BHAM💥, the Doughnut(W)Hole and the The Wrong are coming to an end. What next?
People often assume my work is about AI. It is really a study of language today. The work is motivated by both the immense power and unreliability of language; its tendency for slippage and its concretisation of percepts and concepts across domains, whether in law, the vernacular of social media or in academia. [Edit 20-04026: And where did I read, language emerged primarily as a tool for lying?] By concretisation, I mean the process of notions or ideas becoming solid – i.e. the statement ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ embeds a system of law within a relationship which is extremely difficult and expensive to withdraw from. (Performativity is another word that describes this process, but it is too often used nowadays to describe performance.) There are undoubtedly a plethora of lexicon projects out there – my work is already included in one. Nevertheless, I suspect there is room for another in the perilous times of AI.
Given that language – and specifically natural language processing (NLP), the ability of computers to process everyday speech – is integral to how we use and interact with computer systems, these contemporary processes inevitably take up a major part of my focus. But I am not a technologist and am only interested in the mechanics of dynamic processing systems insofar as they support my ongoing thesis, that language and reality are, for the human animal, so deeply intertwined that separating them poses a problem. Our habitual tendency to speak about them as separate things allows us to recognise their differences, but it potentially prevents us from understanding or addressing our present moment in ways that are helpful and/or affirmative. This is, in part, a Cartesian legacy – perhaps even Platonic. But it maps poorly onto what quantum theory has been doing to our understanding of the universe, and onto the technologies that were always significantly informed by such complex, impossibly difficult science.
Can we trust the words we hear or the symbols we read on the screen? Quite evidently, in many cases, we cannot (marketing has made that an impossibility and as for the state of politics…). At which point, how do we navigate the landscape of signifiers that make up our reality? (The answer is surely not by yelling at each other or sanctimoniously exercising our superiority complexes on social media. Or at least, trying to resist doing so.) This brings me to an underlying question: does reality for the human ever exist ‘pre-linguistically’, or, as I suspect, is there no such thing as the pre-linguistic for the human animal? In other words, is there a line at which reality itself begins or ends, and signs begin or end? My suspicion is that for the human Umwelt (a biosemiotic term that refers to the way species and organisms perceive the world according to their organisational structure, niche and needs), these two categories – base reality and phonemes/symbols – cannot be disentangled easily, not without losing something fundamental about what/who we are.
Before one can have this conversation, language being what it is – intensely prone to slippage and misunderstanding – it may seem overwhelmingly necessary that I, and anyone or anything involved in this dialogue, reach a consensus if we can, about what is meant by the word language itself. What precisely do I mean when I write language? How does it differentiate from generalised expression? Perhaps it does not?
Vicky Kirby (2013 and 2017), author of Quantum Anthropologies and What if Culture Was Nature All Along? suggests that ‘nature’ is literate, and I will draw on Kirby in developing any working lexicon. Following her logic, perhaps, when I say language, I situate it within the broader category of expression and/or signalling. Here, everything has a language, including the soil on which we walk. We humans may not have access to the language of the soil, but that does not mean it does not have one. I am, nevertheless, aware that when someone reads a sentence in which I use the word language, they are likely interpreting ‘human linguistic or symbolic lexicon’. And some may insist on it. Furthermore, the word nature will also need to be explored since it has taken on so much in the way of ideology of late that it means different things to different groups, many of which fail to include the human and human activity in their presumed definitions (across political spectrums). Following on from Kirby’s provocative titular question about culture and nature potentially being one and the same, I am in the small but broadish camp of those who insist on including the human and her activities within and very much part of nature and therefore reject the oft-romanticised binary of nature vs non-nature. This has profound implications for what we mean by the words language and natural.
Could the city and our technologies really be natural? I am not sure how they are not, once the human is knocked down from any perch that positions him outside nature. Again, it becomes clear that if we cannot be certain we are talking about the same set of percepts and concepts before we have even said hello, figuring out how to navigate the complex world in which we find ourselves becomes immensely challenging. As I am someone who refuses to capitulate to the notion that we are living in a world without a future, I believe it is important that we find some common ground. Even if it feels like there is quite a distance between our positions. And that this dialogue takes place, as calmly and with as much generosity as possible, while avoiding the hyperbole and meanness that social media has normalised for all of us.
At present, we are bombarded with so much change, so many frightening situations, and what I see as a barrage of memeified claptrap, that avoiding nihilistic collapse is challenging. Furthermore, a wave of pessimism – borne of multiple abject horrors – means we are forced to work very hard to avoid being swept along in a tide of doom. My desire is not a call for baseless positivism, of which it is liable to be accused. Rather, it stems from a refusal to let the apparatus – and its billionaire keepers – win. For that is what happens when all anyone can do is lament the end of everything and surrender to a world with no future. But before we gather the resources to resist, we need to be capable of dialogue with some degree of clarity. Only then might we begin to address what we mean by words and phrases such as generative, machine learning, technology, algorithm or – my pet peeve – artificial intelligence. And of course, nature, memory, and identity. Thereafter, it would be worth exploring what we mean by copy-edit, even write, and develop in a world in which large language models exist. And perhaps only then will it make sense to address recurring panic over ‘authenticity’ or concerns around cognitive offloading.
I make zines and websites. I imagine this work will end up being one or both. Perhaps I will experiment, with the help of an LLM, in creating an interactive app. I also employ a mix of registers when I write, because it seems to me that admitting to all the sticky, broken, uncomfortable, and slightly awry aspects of what it means to be human is more crucial than ever. Any ‘lexicon for today’ that I develop will invariably include little asides and perhaps even the occasional remark that some might believe has no business being there.
And onwards we go…
Refs:
Scott, R. (dir.) (1982) Blade Runner. USA: Warner Bros.
Kirby, V. (2013) Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham: Duke University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822394440.
Kirby, V. (ed.) (2017) What if culture was nature all along? Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Fry, C. and Eby, C. (eds) (2025/6) ‘LEXICONIA – A Lexicon of Generative AI’, Lexiconia [Online]. Available at: https://lexiconia.art/ (Accessed: 28 March 2026).
Edits 31st March 2026: Title changed from T&Cs of now to Nomenclature of Now and two sentences extended to clarify meaning.
Relevant further reading added post-publish:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/01/dont-blame-ai-for-the-iran-school-bombing
https://theconversation.com/tech-companies-are-blaming-massive-layoffs-on-ai-whats-really-going-on-278314
From the Guardian article 26/3/26:
The AI underneath the interface is not a language model, or at least the AI that counts is not. The core technologies are the same basic systems that recognise your cat in a photo library or let a self-driving car combine its camera, radar and lidar into a single picture of the road, applied here to drone footage, radar and satellite imagery of military targets. They predate large language models by years. Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English. But the language model was never what mattered about this system. What mattered was what Maven did to the targeting process: it consolidated the systems, compressed the time and reduced the people. That is not a new idea. The US military has been trying to close the gap between seeing something and destroying it for as long as that gap has existed, and every attempt has produced the same failure. Maven may not even be the most extreme case.