October 27, 2025, 7pm
Brooklyn NY 11205
USA
Join us on Monday, October 27, 2025 for “World Model Collapse and the Limits of AI Extractivism,” a conversation between Matteo Pasquinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Brian Kuan Wood.
US cultural hegemony reaches the historical limits of its sphere of influence with the imposition of Global English as lingua franca, whose peak and downfall, at the same time, is represented today by Large Language Models (LLMs) and their powerful capacity for translation and text generation in all idioms. A mirror of the global economy in stagnation, however, LLMs are struggling to generate meaningful outputs due to the phenomenon of ‘model collapse,’ an inflation and degradation of the training data on which they are based—and a scarcity of the living labor that is required constantly to make them look 'intelligent' and more valuable. The collapse of LLMs can be taken as a metaphor of the crisis of knowledge extractivism and the global trade system as a whole. Economies in decline indeed generate monsters, such as military expansions, authoritarian personalities, and toxic culture. But through the fissures of this collapsing system, alternative social movements glimmer.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.
