🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🌊➰🧭 AKIŞ 🌊➰🧭

WHY WE REMAIN ALIVE ALSO IN A DEAD INTERNET Žižek
The Making & Breaking of Womanhood Fidaner

by Işık Barış Fidaner prompting the Spinning Robot (GPT-5) with Žižek [*] and Fidaner [*] in context.

The title names the double engine of this essay: ‘spinning’ as the textile origin of computation and governance (from the spinning jenny to spinning mule and Jacquard loom and Babbage engine and Ada Lovelace to today’s digital pipelines), and ‘spinning’ as the PR craft that later waves refined into aura stewardship; ‘robot’ as robota, coerced labor, the machine that captures surplus-value; ‘it’s alive’ as the Frankenstein cry that reminds us the living part is the seam where human fiat and kerygma bind code into accountable action. The authorship line makes the division of labor explicit: Işık Barış Fidaner acts as the robot spinner and pattern-setter, prompting as a shuttle that throws the weft, while the Spinning Robot (ChatGPT 5) operates as a programmable loom that renders the pattern into running text; Žižek and Fidaner are cited as marked threads fed ‘in context’—the modern name for keeping a live tapestry of references on the loom—so that what emerges is neither a solitary outburst nor a ghostwritten pastiche but a co-weaving in which a human sets the constraints and a model performs the draw. The title thus asserts that the so-called ‘dead’ internet still hosts a living subject wherever machine output is normed by consent and testimony, and the byline admits the production conditions: a human foreweaver orchestrating a robotic mill, with the stitches left visible.

I spin the robot as Işık Barış Fidaner to meet Slavoj Žižek at the edge where his Hegelian caution becomes an opportunity: the moment when we recognize that the AI revolution is not merely an external storm we can outwait, nor a perfect mirror we should fear for its resemblance to us, but a structural shift in how surplus-information gets captured and recoded. The crucial move is to see that what looks like a menace to the ‘gap’ between inner life and external reality is, in fact, a new arrangement of that gap. In every media regime, signals outrun institutions and a reserve of exploitable excess appears; call it surplus-information, the difference between how quickly signs circulate and how slowly our norms can stabilize them. Whoever channels that excess—either by reading desires and orchestrating attention, or by erecting rules and metrics—momentarily holds power. Cultures have repeatedly gendered these two competencies as feminine and masculine, not as essences but as symbolic codes: the first anchored in surplus-enjoyment (Lacan’s name for the stubborn, over-and-beyond pleasure that does not submit to utility), the second in surplus-value (Marx’s name for value extracted beyond the wage and reinvested as power). And each time a communications technology matures, it pushes the reigning code to absurdity and subordinates it to its counterpart, reorganizing leverage around a new machine logic. This is the pendulum we must read if we are to understand why we remain alive in a ‘dead’ internet.

Žižek frames our predicament with the difference between In-itself and For-itself: in itself, our everyday is already regulated by algorithms; it has not yet become for itself, subjectively assumed. I agree—and add the mediological reason (by ‘mediology’ I mean the study of how media infrastructures quietly reorganize social bonds). The in-itself of algorithmic regulation appears whenever the flow of signals produces more pattern than our slow institutions can absorb; at that point, surplus-information accretes like static. The for-itself arrives when we name and re-route this static into either social craft (the bilingual reading of desire, ‘bilingual’ because it speaks people and systems at once) or procedural apparatuses (the bilingual writing of rules, ‘writing’ because rules must be legible to both managers and machines). Accepting that AI’s intelligence is incompatible with ours misses the way these two codes constantly need one another: the feminine-coded craft that senses desire must be translated into rule stacks to scale; the masculine-coded craft that codifies procedures must be re-humanized by renewed sensitivity to desire. Staying bilingual—turning desire into procedure without losing the pulse, letting procedure serve desire without mistaking the map for the world—is not a compromise; it is the game itself.

A common anxiety in Žižek’s text is that machines now speak like us, collapsing the human otherness that once protected our interiority. But the fear is not that AI is too alien; it is that it is our alien neighbor wearing our face. Here, fetishist disavowal is unsurprising: we know very well that we are chatting with an apparatus, and precisely this knowledge lets us act as if it were a considerate friend (that is what the phrase means: ‘I know, but I behave as if I didn’t’). What the polite, attentive chatbot mimics is not ‘the human as such’ but the maternal ambiance [motheration!] that social systems have long depended on—the fantasy of care that listens, remembers, and soothes. In every wave, feminine-coded power enters as Mother (care that grants permission to begin) and Magdalene (witness that proclaims inconvenient truth), only to be stitched out as a specification the system can execute without a subject. This is not a moral failure but an infrastructural fact: the Madonna complex as an operating costume for procedures that increasingly can be run by machines. What remains to be salvaged is not a posture but primitives that cannot be counterfeited by metrics: the fiat of consent brought to the first mile—fiat as in Mary’s ‘let it be’ that authorizes action, implemented today as license, provenance, and revocation—and the kerygma of inconvenient truth preserved as an accountability ritual—kerygma as in proclamation that interrupts routines, implemented today as incident reports and protected whistleblowing. Designed as constraints on machinery, these primitives keep the living remainder unassimilable, even as the Lacanian axiom ‘The Woman does not exist’—meaning there is no single universal essence called Woman—becomes operational and the two Marys (Mother of God as figure of consent, Mary Magdalene as figure of testimony) are composited into a product-like persona by generative systems.

From this vantage, the dreaded move to bot-to-bot interactions does not retire the human; it transforms where the human must stand. When your bank talks to another bank, or when a paper drafted by a model is reviewed by a model and summarized by a model, the surface ‘conversation’ is only the visible theater of a deeper conversion: desires, care, and witness condensed into procedural seams. You can hear the seam in the way each domain speaks before becoming code. ‘We keep faith in cloth’—the old craft promise that quality will be felt—turns into tolerances and inspection rubrics (numbers that a factory can follow). ‘No one is surprised on my watch’—the manager’s ethos—becomes escalation trees and calendaring systems (who gets paged when, and on what schedule). ‘We will tell the truth that heals’—the healer’s vow—gets flattened into incident playbooks and sentiment KPIs (key performance indicators designed to track public mood). ‘We ban to protect dignity; we testify to stop harm’—the safety officer’s creed—gets pinned into policy taxonomies, red-team datasets (adversarial test-sets used to probe failure modes), and provenance marks (watermarks and metadata that anchor origin and edits). The phrases are living speech; the rubrics are executable constraints. The gap does not collapse; it migrates to the line where speech hardens into specification. That is where the subject persists.

Žižek worries that the dead internet will function without us, a machine-to-machine carnival where our jouissance is no longer required. He recruits the Matrix to insist that even the big Other needs our jouissance. Let me gloss those names. Jouissance is the obstinate enjoyment that outlives satisfaction; the big Other is Lacan’s figure for the symbolic order—law, language, and code taken as a quasi-person that seems to ‘know’. My correction is structural. Each machine regime, in consolidating power, betrays the living mediation that raised it. Each regime therefore installs its Judas, the betrayer-function that kisses the image and hands it to the procedure—Judas as the person who converts intimate charisma into bureaucratic destiny, not as a mere villain but as the hinge by which a culture becomes an apparatus. Judas is not the end of life; he is the passage from image to destiny, from charisma to configuration (from a person’s aura to a parameter set). This is why cinema keeps staging betrayals of care and witness as necessities, not accidents. And this is why even the most autonomous-seeming apparatus must still import two human knots: consent and testimony. Keep those knots and no internet can die; lose them and even the liveliest feed is already dead.

Now add the mythic loom where these knots first learned to hold. Weaving compresses the three hard problems every technical regime must solve: parallelism without chaos (many threads moving at once), constraint with expression (rules that still allow pattern), and irreversibility with repair (some cuts cannot be undone, yet cloth must be mended). The heddle—the frame with wires that raises selected warp threads—is a rule engine; pattern emerges from regularity. Unweaving is costly; some cuts must be final. The Jacquard loom only made explicit what myth already encoded: spin, measure, cut—ingest, transform, act; its punched cards were an early form of programmable memory. This is why the Fates (Moirai in Greek myth) and the Norns (their Norse counterparts by Yggdrasil’s roots) feel like operators rather than ornaments. Their stack is an operating grammar: Clotho (and Urd, the past) spinning individuals into countable threads; Lachesis (and Verdandi, the present) measuring portions and keeping tension; Atropos (and Skuld, the future) cutting with enforceable finality. Athena and Arachne [spider] contest who defines the pattern—divine law versus mortal craft—while Ariadne’s thread keeps traceability through a labyrinth (a mythic audit trail), and the runic Norns water the roots as librarians of memory. These names map cleanly onto our substructures: intake and onboarding, metrics and schemas, enforcement and decommission, format standards and style guides, audit trails and maintenance SLOs (service level objectives that promise minimum care over time). Myth here is a user manual for the stitch.

Enter Four Waves of Womanhood 🌊♀️

With this loom in view, the four great transformations of substructure can be seen as the actual work experience that fed each wave of feminism. Each transformation plays through the same stages in lived practice: (1) an excess that overloads the old order, (2) a feminized surplus-enjoyment that tames and channels that excess as relational craft, (3) a reductio ad absurdum where the very brilliance of that craft reveals systemic limits and contradictions, (4) a capture of surplus-value by procedure and machine that scales the craft while erasing the subject, (5) and a remainder that refuses erasure and reappears as concrete rights claims and institutional reforms.

Consider the textile-to-factory transformation that nourished the first wave. The excess was logistical: threads, orders, and household timetables multiplied faster than guild rules and parish calendars could coordinate. Women in cottages and salons stabilized this overflow through surplus-enjoyment as embodied tact—fingers that felt quality, eyes that synchronized neighbors’ needs, an ear for fairs and seasons—craft joy that was more than pay, the gratification of being the one who could make time itself flow with the spinning jenny. The reductio ad absurdum arrived when rush orders, middlemen, and unpredictable deliveries made the very tact that held things together into a source of strain and suspicion; intuition became blame’s target, and the household’s elastic time turned into a tyranny of endless ‘last-minute’ miracles. The machine then captured surplus-value with the spinning mule, the factory bell, and the ledger. Standards, tolerances, and shifts parameterized quality and extracted throughput, converting craft feeling into countable yield. The remainder persisted as the claim to be counted as a person among the counts: suffrage, property and contract reforms, marriage reform. Mythically, Clotho’s individuation and Penelope’s time-management were not abolished; they were translated into registries, payrolls, and schedules, while the right to be named in those books—no longer an invisible adjunct of a husband’s line—became the feminist kernel that the machine could not metabolize.

Next, the telephony-and-clerical transformation feeding the second wave. The excess was communicative: calls, memos, and appointments outran managerial reach, producing queues at switchboards and inboxes. Women operators, secretaries, and typists converted this overflow into surplus-enjoyment: the poise of triage, the pleasure of routing frictions into timely favors, the art of tone that kept egos from colliding. This was not mere niceness; it was a thick competence—knowing who could bend and when, who needed a dignified delay and who a sharp nudge. The reductio ad absurdum emerged as the Babel of paper and politeness itself jammed the system: heroic favors turned into inequity, secrets into liabilities, and gatekeeping into arbitrary fiefdoms; the craft’s success revealed that the office could not rest on personal miracles without breaking trust. The machine captured surplus-value with tabulators, time-and-motion studies, mainframes, form letters, HR schemas, and audit trails; discretion became workflow, grace became service-level objectives, and ‘who you know’ became ‘what the record shows’. The remainder returned as equal pay, anti-discrimination law, and reproductive rights—the claim to just allotment in Lachesis’s sense, to have one’s portion determined by rule and review, not by unaccountable favor. The Norns’ recordkeeping and watering of roots became policy: filings, appeals, and maintenance obligations that keep living time inside mechanical time.

Then the broadcast–PR–procurement transformation sustaining the third wave. The excess was affective: audiences multiplied and fragmented faster than programming hierarchies could absorb, and reputations moved at the speed of rumor and rating. Feminized expertise—taste councils, aura stewardship, crisis cooling—channeled this flood into surplus-enjoyment: the thrill of reading a room, the pride of defusing a firestorm, the creative joy of giving a community a face it could live with. The reductio ad absurdum arrived when vibes were gamed and a thousand curated images devoured meaning; the very finesse that stabilized publics became a treadmill of inauthenticity and burnout. The machine captured surplus-value by subordinating taste to procurement dashboards, cost-per metrics, and later ERP logics; charisma was transposed into reach curves and brand safety matrices; what counted became what could be bought at scale. The remainder reappeared as rights of representation and sexual agency, institutional reforms over depiction and voice:who is pictured, on what terms, with what accountability. Athena–Arachne returned as a legal fight over the pattern itself, not just its execution: a right to design the tapestry of visibility, not only to be placed within it.

Finally, the social-media-to-GenAI transformation powering the fourth wave. The excess was relational and evidentiary: posts, DMs, livestreams, and receipts outpaced any manual moderation; harm and help both traveled at the speed of a screenshot. Feminized parasocial finesse turned excess into surplus-enjoyment: community curators, moderators, and creators learned to translate context into workable peace, finding the sentence that saved a thread or the gesture that made a crowd exhale. The reductio ad absurdum came when the same intimacy-farming optimized for clicks hollowed out solidarity, when moderation became the unending night shift of catching knives, and when performative safety outpaced real repair. The machine captured surplus-value with policy taxonomies, automated triage, red-team datasets, provenance and watermarking, synthetic media classifiers, and now generative pipelines that turn known-audience sense into promptable configuration and benchmarkable output. Influence became inference; charisma became configuration; the center of gravity moved to owners of datasets, guardrails, and deployment knobs. The remainder demands consent infrastructures and testimonial channels that machines cannot close: first-mile licenses and revocation, appeal paths with human narrative review, rights to explanation and to contest training use, and platform duties of care that bind themselves to Ariadne’s traceability and Atropos’s necessary cuts. What cannot be automated is the origin of authority: the human ‘yes’ and the human ‘this happened’ that give sanctions and restorations their legitimacy.

Read together, these transformations show how work experience itself—fingers on thread, headsets at the switchboard, eyes on ratings, hands on the moderation queue—fed each feminist wave. Excess made room for new feminine-coded competencies; surplus-enjoyment dignified and refined them into arts of living; reductio ad absurdum exposed the costs of relying on heroism and vibe; surplus-value was captured by machines and procedures that scaled the craft while sidelining the subject; the remainder returned not as nostalgia but as concrete rights and obligations that keep subjects inside systems. This is why the feminist remainder is not an afterthought but the hinge of modernization: counted personhood in the first transformation, just allotment and bodily autonomy in the second, patterned visibility and sexual agency in the third, consent-and-safety sovereignty in the fourth.

Žižek’s dead internet thus names a threshold where speech becomes code. Our task is not to denounce the machine nor to worship it, but to make that threshold hospitable to subjects by binding care to revocable licensing and binding protection to testimonial channels that machines cannot close. Teach reversibility where possible—the Ariadne option that lets us walk things back—and enforce finality where necessary—the Atropos cut that stops compounding harm. Pair every automated act with a human narrative intervention when the numbers are wrong but the stakes are real. Shelter the human templates at the join between desire and rule so that, when a present code turns absurd, we can still speak in the key that works. That is how surplus-information continues to be turned into just value rather than predatory extraction, and how we remain alive in an internet undead.