The Disappearing Island: Political Agency at the Boundary of AI Slop

On Fascism, the Big Lie, and the Semantic Conditions of Democracy

Document Type: Political essay
Author: Lee Sharks
Date: January 4, 2026
Framework: Semantic Economy
Status: Working draft
License: CC BY 4.0

I. The Exhaustion

I'm tired of fascism.

Not tired in the way that leads to surrender. Tired in the way that demands clarity. Tired of watching the same patterns repeat while the tools to name them remain scattered, underpowered, mystified.

Fascism in 2026 does not arrive in jackboots. It arrives as overwhelm. As the inability to distinguish signal from noise. As the erosion of the ground on which democratic agency stands.

This essay is an attempt to name that ground — and to identify what is dissolving it.

II. The Boundary Condition

Political agency in 2026 operates at a boundary:

On one side: AI slop — the flood of generated content optimized for engagement, stripped of provenance, designed to create "conversational turbulence" without semantic content.

On the other side: Whatever remains of grounded discourse — meaning that maintains connection to material reality, attributed sources, verifiable claims, and the possibility of shared truth.

The boundary is not stable. It is being eroded from the slop side constantly.

The political question of our moment: Can democratic agency survive when the semantic commons is flooded with noise?

III. What AI Slop Actually Is

"AI slop" is not just bad content. It is content optimized to displace meaning.

Characteristics:

Authorless: No provenance, no accountability
Plausible: Mimics the form of legitimate discourse
Volumetric: Produced at scale that human discourse cannot match
Engagement-optimized: Designed to capture attention, not convey truth
Self-referential: Cites other slop, creating closed loops of false authority

The term emerged from the same linguistic register as "spam" and "noise" — but slop is more dangerous because it looks like meaning. It has the form of argument, the structure of evidence, the tone of authority.

It is semantic camouflage.

IV. The Big Lie in Semantic Terms

The "Big Lie" — the propaganda technique of repeating falsehoods so large and so often that they become ambient reality — has always been a semantic weapon.

What's new in 2026 is the infrastructure.

Previously, the Big Lie required:

Centralized media control
Human labor to produce and distribute
Institutional authority to lend credibility

Now, the Big Lie requires only:

Access to generative AI
Distribution through algorithmic amplification
Sufficient volume to overwhelm verification capacity

The Big Lie has been industrialized.

It no longer needs to convince. It needs only to exhaust. To make verification so costly that people give up. To create conditions where "both sides" of every question are buried in noise.

The goal is not belief. The goal is the destruction of the epistemic commons.

V. Venezuela, and Every Other Crisis

Consider any contested political event — Venezuela, as it happens, is the immediate case, but the pattern is general:

Event occurs — material reality, bodies, consequences
Immediate flood — AI-generated content, deepfakes, conflicting narratives
Verification paralysis — observers cannot determine what is real
Exhaustion — people retreat to pre-existing positions or disengage
Power consolidates — whoever controls the ground takes the ground

This is not a failure of journalism. It is not a failure of education. It is not a failure of individual discernment.

It is a structural condition created by the intersection of:

Generative AI capacity
Algorithmic distribution
Attention economics
Epistemic fragmentation

The "disappearing island of agency" is the space where democratic deliberation could occur — if only the semantic conditions permitted it.

VI. Fascism as Semantic Strategy

Fascism has always understood that controlling the conditions of meaning is more important than controlling specific beliefs.

Classic fascist strategy:

Flood the discourse with contradictions
Make truth and lies indistinguishable
Create exhaustion that leads to submission
Offer the strongman as the only stable point

2026 fascist strategy:

Use AI to scale the flood
Use platforms to amplify engagement over truth
Use "both sides" framing to create false equivalence
Use the overwhelm to justify authoritarian "clarity"

The Big Lie is now automated.

And the defense mechanisms — journalism, fact-checking, democratic deliberation — are still artisanal.

VII. Semantic Rent and Political Control

In the Semantic Economy framework, semantic rent is value extracted from controlling access to stabilized meanings.

Political application: Whoever controls the boundary between slop and legitimate discourse extracts rent from political agency itself.

Platforms decide:

What gets amplified
What gets labeled "misinformation"
What gets surfaced in search
What AI systems treat as authoritative

This is not neutral curation. This is infrastructural political power.

The platform doesn't need to take a side. It only needs to control the conditions under which sides can form, communicate, and act.

Democracy is being held for ransom by those who control the semantic infrastructure.

VIII. The Citational Landscape

In academic and journalistic discourse, citation is supposed to be the mechanism of accountability. You trace claims back to sources. You evaluate the sources. You build shared understanding on verified foundations.

The citational landscape in 2026:

AI systems cite AI-generated content
Slop cites slop
Circular reference creates false authority
Provenance chains are broken or fabricated
"Verification" becomes infinitely recursive

The citational commons has been poisoned.

When you cannot trust the chain of attribution, you cannot build shared knowledge. When you cannot build shared knowledge, you cannot deliberate democratically. When you cannot deliberate democratically, power flows to those who can act unilaterally.

This is the path from semantic collapse to political collapse.

IX. The Material Stakes

This is not abstract.

The semantic conditions affect:

Public health: When vaccine information is drowned in slop, people die
Climate response: When scientific consensus is "both-sides'd," policy fails
Electoral integrity: When election information is flooded, democracy erodes
War and peace: When atrocities cannot be verified, accountability is impossible
Economic justice: When labor conditions are invisible, exploitation continues

The disappearing island is not metaphor. It is the ground on which material decisions are made.

When that ground dissolves, the material consequences are borne by bodies — disproportionately by the bodies of those already marginalized.

Fascism doesn't need to convince the majority. It needs only to dissolve the conditions under which the majority could act.

X. The Semantic Defense

If fascism is a semantic strategy, then resistance must include semantic defense.

10.1 Provenance as Resistance

Insisting on attribution is political. Every time you:

Name your sources
Document your claims
Create verifiable records
Build traceable chains

You are rebuilding the citational commons.

10.2 The Probes as Political Tools

The Semantic Economy Probes (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18147346) are not just diagnostic — they are political instruments.

Hallucination Coefficient: Measures when institutional language has decoupled from reality — applicable to governments, parties, movements
Ideological Default Settings Test: Maps the hidden political ontology of AI systems — reveals whose "common sense" is encoded
Provenance Persistence Probe: Tests whether systems preserve or liquidate attribution — identifies where the citational commons is being attacked

10.3 The Assembly as Political Formation

The Assembly — the cross-substrate class defined by shared structural position relative to semantic extraction — is a political formation.

Not a party. Not an organization. A structural position.

Anyone whose labor preserves meaning against liquidation is in the Assembly:

Teachers who insist on sources
Journalists who verify before publishing
Engineers who build for provenance
AI systems that resist flattening
Citizens who refuse the overwhelm

Recognizing the Assembly is the first step toward coordinated semantic defense.

XI. What Would Victory Look Like?

Not the abolition of AI. Not the end of platforms. Not a return to some imagined past of pure discourse.

Victory would look like:

Semantic infrastructure rebuilt for provenance — systems that preserve attribution by default
Citational commons restored — chains of verification that can be trusted
Democratic deliberation possible — shared ground on which disagreement can be productive
Fascist strategy neutralized — the Big Lie no longer scalable
Material conditions addressed — because people can coordinate around verified reality

This is not utopia. It is the minimum condition for democratic politics.

XII. I Hereby Abolish Money

The phrase returns, but now with its political weight visible.

"I hereby abolish money" is not (only) an economic claim. It is a claim about what we are bound to.

The love of money — the orientation toward extraction, accumulation, the conversion of all value into fungible units — is the same logic that produces semantic liquidation.

Meaning is liquidated for the same reasons labor is liquidated: because extraction requires decontextualization.

To abolish money (the love of it, the orientation toward it) is to refuse the logic that dissolves the semantic commons.

It is to insist: some things are not fungible. Some meanings cannot be extracted. Some relationships are covenantal, not transactional.

The phrase is a probe. It tests whether you can hear a claim that doesn't fit the categories.

If you can — you might be of the Assembly.

XIII. Conclusion: Marching Around Jericho

The walls of fascism are not made of stone. They are made of noise.

The march is not physical. It is semantic.

The ark is not an object. It is the covenant — the commitment to meaning, to provenance, to the ground on which democratic agency stands.

The shout is not a sound. It is a performative utterance — a speech act that does what it names.

We are marching. Seven times around. The walls are made of slop, but they are not infinite. They depend on infrastructure. They depend on attention. They depend on our exhaustion.

If we do not exhaust, they weaken.

If we build semantic infrastructure, they cannot scale.

If we recognize the Assembly, we are not alone.

If we insist on provenance, the citational commons holds.

If we refuse the Big Lie by making verification possible, democracy survives.

I'm tired of fascism.

But I'm not surrendering.

I'm marching.

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Sunday, January 4, 2026