Blog — Dr. Victor Shammas

The Tamagotchification of AI

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Browsing the Internet in the age of AI can be frustrating. Many websites now have a distinctly vibe-coded, AI-slopified feel, from the out-of-place dark-mode palette to the all-caps labels to excessive AI verbiage like “load-bearing spines” and “evidence ledgers,” interspersed with qualifiers like “quietly” and “genuinely.”

AI content often feels hollow and distant, too mechanical, too synthetically written. Its strangeness is only deepened by the fact that one often does not experience this same hollowness with “one’s own” AI outputs. I read “my” Claude daily and receive meaningful, informative, or enlightening responses—certainly, tailored to my experience of reality, but pushing beyond it in new and interesting ways. Used as high-powered search engines, frontier models have become surprisingly useful to think and learn with, an improvement on the hallucination-prone machines of two or three years ago.

AI and Authenticity

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In recent months we’ve seen a wider debate over the use of AI in both academic research and among students pursuing higher education. But much anti-AI positioning seems to rely on its weakest argument. Yes, there are legitimate questions about veracity — about truthfulness, accuracy, and hallucinations — and about deskilling, particularly with regard to students. But the least convincing claim on the anti-AI side is that of authenticity, because authenticity is such a deeply problematic category. We’re never simply authentic; Adorno taught us that in the 1960s in The Jargon of Authenticity. We’re always-already embedded in a social order, which means we benefit from or are disadvantaged by the social relations that we find ourselves caught up in. We’re enmeshed in a social fabric that punishes or rewards us, conferring unfair advantages or disadvantages, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out over decades of research. There is, therefore, no natural, spontaneous self with which we can authentically be in communication. We’re augmented or disadvantaged by the mere fact of being social beings or products of societies.

The Politics of Sociological “Liquidation”

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A recent Wall Street Journal piece asks whether it is time to liquidate sociology—not a question one is used to hearing about academic disciplines, it must be said, in liberal-democratic societies. A disgruntled ex-professor of Notre Dame, Christian Smith, is quoted in the piece as asking: “Over time, I’ve thought to myself, ‘What if we just liquidate the discipline?’” (Smith wrote a public break-up letter with academe, where his chief complaint seems to have been that his employer was insufficiently Catholic.) “Liquidation” might be the language of insolvency and bankruptcy, just barely defensible. But it is also a term associated with harsh authoritarianism, an instrument for imposing social and ideological control. It is surely ironic that the right, which rails against the dangers of so-called cancel culture, wants to delete an entire field because it doesn’t conform to the right’s own viewpoints. The plea for, or question of, “liquidating” sociology is inherently authoritarian. But we should also ask whether such faux-innocent probing about liquidating sociology might not in turn morph into a plea for liquidating sociologists—whether by funding cuts, hiring freezes, or lay-offs.

Elon Musk for the Not-So-Perplexed

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (HarperCollins, 2026).

Elon Musk is one of the most powerful people alive. SpaceX’s IPO in June made him history’s first trillionaire, and his companies increasingly control essential infrastructure both on and off Earth, from launch vehicles to satellites, EV production, AI compute, and a still-influential social media platform. His $44 billion purchase of Twitter helped Trump win the 2024 presidential election—Bloomberg found Musk to be the platform’s single most important spreader of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories—and his $288 million in Republican campaign donations allowed him to aim, at least for a time, the DOGE wrecking ball at the U.S. government’s administrative, assistive, and redistributive wing. Millions are projected to die as a result of USAID cuts, according to a Lancet study. Musk’s power, both corporate and political, is growing, and he is unafraid to use it to further his far-right goals.

One Giant Leap for Oligarchy

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The world is becoming ever more oligarchic. As private capital increasingly wields control over essential infrastructure, Silicon Valley’s expanding political influence is forging a new hybrid class of corporate/state rulers.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Elon Musk. This week he became the world’s first trillionaire thanks to SpaceX’s IPO, with the company trading at a valuation of nearly $1.8 trillion after investors around the world suffered serious investment “FOMO.” Musk is likely to continue to use his growing political-economic power to keep advancing a global far-right agenda.

AI and the Means of Intellectual Production

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Silicon Valley’s technologists have vacuumed up humanity’s near-total cultural output to build platforms with tremendous potential economic and ideological power. Generative AI has become the subject of enormous hype and staggering, trillion-dollar investments. So what can we learn about AI by reading it through the lens of a nineteenth-century thinker like Karl Marx?

What’s striking about AI, from a Marx-inflected perspective, is how little is fundamentally new about this technology in political-economic terms. In the Grundrisse, Marx describes how capitalism generates ever more advanced machines and scientific and technical knowledge, which become increasingly important factors in the production of wealth. In Capital, Marx shows that machines, from the capitalist’s standpoint, serve as a means of cheapening commodities and intensifying the working day, raising the level of surplus-value extracted from workers.

Have Denmark’s Right-Leaning Social Democrats Finally Learned Their Lesson?

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Progressives, especially in the U.S., are prone to bouts of romanticism about the Nordic countries. But things aren’t quite so rosy in reality—especially for immigrants and minorities. Denmark in particular has taken a hard turn to the right on immigration—so much so that Britain’s increasingly anti-immigration Labour Party, under pressure from Farage’s rising Reform UK, has said it is looking to emulate Denmark’s hardline asylum stance.

Since 2022, Denmark’s Social Democratic prime minister Mette Frederiksen has led an increasingly right-leaning coalition government. Initially head of a minority Social Democratic government, Frederiksen has, to be sure, inherited a slew of immigrant-hostile policies. In 2016, Denmark passed a controversial “jewelry law” legalizing the confiscation of asylum seekers’ personal possessions, including cash and jewelry above a certain value, to offset public spending. While the law has only rarely come into use, raising little revenue over the past decade, its real significance is its messaging effect, signaling Denmark’s shift to a nativist stance. The jewelry law’s racialized underpinnings were disclosed when the country, in 2022, clarified that it aimed to make an exemption for Ukrainian refugees, even as its treatment of Syrian arrivals was hardening—a case of “mismatched treatment” decried by Human Rights Watch, which rightly argued that Denmark should “widen its embrace of Ukrainian refugees to include others as well.”

The Trillion-Dollar Vassal

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, Norway’s $2.1 trillion Oil Fund—the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund—was the subject of a heated public debate over its links to Israel’s war in Gaza. In June, a group of Norwegian academics, the Historians for Palestine, revealed that the fund owned shares worth nearly $30 million in the Israeli company Bet Shemesh Engines, which reportedly maintained engine parts used by Israeli jets conducting airstrikes on Gaza. Beginning in 2023, the fund had increased its investment stake in the Israeli company in tandem with Israel’s mounting attacks on Gaza and rising Palestinian civilian deaths. The academics delivered their findings to the Norwegian Ministry of Finance in June. The Labour government, it seems, did nothing with them.

Dan Wang's "Breakneck": A Lesson in Disavowed Hawkishness

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2025).

Breakneck can be read as the center-right counterpart to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s center-left Abundance. Where Klein and Thompson largely focused on California to make the case for an American “liberalism that builds”—a greener capitalism aiming to deliver higher living standards—Wang pivots to China to make the case for U.S. manufacturing renewal, now from a less progressive, more security-motivated angle.

Picaresque Postmodernism in Dangerous Times

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Despite its critical acclaim, One Battle After Another is a dangerously mistimed movie for the left. Its first thirty minutes read like a MAGA fantasy, or nightmare, about the “antifa” left: In rapid succession, we see violence, bombings, and a deadly bank robbery carried out by a shadowy activist group calling itself the French 75—Thomas Pynchon’s parallel-universe version of the real-world, early-1970s Weathermen. Parts of the French 75’s activism is about breaking migrants out of camps, but other parts seem anarchic and aimless—as if Paul Thomas Anderson set out to provide cinematic validation for Trump’s confabulations about “radical left lunatics.” The collision between real-world MAGA talking points, on the one hand, and the film’s portrayal of violence is disconcerting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s whooping “Viva la revolución” while his band of fellow merry pranksters, led by the berserk Perfidia Beverly Hills, assassinate a security guard. The film’s essential cartoonishness doesn’t keep One Battle from handing the MAGA movement a broad brush to tar the left as amoral worshippers of lawlessness and disorder.

Harris’s 107 Days and the Missing Reckoning: Gaza

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Much of the early media coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign-trail memoir, 107 Days, was essentially unfair. Political commentators and media outlets portrayed her book as divisive, splitting the Democratic camp at a time when unity against Trump 2.0 was the top priority. USA Today reported that 107 Days was filled with “score-settling.” Politico claimed Harris’s book constituted an “ambush of fellow Democrats” because—shockingly!—Harris “used her new memoir to speak her mind”; four days later, the outlet wrote, Harris was desperately trying to “unburn the bridges.” The Hill adopted a similar line, but outsourced the task of giving voice to it to Democratic strategists said to be “frustrated” with Harris over a book intent on “picking fights and causing divisions at the worst possible time for the party.”

The Poverty of Abundance

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025). Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. Avid Reader Press.

One way of thinking about Abundance might be to see it as a blueprint for a Democratic victory in 2028. Structured around five chapters, Klein and Thompson want to teach liberals how to grow, build, govern, invent, and deploy. At the core of their vision is the idea that the state needs to take on a more active role in helping build green energy or basic infrastructure and funding daring new scientific research.

Lemkin's Concept of Genocide

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some years ago, I was conducting research on the history of imprisonment in the Scandinavian countries, which later came to form part of my doctoral dissertation. One strand of this research took me to the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm where I came upon a series of boxes the containing the files of Karl Schlyter, Sweden’s progressive minister of justice in the mid-1930s. Schlyter had been something of a firebrand social democrat. His professional pedigree was impeccable, but unlike most bourgeois jurists, he had used his legal capital in service of a progressive reform of law and punishment—as seen in his advocacy for “emptying the prisons,” a radical stance for a highly placed former civil servant, judge, and then Minister of Justice.

Ringo's "Peace and Love" and the Problem of the Empty Signifier

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For his 85th birthday, former Beatle drummer Ringo Starr expressed just one wish in a video message to his followers: that everyone join together “at noon, wherever you are, all over the world” in a display of “peace and love”—his signature mantra, always accompanied by a V-shaped peace sign gesture.

Ringo’s pious wish continues to endear him to his millions of fans and followers. As one of the most beloved members of The Beatles—due in part for his apparent, perhaps deceptive, simplicity—Ringo’s seemingly naïve insistence on the continued importance of peace and love, in an age of cynicism and violence, feels oddly refreshing.

Review: Not Enough Fight

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2025). Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. William Morrow.

In Fight, veteran political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes guide us through one of the most momentous electoral campaigns in recent memory, offering a post-operative assessment of Kamala Harris’s whirlwind 107-day effort—launched in the wake of Biden’s less-than-stellar debate performance in late June 2024—and Trump’s third-iteration campaign machine that ultimately secured him a second term. Figuring out what went wrong with Harris’s campaign, and why Trump was successful after crashing so decisively in 2020, should be of essential interest to anyone to the left of fascism.

The Dangers of TACO

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At first glance, TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out,” seemed like a smart, playful acronym when it first began making the rounds on social media earlier this year. In the wake of Trump’s apparent vacillation over global tariffs, TACO named a feature of Trump 2.0’s first few months: While “reciprocal” tariffs were announced on April 2nd to much fanfare, they were shortly thereafter paused for a number of countries, suggestive of a Trump White House once again in disarray despite the post-2024 election propaganda about a more professional and polished second-term Trump. Trump 2.0 was still, it seemed, characterized by brash pronouncements one moment, followed by the inevitable climb-down the next, as markets were roiled by MAGA shock therapy. In a piece published weeks before the Iran strikes, the FT’s Gideon Rachman has also drawn attention to a study showing that Trump has threatened dozens of adversaries with the use of force, but “only” deployed force a handful of times. Hence, TACO: Trump always backs down, chickens out, doesn’t have the guts to stay the course.

Norway's Right is Obsessed With Immigration and Crime

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s election season in Norway. On September 8, voters will likely choose between a red-green coalition—including the Labour Party, Socialist Left Party, Red Party, Green Party, and Centre Party—or a right-wing bloc, potentially led by the ethnonationalist-neoliberal Progress Party, currently polling second behind Labour, and joined by the Conservative Party, Christian Democratic Party, and Liberal Party.

With less than two weeks to go, some polling indicates the red-green bloc may secure a majority in the Storting. But it remains a tight race. August polling averages, for instance, show the red-green coalition with 85 mandates, a narrow majority, against the right-wing bloc’s 84 mandates.

Shock and Subordination: The First 100 Days of Trump 2.0

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the MAGA perspective, Trump has spent the first 100 days of his second term well. Clearly intent on making better use of his time than the last time around, Trump has embarked on what I have called a blitzkrieg presidency: a frenetic politics of shock-and-awe intent on “flooding the zone.” Policies range from from the bizarre, such as ordering the federal government to stop buying paper straws, to the world-impacting, like the infamous April 2nd tariffs. As the Washington Post writes, “No president in modern times has moved more swiftly than Trump to remake so many parts of government, as well as some outside institutions.” In so doing, the 47th president seems to have hoped to disorient and overwhelm any opposition to his administration’s far-reaching program of institutional, economic, and cultural transformation.

Trump’s Nordic Encounter

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The United States, though fiercely militaristic across much of the globe, has been a friend and protector to the Nordic countries. Unlike Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, and other peoples around the world who have become acquainted with the uglier realities of American empire, the Nordics have done well by the transatlantic relationship.

Freed from hot conflicts and dangerous geopolitical entanglements, the Nordics have been left alone to develop their natural resources and industrial base, from Denmark’s Novo Nordisk to Norway’s highly profitable oil sector, netting it the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and Sweden’s globally-oriented companies like IKEA and Spotify.

Between MAGA and a Hard Place

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (2020). War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right. Penguin Books.

Daniel A. Bell (2023). The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University. Princeton University Press.

Published half a decade ago now, War for Eternity examines the rise of the new right, including the alt-right or “populist nationalist” movement, via key figures like Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin, and a smattering of other far-right characters from across the globe. Sadly, the book remains even more relevant now, five years later, under Trump 2.0.