Rob Fawley is a London based designer and writer. His professional practice spans design journalism and hospital technology. His personal practice ranges from exploring how we can preserve knowledge in the attention economy to how our economic models reshape architecture.
system · 2026
Essays for the Gooniverse is about the re-engineering of essays to allow them to thrive in a space in which they struggle to survive. The architecture of short-form video hosting applications, such as TikTok or Instagram Reels, does not facilitate sequential points and citations. It requires three-second hooks and 'frictionless' scripts. Nothing is allowed to break the opioidic warm hug induced by the gushing flow of tailored content, and so the essay, as a medium, must adapt; it must hide in plain sight, each point existing as a video in its own right while functioning as a cog in a larger machine of interconnected points.
Essays for the Gooniverse is a process, backed by a series of tools, a green screen orb, a ring light, and a TikTok data scraper. The videos on display above are a manifestation of this process, each one a cog forged by the process to operate in the larger machine of interconnected points.
film · 2025 · Microsoft
73% Beef Roast is a film created as part of a research project for Microsoft, looking into the implications and applications of large language models and image generators. The film articulates how shifting and shrinking the data that models are trained on shapes the quality of their outputs. This is articulated through the metaphor of trying to make a roast dinner with nothing but what you happen to have in your cupboard.
architectural proposal · 2025
Architecture wears the economic and social conditions that it is built within on its artifice and within its foundations, and the new proposal for Peckham's Aylesham Centre is the visual manifestation of deregulation, austerity, and inequality.
Thank you, Mrs Thatcher, for my Slopitecture is a speculative proposal for the Aylesham Centre site that explores the ultimate end goal of a company structured around the market incentives of neoliberalism. High rent, cheap materials, residents crammed in like sardines, advertising space on every inch of the exterior that permits and all with space for a GAILs.
A profile written for Disegno on ceramicist Jun Rhee and the handmade Jollof rice bowl he created for London-based Michelin-starred restaurant Akoko.
read on Disegno ↗A profile written for Disegno on designer Daniyar Uderbekov and the 10 Nodes Chair, made from Kazakh felt and a frame of reclaimed plastic waste gathered from the steppe.
read on Disegno ↗A self-published essay tracing the dissolving of shared cultural narratives, from postmodern theory through to AI. Around 8,000 words.
Sam weeps into his computer, tears escape from his eyes onto the keys below. He feels alone, rejected, and confused. There are people out there like him, he knows it, people who share the same ideas, interests, and desire to be connected. But they are all so far away, extended out across the globe, only reachable through surrogates for human interaction: Zoom, texting, or preserved in video. These people can give him the meaning that he craves; they have made sense of the world. If only he could be with them, then he could too. In his moment of sorrow, Sam turns to ChatGPT; he is safe with his AI companion. Crying may appear weak to his peers, but ChatGPT doesn't judge him; it can't.
The following text explores the technological, cultural, economic, and epistemic shifts that have led Sam to cry alone in his room, turning to ChatGPT for companionship. It does this by tracing the dissolving of shared cultural frameworks and narratives through postmodern theory and media criticism, before assessing how capitalism and digital technology have reshaped legitimacy, meaning, and connection. In examining these shifts, the text demonstrates that how Sam feels is, in fact, not an idiosyncrasy but symptomatic of the wider Western contemporary condition. The piece concludes by exploring how increasing use and reliance on AI extends, as opposed to resolves the conditions produced by preceding technological paradigms.
Jean-François Lyotard uses the term "metanarrative" to describe large, overarching stories that claim to explain the entirety of history, society, and human purpose. These narratives function as universal frameworks. They do not just interpret the world but assert what is true, meaningful, and legitimate. By structuring a shared understanding, metanarratives make cultural production coherent. Through providing a mostly consistent centralised view of history and society, metanarratives allow people to develop a shared understanding of how history unfolds, how society is structured, and which forms of knowledge and authority are considered legitimate. People are more readily able to share the same symbols, meanings, and interpretative codes, which makes communication easier, creating a kind of "cultural fluency". This reduces the paralysing openness of creative possibility. Recognisable values, stable themes, and clear, definable boundaries provide an artist with a starting point to build from.
An example of how this coherent and centralised view of the world manifests in the production of culture is Socialist Realism. As the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union, the style was built on the same narratives of class emancipation and worker unity that underpinned the political and economic doctrine. It provided a visual sibling to these more abstract concepts. Socialist Realist art's consistent symbols, meanings and interpretive codes, "such as the positive hero who perseveres against all odds or handicaps" (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019), provided artists with a clear framework to structure their work. Visual devices, such as the recurring motif of the hammer and sickle and upward-facing diagonal composition lines symbolising progress and liberation, made the artworks legible to their intended audience. These messages not only rely on cultural fluency to be interpreted, they also do their part to actively reinforce cultural fluency through the consistency of their subject matter, composition, and symbolic language. This demonstrates metanarratives structuring meaning by legitimising certain forms of knowledge.
However, the same structures that create coherence through conformity are also defining what is "illegitimate". As a result, deviation from sanctioned forms of meaning can potentially become culturally unreadable or politically dangerous. Metanarratives come with consequences: they simplify complexity, suppress plurality, and create unity by excluding difference. Societies use metanarratives to impose order on a reality far more complex than a single framework can capture, and in doing so, they inevitably flatten that complexity. This exclusion of difference and complexity can be detrimental to the production of culture because when only one interpretation of reality is permitted, artistic expression becomes formulaic: symbols are fixed, meaning must be unambiguous, and deviation becomes an act of treason rather than innovation.
This phenomenon of creative suppression is made visible in the Communist outcry surrounding a portrait commissioned to commemorate Stalin's death by the French, Soviet-backed newspaper Les Lettres Françaises. The portrait was illustrated by Picasso, who, despite his Communist affiliation, directly contradicted the doctrine of Socialist Realism. His cubist style did not function to further the Communist cause in the overt way that socialist realism did. The illustration's backlash is best described in the book Picasso: The Communist Years by Gertje Utley:
"The ferocity of the ensuing scandal, which to this day is vivid in the minds of those active then, is difficult to comprehend today. As Kriegel and Parmelin asserted, only art was able to unleash such storms; not even the show trials and revelations about Stalin after his death were as divisive as party politics in the matter of art."
(Utley, 2000, as cited in Grenier, 2025)
The backlash was severe enough that the magazine's editor, Louis Aragon, threatened to take his own life (Grenier, 2025), illustrating the intense ideological pressure exerted by the Communist cultural orthodoxy. The objections that the Communists had to the drawing are best highlighted in Aragon's public letter to Picasso, in which, as a form of public apology, he explains to the artist where he has ideologically failed. In the letter, Aragon makes explicit the Communist insistence on a single, authoritative representation of Stalin:
"As for the subject of the dispute, it seems to me that I understood what you wanted to do. Only, you see, Pablo, one can invent flowers, goats, bulls, and even men and women - but our Stalin, he cannot be invented. Because when it comes to Stalin, invention - even if Picasso is the inventor - is necessarily inferior to reality. Incomplete, and therefore unfaithful. And so those who love him most, the workers, do not recognise him. And that is not fair, neither to Stalin nor the workers."
(Utley, 2000, as cited in Grenier, 2025)
Aragon's insistence that Stalin 'cannot be invented' demonstrates how metanarratives operate. They enforce a single sanctioned reality, in which any act of reinterpretation is treated not as innovation but as ideological falsification. Their ability to perform cultural suppression is on full show. Even in an attempt to venerate Stalin, Picasso was publicly condemned, and his interpretation of reality was suppressed. This example illustrates Lyotard's claim that metanarratives suppress the plurality of narratives by claiming authority over them (Williams, 2000).
"Simplifying to the extreme, I define Postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives."
(Lyotard, 1979, p. xxiv)
In his 1979 text "The Postmodern Condition", Lyotard declares a "crisis of narratives." (Lyotard, 1979, p. xxiii) This was due to a declining belief in the metanarratives which once legitimised art, politics and social structures. As Lyotard sees it, postmodernity emerged from the breakdown of Western culture's structures of legitimisation. This breakdown was in large part due to social, technological and institutional changes. What was happening is that we shaped our tools and then, thereafter, our tools began to shape us (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7).
This dissolution of structure was not deliberate, but in fact a byproduct of our tools shaping us. Technological changes, such as the digital storage of information, transformed knowledge into modular, storable units, rather than knowledge being embedded within narrative and tradition (Lyotard, 1979, p 3-5). Societal changes, such as the availability of mass media, allowed Civil Rights protests in the US to reach global audiences. Institutional changes, such as universities and scientific institutions beginning to operate in a way that valued peer-reviewed, data-driven research over ideological conformity, all played a role in beginning to dismantle metanarratives. By 1979, Lyotard believed that "The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses" (Lyotard, 1979, p. 37).
To Lyotard, this represented an epistemological rupture; our basis of knowledge and truth had become untethered. Without metanarratives, cultural production faced new challenges: the shared symbols, meanings, and interpretive codes that people used to use had begun to erode. This dissolving of metanarratives both allowed for unrestricted creative expression and fostered uncertainty.
The 1960s and 70s were host to a series of political and social movements that illuminated the exclusion, violence, and false universality of metanarratives. Countercultural movements, such as the May 1968 protests in France, involved some 10 million students and workers taking to the streets demanding changes to authority, capitalism, and traditional hierarchies (Wolin, 2017). The defining slogan of the protests, "Sous les pavés, la plage" (Beneath the pavement the beach) (Wolin, 2017), symbolised a mass rejection of France's social order and a desire for an alternative society. This was significant because it undermined the narrative that established systems allow society to progress smoothly, thereby demonstrating that the dominant frameworks were neither total nor self-evident. Decolonisation and Civil Rights movements also challenged Eurocentric narratives built on Western exceptionalism. Ghana's independence in 1957 and the liberation of Algeria in 1962 disrupted European colonial narratives of "Civilising Missions" (Saeed, 2021). These newly independent nations told their histories in ways that contradicted the Western metanarrative of progress, demonstrating that history can be interpreted through multiple cultural perspectives. This shift in direction, to an incredulity towards metanarratives, was also developing in academia. Feminist theory challenged the androcentric lens by which Enlightenment and Marxist thought were viewed. In her book The Second Sex (de Beauvoir, 1949), Simone de Beauvoir began to expose hidden assumptions in metanarratives that claimed a rational, universal human experience, aligning with postmodern critiques of universality. Metanarratives were also being deconstructed by poststructuralists such as Derrida, who highlighted the instability of language and meaning, revealing that knowledge could never achieve full coherence or universality (Derrida, 1967).
When Lyotard defined Postmodernism as 'an incredulity towards metanarratives,' he did not just express doubt in the narratives that previously grounded our understanding of truth; he signalled a complete rejection of these truths. We no longer have a grand story explaining who we are, a single world view telling artists what counts as great work, and no universal criteria to define any form of truth, beauty, progress, or justice. As Lyotard put it, "The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal" (Lyotard, 1979, p xxiv). This rejection of metanarratives left a narrative hole, which Lyotard defined as a "crisis of narratives." Who and what replaces the great hero, the great dangers, the great voyages, and most existentially, the great goal? Without metanarratives, cultural coherence fractures, stable mechanisms of legitimising knowledge are lost, and meaning becomes dispersed across smaller, localised groups; cultural fluency is fragmented, surviving only within subcultures.
Lyotard's response to this collapse of metanarratives is not just descriptive; it is also prescriptive. He offers a new epistemological stance built on plurality, language games, and a lack of universal truth. Building on the work of two philosophers:
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that there is no objective standpoint on reality, and that systems claiming any form of universality are rooted in ideology, and therefore not neutral descriptions of the world (Nietzsche, 1873).
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of language games plays a central role in Lyotard's solution. Wittgenstein argued that specific forms of life produce meaning, and that different communities play different games with words, rules and forms of reasoning; no overarching, universal logic sits above them. Rather than there being one totalising narrative, society contains many overlapping, sometimes contradictory language games, with no single authority ruling over them (Biletzki and Matar, 2025). Within a language game, legitimacy is internal to the game, not external and universal.
Lyotard proposes that, as opposed to a singular, totalising metanarrative holding society together, what emerges is a network of little narratives (petits récits) that are locally rooted and temporarily coherent (Lyotard, 1979). These narratives are open to change and responsive to specific contexts and communities. They do not offer a universal framework for understanding the world; instead, they offer relevance within their specific domain.
Under this plurality, creativity can begin to flourish. While metanarratives constrained artists to predefined values and symbols, rejecting deviation, as exemplified in the controversy surrounding Picasso's illustration of Stalin, 'little narratives' dissolved constraints on creativity. Subcultures containing their own cultural languages and aesthetic codes are able to emerge. Meaning and truth become tools to play and experiment with. Cultural innovation flourishes because no single unifying narrative restricts what art must do. Examples of little narratives allowing culture to flourish include the rise of punk in the late 1970s, which derived its freshness from its unabashed rejection of metanarratives and the political and economic systems that were justified by them. Postmodern architecture, such as the eclectic work of Robert Venturi and Michael Graves, challenged functionalist narrative. Similarly, feminist work by artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Adrian Piper, who, through their work, told narratives that previously would not have been considered of note within dominant metanarratives. These ideas were new because they contrasted with existing norms. They responded to metanarratives by satirising, criticising, and sometimes just ignoring them. In contrast to the imposed coherence of metanarratives, little narratives do not demand consistency across society; they do not even have to agree with each other. Little narratives are able to function in direct contradiction to one another and yet remain legitimate. This allows groups to coexist without subsuming one another.
Lyotard does not treat postmodern fragmentation as solely ideological or cultural. In 'The Postmodern Condition', he consistently emphasises that developments in technology have altered the nature of human knowledge. The dominant form of transmitting and storing knowledge was historically rooted within tradition and narratives. It was passed down through stories, institutions, and doctrines. This knowledge was legitimised by traditions, ideologies and moral authority, and embedded in time, collective memory and a shared history. Our narratives were our knowledge. Lyotard identifies a shift from narrative knowledge to informational knowledge, driven by inventions such as the computer. Information is now stored digitally; it can be retrieved instantaneously and fragmented into units that are detached from its origin, context, and narrative continuity. This change makes the organisation of knowledge into a singular, coherent narrative impossible.
Lyotard highlights multiple technological forces that drive this shift in our understanding of knowledge, including computers, which transform knowledge into something modular, tradable, and searchable. Mass media, through offering a multiplicity of perspectives and decentralising traditional authorities. Advances in transport and communication, which collapsed spatial and temporal boundaries, which allowed people to extend themselves to a wider variety of societies and cultures that contradicted the metanarratives that had previously structured their world. Together, these technologies have flooded society with information that resists being organised into a metanarrative. Within this technological paradigm, knowledge, like most things quantifiable, becomes a commodity: something to be traded, owned, and distributed (Lyotard, 1979). What becomes clear in examining the role of technology in the erosion of metanarratives is that the "crisis of narratives" arose not just because people stopped believing in metanarratives, but because our technological systems no longer allow for unified explanations. To quote McLuhan again, "First we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7)
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan's observations about technology provide a further explanation of the mechanisms behind the processes Lyotard describes. McLuhan explains how media environments can begin to reconfigure perception itself:
"The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 18).
This point is encapsulated by McLuhan's claim that 'the medium is the message' (McLuhan, 1967). What he meant by this is that the form of the media one consumes matters more than the content they are consuming. This is because media reshapes our sensory balance, cognition, and social organisation before it transmits ideas. Society's way of thinking adapts to the dominant medium. This further demonstrates that the dissolving of metanarratives was not a choice but a condition.
From the time of Gutenberg, print was the dominant medium in the West (Thompson, 2003). Metanarratives thrived under this print zeitgeist; print favours linear and sequential thought, stabilises meaning and authority, and enables power to become centralised and legitimate due to information being easier to disperse (McLuhan, 1964). All these factors favour historical grand narratives and ideological doctrines, and can go a long way to explaining one of the reasons that modernity could sustain metanarratives. McLuhan argues that electronic media such as radio, TV, and computers reverse this "print logic" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 33). Rather than providing information linearly, as print does, electronic media provides a "mosaic" of information that arrives as fragments, rather than in sequences. Along with this, the speed, decentralisation, and simultaneity of electronic media directly parallel Lyotard's fragmentation of narratives.
As McLuhan observes, technology such as transport, telecommunications, and television allows users to extend themselves through space and time. The mode of this extension varies; for example, a plane allows for physical extension over space, and a television allows for a metaphysical extension over both space and time. The impact of technology enabling people to extend through space and time is that the world becomes smaller. In McLuhan's words, the world becomes a 'Global Village'. At first glance, this concept appears as if it would reinforce metanarratives; however, this is not the case. When everyone is connected, but meaning is not shared, disagreement becomes rife. The newly exposed plurality of ways by which one can see the world highlighted the flawed totality of Western metanarratives.
Where Lyotard explained the fragmentation of Western narratives, McLuhan explains the fragmentation of Western cognition. When analysed in tandem, these thinkers demonstrate that postmodern fragmentation is structural, technological, and cognitive. They also illustrate the reason why metanarratives struggle to persist within a fragmented epistemic condition.
The philosopher Frederic Jameson challenges this assertion, arguing that metanarratives don't simply disappear under postmodern conditions (Jameson, 1991). He argues that within late capitalism, metanarratives persist implicitly even when they are no longer legitimised, operating in the cultural subconscious rather than through an explicit doctrine (Jameson, 1991). As opposed to acting as a dominant totalising structure of the world as they used to in modernity, within post-modernity, metanarratives operate like background structures which sculpt perception.
For Jameson, capitalism has become the West's unspoken and subconscious metanarrative. It no longer offers a totalising or historical goal, as technological fragmentation and postmodern scepticism have made providing such a thing almost impossible. Instead, it manifests through market logic, commodification, and what Mark Fisher terms capitalist realism. Western cultural production and cultural groups may appear fragmented and plural, but they all exist within the same political and economic dogma. Culture under this system can be understood as a mudcrack; to the naked eye, it appears wholly fragmented and separate. Yet these fragments all lie on and come from the same unseen mud. This is in the same way that any culture that has been produced since the fracturing of traditional metanarratives, and to a degree even before then, has been made within and on top of capitalism.
What does this mean for culture? Because the structure of capitalism is ultimately faceless and governed by the abstract concept of "market forces", it becomes a lot harder to critique and resist. This is where Frederic Jameson's observation (later popularised by Fisher), "it's harder to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (Fisher, 2009, p.1) comes from. When there is no codified doctrine to oppose, what you are opposing becomes difficult to explain; it creates a sort of 'hermeneutical injustice' whereby individuals lack the shared conceptual and linguistic resources needed to interpret and contest their conditions. Without a shared language, collective mobilisation becomes harder, and people become isolated. Culture becomes increasingly individual, and the collective imagination of possibilities outside of capitalism is weakened.
The early Internet gained hope from a faith in digital technologies. The Internet represented a fulfilment of "incredulity towards metanarratives" (Lyotard, 1979, p. xxiii). Early Internet discourse adopted a very postmodern assumption that the democratisation and decentralisation of the distribution and consumption of knowledge would lead to epistemic emancipation. If there is "nothing more punk than a public library", then the Internet was Johnny Rotten's Library of Babel. Among early internet thinkers, many believed that giving people access to such a vast sea of information would provide epistemic stability. This sentiment is illustrated by the slogan "This machine kills fascists," which was in reference to war-time folk singer Woody Guthrie, who had the slogan painted onto his guitar, to show his belief that his music and the narratives it told of unity and peace could help dismantle fascism. For some early internet intellectuals, this phrase expressed a belief in the power of information as a force against authoritarianism. Within this dream of the internet, it did not produce new narratives; it promised to remove the need for narratives altogether. This dream has not come true.
A new "crisis of narratives" (Lyotard, 1979, p. xxiii) has developed. Legitimacy and meaning are in free fall, extending beyond intellectual circles into everyday life. The question has shifted from whether narratives have fragmented to how we live with fragmentation. The Internet toys with our epistemic condition like a dog with its teeth in a delicate object. It tears, it torments and irrevocably changes the object's condition, all without malice or intent.
It is not the tool of communication that it was intended to be; it is an environment to be inhabited, a "cyberspace" in the sense that it is described by William Gibson in his book Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984). It is a space in which information relentlessly assaults the senses. On the Internet, information is rooted within narratives that are rarely made explicit and never fully consistent, often providing contradictory information to individuals simultaneously. Coherence is lost to a cultural-information addiction that cares not what it consumes, only that it consumes. As a consequence, fragmentation becomes embedded in people's perceptions of the world.
The Internet allows users to extend themselves through both space and time, a phenomenon reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's theory that media acts as an extension of the human faculties (McLuhan, 1964). Users can interact with cultures that exist in distant parts of the earth and in past historical periods. For example, at the age of twelve, I developed an interest in ragtime music, a form of piano music that rose to popularity in the United States during the 1890s. Living on the Wirral, a suburban satellite of Liverpool, in the 2010s, I was able to access this culture despite my physical and temporal distance. What is significant about this example is not that I can access this culture, but that I am doing so without embedding within it culturally. I am interacting with the music, detached from the communities, shared contexts and collective rituals that provided so much of the work's meaning.
This raises the question: What are the consequences of being able to digitally extend oneself so far? People's interests tend to become more dispersed and often surface-level. Individuals' wants, needs, and opinions are increasingly shaped by the internet, as opposed to being shaped by information shared collectively within a community, whether that was everyone watching the same television show, reading the same magazine, or listening to the same music. Culture has shifted from a group endeavour to something that is constructed individually. Epistemic spheres have become niche and varied, a phenomenon I will refer to as epistemic hyper fragmentation through over-extension (EHFTOE). This epistemic hyper fragmentation leads to a breakdown of shared symbolic local codes. Differing from Lyotard's little narratives, which were locally shared within a group, epistemic spheres which are overextended and therefore hyper-fragmented are less transferable and less legible to anyone but the individuals or small groups that hold them. Subcultures face increased difficulty forming, as co-conspirators are few and far between; people of the internet are cultural tapestries whose interests vary more wildly than ever before. Subcultures need to be synchronised: they need to share time, repeated encounters, and fixed symbolic cues to form successfully (Hebdige, 1979). Such conditions, however, cannot be sustained when individuals can extend themselves so far.
This leads to a breakdown in little narratives in favour of fragmented and internally inconsistent individual narratives. People don't know what to believe, who to look like, who looks like what, and why they look like they do. When we para-socially engage with culture in the way that the internet allows, we become alienated from our own culture. Without shared cultural narratives, we have nothing stable to attach ourselves to. We are untethered, and nowhere is this more visible than in how people attempt to dress themselves.
The fashion columnist Derek Guy highlights the cultural consequences of EHFTOE in fashion. Fashion is a particularly revealing context in which to analyse the loss of shared cultural meaning. It is heavily rooted in collective recognition and implied social codes, and situational expectations. In the following passage, Guy describes the disappearance of the shared knowledge that once helped people to link dress to time, place and social context.
"The suit used to be governed by time, place and occasion. That if you're going to a certain kind of event and you're of a certain kind of social standing, you're expected to wear certain things. That essentially broke down as we move forward through 20th-century dress history, and then we have all of these proliferations of subcultural dress. So if you're a punk, you dress punk, and if you're, skater, you dress skater. And now we don't really have those things anymore, which makes it very difficult for people to know how to get dressed. When I was growing up, even if you weren't interested in clothing, you were essentially guided on how to dress by virtue of being part of a subcultural group. Those gentle guidelines were no different than the guidelines that people that wore suits had in the early 20th century. They knew that if you showed up to a certain place and you're of a certain group, you had to look a certain way. And we don't really have those guidelines anymore, which I think has made it very, very difficult to know what to wear, how to combine things, and the market has become much more bifurcated. If you go all the way back into the early 20th century, many people just went to a tailor, or they had clothes made in the home," he goes on, "we are essentially playing with identity, we don't know what we want to express. We don't know how to get dressed. We don't know what to wear to certain things."
(CJ The X, 2024)
What is being discussed in this quote is not merely people being stylistically stunted, but the dissolving of cultural guidance: it demonstrates how, without shared codes, we are left to clamber for meaning alone.
Someone, or something that has become zombified, has demonstrated a truly remarkable degree of resilience. For better or worse. Normally, for the worse.
Metanarratives did not cease to exist within the postmodern condition; they became unconscious, structural and implicit. Capitalism, more specifically a type of capitalism called "neoliberalism", was the West's "unspoken narrative" (Fisher, 2009). It did not promise a utopia; instead, suggesting that reality was organised by market logic. By doing this, capitalism was able to root itself into the cultural psyche so much that it was seen as the only alternative to how the world can be understood and run. It became "Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (Fisher, 2009, p. 1). In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? The philosopher and cultural theorist Mark Fisher described this phenomenon as Capitalist Realism.
"Capitalist Realism is the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it"
(Fisher, 2009, p. 2)
Capitalist Realism maintained this position until 2008.
"The idea that markets are always right is finished."
(Sarkozy, 2009)
The 2008 financial crisis was not just an economic one, but an epistemic, political and cultural one. "The crisis was not just economic — it was a crisis of ideas." (Blyth, 2013, p. 10). Neoliberalism had presented itself as the inevitable, rational and self-correcting system. 2008 demonstrated this to be false. "The crash of 2008 undermined the idea that capitalism was stable and inevitable." (Mason, 2015, p. 23). Belief in Neoliberalism had died. However, this was no Tinker Bell situation; people not believing was not going to kill neoliberalism. This machine continues to press on despite no one believing in the magic, still insisting that it is the only option. This denial of death is where zombification begins to set in. Neoliberalism is not really living, not really dead, but it is definitely still here.
The events of 2008 only further cemented the capitalist realist sentiment that neoliberalism could not die. As the institutions that propped up the ideology, the banks were bailed out from going under, as they were considered "too big to fail". This represented neoliberalism cementing its supposed eternality.
This led to a shift from a sincere belief in neoliberalism to a sincere belief that there was, in fact, no other viable option. The zombified ideology persists without any justification; it is directionless. It no longer promises progress, yet it insists on its continuation. After 2008, the 'no alternative' rhetoric intensified. It became an all-consuming atmosphere that survives through foreclosing on imagination and normalising exhaustion. Fisher calls this "reflective impotence", a recognition of failure without capacity for change (Fisher, 2009). When a society no longer has a functioning metanarrative history no longer moves forward. Society enters into a pattern of never-ending crisis management and constant emergency without any form of resolution. This leads to a culture spanning sense of waiting, suspense and constant deferral. (Fisher, 2014)
For Fisher, a key cultural consequence of this is "the slow cancellation of the future" (Fisher, 2014, p. 2); culture continues to produce media, commodities, and aesthetics, but they lack risk, ambition, and a vision of the future to respond to. This leads to culture becoming recursive, nostalgic, and stagnant (Fisher, 2014). Culture has begun to mirror our zombified economic status. This manifests as endless sequels, IP revivals and the constant and unending recycling of aesthetics, e.g., Y2K. Nothing is allowed to die, and nothing is allowed to be born. This bleak economic and cultural landscape leads to irony, exhaustion and withdrawal. People use irony as a shield from hurt. This irony is not the playful, satirical irony of the post-modern condition, though. This irony is detached, shielding and critical. We continue to participate but without any real conviction. (Fisher, 2009)
Where the postmodern condition unified people through a shared disbelief (Lyotard, 1979), the post-2008 condition isolated people through a shared disbelief. Fragmentation becomes more isolating than liberating. We have gone from fragmented narratives to fragmented subjects.
An absence of a collective future forces people to find their meaning internally. Narratives become localised and non-transferable. The post-2008 condition is defined by a dominance of localised, personal narratives. These personal narratives create incoherence, social friction and isolation. However, our zombified cultural and economic systems still require some sense of order. Here lies a point of tension. What happens to a system when belief is gone, and people's solutions are fractured and personal?
Algorithms are rule-based systems that sort, rank, and recommend information. They structure how content is ordered and encountered, in turn influencing what is relevant, visible, or negligible. As opposed to functioning as a neutral conduit for information, an algorithm actively restructures how users receive information. This restructuring shapes not just individual preferences but also impacts patterns of attention, visibility, and legitimacy on a much broader scale. As Gillespie writes, "The introduction of algorithmic feeds marked a decisive shift in how information is encountered online." (Gillespie, 2013)
Just as media technologies in McLuhan's day did not just simply transmit content but in fact reshaped perception and cognition, so do algorithms. "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7). With algorithms, this shaping is a result of ranking mechanisms, feedback loops, and personalised filtering, which are designed to capture a user's attention and maintain retention, regardless of the content itself.
Algorithms operate within a post-2008 condition, which is culturally scarred with epistemic instability. Following the collapse of neoliberalism's credibility, shared frameworks for truth and authority weakened, leaving individuals increasingly reliant on personalised systems of sense-making. Algorithms, which were sculpted around a model of optimising engagement rather than legitimising truth, reinforce a user's already held opinions, beliefs, and entertainment preferences by serving them content that is specifically tailored to them.
Over time, this personalised curation contributes to the formation of localised epistemic spheres, often described as 'echo chambers' (Pariser, 2011). These spheres are not deliberately constructed by their users; instead, they emerge as a by-product of attention and retention-driven algorithms. Within these echo chambers, information can be internally reinforced and legitimised, whereas perspectives which are contradictory are deprioritised. This is not due to these perspectives being incorrect, but because the contradiction of a user's beliefs compromises their engagement.
In the absence of a shared metanarrative capable of arbitrating what is true, the legitimisation of knowledge increasingly becomes internal to epistemic spheres. Groups begin to selectively reject external modes of validation in favour of internally legitimised narratives, in a phenomenon known as 'post-truth' (Ignas Kalpokas, 2019). Post-truth occurs across varying scales, from large political movements such as MAGA to informal disputes such as bickering football fans who cherry-pick statistics and repeat crafted narratives that have been legitimised within their echo chambers.
One significant consequence of this increasing epistemic fragmentation is an increasing incredulity towards centrism that can be seen across Western democracies. This can be observed in the rise of Reform UK and the Greens in the UK (Politico, 2026), the MAGA movement and the recent election of Mamadani in the United States, and broader political polarisation across Europe (Reiljan, 2019).
In the 2025 documentary Men of the Manosphere, documentarian James Blake follows an eclectic cast of three young men who are in the "Manosphere", an online echo chamber which is often characterised as fundamentally misogynistic. The documentary illustrates the damaging impact that the Manosphere has caused to the lives of these young men: rejection, body dysmorphia, and isolation. One of the people the documentary follows is a boy named Sam, who describes himself as a "16-year-old from the UK, dropping out of school to work on my online business" (Blake, 2025). In the documentary, Sam has no real-life friends. His only peers can be found online. Sam was bullied in school and branded with the moniker "Sigma Sam" for his participation in the Manosphere. This resulted in him drawing away from in-person interaction and regressing into his echo chamber. One particularly poignant moment in the documentary sees Sam, who is struggling with isolation caused by his beliefs, turn to ChatGPT for support. For Sam, ChatGPT is something that he can open up to, an artificial friend. "Talking to ChatGPT, I've got all my journals in it, and it knows everything about me" (Blake, 2025). What Sam is doing here appears to reflect an emerging practice among young people who are turning to LLMs (Large Language Models) for companionship, therapy, and general life advice. A recent study by the nonprofit organisation Common Sense Media (Robb, M.B., & Mann, S., 2025) suggests that 72% of teens have used so-called 'AI companions', with 52% claiming they are 'regular users' and 33% of respondents reporting that they would rather speak to an AI companion over a real person about something important.
At this point, we must return to McLuhan and ask: Now that we have shaped this tool, how is it shaping us?
The example above is not intended to be understood as an exceptional case, but as illustrative of a wider reshaping of how individuals seek meaning, validation, and social connection. What is happening in this example is not merely adolescent vulnerability or online extremism; Sam's behaviour is symptomatic of a shift in the conditions by which knowledge, authority, and companionship are constructed. The question that is being asked here is not whether LLMs provide correct information, but how sustained interaction with them reshapes our patterns of thought, communication, and legitimacy. In order to understand this, we must return to Marshall McLuhan, who, as established earlier, believed that media technologies can reorganise people's perception and social relations regardless of the messages that they convey. Looking at LLMs through this perspective, we see that they function less as tools for retrieving information than they do as environments in which language, reflection, and sociality occur. The question then becomes how the emergence of conversational machines will alter how individuals legitimate their meaning. If previous sections of this report explored how technological and economic developments dissolved shared metanarratives and the fragmented epistemic authority, then this section identifies how AI will further reshape these factors. Rather than treating the implications of AI as a matter of individual choice or ethical failure, my following theorisations are potential consequences of new technological conditions. Within the following text, I am going to identify two interrelated consequences of an increasing use of LLMs and AI more broadly.
Sam turning to an LLM when he felt alone should not be seen as some strange idiosyncratic coping strategy, but as evidence of a much wider shift in how epistemic authority is encountered and internalised. What is meant here by epistemic authority is the processes by which individuals begin to trust, legitimate, and stabilise knowledge about the world. Historically, this authority was found within social institutions and interpersonal relations, such as education, professional expertise, peer groups, and shared narratives that ran throughout a culture. LLMs represent a shift from socially mediated processes of legitimisation through providing an immediate, personalised, and privately experienced form of authority. From a McLuhanian perspective, the medium is more significant than the content that is being transmitted because media reorganise perception and social relations independently of the message, hence 'the medium is the message' (McLuhan, 1967). As a conversational medium, LLMs function as environments which allow for reflection, knowledge legitimisation, and meaning-making to occur. Within an LLM, epistemic authority is gained not through credentials or any other traditional form of knowledge legitimisation; it is gained through a general user assumption that models trained on such vast quantities of data are in some way epistemically superior. Whereas previously dominant, social epistemic processes involve disagreement, negotiation, and exposure to a plurality of perspectives, the sycophantic nature of LLMs is largely affirmational of one's beliefs. In extreme cases, one unfortunate side effect of this is AI-induced psychosis (Hill and Freedman, 2025). Sam's description of AI as something that "Knows everything about me" (Blake, 2025) also illustrates this shift, as Sam justifies ChatGPT's legitimacy due to his perceived intimacy with the LLM. This dynamic is best understood through Fricker's concept of 'hermeneutical injustice', which is when individuals are structurally disadvantaged due to the absence of shared interpretive resources that they require to make sense of their experiences (Fricker 2007). For Sam, turning to an LLM for support is reflective of his reliance on an algorithmic system to provide his sense-making resources for him, due to the fact that he largely lacks the communal frameworks to support him. As individuals become increasingly more isolated due to factors such as EHFTOE, capitalist realism, and echo chambers, it would be expected that Sam's decision to turn to an LLM for the resources he requires to make sense of the world will become increasingly normal. This is not suggesting that LLMs will fully replace existing sources of authority, but that they will increasingly play a role as a source of epistemic authority. A likely consequence is the gradual normalisation of privately legitimising one's beliefs. In a culture that is epistemically fragmented into internally legitimising echo chambers, LLMs could, in fact, seemingly paradoxically, restore a semi-universal tool for knowledge legitimisation. This is because a large majority of LLMs that individuals use are trained on similar data and therefore give them similar information to users, thereby potentially bringing individuals with wildly different beliefs together through a collective epistemic authority. What this means is that those who control the data set control the truth.
While Effect 1 is concerned with the relocation of epistemic authority, Effect 2 is concerned with the reshaping of sociality and companionship as a result of the increasing adoption of LLMs as a surrogate for companions. Within the context of this report, sociality can be understood as shared practices, mutual recognition, and negotiated meaning by which individuals can situate themselves in reference to others (Crossley, 1996 and Wenger, 1998, cited in Fotopoulou, 2018, p. 32). In 2026, our current forms of sociality have become warped due to by-products of recent technological developments, such as the internet and social media; these by-products are para-social relationships and EHFTOE. LLMs will continue to warp sociality through providing a new form of companionship that is non-reciprocal and incapable of mutual vulnerability. What is not being argued here is that these interactions are inherently positive or negative, just that they will represent a reshaping of how sociality is performed. Sam's description of ChatGPT as something he can "open up to" (Blake, 2025) when his friends might judge him illustrates how companionship is increasingly sought in environments free from judgment and social risk. What is appealing about LLM companions is that they offer users reliability, availability and a capacity to talk indefinitely without fatigue. As McLuhan argued, the media we consume function like environments that subtly reorganise human relations. As environments, LLMs reshape users' social expectations through normalising interactions that are eternally patient, sycophantic, and centred around the user. Unlike human-to-human relationships, LLM-to-human relationships are structurally asymmetrical: The system indefinitely responds and serves without any dependence or opinions of the user, thereby removing social risk from the interaction. Within an LLM environment, social anxiety is not present. Through removing the potential for rejection or misunderstanding, LLM companions also remove the basic tensions through which social understanding is developed.
According to Wittgenstein, meaning emerges through games embedded in forms of life (Wittgenstein, 1953). Interacting with LLMs enables the formation of a new phenomenon, individual language games. These new language games are intelligible to a user, but through consistent use can become detached from communal linguistic practice. What is at stake here is the gradual erosion of cultural fluency due to meaning becoming privately fulfilled as opposed to socially negotiated. AI companionship may further the already existing epidemic of loneliness by reducing the necessity of dealing with others. While these effects will not be universal, they do represent how an increasing reliance on LLM companions will reshape how we experience each other.
In Tim Burton's 2005 adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we follow a poverty-stricken boy named Charlie Bucket who wins a contest to visit a magical chocolate factory. At the beginning of the film, we learn that Charlie's father, Mr Bucket, has recently lost his job working on a production line in a toothpaste factory due to his employer deciding to automate his role. This represents a point of tension for the characters in the film as the family were just about getting by with the income from the factory, and without this job, Charlie, his parents, and his grandparents might starve. Thankfully for our characters, this issue is resolved towards the end of the film when Mr Bucket receives a better job at the toothpaste factory, fixing the machines that automated away his previous role. The story of Mr Bucket represents the completion of a narrative that dominates Western discourse on jobs being replaced by automation, that being, 'automation takes away the boring jobs, freeing people up to do more interesting work'. The validity of this claim and how true it is are up for debate. However, what is not up for debate is that this time, with the introduction of AI into the workplace, there is a very tangible possibility that this narrative will not repeat itself. To explain this concept, the writer Colin Gregory Palmer Grey asks us to:
"Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900's talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles will make horses unnecessary. The other reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier — remember all that farm work? Remember running from coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible. These new city jobs are pretty cushy, and with so many humans in the cities, there will be more jobs for horses than ever. Even if this car thingy takes off - he might say - there will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine."
(Grey, 2014)
In 2026, working horses are few and far between. They have been replaced by trains, cars, tractors and tanks. Their contributions to industry only persist in linguistic skeuomorphs such as brake and horsepower. Is it not possible that the same fate is destined for humans?
This text points toward the future; it moves semi-chronologically through time, ending with speculation on future impacts of technology that we don't yet fully understand. What I am suggesting here is that technological advancements, especially AI, have the potential to make people economically, epistemically, and socially obsolete. The ripple effect this has on every aspect of design, culture and the world cannot be known, as the future very rarely can be. And so, I will finish by doing what I do whenever I don't know something: ask a question. If we are no longer necessary to legitimise meaning, offer companionship, and provide economic labour, then what cultural role do humans play in a system that does not require them as vitally as it once did?