CartHow to Fix Brain Rot:
A Soviet guide to AI, labor, dialectics, and reflexivity Instructor: Maxim MiroshnichenkoProgram: Art & Curatorial Practice, Transdiciplinary Studies, Critical PhilosophyDate: May 21, 28Time: 9:00AM - 12:00PM ET
DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable addresses the widespread sense that current discussions about AI and cybernetics are creating cognitive breakdowns rather than genuine insights. Instead of producing new philosophical understanding, today’s AI often promotes what we might call “existential stupidity” – a kind of ideological brain rot that traps both technological systems and human thinking in repetitive, meaningless loops that drain vitality from social systems. This course uses Soviet cybernetic theory to understand why current AI discourse often feels stuck and unproductive, and offers practical tools for more reflexive, collaborative approaches to thinking about technology, cognition, and society.The problem is that we’re stuck in a closed loop: whenever we try to understand machine intelligence, we end up with incomplete visions of either technological apocalypse or singularity, preventing us from developing truly self-critical perspectives.To break out of this trap, the course draws on Soviet thinkers who developed an unconventional Marxist-cybernetic approach. They proposed what they called a “reflexive exit” – a way of acting that enables radical reconfigurations and helps us handle unprecedented situations. Central to this approach is the figure of the “methodologist” from the Moscow Methodological Circle (MMC), who uses dialectical tools to critically examine their own thinking processes in collaborative, multi-perspective ways.
SESSION ONE: In this session, we will work with the concept of brain rot as the emerging tendency in collective sense-making that brings what R. Scott Bakker calls “semantic apocalypse.” Using the second-order cybernetic framework, we will analyze brain rot as an exemplification of reflexive closure and trace its implications, revealing a non-reflexive, individualist understanding of cognition and action, caught by cognitive science’s gap between the individual and the collective. This gap, weaponized by the algorithms, reveals how brain rot confines cognitive systems – along with their norms and values of activity – to endless, trivializing self-referential iterations trapping the social system within pre-set patterns. We will see how this cultural situation can be assessed as a cognitive-practical rupture. This will set the stage for introducing the MMC’s emergence within Soviet philosophy, tracing its roots in systems theory, cybernetics, and especially Marx’s methods of organic wholes, cell-forms, and the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. After that, we will present MMC as a counter-culture to dogmatic Marxism, classical cognitivism, behaviorism, and reflexology – especially regarding their early debates on logic and thinking with Evald Ilyenkov. Totality and omniscience – the aims pursued by AI – can be disenchanted as based on hollow abstractions extracting thinking, action, society, and innovation from their functioning in organic wholes. These one-sided abstractions are yet to be concretized with a robust methodological toolbox.
SESSION TWO: In this session, we will see how the MMC reinterpreted dialectics and reflexivity – as an optimization of activity (Georgy Shchedrovitsky’s general activity theory), observation of cognitive systems’ resistance against trivialization (Vladimir Lefebvre’s reflexive control theory), and the generative mechanism of mutual mirroring and communication between cultural systems (David Zilberman’s modal methodology). These positions interpret labor and activity as collective and transformative, with an inherent, concrete (“contentful”) logic irreducible to atomized, abstract algorithmic operations. Brain rot will be a primary example of successful trivialization and the execution of reflexive control, detaining the system in the interposition of cognitive-practical rupture, and not merely a neurological disorder kindred to ADHD or attention span reduction which are often analogized with the impact of brain rot. We will unpack the instrumental view of reflexivity as an exit from the standpoint of the generic individual embraced by the classical political economy. Philosophical systems can be operated as technical instructions and mechanisms for a praxis devoid of prototypes, thereby overcoming intersystemic tensions and incompatibilities. This supplies the means to analyze, reengineer, and overcome destructive ruptures (such as brain rot), cultivating a new understanding of AI as a converted form (verwandelte Form) compressing the elements of human labor, its reciprocal linkages with social-systemic structures. Ultimately, this session aims to elucidate how ruptures – while potentially leading to both failure and creation – can be dialectically overcome through a gradual approximation of truth and goodness.
IMAGE: Digital illustration meme, Neural Network, 2019
Maxim (maksym) Miroshnichenko holds a PhD in philosophy (2019). Since 2024, he is a research fellow at the Bauhaus University. He also teaches at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. His interests revolve around cybernetics/systems theory, enactive cognition, and Soviet philosophy of science. Currently, he works on a project dedicated to the intersections of Marxism and cybernetics in the Soviet logico-methodological thought as a contribution to the discussions on cognitivism, AI, and posthumanism. Right now, he prepares a book about brain rot and semantic apocalypse.
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