CONCEPT
Short-Circuiting of Long Circuits
Stiegler's diagnosis of the specific damage done when technical systems produce the output of cognitive processes without requiring the long circuits of understanding, practice, and individuation through which the output used to be built.
A long circuit is the extended temporal process through which knowledge is built — years of reading, decades of practice, sustained engagement with difficulty through which savoir-faire accumulates. A short circuit is the direct production of the output the long circuit was supposed to produce, without going through the intervening process. Stiegler argued that the cultural industries of the twentieth century began short-circuiting long circuits of attention and desire — delivering pre-formed cultural products that replaced the longer processes of individual and collective meaning-making. AI extends short-circuiting into the long circuits of cognition itself: the production of philosophical prose, working code, competent analysis without the process through which such outputs used to be built.
