World Collapse and the Limits of AI Extractivism

Image: Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (still), 2008.

Join us on Monday, October 27, 2025 for “World Model Collapse and the Limits of AI Extractivism,” a conversation between Matteo Pasquinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Brian Kuan Wood.

US cultural hegemony reaches the historical limits of its sphere of influence with the imposition of Global English as lingua franca, whose peak and downfall, at the same time, is represented today by Large Language Models (LLMs) and their powerful capacity for translation and text generation in all idioms. A mirror of the global economy in stagnation, however, LLMs are struggling to generate meaningful outputs due to the phenomenon of ‘model collapse,’ an inflation and degradation of the training data on which they are based—and a scarcity of the living labor that is required constantly to make them look 'intelligent' and more valuable. The collapse of LLMs can be taken as a metaphor of the crisis of knowledge extractivism and the global trade system as a whole. Economies in decline indeed generate monsters, such as military expansions, authoritarian personalities, and toxic culture. But through the fissures of this collapsing system, alternative social movements glimmer.

Bios

Matteo Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where he coordinates the ERC project AIMODELS. His latest book is The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).

Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. His latest book is The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021). Beller currently serves as co-editor of the international journal Social Text.

Brian Kuan Wood is an editor of e-flux journal.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

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