Michel de Certeau — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Michel de Certeau — On AI. 22 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Aesthetics of the Smooth
Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis of the cultural trajectory toward frictionlessness — a smoothness that conceals the labor and struggle that gave previous work its depth.
AI Alignment
The problem of making a powerful AI system reliably pursue goals that its designers and users actually endorse — the central unsolved problem of contemporary AI.
Bricolage
Making-do with materials at hand: the cook's improvisational meal from refrigerator scraps, the craftsman's assembly from oddments. De Certeau adapted Lévi-Strauss's term for mythical thought into the operational logic of everyday practice.
Democratization of Capability (Senian Reading)
The Orange Pill claim — that AI tools lower the floor of who can build — submitted to Sen's framework, which asks the harder question: does formal access convert into substantive capability expansion?
Everyday Creativity
The creativity of people who were never invited into the conversation about creativity: the cook's improvisational meal, the walker's personal geography, the reader's poached meaning. De Certeau's recovery of ordinary practice as genuine cr…
Habitus
The sedimentation of cultural practice into automatic bodily competence — what the body has learned to do without thinking.
La Perruque
The wig: using the employer's tools, time, and materials for one's own work. De Certeau's paradigm of invisible resistance—not theft, not sabotage, but creative redirection of institutional resources toward personal purposes.
Lieu Propre
A proper place, a place of one's own—the spatial and institutional foundation of strategic action. The corporation's headquarters, the planner's office, the platform company's server farm: territory from which to survey, calculate, govern.
Platform Economics
The analytical framework governing multi-sided markets where value is created by participants and captured by intermediaries — now the defining economic structure of the AI-enabled creation ecosystem.
Poaching (de Certeau)
The reader's creative appropriation of texts: taking what serves, leaving the rest, producing meanings the author never intended. Extended to all consumption—using systems in ways their designers did not foresee.
Resistance Through Use
Not breaking the machine but using it differently. De Certeau's paradigm: the worker practicing la perruque, the reader poaching meanings, the walker taking unauthorized shortcuts—resistance invisible to power because it looks like complia…
Rhetoric of Practice
The practitioner's specific, contextual way of speaking through action—distinct from the system's strategic rhetoric. Selection, refusal, inflection, enunciation: the operations that transform the model's generic output into the builder's p…
Space vs. Place
Space is the abstract, geometric, strategic order—the city as planned. Place is space as practiced, lived, inhabited—the city as walked. De Certeau's distinction locates creativity in the transformation of impersonal space into personal pla…
Strategies vs. Tactics
De Certeau's foundational distinction: strategies are operations by subjects possessing territory—institutions defining space, setting rules—while tactics are operations by subjects who do not own terrain, navigating others' systems thro…
The Grammar of the Prompt
The emerging discipline of framing questions to AI systems in ways that produce useful outputs — structurally different from Newman's grammar of assent, and dangerously easy to mistake for it.
The Judgment Economy
The economic regime that emerges when the cost of execution approaches zero and the premium on deciding what to execute rises correspondingly — the Smithian reading of the Orange Pill moment.
The Orange Pill Moment
The threshold crossing after which the AI-augmented worker cannot return to the previous regime — The Orange Pill's central metaphor for the qualitative, irreversible shift in what a single person can build.
Voice (Elbow's Concept)
The irreducible human signal in writing: the audible presence of a specific consciousness wrestling with material — built through first-order discovery, detectable as the quality that makes prose sound like one particular person.
Claude Code
Anthropic's command-line coding agent — the specific product through which the coordination constraint shattered in the winter of 2025, reaching $2.5B run-rate revenue within months.
Large Language Models
Neural networks trained on internet-scale text that have, since 2020, demonstrated emergent linguistic and reasoning capabilities — in Whitehead's vocabulary, computational systems whose prehensions of the textual corpus vastly exceed any i…
