How Antihumanism Turned on Its Authors

Ever since physicist Alan Sokal published a hoax paper in the journalSocial Textin 1996 to skewer the “fashionable sectors of the American academic left,” a mini-industry of polemicists has dedicated itself to exposing the ideological excesses and intellectualbizarreriesof humanities scholarship. In 2018, the provocateurs James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose performed Sokal’s stunt on a larger scale, to considerable fanfare.¹1xAlexander C. Kafka, “‘Sokal Squared’: Is Huge Publishing Hoax ‘Hilarious and Delightful’ or an Ugly Example of Dishonesty and Bad Faith?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3,  2018; https://www.chronicle.com/article/sokal-squared-is-huge-publishing-hoax-hilarious-and-delightful-or-an-ugly-example-of-dishonesty-and-bad-faith/.A host of pundits have since built careers assailing critical race theory and “gender ideology.” The Trump administration is now bringing these efforts into policymaking, canceling grants based on keyword searches for terms that seem to betray a woke orientation, such as “Latinx” and “systemic,” and pressuring universities to rein in what it claims are the anti-white and antisemitic views of some faculty.²2xKaren Yourish, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Isaac White, and Lazaro Gamio, “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration,” New York Times, March 7, 2025; https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html.

There is one burgeoning academic subfield that, perhaps surprisingly, has yet to attract the ire of anti-woke crusaders. This area of scholarship is new enough that it doesn’t have a name yet, but I will call it Queer Chemical Studies (QCS). QCS begins by noting a phenomenon widely decried by environmental activists and studied by biologists, ecologists, and medical researchers: the impact of plastics, pesticides, and other synthetic materials in the environment on reproduction, human and animal. It then makes the classic critical-jujitsu move of questioning the binary of natural/unnatural underlying the usual responses to this fact. When environmentalists worry about endocrine disruption, QCS scholar Giovanna Di Chiro alleges, they are reinforcing “eco(hetero)normativity,” which assumes the necessity of heterosexual reproductivity.³3xGiovanna Di Chiro, “Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 199–230, 224.

QCS scholars instead invite us, as New School professor Heather Davis puts it in her 2022 bookPlastic Matter,to view “the queering of the body” brought about by environmental toxins “as opening on to new, and ecological, possibilities rather than reasserting a threatened heteronormative configuration.”⁴4xHeather Davis, Plastic Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 87.The remarkable implication of this is that pervasive pollution can be recast as a vector of queer liberation. As Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward argue in a 2013 article: “the supremacy bestowed to sexual difference—its ontological force—is outpaced not only by social or political movements, but also by metabolizing pollutants, xenotransplanting toxicants, and intravenous banes.”⁵5xMalin Ah-King and Eva Hayward, “Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption,” O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, no. 1 (2013): 1–12, 7.This means, as Davis notes, that there is “an inadvertent allegiance between certain forms of queerness and the petrochemical industry.” She quotes fellow QCS scholar Max Liboiron to similar effect: “Is feminization of male fetuses abnormal, or even pathological? Is it a form of harm? The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community has argued that it is not. So, too, has the chemical industry.”⁶6xMax Liboiron, “Plasticizers: A Twenty-First-Century Miasma,” in Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, ed. Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 134–49, 143.

As alarming as this endorsement of environmental toxicity may sound, we shouldn’t be too surprised that anti-woke muckrakers haven’t seized on QCS scholars’ celebration of the “queering” effects of chemical pollutants. QCS is as committed to “nonreproductive futurity”⁷7xDavis, Plastic Matter, 95. as the rest of queer theory, but its innovation is to discover a comprehensive execution of this agenda not in activist agitation but in the effects of industrial processes and mass consumption. To the extent a politics emerges from this, it would seem to be tacitly aligned with the laissez-faire, deregulatory agenda long advocated by the Republican Party. To be sure, scholars like Davis gesture toward “holding chemical companies to account for the vast harms they are enacting on numerous bodies, human and nonhuman”⁸8xIbid., 83.—but it is unclear what they think those “harms” are.

The QCS discovery that queer liberation is being realized by the petrochemical industry may seem like a niche matter, but it is emblematic of a broader impasse faced by the academic humanities. For the past half century, humanists have deconstructed, subverted, problematized, and queered every normativity and supremacy they could find. The ultimate target of this systematic critical project was, paradoxically, the value that originally founded and gave shape to their disciplines: humanism. The dismantling of “Man” was the impetus for some of the founding polemical statements of what came to be called “theory.” In recent decades, this project was reinvigorated in the form of “posthumanism” and the “posthumanities,” which launched an attack on the most centric of all centrisms: anthropocentrism.⁹9xSee, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2000); Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).In line with this project, QCS discards any idea of a fixed, natural human essence to which synthetic substances pose a threat.

The early parts of the story of how the humanities turned against “the human” are well told in two intellectual histories: Stefanos Geroulanos’sAn Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thoughtand Mark Greif’sThe Age of the Crisis of Man.Geroulanos traces the critique of humanism to the interwar period in France, when a new generation of iconoclasts repudiated the elevation of abstract, universal “Man” as a substitute for God that would furnish a basis for values, a project dating back to the French Revolution.¹⁰10xStefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).This antihumanist atheism later made its way to the United States in the form of structuralist and poststructuralist “theory.” Greif’s book, while primarily a study of the mid-twentieth-century American effort to restore humanism in the wake of the catastrophes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, dedicates its final chapter to showing that what succeeded this driving concern with “Man” was what we now call “theory,” the basic agenda of which he defines as a repudiation of the humanism of crisis. “The best name,” Greif writes, “for the unifying philosophical impulse behind theory is antihumanism.”¹¹11xMark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 285.

The Mainstreaming of Antihumanism

But what if academic antihumanists turn out to be dispensable to the realization of antihumanist goals? That is the unsettling conclusion QCS points us to, without acknowledging it. But we can find further indications of the same predicament on far more prominent display today. Just as environmental toxins turn out to pose a greater threat to “reproductive futurism” than queer theorists ever mustered, a posthumanist project has now arisen that makes all the rhetorical performances of academic antihumanism seem rather quaint. I am referring to the creation of generative artificial intelligence and the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) by a number of the world’s most highly valued companies. Like so many humanities scholars before them, the entrepreneurs and engineers pursuing AGI openly seek to “decenter the human” and explore the possibilities of nonhuman agency. But their plan for doing so has far vaster resources behind it than all academic humanities departments combined, in addition to the backing of the governments of the world’s rival superpowers. AI companies are also enlisting a growing share of humanity in the enterprise by offering their wares as a “freemium” service direct to consumers.

The rise of generative AI poses problems for the humanities that are at once practical and philosophical. In the first category is the much-discussed question of what these disciplines’ value proposition is for the university now that core humanistic competencies—most notably, writing college term papers and the like—can be effectively automated. The obvious answer is that there are intellectual capacities in human beings that must still be cultivated for the sake of citizenship. But there is a quandary here too. Humanities scholars have been uneasy about justifying their activities in these terms for some time. For instance, the idea of writing instruction has been called into question—including by many writing instructors—because it assumes a universal, standard literacy in which all students should be inculcated. This repudiation of the normal and the standard is an extensionof the core posthumanist critique of an abstract, universal humanity.

One attempt at a solution has been to apply something like the critique of standard literacy to generative AI itself: Its output, according to this critique, is made to appear to us as a universal, neutral voice from nowhere, but in fact it encodes the particular biases of its creators. Yet anti- and posthumanist thinking has usually tended to embrace technologies with morally tainted origins so long as they can be enlisted in the project of decentering the human. In her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” posthumanist pioneer Donna Haraway noted that cyborgs—the human-machine hybrids she framed as a new sort of revolutionary subject—are the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.… But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”¹²12xDonna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 8–9.Davis cites this statement to suggest the same is true of “queer kin…birthed from chemical companies.”¹³13xDavis, Plastic Matter, 89.Surely the same could apply to a large language model (LLM).

In other words, the humanities have spent half a century decentering the human but now face steep competition in that effort from tech companies with more than trillion-dollar valuations. The most common response is the defensive crouch that Leif Weatherby calls “remainder humanism.” As Weatherby writes in his recent book,Language Machines, this is a “humanism without a theory or doctrine of what is human, in which humanity is remaindered, like a book past salability. The human here is defined by technology’s creep, but only negatively.”¹⁴14xLeif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2025), 34.Having repudiated all positive definitions of humanity, it can only “[shout] more loudly each time something is quantified that the ‘essence of the human’ can never be quantified”¹⁵15xIbid., 35.—and on this basis, demand that university administrators continue to fund humanities departments.

Ironically, as Weatherby notes, “[it] was the literary theorists who rescinded the genteel gesture of the Turing test by denying authorship even where it clearly applied.”¹⁶16xIbid., 95.The reference here is to “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes’s 1967 polemic, which became a founding statement of the late-twentieth-century antihumanist humanities. In that essay, Barthes declared: “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”¹⁷17xRoland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1467–1472, 1466.He went on to say that “to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality…to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me.’”¹⁸18xIbid., 1467.It’s also a statement of the core premise of a great deal of poststructuralist theory: In Weatherby’s formulation, “[w]e do not possess language…it possesses us.”¹⁹19xWeatherby, Language Machines, 71.But now, with few adjustments, this could be repurposed as a product description of an AI chatbot.

The line of thinking pursued by Barthes goes back to Plato’sPhaedrus, where writing is understood—not unlike chatbots today—as a technological prosthesis separate from the human person that produces an alienated, threatening simulacrum of discourse. In this sense, writing already forced the questioning of human essence more recently attributed to AI text generation. This questioning was at the center of the major lines of poststructuralist thought. Jacques Derrida enlisted the subversive power of writing identified by Plato in his project of “grammatology,” which sought to decenterlogos, presence, authenticity, and other hallmarks of the human. For his part, Michel Foucault followed up on Barthes’s polemic with his “What Is an Author?” which concludes by heralding “the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?”²⁰20xMichel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101–120, 120.This prophecy echoes Foucault’s earlier proclamation, in his 1966 bookThe Order of Things, that “man [will] be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”²¹21xMichel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), 387.

In the wake of these influential critiques of authorship and humanism, the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler argued that technological shifts in the practice of writing helped make the poststructuralist theoretical revolution plausible. In Kittler’s account, the early-modern Europe dominated by alphabetic literacy—what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy—had accorded to the handwritten word much of the metaphysical prestige reserved by Plato for the voice. For centuries, handwritten script was the visible trace of the soul, its “energetic and ideally uninterrupted flow” validating the presence and wholeness of a self: “the alphabetized individual had his ‘appearance and externality’ in this continuous flow of ink or letters.”²²22xFriedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 9.For Kittler, the self-confident individual who emerged out of the Enlightenment endowed with a rich sense of “interiority” (Innerlichkeit) found substantiation in script, which accorded to the ineffable self a material being communicable to the outer world by means of the hand. The crisis of this well-defined individual emerged in tandem with a technology that inserted a complex mechanism between the individual producer of text and its product: the typewriter. As Kittler writes, “[i]n standardized texts, paper and body, writing and soul fall apart.”²³23xIbid., 14.This mechanization of literary production enabled the poststructuralist liberation of writing from the human.

Generative AI, instead of liberating writing from the human, liberates textualist antihumanism from the theoretical edifice of poststructuralism. Derrida’s dictumil n’y a pas d’hors-texte(“there is no outside-text”) takes on an interesting new meaning in a world where all of reality has become so much training data for LLMs. With the launch of ChatGPT, moreover, the “death of the author” goes from scandal to banality; Foucault’s “indifference” to “who is speaking” goes from a liberating escape route from bourgeois individualism to a necessary adaptation to a world in which most text production is automated, bypassing the individual; and engagement in “automatic writing,” once an avant-garde pursuit, is integrated into the daily lives of average people as a form of entertainment, as well as a means of enhancing efficiency and productivity.

Weatherby seems to view his fellow academics’ failure to embrace this situation as a loss of nerve—a “backslide” from the premises they long endorsed. He thinks this situation presents an opportunity to revive a particular strain of antihumanism: the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roman Jakobson, which offered a “nonreferential theory of language” as a system of “differences without positive terms.” “For machines to communicate,” Weatherby writes, “they need to use language as it is internally structured.… Once we see this, we can see that ‘meaning’ resides not in one or the other part but in the relationship of part and whole.”²⁴24xWeatherby, Language Machines, 134.In other words, machines can master language because, as the structuralists argued, language itself is a kind of machine, and not primarily a vehicle for expressing human meanings.

Automatic for the People

Revisiting these insights, Weatherby argues, offers a new vocation to the humanities. To study the “encounter between the generativity of computation and the generativity of language,” he says, “we need a general poetics”²⁵25xIbid., 171.—a revival of the project pursued by Jakobson and others in the mid-century heyday of structuralism. “Literary scholars,” he says, are “the only professionals positioned to do this work.”²⁶26xIbid., 172.Here he converges with the “remainder humanists” in being attuned to the practical problem of justifying the continued budget lines of humanities departments. As he puts it elsewhere, “we will surely have to train our citizens to understand how to use language in computational settings in new ways.”²⁷27xIbid., 212.Despite stating at one point that “humanism…is not dying fast enough,”²⁸28xIbid., 94.he also points to the need for a “real humanism” that provides students with pedagogical orientation in the emerging world of “computational-linguistic culture.”²⁹29xIbid., 94.

The potential problem here is that LLMs automate the labor of literary scholars no less than the production of the objects they scrutinize. Weatherby recognizes this, to an extent. He recalls Fredric Jameson’s proposed vocation for humanistic study in postmodernity: the “invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping.” Today’s generative AI “fulfills exactly this function”³⁰30xIbid., 191.because it shows us what the totality of our culture is, in the form of algorithmically processed statistical aggregates. But the twist is that instead of demystifying culture by revealing how it works as a linguistic system—as, for instance, Barthes attempted inS/Z, his analysis of Balzac’sSarrasine—AI’s output is itself “ideology” in need of demystification. This is where our literary scholars come into the picture, to perform the debunking operations ofIdeologiekritik.

Here Weatherby reenacts a pattern he observes when he notes that “poststructuralism has tended to become a humanism.”³¹31xIbid., 137.He means this as a critique of poststructuralism’s mystical tendencies, derived especially from Heidegger’s apophatic invocation of Being. But it is applicable to the various forms of antihumanism that prevailed in late-twentieth-century academia, which, even as they repudiated the human, valorized a certain human subject position:that of the critic of humanism, who stealthily continued to embody Enlightenment humanist virtues. Antihumanism was, as Geroulanos’s account of its origins shows, a turning of the critical project that began with the humanist deconstruction of religion onto the religious residues attached to the notion of Man.

The project of critique Weatherby seeks to vindicate faces as much risk from automation as do its objects of analysis. At the same time, it is in a pincer grasp, squeezed by two seemingly contradictory forces that paradoxically amount to the same thing. On one hand, it is currently the target of a right-wing political backlash, which, no matter how ill-informed and ill-intentioned, can claim a certain popular mandate. “Critical theory” is embattled for some bad reasons, including antisemitic narratives about the Frankfurt School and racial backlash. But it also faces the problem that, despite its tendency to anti-elitist and egalitarian rhetoric, its practitioners have never offered a clear explanation of their relationship to the democratically governed nation and its institutions, despite expecting them to continue renewing their budget lines indefinitely.

The other side of the right-populist revolt against critical theory presents what might seem like the opposite problem: The “hermeneutics of suspicion” that have defined antihumanist humanities scholarship have been outstripped by the surrounding culture. Bruno Latour already made note of this in his 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” In “the good old days,” Latour writes, “revisionism arrived very late,”³²32xBruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–248, 228.and it was left to practitioners of critique like himself. “Now,” he continues, “we have the benefit of what can be calledinstant revisionism. The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account.”³³33xIbid.Recounting a time when his neighbor ridiculed him for believing the official account of the 9/11 attacks, Latour remarked, “Remember…when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naively believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie?”³⁴34xIbid.Today, humanities scholars’ populist antagonists are probably more likely to regard them as uncritical dupes of liberal propaganda than excessively withering in their skepticism.

It isn’t simply, Latour argues, that the hermeneutics of suspicion have become banal but have been—metaphorically, in his account—automated and mass-produced. “[C]ritique,” he writes, “has been miniaturized like computers have. I have always fancied that what took great effort, occupied huge rooms, cost a lot of sweat and money, for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin, can be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s, which used to fill large halls and expend a vast amount of electricity and heat, but now are accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail.”³⁵35xIbid.Two decades after Latour wrote this, his metaphor has become strangely literalized: LLMs can be prompted to churn out instant structuralist analyses and critiques of ideological artifacts. Weatherby castigates his fellow scholars for “retreating into…[the] remaining corners as yet untouched by computation.” However, when he invokes structural linguistic analysis and ideological critique as non-automatable tasks that can be performed only by literary scholars like himself, he seems to be retreating into such a corner himself.

Nick Land Hits the Accelerator

An earlier and more comprehensive diagnosis of this predicament can be found in the work of the philosopher Nick Land. Currently best known as a far-right blogger and Internet personality associated with “accelerationism”—a radical advocacy of technological advancement unconstrained by politics or ethics—in an earlier phase of his career Land was a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick, specializing in continental thought. Land wrote his dissertation on Martin Heidegger and his first book on Georges Bataille—one of the interwar antihumanists studied by Geroulanos—before turning primarily to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which animated his prolific writing in the 1990s. Land’s work broadly synthesized the two traditions identified in the last chapter of Greif’s study: the “quietist and irrationalist Heideggerian antihumanism” and the “scientific antihumanism of Lévi-Strauss” as the latter was radicalized in the gonzo materialism of Deleuze and Guattari.

In his 1990s work, Land identifies in the viral spread of digital capitalism a radical realization of the Deleuzian agenda of “deterritorialization.” At times, he sounds somewhat like Weatherby when he evokes the “meltdown of culture into the economy…triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers”³⁶36xNick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011), 447.or declares that “cybernetics is the reality of critique.”³⁷37xIbid., 300.But, for Land, what this means is the obsolescence of critique. By his account, critical philosophy was first birthed alongside capitalism in the work of Kant as a form of what Deleuze and Guattari called “reterritorialization”: an attempt to constrain the disruptive “synthesis” unleashed by capitalist production. For Land, that project had fully run its course. “Critique belongs to capital,”³⁸38xIbid., 262.and “postmodern or climaxed cynicism capital is saturated by critique.” In these conditions, capital “clocks up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy.”³⁹39xIbid., 448.

What Land saw in the 1990s was the same thing QCS has discovered somewhat later: that the procedures of critique were being realized by the emergence of the “planetary technocapital singularity.”

For instance, consider Heather Davis on “the technobacterial future”:

Evolutionary becoming seems to be especially fertile for bacteria. In many ways, the fact that plastic is leading to evolutionary shifts in bacteria points to the vitality and creativity of life itself, and certainly in the realm of gender and sex, it might be quite instructive for humans to learn from bacteria, especially in relation to queer forms of life. If bacteria were understood as queer kin, the plurality of forms of sex, reproduction, and gender that bacteria embody could metaphorically provide new forms of social organization for humans as our bodies increasingly morph into queerer formations. Bacterial progeny of plastic create new organisms to understand, metaphorically and literally, the potential relations of sex and reproduction beyond sexual difference.⁴⁰40xDavis, Plastic Matter, 95.

And now compare that to Land, writing in 1994:

Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects; networking through plastic and transversal replicator-sex rather than arborescing through meiotic and generational reproducer-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as opportunities for communicative mutation. In the bacterial system all codings are reprogrammable, with cut and paste unspeciated genetic transfers. Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal formations of sedentary biological identity.⁴¹41xLand, 448.

Land’s outlook later became known as “accelerationism,” after Deleuze and Guattari’s injunction to “accelerate the process.” After resigning from his position at Warwick in 1997 and leading the renegade interdisciplinary Cybernetic Culture Research Unit off campus for several years, he disappeared for some time. In the 2000s, he resurfaced as a leading neo-reactionary blogger based in Shanghai, from whence he continues to advocate the hastening of the “planetary technocapital singularity” through the AI explosion he was already predicting three decades ago. Tapping back into something of the Heideggerian antihumanism that he absorbed early on, he depicts this apotheosis in mystical and occult terms, as a fulfillment of “Gnostic Calvinism.”

Although Land is generally understood as a far-right figure today, he has acolytes among an online subculture of “gender accelerationists”⁴²42xSee, for example, Vikky Storm and Eme Flores, “The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto,” The Anarchist Library, April 24, 2019; https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/vikky-storm-the-gender-accelerationist-manifesto.who view his celebration of the “dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere” as a prophecy of the end of sex and gender, as all forms of fixed biological being give way to Deleuzian flux and becoming. QCS scholars don’t seem to have noticed gender accelerationism, but it is difficult to differentiate from their own views. Their own form of “remainder humanism” consists mostly of clichéd sermonizing against bugbears like “settler colonialism” and “racial capitalism,” which provides cover for their bracingly amoral apologia for pollution. Their gesture parallels that of the AI-critical antihumanists who smuggle in just enough sentimental moralism to make clear to us we needthem, and not Big Tech, to decenter the human. But to quote Foucault again, “What difference does it make who is speaking?”