I. On rupture

We are standing in a crack in the wall. The old fortresses of academic worth had iron gates and knights barring entry, built by and for particular bodies, particular tongues, particular ways of knowing. Now we say these spaces have been invaded by AI slop. But invasion implies a pure territory. There was never a pure territory.

II. On slop

My feed is flooded too. Frictionless faces, images polished until nothing feels particular. I want the cringe back: the badly lit, the over-earnest, the poem that tries too hard. Cringe carries the possibility of embarrassment because someone wanted to make something and risked showing how much they cared.

III. On perfection

If the machine can produce thoughtful reflections and the perfect paragraph at the whim of a few prompts, then what was perfection ever for? Perfection was a discipline, a way of training us to be smooth, legible and productive. Now it is cheap and mass-produced, yet expensively paid for in freshwater drawn from the only planet we call home. With perfection so readily available, can we finally value human messiness?

IV. On validity

Every paper we write opens with an apology. Before saying what we think, we explain why we are allowed to think it: the sample, the method, the limitations, the gap we are dutifully filling. These are incantations. Say saturation, say triangulation, say rigour. Validity is dark magic. Cast over us and demanded of us, spelled out in every paper, until we spell it without thinking, the way we spell our own names. In the spelling, the grimoire is forgotten: who wrote it, whose hands copied it down, which bodies it was cast to keep out. And so the spell conjures the world as if it simply spoke through us. Let us be invalid to the machine(s).

V. On Marx, and the many Marxes

They say we live to work. But there was never one Marx. There are many Marxes, plural, contradictory, read and misread across centuries. Resist the urge to make him a coherent thought-figure; resist reading our present back into his work as if he wrote for us. Read him as we should read ourselves: unfinished, inconsistent, situated. And from that partiality, take this: labour is not only what we produce, but what produces us. If we let the machine make the finished thing, what happens to the thinking, experimenting, and learning we would have done in making it? What of us?

VI. On R&R (not revise and resubmit, but resist and refuse)

This is the moment to resist and refuse, not the technology, but the fantasy it sells: that knowledge can be seamless, that a thinker can be frictionless and coherent, and that value lives in a valid output. We can choose to privilege human messiness as a politics that gives uncertainty, contradiction, and unfinished thinking a place in how we work.

VII. On the cyborg

We were never purely human. We think through pencils, keyboards, archives, spellcheck, each other. The cyborg has no innocent origin to return to and no pure future to arrive at. So we refuse both prophecies: the one where the machine saves us, and the one where the human must be defended from contamination. The mess we privilege is not a human essence. It is the tangle itself: bodies, tools, water, servers, and the unequal hands that build and clean them. We do not reject our kinship with machines. We demand that it be accountable.

VIII. Have we been here before?

In the past, every new machine promised to free us and instead remade what counted as work. In the future, we will be here again. So these are not answers. These are prompts, for you, me, and the machine that will eat this manifesto, and then itself.