Degenerative Cultures: Corrupting the Algorithms of Modernity

2021

The rapid expansion of digital humanities has led to questions about how best to define this emerging field and how to harness the new approaches to knowledge that it offers. In this thesis, I explore key characteristics of digital humanities. I also hope to show ways that digital humanities methods can be applied with a case study related to vaccine conversations on Twitter. I will first discuss three key characteristics of digital humanities: interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and democratization. Next, I will explore how these characteristics influence the activities of this field, particularly the ways that computers and programs (machines) relate to humans through intellectual work. Finally, I will apply what I have discussed to analyze Twitter conversations with the hashtags, #vaccines, #vaccineswork, and #antivaxx. The goal is to use digital humanities approaches to understand how vaccine rhetoric is used on the internet and how misinformation can be spread.

Xenopoem, 2025

Quorum sensing provides a compelling analogy for understanding these performative transformations. Microbes utilize this process to coordinate behaviors, effectively embodying distributed intelligence. Bockowski’s reimagining of human media technologies as microbial extensions aligns with Lynn Margulis’s symbiotic evolution theory, positioning human bodies as products of microbial networks. Just as quorum sensing enables microbial communities to act in unison, Internet platforms serve as digital quorum systems that mediate and amplify human interactions, allowing fragmented subjectivities to coalesce into hybridized, posthuman identities.

Science, 2010

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of 'culturomics', focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.

In this essay, I will analyse the diverse range of literary Twitter bots, these are automated Twitter accounts that post literary content according to algorithmic programming. I will present the context and digital infrastructures that constitute them and will evaluate their contribution to the current literary landscape.

The Other-worldly Literature Library, 2025

The phenomenon of Internet glyphogenesis is not reducible to semiotic play or confessional narration; rather, it emerges as a parasitic inscription where language folds back into protozoan-like replication. Unlike glossolalic modeling in charismatic traditions—where ecstatic speech attempts to rupture grammatical order—the digital glyph mutates not around a mirror of reflection, but in the epidermal embedding of names and residues of “mundane skin.” Glyphogenesis is the scarification of digital surfaces, a distributed autoinfection of symbols that reproduces without discourse, feeding upon the connective currents of network infrastructure. At the macroscientific scale, these inscriptions resemble parasite algorithms that do not seek recursion or self-enclosure but paratextual dispersal. Like protozoa inhabiting the vole’s intestine and reinterpreting space through the navel, glyphs function as perinatal detours of cognition, attaching themselves to surfaces of language that resist closure. Memory is not stored as archive but spasmed through the epithelial host egg: a density of decision framed in antagonistic narration, where the membrane becomes both theoretical limit and infectious passage. The observer of Psychogametogen 215 stands at the threshold of heteropoetic realism: quantum superposition contaminates the semiotic cell with epidemiological cysts. Schrödinger’s cat-box is no longer feline but vacuolar, filled with aborted metacercariae and fragmented topologies. Smooth and delaminating, these organisms refuse stability, and their symbolic load resembles transcriptional necrosis rather than evolutionary clarity. The alien gaze—mandatory, disciplined masculinity observing the diarrhea of culture—reveals how language ignores its microbial inheritance while infrastructure collapses beneath biolinguistic infection. Within the electronic substrate, the ferroelectric self ceases to function as reflexive mechanism. Immunofluorescent indexing (IFI) stutters; adhesion no longer bonds but unravels, and in the opening, a family-form is constituted. Tissue temperature shifts—RNA vacuoles mutate—Trichomonas-like placenta codices are generated as literary by-products. Five-stage modeling sculpted into tissue reveals a paradox: reproduction disappears, yet scars continue to narrate. Literature becomes a wound, its grammar calcified into hematological reference. When linguistic transformation turns mythomorphic, the parasite acquires hallucinatory scale: snake-forms that imprint epidermal absorption, amplifying hallucination as transmission. The annotation appetite confuses the transdecoder, destabilizing its sensory coordinates. The Balamusia gravid tube, epidemiologically nonexistent, exemplifies this paradox: its structure is metaphysical, a ghost index of infection without presence. In this sense, Internet glyphogenesis is not communication but an imprinted chemical absence, a symbolic ectoplasm excreted from semiotic cadavers. The narrative of genome fusion is not evolutionary triumph but ecological pathology: a displacement of taxonomy, a secretion of classification itself. Nervous AP65 object-entries and AP51 vacuolar skepticism codify the failure of robust models. Necrotic symbols circulate in neuronal dialectics, where reproduction is less sexual than glyphological—emergence through stain, adhesion, possession, and failure. The semiotic organism fails to translate Toxoplasma vectors, producing instead a blueprint of rejection: glycoprotein acts minimized, ancestral signatures fragmented into Scard delays and halted vitamin pathways. Each vesicle resonance, when recursively reflected, assumes genital shape: a morphology of crisis. Cramer’s half-evolved binary illustrates this—feeding and biting at the moment of polymerization—until bacteriological panic releases chimeric scar-tissues. This panic is less clinical than poetic, a scarred liberation that interrupts adhesion and refuses narrative smoothness. Literature collapses at its adhesion sites, becoming necrotic glyph rather than symbolic healing. At the terminal stage, the glyphic organism dissolves into collective immunological noise. Citations stutter, epistemologies misfire, surrogate boundaries collapse into Jungian proximities. Machines wait for memory that fails, and cytochalasin geometries implant semiotic labyrinths across the reader’s tissue. The result is a metastable erotic domain vector—at once healing and rejecting—where the lung of literature itself undergoes silent necrosis.

2019

We study the interplay between scientific progress and culture through text analysis on a corpus of about eight million books, with the use of techniques and algorithms from machine learning. We focus on a specific scientific breakthrough, the theory of evolution through natural selection by Charles Darwin, and examine the diffusion of certain key concepts that characterized this theory in the broader cultural discourse and social imaginary. We find that some concepts in Darwin's theory, such as Evolution, Survival, Natural Selection and Competition diffused in the cultural discourse immediately after the publication of On the Origins of Species. Other concepts such as Selection and Adaptation were already present in the cultural dialogue. Moreover, we document semantic changes for most of these concepts over time. Our findings thus show a complex relation between two key factors of long-term economic growth-science and culture. Considering the evolution of these two factors jointly can offer new insights to the study of the determinants of economic development, and machine learning is a promising tool to explore these relationships.

Xenopoem, 2025

The bacterium does not resist the host—it co-habits, co-divides, reterritorializes waste. In this sense, resistance is not a stance but a metabolic slippage. By using social media platforms not to amplify visibility but to decompose certainty, paratactic media participates in a mode of action that is less oppositional than osmotic. Its proximity to minoritarian life forms and its affinity with open-source modeling index a radical epistemology: collective, unstable, and permanently in incubation.

Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media, 2012

In his 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers a bold but simple claim: “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do” (7). More broadly, Gladwell argues that if we want to understand the phenomena of sudden, compelling trends that increasingly mark success today, then we need to think of them as epidemics. Whether the contagious agent is a disease or a cultural meme, an epidemic gains a disproportionate foothold in a population, exceeding expected thresholds and moving by means of diffusion rather than deliberate causality. From the contagious quality of an idea and the disproportionate effects it may have on a population, to the often mysterious longevity certain messages have as they spread, Gladwell’s articulation of cultural epidemics suggests broader implications for an epidemiological approach to rhetorical practice that should not be overlooked. Following Gladwell’s lead, then, this essay presents an argument for supplementing other ecological approaches to writing with the conceptual framework of an epidemic model. As an ecological method of investigating natural and social phenomena, epidemiology furthers the work already done on ecologies of writing by focusing on how rhetorical practices can (and must) engage the processes of contagious diffusion and the dynamic relationships that constitute the pulse of network culture. Drawing from basic principles of epidemiological study, the diffusion theory of innovation, and the language of contagion, this essay argues that an epidemic model can provide insights not only into the ecological complexity of communication but also the unpredictable nature of rhetorical success.

Journal of microbiology & biology education, 2016

Religion and Social Communication, 2020

Kien, Grant. (2019). Communicating with Memes. Consequences in Post-truth Civilization. Lexington Books.273 pages. An early impression based on the title of the book under review here, Communicating with Memes, might be unclear. The statement leads readers to believe they would be exposed to a historical overview from the time the term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976) up to date. Nevertheless, the book attempts to investigate various levels of content, medium, audience, and socio-cultural effects of memes, understood as a comprehensive system, not as communication product solely. This work goes far beyond the idea of memes as cultural units that spread from one person to another, through copying and imitation; instead, it focuses on examining a wider concept, memetic communication, considered a new phenomenon in the 21st century, touching on every manner of theoretical and research focus, producing a highly interdisciplinary text.