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Craig Van Pelt

REFEREED ARTICLES

  • Van Pelt, Craig. forthcoming. “Dead Cognitive Labor and the Tempo of Machine-Time: AI, Infrastructural Capture, and the Privatization of the General Intellect.” Sociation.
    • This article argues that contemporary AI systems convert accumulated social knowledge into operational power by embedding it within capital-intensive infrastructures. Drawing on Marx and Braverman, I call this process infrastructural capture: the content harvesting of socially produced knowledge, its crystallization as stored judgement, and its privatization through access-controlled deployment. This configuration is then stabilized by monopolization, which concentrates deployment in a small number of firms.  Once embedded in institutional workflow, these outputs appear as neutral decision support. Two temporal consequences follow. The verification lag names the interval between computational output and institutional verification. Ghost context names marks the activation of stored judgement outside the social relations and deliberative contexts that produced it. The central claim is that AI reorganizes social knowledge as dead cognitive labor. This process deepens a structural separation between the social production of knowledge, and private control over the infrastructures through which cognition becomes actionable.

    • Cyberzombies and the Afterlife of Thought
  • Van Pelt, Craig. 2026. “Cyberzombies and the Afterlife of Thought: Dead Labor, AI, and the Necropolis of Capital.” Fast Capitalism. 23(1): Article 4. https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/fastcapitalism/vol23/iss1/4
    • Marx invoked a metaphor of vampires to explain how capitalism feeds on living labor. This essay employs zombies instead: They embody the mindless, endlessly repetitive, structurally automated character of machine cognition built from accumulated dead labor. In what follows, vampires and ghosts appear as secondary figures, with machines as their modern relay. The zombie remains the analytic core because it clarifies how dead labor moves through digital infrastructures.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

  • Van Pelt, Craig. 2018. “Champion of the People: Technology and the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” in Iron Man vs. Captain America and Philosophy, Nicolas Michaud and Jessica Watkins (eds).  Open Court Books.
  • Van Pelt, Craig. 2017. “Small Farms, Big Ideas” in LEGO and Philosophy, Roy T. Cook  and Sondra Bacharach (eds). Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Van Pelt, Craig. 2016. “Infinite Environmental Crisis,” in Superman, Batman, and Philosophy, Nicolas Michaud (ed).  Open Court Books
  • Van Pelt, Craig. 2015. Review of: The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders. Megan Carney. Food & Foodways.
  • Van Pelt, Craig. 2015. “Population and Food Supply” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Food Issues, Ken Albala (ed). SAGE Publications, Inc.

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