<div dir="ltr"><div>Dear Language Machines Network,<br><br>We'd like to invite you to our next reading group meeting. We'll discuss Jack LaViolette (Columbia) & Mikael Brunila's draft article <b>"Transforming the Invention of Culture: Masking, Attention, and Semiotic Alienation in the Age of LLMs"</b> on Monday, December 15, 2025 from 18:00-20:00 CET. See below for the schedule of future meetings.<br><br></div><div></div><div>Abstract: Building on recent scholarship that understands Large Language Models (LLMs) as the materialization of a "distributionalist" language ideology, this paper unpacks the specific mechanics of this operation for an anthropological audience. We theorize the Transformer architecture that powers all modern LLMs by drawing on the symbolic anthropology of Roy Wagner, whose dialectic of invention and convention offers a precise structural vocabulary—"masking," "attention," and "context"—that uniquely mirrors the technical nomenclature of contemporary machine learning. By placing these two regimes of semiosis on a collision course, we distinguish the generative acts of human speakers from the probabilistic calculations of the machine.<br><br>We demonstrate that while the Transformer’s "attention mechanism" simulates context by scanning a totalizing archive of fossilized text, it fundamentally inverts the Wagnerian process of meaning-making. For the human subject, masking obscures the arbitrariness of convention to allow actors to experience culture as phenomenologically real, whereas for the model, masking serves only to enforce statistical probability, foreclosing invention in favor of a closed loop of prediction. We further contend that alignment techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) entrench this deficit, producing what Wagner calls a "wax museum" of culture—static forms severed from the motivating resistance of social life. Finally, we examine how the AI industry manipulates the Wagnerian opposition between "Nature" (the innate) and "Culture" (the artificial). By masking the statistical constructedness of these models behind a rhetoric of biological inevitability, the industry presents algorithmic output as the organic intuition of a sui generis mind. We conclude that as our communicative practices increasingly depend on such automated replication, we risk a distinctly semiotic form of alienation.</div><div><br></div><div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);margin:0px"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="arial, sans-serif"><font color="#1A1A1A">Please </font><font color="#FB0007">RSVP </font><font color="#1A1A1A">by </font><a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1d_dBldMkRgVOmsdCERvYktNpLAAE44NktxOip1IC9h8/edit" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">filling out this form</a><font color="#1A1A1A"> to receive the Zoom link and PDF of the article when it's available (not to be circulated please)</font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);margin:0px"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="arial, sans-serif"><font color="#1A1A1A"><br></font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);margin:0px"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="arial, sans-serif"><font color="#1A1A1A">If you are interested in presenting a draft paper yourself, please get in touch. We have open slots starting in March.</font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><font face="wf_segoe-ui_normal,Segoe UI,Segoe WP,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont" size="2" color="#212121"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><font face="wf_segoe-ui_normal,Segoe UI,Segoe WP,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont" size="2" color="#212121"><font face="Arial,serif,EmojiFont" color="#191919">We look forward to seeing you there!</font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><font face="wf_segoe-ui_normal,Segoe UI,Segoe WP,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont" size="2" color="#212121"><font face="Arial,serif,EmojiFont" color="#1A1A1A"><br></font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><font face="wf_segoe-ui_normal,Segoe UI,Segoe WP,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont" size="2" color="#212121"><font face="Arial,serif,EmojiFont" color="#1A1A1A">Siri and Anna</font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><font face="wf_segoe-ui_normal,Segoe UI,Segoe WP,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont" size="2" color="#212121"><font face="Arial,serif,EmojiFont" color="#1A1A1A"><br></font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><span id="m_-5227241711175546466m_-7982740816310344781docs-internal-guid-6a05a472-7fff-c07a-e2a8-bac1491764ce"><span id="m_-5227241711175546466gmail-docs-internal-guid-b8255da5-7fff-60f1-c0d7-bff8a08320b2"><table style="border:medium;border-collapse:collapse"><tbody><tr style="height:0pt"><td style="border-width:1pt;border-style:solid;border-color:rgb(0,0,0);vertical-align:top;padding:5pt;overflow:hidden"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">January 19, 2026</span></p></td><td style="border-width:1pt;border-style:solid;border-color:rgb(0,0,0);vertical-align:top;padding:5pt;overflow:hidden"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Leif Weatherby</span></p></td><td style="border-width:1pt;border-style:solid;border-color:rgb(0,0,0);vertical-align:top;padding:5pt;overflow:hidden"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:6pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Talking about his book </span><a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919320/language-machines/" style="text-decoration-line:none" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-color:transparent;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline">Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism</span></a></p></td></tr><tr style="height:0pt"><td style="border-width:1pt;border-style:solid;border-color:rgb(0,0,0);vertical-align:top;padding:5pt;overflow:hidden"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">February 16, 2026</span></p></td><td style="border-width:1pt;border-style:solid;border-color:rgb(0,0,0);vertical-align:top;padding:5pt;overflow:hidden"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Spencer Kaplan</span></p></td><td style="border-width:1pt;border-style:solid;border-color:rgb(0,0,0);vertical-align:top;padding:5pt;overflow:hidden;text-align:left"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:6pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Artificial Agency/“You can just do things”</span></p></td></tr></tbody></table></span></span></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><font face="wf_segoe-ui_normal,Segoe UI,Segoe WP,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont" size="2" color="#212121"><font face="Arial,serif,EmojiFont" color="#1A1A1A"><br></font></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont;margin:0px"><font face="wf_segoe-ui_normal,Segoe UI,Segoe WP,Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif,serif,EmojiFont" size="2" color="#212121"><font face="Arial,serif,EmojiFont" color="#1A1A1A"><br></font></font></div><br></div></div>