PERSON

Paul Gilroy

The British cultural theorist whose concept of the Black Atlantic—culture defined by routes, not roots, by movement and transformation rather than origin—provides the most precise available instrument for asking whose intelligence AI amplifies, on whose terms, and at whose cost.

Paul Gilroy is the thinker who asks who controls the channel. His 1993 masterwork The Black Atlantic traced how cultural forms moved across the Atlantic not as fixed objects but as living practices continuously transformed by the conditions of their circulation—and how the technologies of that circulation, from the slave ship to the phonograph to the radio, simultaneously transmitted and extracted, liberated and exploited, depending on who controlled the amplifier. His central analytical move—the insistence on routes over roots, on the movement rather than the origin as the defining feature of culture—translates directly into the age of AI: a large language model is not a neutral amplifier but a channel whose traffic patterns are shaped by the power structures that determined what was recorded, what was preserved, what was digitized, and what was made available for computational processing. The silence in the training data is structured silence—the same silence that the BBC’s adoption of Received Pronunciation

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