping the culture in which it grows and the consciousness that conceives it. We have been coevolving with our tools for millions of years. Obsidian blades, bone flutes, spoken words binding scattered attention into shared worlds. Our lips and tongues are nimble enough for language only because fire and stone first softened our food, allowing our jaw to shrink and our brain to swell. We were cyborgs long before we spent our days and half our nights staring at screens. LLMs are not an alien intelligence but the latest prosthesis of human minds that were always already anthropotechnic. This latest coevolutionary mutation does not absolve us of our freedom and responsibility, factors machines remain unburdened by."

Segall