CONCEPT
The Interpretation That Remains
The Geertzian closing position: thick description of the AI transition is just beginning, must be produced in the plural by many observers in many contexts, and will constitute — over time — the consultable record of what this moment meant to the people who lived through it.
The final interpretive commitment of this volume is a refusal of finality. The AI transition cannot be captured in a single reading, however thick, because the transition exceeds any single interpretive frame and because the phenomenon is still unfolding, still generating new meanings, still reconfiguring the webs of significance in which interpreters themselves are suspended. The thick description of the AI transition remains to be made — not in the singular but in the plural. Many descriptions, produced in many contexts, by many observers, attending to many dimensions of a transformation that requires the consultable record to be written collectively and continuously.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Geertz was consistent about the limits of interpretive knowledge. Interpretations are partial. They are contestable. Another observer, attending to different details, operating within a different web of assumptions, might produce a different and equally