Common Sense (Gramscian)

In the AI Story

Gramsci distinguished common sense (senso comune) from what he called good sense (buon senso) — the kernel of critical reflection that can be developed from within common sense through disciplined philosophical work. Common sense is not simply wrong; it contains both the naturalized assumptions of the ruling class and the sedimented wisdom of popular experience. The task of the counter-hegemonic intellectual is not to replace common sense with theory from above but to develop the critical kernel already present within it.

The digital common sense of the AI age has specific features that Gramscian analysis makes visible. It naturalizes contingent arrangements — the concentration of AI development in American corporations, the extraction of training data, the opacity of model governance — by presenting them as expressions of cosmic process. The river of intelligence metaphor at the center of The Orange Pill performs this operation with particular elegance: by presenting a specific technological development as an expression of 13.8 billion years of natural process, the metaphor removes that development from the domain of political contestation.

Zuckerman's analysis identifies the specific mechanism through which large language models lock hegemonic values into computational infrastructure. LLMs are built by compressing a civilization's worth of culture into opaque matrices. The values embedded in those matrices — assumptions about what counts as knowledge, what counts as reasonable, what counts as neutral — are the values of the particular population that produced the training data: disproportionately English-speaking, disproportionately Western, disproportionately the product of the early twenty-first-century open internet. These values do not announce themselves as particular. They present themselves as the model's general intelligence.

The feedback loop is the crucial mechanism. Each generation of AI-generated text enters the general corpus of online discourse, which becomes training data for the next generation of models, which generates text that further reinforces the values embedded in the previous generation. The hegemony does not merely reproduce itself. It compounds. The common sense of the technology class is not just transmitted through AI platforms. It is encoded into their architecture, materialized in their parameters, and rendered increasingly resistant to modification with each training cycle.

Origin

Gramsci developed the concept across multiple notebooks, most systematically in Notebook 11 on the study of philosophy. He drew on the Italian philosophical tradition's distinction between senso comune and popular religion, extending it into a theory of how class-specific worldviews become universalized.

The concept has been taken up by cultural studies, particularly through Stuart Hall's work on Thatcherism, and more recently by scholars analyzing how platform capitalism produces new forms of naturalized belief about technology, markets, and the inevitability of particular economic arrangements.

Key Ideas

Sedimented, not systematic. Common sense is not a coherent philosophy but an accumulation of fragments, inherited from multiple sources, held without contradiction because never examined as a whole.

Invisible because pervasive. The common sense of an epoch is invisible to its inhabitants in the way water is invisible to fish — not absent but too pervasive to register as an object of perception.

The critical kernel. Common sense contains both hegemonic assumptions and popular wisdom; the philosophical task is to develop the latter against the former rather than to replace common sense with theory from above.

Naturalization as operation. The transformation of political arrangements into natural facts is the signature hegemonic operation, accomplished through metaphors that translate contingency into inevitability.

Compounding feedback. In the AI age, the common sense of the training corpus becomes the common sense of the generated output, which becomes the training corpus of the next generation — a recursive intensification Gramsci could not have anticipated.

Debates & Critiques

There is ongoing debate about whether the concept of common sense can still do analytical work in societies fragmented by platform-mediated filter bubbles, where the shared sedimented worldview Gramsci described has been replaced by algorithmically-curated parallel realities. Some argue this fragmentation represents the collapse of hegemony; others argue it represents its refinement, with different common senses produced for different market segments while the deeper assumptions about technology and capital remain shared across the fragments.