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<p>This article examines resistance to artificial intelligence not only as political opposition but as an aesthetic and ethical practice of refusal. As generative AI and algorithmic infrastructures increasingly mediate work, perception, and decision-making, they produce what I term the <i>clean interface</i>: a frictionless design regime that obscures human labor, power relations, and material costs sustaining digital systems. Within this environment, human actors are gradually displaced from creators of meaning to validators of machine-generated outputs—a process leading to emptification of agency.</p><p>Drawing on Florian Klinger [<CitationRef CitationID="CR17">17</CitationRef>], I develop and deepen a distinction between&#xa0;Historical Action—what the world should be, a deterministic mode of world-making oriented toward optimization and control—and&#xa0;Aesthetic Action—<i>what the world could be</i>, a frictional praxis that sustains relational and open-ended meaning-making. Through an analysis of the anime <i>86 EIGHTY-SIX</i>, I explore how AI-driven interfaces maintain legitimacy by projecting violence onto technological “monsters” while obscuring the precarious human labor that maintains digital smoothness. I term this stabilizing condition the Delusional Dilemma: a situation in which confidence increases precisely as ethical contact with reality diminishes. The article concludes by proposing friction, opacity, and care as design strategies for resisting the epistemic closure of AI systems and reclaiming human meaning-making in the postdigital age.</p>

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The delusional dilemma: AI, the clean interface, and the politics of refusal

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月1日

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  • Simon Lindblom

摘要

This article examines resistance to artificial intelligence not only as political opposition but as an aesthetic and ethical practice of refusal. As generative AI and algorithmic infrastructures increasingly mediate work, perception, and decision-making, they produce what I term the clean interface: a frictionless design regime that obscures human labor, power relations, and material costs sustaining digital systems. Within this environment, human actors are gradually displaced from creators of meaning to validators of machine-generated outputs—a process leading to emptification of agency.

Drawing on Florian Klinger [17], I develop and deepen a distinction between Historical Action—what the world should be, a deterministic mode of world-making oriented toward optimization and control—and Aesthetic Action—what the world could be, a frictional praxis that sustains relational and open-ended meaning-making. Through an analysis of the anime 86 EIGHTY-SIX, I explore how AI-driven interfaces maintain legitimacy by projecting violence onto technological “monsters” while obscuring the precarious human labor that maintains digital smoothness. I term this stabilizing condition the Delusional Dilemma: a situation in which confidence increases precisely as ethical contact with reality diminishes. The article concludes by proposing friction, opacity, and care as design strategies for resisting the epistemic closure of AI systems and reclaiming human meaning-making in the postdigital age.