Originating from a profound concern regarding the abusive deployment of AI platforms within academia—and, in particular, the pedagogical destabilization engendered by the proliferation of academic fraud—this text offers a critical exploration of the contexts of meaning within the current stage of global digitalization and its attendant psychic economy. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) signifies the expropriation of both language and autonomous thought, and, consequently, of human dignity itself, while simultaneously rendering invisible the processes that have transformed universities into corporate entities and knowledge into a commodity. The institutionalization of “dataism” constitutes a symptomatic manifestation—simultaneously conspicuous and concealed—of the morbid rationalism characteristic of a novel form of totalitarianism, distinctly different from those of the twentieth century, aimed at eradicating all exteriority through propaganda and the voluntary servitude of digital-platform users, reduced to mere objects within the extractive frontiers of human mining, serving the interests of the technolords. To guide the analysis, I draw upon Günther Anders’s concept of “Promethean shame” and seek to interpret the meaning of human exceptionalism through the lens of André Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of technicity, projecting these ideas into a near future in which the present state of symbolic misery may be consummated irreversibly through the creation of “enhanced” humans—that is, the terminal stage in the annihilation of the human within Humanity. Finally, I propose potential foundations for an ethics of resistance to digital carcinogenesis and to the “assault of the bots,” informed by the metaskills identified by Marty Neumeier and long cultivated within the discipline of Anthropology.

This text results from the invitation of my colleague Manuel João Ramos, whom I thank, to participate in the meeting "AI-pocalypse Now? How AI is Turning Academia Upside Down" which took place in the Auditório JJ Laginha at ISCTE-IUL on May 28, 2025.

Artificial Intelligence (AI),Dataism,Gunther Anders,Large Language Models (LLMs),Military Industrial Mediatic Academic Complex (MIMAC),Professional Managerial Class (PMC),Ectogenesis.