\chapter{Conclusion \& Outlook}\label{cha:conclusion}
\glsresetall

The thesis commenced from a pressing theoretical and political problem: in an era increasingly mediated by computational systems, and especially by contemporary forms of \gls{ai}, how can critique and resistance be (re)theorised?
The rapid emergence of \gls{genai} as a meaning-making infrastructure, rather than a merely predictive tool, renders this problem both urgent and complex.
To address it, the analysis unfolded through a series of interconnected analytical movements, each designed to clarify how contemporary formations of power operate and to specify the conditions under which critique and resistance may still emerge within them.

The first analytical step began by situating contemporary computational infrastructures within \citeauthorfull{deleuze1992a}’s \parencite*[]{deleuze1992a} account of control societies. Tracing the transition from \citeauthor{Foucault1977}’s \parencite*[]{Foucault1977} disciplinary societies, in which subjectivity was shaped within institutional enclosures, to the flexible and continuously adaptive mechanisms of control associated with computational developments clarified two foundational elements. First, the operation of power has shifted toward increasingly personal, fluid, and anticipatory forms of modulation, which provides a conceptual framework for examining the novelties introduced by contemporary \gls{ai} systems. Second, this shift reorganises the relation between power and the production of subjectivity, rendering subjectivation itself the primary site of political struggle. In this light, the pillars of control already display a striking resemblance to contemporary computational infrastructures, particularly in their reliance on personalised modulation through dividual based operations, pre-emptive adjustment, and continuous calibration.

However, the analysis quickly turned to the missing or incomplete elements of the \textit{Postscript}, where the absence of a developed programme for resistance was of particular concern. Examination of secondary literature such as \citeauthor{hardt1998}'s \parencite*[]{hardt1998} reflections further consolidated this gap. As a direct attempt to conceptualise resistance and critique in control societies, the analysis then turned to the insights of \citeauthor{mackenzie2018}'s \parencite*[]{mackenzie2018} \citetitle{mackenzie2018}. Responding to \citeauthor{rouvroy2012}'s \parencite*[]{rouvroy2012} question of whether critique remains possible in regimes that bypass confrontation with subjects by operating through infra-individual data and supra-individual profiles, \citeauthor{mackenzie2018} framed critique as a historically adaptive practice and clarified both the necessity and the difficulty of formulating resistance within infrastructures defined by continuous modulation. His account established critique as a necessary precursor to resistance in control societies and emphasised that the mechanisms of control cannot be countered through models grounded in the reflexive or transgressive subject, nor through processes that mimic algorithmic \enquote{IF...THEN...} procedures. In this context, his elaboration of \citeauthor{guattari1995a}’s artistic activity as a practice of recomposing signs provided a concrete illustration of how immanent divergence might be enacted without reproducing the procedural logic of control. Yet the specific approaches to critique, and the reflections on control's \glspl{dispositif}, either lacked compatibility with the current turn in \gls{ai} systems or lacked sufficient articulation, which necessitated further examination.

The later work of \citeauthor{mackenzie2018} with Robert Porter \parencite[]{mackenzie2021} offered a deeper account of computational infrastructures by framing them not as agents of de-institutionalisation but as a new and \textit{totalising} mode of institutionalisation. This shift made clear that any theory of critique and resistance must address both the technical operations of \gls{genai} systems and the institutional logics through which they are embedded and reproduced. Their proposed methodology of interruption, termed \enquote{counter-sequencing}, provided a valuable point of departure for action, yet both its operational specifics and its strategic orientation remained insufficiently defined. These contributions therefore performed two crucial functions for the present study: first, they strengthened the argument for understanding critique and resistance in control societies as interconnected and immanent processes, enabling their formulation here as Resistance/Critique; and second, they reinforced the necessity of developing a well articulated strategy for divergence that accounts for both the technical architecture and the institutional dynamics of regimes characterised by an intensified management of knowledge and subjectivity.

The discussion then turned to the technical and historical substrate of \gls{genai}, offering a genealogical analysis that traced the evolution from \gls{symai} to the contemporary paradigm of transformer-based generative models. This was not a neutral technical account but a critical exegesis of the operational shifts that shaped the current machinery of these architectures. The transition from rule-based, logically interpretable systems to statistical, connectionist approaches marked a decisive transformation in how intelligence is computationally modelled, moving from explicit representation to emergent, data-driven inference. Building on this historical groundwork, the analysis examined the operational use cases of \gls{ai} prior to the advent of \gls{genai}. Early predictive models and recommendation systems, despite their more descriptive scope, already embodied the logic of modulation and feedback characteristic of control societies. Through profiling, personalisation, and behavioural steering, these systems established an infrastructure of algorithmic governance that effectively prepared the terrain on which generative models would later develop on.

The analysis then advanced to examine the \gls{dl} mechanisms that enabled the rise of \gls{genai}, with particular attention to the transformer architecture that underpins contemporary generative models, especially \glspl{llm}. Through an exploration of feature spaces, attention mechanisms, gradient descent, and backpropagation, the chapter revealed an epistemology of modulation and probabilistic inference at the core of these systems. Reframed through a Deleuzoguattarian lens, the transformer's \enquote{double articulation} was shown to operate simultaneously on molecular flows of neuronal activation and on molar aggregates that structure meaning and coherent output. Gradient descent and backpropagation were interpreted as dynamic processes of de- and reterritorialisation within the model’s representational space, while further procedures such as fitting and fine-tuning were analysed as mechanisms that adjust the sedimentation and openness of internal structures. Although \gls{genai} models clearly display the modulative capacities that could render them typical \glspl{dispositif} of control, the diagnosis also suggested that their generative capacities and continuous, context-sensitive production of meaning position them as communicative agents that do not fully conform to earlier, more rigid categories of algorithmic governance. This is especially significant given that, once \gls{genai} models operate as communicative agents, these dynamics introduce new possibilities for understanding, reshaping the nature of negotiation itself, and even possibly altering them.

After the technical account, the analysis turned to the nature of human–machine communication, the question of agency, and the conditions under which models produce meaning, examining the institutional tendencies of \gls{genai} systems in their governance of knowledge and communication. The discussion began with \citeauthor{bender2021b}'s \parencite[]{bender2021b} critique of the representational limits of \glspl{llm} and the risks of mistaking statistical reconstruction for linguistic or social understanding, crystallised in the metaphor of the \enquote{stochastic parrot}. Building on this, \citeauthor{amoore2024}'s \parencite[]{amoore2024} analysis of perceptual gaps, arising from continuous dimensionality reduction and reconstruction, demonstrated how these systems infer continuity where none exists. This raised critical questions about how political or ideological tendencies may be amplified within predictive infrastructures as models interpolate meaning to fill these gaps. Taken together, these perspectives foregrounded the representational stakes of \gls{genai}, framing its outputs not as neutral reflections of underlying data but as active, distributionally shaped constructions of reality.

The analysis then shifted to conceptual frameworks that reposition the human–machine relationship beyond simple representation. \citeauthor{eloff2021}'s \parencite*[]{eloff2021} concept of the algoplastic stratum enabled examining humans and machines on a shared topological plane of interaction, demonstrating how human illusions about the capabilities of \gls{genai} contribute to a mutual feedback loop of adaptation and projection. This provided the grounding for \citeauthor{dishon2024}'s \parencite*[]{dishon2024} argument that \gls{genai} blurs the boundaries of agency through ongoing negotiation, as meaning is continually (re)constructed across human–machine exchanges in a manner reminiscent of Kafkaesque bureaucracy: personalised yet opaque, responsive yet uncontrollable. Building on this, the chapter considered alternatives to rigidly representational interpretations of \gls{genai} by turning to \citeauthor{beckmann2023}'s \parencite*[]{beckmann2023} corporeal phenomenology, which reframes \gls{dl} in \gls{cp} rather than \gls{nr} terms. Here, meaning arises not from fixed internal maps or a singular representational structure but from layered activations that resemble lived experience, reframing both hallucinations and interpretive failures. \citeauthor{montanari2025}'s \parencite*[]{montanari2025} contribution extended this trajectory by emphasising transformers’ capacity for long-distance conceptual relations and imagining futures in which \gls{genai} participates more autonomously in shaping socio-political narratives. Taken together, these perspectives frame human–machine interactions as hybrid formations in which meaning is co-produced across technical and social strata. This opens conceptual space for resisting convergent rationalities by intervening in the layered processes through which \gls{genai} generates patterns, narratives, and forms of subjectification.

The insights gained from examining contemporary debates on the institutional dimensions of human–machine communication not only rendered the inner processes of \gls{genai} more intelligible but, when combined with the preceding technical analysis, also made visible where and how aspects of the meaning-making process, especially those contributing to its sedimentation, might be reconfigured. Building on this groundwork, the final chapter shifted from theoretical and technical exposition to a micropolitical articulation of how the conditions for Resistance/Critique could be established. The analysis brought together the theoretical, technical, and institutional strands by examining how the generative capacities of \gls{genai} open distinctive possibilities for resistance within control societies. To articulate these micropolitical interventions, the chapter turned to the joint work of \gls{dg}, whose concepts offer a powerful vocabulary for understanding how power, desire, and subjectivity operate within and through generative infrastructures.

Several key Deleuzoguattarian concepts were introduced in this step, each illuminated by a concrete case from contemporary \gls{ai} research and related scholarship. The concept of desiring-production, which redefines desire as a productive and connective force rather than a lack, was explored through \citeauthor{yu2025}'s \parencite*[]{yu2025} study on \gls{genai} and the \enquote{Six Thinking Hats} method. This work demonstrated how \gls{genai} models can either constrain creative flows into utilitarian patterns or, under the right conditions, reopen them, thereby illustrating the persistent tension between the capture and the liberation of desire. The schizophrenic process (a model of unregulated, proliferative productivity) was then used to interpret experiments with autotelic \gls{ai} agents. Tasked with generating their own goals, these systems displayed a form of artificial curiosity that mirrors schizoanalytic accounts of desire's pure productivity, revealing the capacity to break from pre-coded circuits.
The distinction between nomad science and state science was activated through an examination of Anthropic’s \parencite[see][]{templeton2024} feature-amplification research. By artificially amplifying a specific neural pattern (as in the \enquote{Golden Gate Bridge} example), researchers shifted the model into an entirely different plane of meaning, altering both its behavioural structure and its operative purpose. This dissolution of stable representational identities resonates with \citeauthor{beckmann2023}'s \parencite*[]{beckmann2023} account of multiple, coexisting planes of meaning in \gls{cp}, where new configurations emerge through differential activation. Finally, practices such as jailbreaking \parencite[see e.g.][]{shen2024} were interpreted through the lens of double articulation and counter-sequencing \parencite[see][]{mackenzie2021}, revealing how users exploit the gap between a model’s molecular associations and its molar constraints to subvert safety protocols and redirect its outputs.

Together, these conceptual pairings demonstrate that the technical architecture of \gls{genai}, analysed within the context of control societies, is inseparable from a micropolitics of desire. The same systems engineered for modulation and control are fissured by their own productive excess, whether manifested as creative divergence, autotelic exploration, feature-based drift, or adversarial hallucination. These dynamics show that smooth spaces and the lines of flight they enable can be generated within the striated apparatus of control itself: neural architectures that stabilise and normalise conduct simultaneously harbour structural points of deviation, including representational drift, long-distance conceptual leaps, and hallucinatory disruptions that interrupt the consolidation of meaning. Viewed through a Deleuzoguattarian lens, such behaviours allow Resistance/Critique to be reconceived not as an external opposition to generative infrastructures but as an immanent practice of navigating, amplifying, and recombining the very flows that constitute them. By integrating these insights into a micropolitical account of intervention, the thesis shows that \gls{genai} operates not only as a \gls{dispositif} of control but also as a contingent field in which new subjectivities, unexpected meanings, and lines of flight can be forged, thereby providing a concrete basis for rethinking critique and resistance within generative environments.



\section*{Final Outlook}
As \citeauthorfull{weber2007} \parencite*[]{weber2007} argued in \citetitle{weber2007}\sidenote{\enquote{The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism}}, the emergence of modern capitalism in Northern Europe depended not only on economic or technical preconditions, but crucially on a specific transformation of subjectivity. He charted the origins of capitalism by identifying a particular form of decentralisation within Protestantism, especially Calvinism, which replaced earlier and more institutionalised modes of religious production and emission of truth found in Catholicism. The Protestant work ethic introduced a personalisation of moral responsibility, a mode of self-government, and an internalisation of salvation\sidenote{See \cite{epochphilosophy2023} for an interesting video essay that connects these themes to Charles Baudelaire’s theory.}. Faithful dedication to labour became the primary route to Christian worth \parencite[see][]{epochphilosophy2023}, and this orientation generated the disciplined accumulation on which the spirit of capitalism relied. It marks an inversion within the regime of subjectivity itself.

The essence of decentralisation reappears in \citeauthorfull{hayek1945}’s \parencite*[see e.g.][6-7]{hayek1945} thesis that a market economy, unlike a centrally planned system, is able to mobilise the dispersed and partial knowledge of individuals and can therefore achieve a more powerful form of coordination. This insight led some of his followers to describe capitalism as operating like a collective brain. In a metaphorical sense, it is on point that \citeauthorfull{galloway2004} \parencite*[]{galloway2004} asks how control persists after decentralisation. Scattered protocols that regulate information flows on the web show how significations of truth established within subjectivities continue to sustain decentralised regimes.

Accelerationists such as \citeauthorfull{land1992b} \parencite*[]{land1992b} extended \citeauthor{hayek1945}’s formulations and began arguing that capitalism itself is \gls{ai}. \citeauthor{land1992b} mentions that \enquote{knowledge of the future of capitalism can be derived from insights into complex adaptive systems and already from basic convergent wave dynamics} \parencite[]{land1992b}. What is it then, was all this innuendo? Are these merely hints, allusions, or exaggerated metaphors we are dealing with? Frankenstein was not the only imaginary humanity developed about artificial agents, since the figure of a machine capable of scrutinising human knowledge has also signified fascination and hope in many cases. Artificial agents, especially those capable of producing meaning, could have marked a horizon of possibilities. Yet they are increasingly subsumed under the not so subtle intentions of tech giants to steer public opinion. In the best case, these systems risk becoming forces that blur context and creativity in digital environments, and in the worst case, they risk becoming sophisticated mouthpieces.

Taken as a whole, the thesis does not offer a definitive programme (after all the criticism about the \textit{Postscript}). Instead, it proposes a research trajectory that highlights how the technical, institutional, and theoretical dimensions of \gls{genai} must be understood together. My contribution has been to chart the nature of these systems analysed in terms of \glspl{dispositif} of control and to emphasise that as contol's decentralisation advances, as subjectification systems become more pervasive, more sophisticated, more flexible, and more micropolitical through their novel machineries; they also become increasingly difficult to contain, and they introduce new (partial) objects, and flows through and across which (more) lines of flight immanently emerge. As a further research direction, the technical, institutional, and theoretical dimensions of \gls{genai} invite integrated analysis, and the framework here is deliberately open into several directions. Empirical analyses of user interactions with generative systems can investigate if and how divergent practices develop in lived settings. Further technical work can examine how training regimes, fine-tuning methods, and architectural variations reshape the possibilities for diverging, \textit{following} systems, or even practices like counter-sequencing. Theory can further explore how subjectivity develops in hybrid constellations where meaning is co-produced by human and machine, and how critique must adapt to this distributed configuration of agency.


