Adam Mickiewicz, Konrad Wallenrod: An Historical Poem, trans. Maude Ashurst Biggs (Trübner & Co., 1882), Section IV, “The Festival.”
@kitsumute, “It just struck me that a lot of US social life revolves around communities, which must be linked to immigration waves in the nation’s origin, meanwhile in Poland we naturally say milieus/circles, which stems from nation’s identity forming in conspiracy under foreign occupation,” X, July 5, 2025 →.
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich Lectures (Vintage Books, 1993), EPUB.
Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) poses the problem of the representing intellectual: not that she should abstain from representation, but that without having traced the community’s own itinerary, she risks filling that gap with her own position. As Spivak writes, “The intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation.” The problem is prior: The subject’s voice has not been sufficiently attended to. Reprinted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (Columbia University Press, 2010).
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Free Press, 1952).
On the relationship between the two poets, see J. Krzyżanowski, “Mickiewicz and Pushkin,” Slavonic and East European Review 6, no. 18 (March 1928). Krzyżanowski notes that Pushkin’s admiration was substantial enough that he intervened personally with the Russian Intelligence Service to secure Mickiewicz’s permit to leave the empire. A memorandum in Pushkin’s hand was later found among the secret police papers (Krzyżanowski, “Mickiewicz and Pushkin,” 639).
Mickiewicz later regretted publishing Konrad Wallenrod, and before his death expressed frustration at his financial inability to buy back and burn every copy, dismissing it as a mere “political pamphlet.” (He felt like this about his other works too. Relatable.) The regret was twofold: moral (the poem’s glorification of deception sat uneasily with his deepening Catholicism) and political (the poem was incredibly influential and helped inspire the Polish 1830 November Uprising against Russian rule, which was brutally crushed, resulting in mass executions and deportations to Siberia).
Quoted in Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (Vintage Books, 1981), 57–58.
Miłosz, Captive Mind, 60.
Miłosz, Captive Mind, 80.
Miłosz knew this too. In 1950, he wrote a poem addressed to dictators and tyrants: “Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. / You can kill one, but another is born. / The words are written down, the deed, the date / And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.” To have one’s evil truly named, remembered, and written down is a worse fate than execution, since it is a death that even dying cannot undo. This poem is available on the Poetry Foundation website →.
John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996 →; Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993); Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (1994; Basic Books, 1999).
See, for example, Jodi Dean, “Why the Net is Not a Public Sphere,” Constellations 10, no. 1 (March 2003); Geert Lovink, Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz, 2022); Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton, 2010); and Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (Indigo Press, 2019).
One exploration of potential covert tactics can be found in the chapter “The Dark Forest Theory of Information” in Bogna Konior, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025), esp. 31–38. To summarize: If some humans are already aware that they are generating data for artificial intelligence, their messages may begin to appear incoherent, contradictory, or deliberately opaque. They might engage in controversial, socially unacceptable, or morally ambiguous behavior, as a tactic calibrated toward machine interpretation rather than human understanding. In this sense, communication drifts away from sincerity or legibility and toward strategic distortion, as users anticipate a near-future digital environment in which the distinction between human and bot is no longer stable, and in which visibility, consistency, and coherence may become liabilities rather than virtues.
