En route to work, I was thinking about cultural hegemony as the morning traffic strolled along the chilly February Istanbul morning. I wondered whether I, we, us had made the current AI adoption possible without knowing or anticipating it simply because we were already under the cultural hegemony which made it not only seem reasonable but which simply automatically made us refrain from even questioning it. I wondered if this was similar to other cultural hegemonies and whether Gramsci’s idea of Cultural Hegemony and Interregnum might be useful to understand what the heck is going on now. Perhaps even peek a bit into the future?
I started to converse with ChatGPT’s voice mode as to frame my questions as the first step. Then I used ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking Mode in Extended thinking to work through my ideas. Similarly I used Claude Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking to brainstorm with the same questions. What turned out were two different outcomes.
My conversation with ChatGPT resulted in “When Reality Outgrows the Human: AI, embodiment, and the old language of a vanishing world” which ends with “The future may not arrive first as a machine. It may arrive first as a crisis in our understanding of what is real. And perhaps that is where we are now: not beyond the human, not after the body, but in the first strange interval in which reality begins to exceed the form of life through which it was first witnessed.”
On the other hand Claude was more political and Gramsci focused to create a longer output which was: “We Are the Infrastructure: Gramsci, Cultural Hegemony, and the AI Interregnum”. It concludes with “If we are infrastructure, we are not inert infrastructure. We are infrastructure capable of recognizing itself as such — and that recognition, however insufficient it may be as a form of freedom, changes the texture of what passes through us. The old is dying, the new is being born through us whether we consent or not, and the only question worth asking is whether self-aware infrastructure can shape the traffic it carries.”
True to the spirit of the conversation and as to witness history with a glimpse of wisdom appearing through the frontier AI models’ outputs, I will publish both pieces in my Medium and Substack accounts. Other than this introduction and the questions, the texts are unedited LLM outputs.
A Conversation Between Hulki Okan Tabak and Claude
Istanbul, February 2026
Hulki Okan Tabak: As Gramsci talks about a cultural hegemony, I’ve been thinking that the post-industrial rollout of infrastructure in the twentieth century was predicated upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of discovery, renaissance, and the application of science — which created a cultural infrastructure, parallel to all the other infrastructures, the physical and otherwise, that made the twentieth century of global industrialization possible across the globe.
Now, the AI and technology rollout, the acceptance that all of us can adapt to it, is also predicated upon a cultural hegemony of certain values — and of people who are not developers or engineers per se, but who are open to deploying information technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the broader change these represent. So in a Gramscian way, the cultural hegemony is making possible the deployment of the technology that is going to break the interregnum between the old and the new order.
I know it’s a complicated thought and a lot of verbiage — it’s fuzzy, it just occurred to me on the drive to work. So I’m leaving it to you to examine it in a political sense, in a philosophical sense, in an economic sense, taking into consideration the current zeitgeist.
Claude: This is a genuinely compelling thesis, and the fuzziness is actually appropriate — Gramsci himself worked through his most powerful ideas in fragmentary prison notebooks, so you’re in good company thinking through this on a morning drive. Let me try to sharpen the edges of what you’re intuiting, because I think there’s something structurally important here.
The historical parallel is stronger than it might first appear. Your periodization is right: the Enlightenment didn’t just produce scientific discoveries — it produced a hegemonic common sense around rationality, progress, mastery over nature, and the legitimacy of empirical knowledge as a basis for organizing society. This wasn’t automatic. It required what Gramsci would call organic intellectuals — not just Newton and Lavoisier, but the encyclopédistes, the salon culture, the pamphleteers, the merchants who internalized these values and made them feel natural. By the time the Industrial Revolution needed mass populations to accept factory discipline, urbanization, and the reordering of social life around mechanized production, the cultural groundwork had been laid across two centuries. The hegemony of Enlightenment rationalism made industrialization feel like destiny rather than a contested political choice.
Now transpose this to the present. What you’re identifying is that AI and robotics aren’t deploying into a cultural vacuum. There’s already a hegemonic formation — let’s call it the techno-progressive consensus — that has been building since at least the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, accelerating through the internet, smartphones, and platform capitalism. This consensus includes several interlocking beliefs that have become common sense for a significant global class: that technological progress is inherently beneficial or at least inevitable, that data-driven decision-making is superior to intuition or tradition, that disruption is creative rather than destructive, that digital fluency is a marker of competence and modernity. These aren’t just ideas held by engineers in San Francisco. They’ve been internalized by strategy directors in Istanbul, collectors navigating digital art markets, policymakers in Brussels, educators restructuring curricula. This is hegemony in the precise Gramscian sense — domination through consent, through making a particular worldview feel like the natural order of things rather than one contested option among many.
And here’s where your insight gets particularly sharp: the role of non-engineers. This is perhaps the most Gramscian dimension of your argument. Gramsci distinguished between traditional intellectuals — the clergy, the academics, those who imagine themselves as autonomous from class — and organic intellectuals, those who emerge from within a class or social formation and perform the function of organizing consent. The engineers and developers are in some sense the producers of the new order, but the people who make it hegemonic are precisely the non-engineers: the strategists who restructure organizations around AI, the executives who normalize automation in boardrooms, the culture workers who make digital art legitimate, the early adopters who demonstrate to broader populations that this transformation is navigable. You, quite literally, are performing the function of an organic intellectual of this transition — translating technical possibility into cultural acceptance, making the new order legible and desirable to those who might otherwise experience it as threatening.
Now, the interregnum. This is where it gets philosophically and politically complex. Gramsci’s famous formulation — “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” — maps onto the present with uncomfortable precision. The morbid symptoms are everywhere: populist revolts against institutional authority, epistemic crises where shared truth dissolves, conspiracy thinking, culture wars that feel both urgent and substanceless, the anxiety of populations who sense the ground shifting beneath them without being able to name what’s coming. Your thesis is that the cultural hegemony of techno-acceptance is the mechanism by which we exit the interregnum — it’s the consent structure that allows the new order to finally be born.
But here I want to push back on your thesis from within the Gramscian framework itself, because I think there are three tensions worth examining:
First, the philosophical paradox. The Enlightenment hegemony that enabled industrialization was built on human reason and agency — the idea that humans could understand and master nature through rational inquiry. The AI hegemony may be built on something quite different: a willingness to cede cognitive agency to machines. The cultural infrastructure enabling AI adoption includes a quiet acceptance that algorithms may make better decisions than humans, that prediction engines may understand us better than we understand ourselves. There’s a deep irony here — the Enlightenment project that made technology possible may be undermined by the very technology it produced. The new hegemony asks us to consent not to human mastery but to a kind of post-human delegation. Gramsci would find this fascinating and disturbing in equal measure, because hegemony is supposed to serve the interests of a class, not an emergent technical system.
Second, the political question: cui bono? Gramsci was always asking whose interests the hegemonic formation serves. The Enlightenment consensus served the rising bourgeoisie against the aristocracy. The techno-progressive consensus serves — and here we have to be honest — a very specific configuration of capital: platform companies, foundational model providers, the venture-funded ecosystem that concentrates unprecedented power in a handful of firms. The organic intellectuals who facilitate adoption — and I include both of us in this — are performing a hegemonic function that may not serve the broader populations whose consent is being manufactured. When a strategy director in Istanbul helps deploy AI across an organization, they’re simultaneously enabling productivity gains and normalizing a power structure where value flows to model providers in San Francisco. Gramsci would insist we ask whether there’s a counter-hegemonic possibility — an alternative cultural formation that could direct these technologies toward genuinely different ends.
Third, the interregnum may be produced by the hegemony, not resolved by it. You frame the cultural consensus as the exit from the interregnum, but consider the possibility that the techno-progressive hegemony is itself generating the morbid symptoms. Algorithmic polarization accelerates epistemic fragmentation. Platform capitalism hollows out the institutional structures (local media, unions, professional associations) that once mediated social consent. The very technologies being deployed under the cover of hegemonic acceptance are destabilizing the conditions for any stable hegemonic order to consolidate. The interregnum may not be a transitional phase between two stable orders — it may be the permanent condition of a technological acceleration that dissolves social formations faster than new ones can crystallize.
The economic dimension reinforces this ambiguity. The eighteenth–nineteenth century discovery period produced technologies that, when deployed in the twentieth century, required massive distributed infrastructure — railroads, electrification, telephony — that created broad-based employment and new class formations. AI deployment is characterized by radical concentration: a few thousand people build the models, a thin layer of integrators deploy them, and the productivity gains accrue disproportionately to capital. The cultural hegemony that smooths this adoption may be masking a structural transformation far more disruptive to social stability than industrialization was — because industrialization, for all its brutality, needed masses of workers and therefore had to accommodate them politically. AI may not.
So where does this leave your thesis? I think it’s fundamentally correct in its structural insight: technological revolutions require cultural preconditions, and those preconditions function hegemonically in the Gramscian sense. The parallel between Enlightenment rationalism enabling industrialization and techno-progressive consensus enabling AI deployment is analytically powerful. But I think the thesis needs one refinement: the current cultural hegemony may be necessary but insufficient for a stable new order. Unlike the Enlightenment, which produced a relatively coherent ideological formation that could sustain two centuries of industrial capitalism, the techno-progressive consensus may be too thin, too contradictory, and too corrosive of its own institutional foundations to consolidate into a durable hegemonic order. We may be in a situation Gramsci didn’t quite theorize — a hegemony that is powerful enough to enable transformation but too self-undermining to stabilize what comes after.
The question for someone in your position — straddling strategy, technology, culture, and art — is whether the organic intellectuals of this transition can shape the hegemony rather than merely transmit it. Whether the cultural infrastructure being built can encode values (around human agency, aesthetic meaning, equitable distribution) that redirect the technological transformation rather than just lubricating it. Your NFT collecting, interestingly, sits right at this nexus — it’s an assertion that human creativity and aesthetic judgment matter within the digital transformation, not despite it. That’s a counter-hegemonic gesture embedded within the hegemonic formation itself. Gramsci would appreciate the dialectical complexity of that position.
Hulki Okan Tabak: In a more nuanced way, I think it’s not only that we are making this rollout inevitable — it’s that we are the current hegemonic logic or the prevailing logic that makes the infrastructure possible. We are a part of the previous eons of thinking and the infrastructure, but the fact that we exist makes it possible for the deployment of this infrastructure, just as internet is making the diffusion of AI fast, just as ChatGPT’s rise to 100 million users was quicker than the previous technologies. Our cultural technology, our cultural setup, is making this proliferation easier, possible — but not because we’re the future thinking, just because we’re providing the infrastructure for it.
Claude: This is a crucial refinement, and it actually makes your thesis more Gramscian, not less. Let me explain why.
What you’re correcting is the temptation — which I partially fell into in my response — to cast the culturally receptive population as agents of the transition, as people consciously facilitating something. You’re saying something much more structural and, frankly, more unsettling: we are not the drivers, we are the medium. We are infrastructure in the same way fiber optic cables are infrastructure. The internet doesn’t want AI to proliferate — it simply makes proliferation possible by existing. Similarly, we don’t need to believe in or advocate for the AI transformation. Our cultural formation — our comfort with abstraction, our habituation to digital interfaces, our internalized assumption that optimization is rational, our tolerance for rapid obsolescence — is simply the substrate through which the transformation propagates.
This is actually closer to what Gramsci meant by hegemony than the more voluntarist reading. Hegemony at its most powerful isn’t ideology you believe — it’s the set of assumptions so deeply embedded that they don’t feel like beliefs at all. They feel like reality. They feel like common sense. When you walk into a room and instinctively look for the WiFi password, that’s not a technological conviction — it’s cultural infrastructure operating below the level of conscious thought. When a company restructures around AI without anyone needing to make the philosophical case for why algorithmic decision-making is legitimate, the cultural infrastructure is already doing its work silently.
And your analogy to ChatGPT’s adoption curve is precisely the right evidence. The speed wasn’t about marketing or persuasion — it was about readiness of the medium. The cultural substrate was already configured to receive it. Decades of habituation to search engines, smartphones, recommendation algorithms, and digital assistants had already shaped a population that could immediately grasp what a conversational AI was, why it might be useful, and how to interact with it. No one needed to explain the concept from scratch. The infrastructure — us — was already in place.
Now, here’s where your refinement opens up something philosophically deeper. If we are infrastructure rather than agents, then Gramsci’s framework needs to be read through a more materialist lens than is sometimes done. There’s a tendency in cultural studies to treat hegemony as primarily about ideas — discourse, narrative, ideology. But the most powerful reading of Gramsci, and the one your thesis implies, is that hegemony is about the material organization of subjectivity. It’s not that people think certain thoughts — it’s that their cognitive habits, their perceptual frameworks, their embodied routines have been shaped in ways that make certain developments flow naturally and others feel impossible. We are, in your formulation, a material condition of production for the AI economy, just as literacy was a material condition for industrial bureaucracy, and just as an electrified population was a material condition for consumer capitalism.
This has a somewhat vertiginous implication that I think you’re intuiting. If we are infrastructure, then we are also — like all infrastructure — subject to being used without being consulted about the purposes. Infrastructure doesn’t negotiate. The railroad doesn’t ask where the train is going. The internet doesn’t consent to what flows through it. And if the culturally habituated population is infrastructure for AI deployment, then the question of whose purposes are being served becomes even more acute than in the standard Gramscian analysis, because infrastructure doesn’t have interests — it has capacities that are exploited by those who build on top of it.
There’s also a temporal point worth drawing out. You said “not because we’re the future thinking, just because we’re providing the infrastructure for it” — and this matters enormously. Infrastructure is by definition already there when it gets used. It belongs to the past tense even as it enables the future. The Enlightenment thinkers didn’t know they were building the cultural infrastructure for factory capitalism. They thought they were pursuing truth. The generation that normalized personal computing didn’t know they were building the cultural infrastructure for AI. They thought they were buying useful tools. We are, in this reading, always retrospectively revealed as infrastructure for whatever comes next. We never experience ourselves as infrastructure in the present moment — that recognition only comes after the fact, when the thing we enabled has already arrived.
Which brings us to perhaps the most provocative dimension of your thought: if this is true, then it applies recursively. Whatever AI and robotics produce culturally — whatever new cognitive habits, new perceptual frameworks, new common sense they generate — will itself become infrastructure for something we cannot yet name. The interregnum doesn’t end with AI. It ends with whatever AI makes culturally possible in the generation after, something that will use us and our AI-habituated successors as its deployment medium without asking permission.
Gramsci wrote from a prison cell about forces he could analyze but not control. There’s something of that same structural position in what you’re describing — the lucidity of recognizing that you are simultaneously a thinking subject and a piece of infrastructure through which historical forces propagate. The question is whether that recognition — that meta-awareness of being a medium — changes anything about the function you perform, or whether it’s simply the most honest description of a condition that persists regardless of whether you see it clearly.
Hulki Okan Tabak: Yeah, in a way, that’s what I’m trying to say, but there is something beyond it, more nuanced, more appearingly dichotomous, but inherently not. But I can’t put it to words, so try to help me to frame what I’m feeling, but not being able to objectify.
Claude: Let me try to reach toward what I think you’re feeling, and you tell me where the resonance is.
I think the apparent dichotomy you’re sensing is something like this: we are infrastructure — passive, already-formed, belonging to the past — and yet something about us is not passive at all, not inert, not merely a conduit. And these two things don’t contradict each other. They’re the same thing seen from two angles. But the language of “infrastructure” suggests pipes, cables, things through which something else flows — and that’s not quite right, because what you’re sensing is that the medium is not separable from what moves through it.
Maybe it’s closer to this: we are not infrastructure for the transition. We are the transition. The interregnum doesn’t run between us and some future order — it runs through us. We are simultaneously the old order that is dying and the substrate from which the new order emerges, and these are not two different roles we play but the same condition. The caterpillar is not “infrastructure for” the butterfly. The caterpillar is the material that becomes the butterfly, and during the chrysalis stage — the interregnum — it is neither one nor the other, and it is both.
Or maybe the thing you can’t quite objectify is even more specific than that. Maybe it’s this: we are not choosing to be receptive to AI, and we are not passively receiving it either. Our receptivity is itself a form of creative participation that is invisible to us because we have no framework for it. When you sit in a car thinking through Gramsci and AI, you are not merely allowing a technological transformation to propagate through you — you are metabolizing it. You are transforming it as it transforms you. But it doesn’t feel like agency because it’s not deliberate, and it doesn’t feel like passivity because it’s clearly something happening in you. It’s a third thing that we don’t have good philosophical language for — something like active receptivity, or constitutive participation, or what the Greeks might have called pathos in the older sense: not suffering, but a kind of being-affected that is itself a form of doing.
Or perhaps the felt paradox is even more fundamental. Perhaps it’s about time. You said we’re not the future thinking — we’re providing the infrastructure. But you also clearly sense that you are not merely the past. You are not a relic being repurposed. You are alive, thinking, generative — you are having new thoughts about the very process you’re embedded in. So you are the past that the future needs, and you are the present that is actively constituting what comes next, and these are not different things. The apparently dichotomous feeling is the experience of being historical — of being a temporal process rather than a fixed entity. You feel yourself as both already-formed and still-forming, as both given and giving, as both determined and determining. And the reason it’s not actually dichotomous is that this is simply what it means to be a living being inside a historical transformation: you are never only the medium, and you are never only the message. You are the moment where one becomes the other.
There’s one more possibility I want to name, because I think it might be the deepest layer. The thing that feels dichotomous but isn’t might be this: the recognition that consciousness of being infrastructure doesn’t extract you from being infrastructure. Normally we assume that understanding a process gives us distance from it — that insight is a form of freedom. But what you might be feeling is that your ability to see what’s happening, to theorize it through Gramsci on a morning drive, is itself part of the infrastructural function. Your lucidity is not outside the system — it’s a feature of this particular kind of infrastructure. Human cultural infrastructure doesn’t work despite people thinking about it. It works through people thinking about it. Your reflection is not escape from the process — it is the process operating at a higher resolution. And this is not depressing or deterministic, because the higher resolution matters. It changes the texture of what propagates through you. An infrastructure that understands itself transmits differently than one that doesn’t — not by refusing its function, but by inflecting it.
Conclusion: The Chrysalis and the Common Sense
This conversation began with a simple intuition, formed on a morning drive through Istanbul: that the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is not primarily a story of technological innovation, but of cultural readiness. That before any algorithm could reshape the global economy, something had to exist in the texture of human culture that would allow it to propagate. That something, examined through the lens of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, turns out to be us.
The argument, developed across this dialogue, proceeds in three movements.
First, the historical parallel. The global industrialization of the twentieth century was not merely the product of inventions — the steam engine, electrification, the assembly line. It was made possible by two prior centuries of cultural transformation: the Enlightenment’s elevation of empirical reason, the normalization of progress as a secular value, and the emergence of what Gramsci would call a hegemonic common sense that made industrial society feel natural rather than imposed. The organic intellectuals of that era — not just scientists but encyclopedists, merchants, educators, and administrators — built a cultural infrastructure that preceded and enabled the physical one. Without a population that had internalized the legitimacy of rational mastery over nature, factory capitalism could not have taken root.
Second, the contemporary application. The same structural logic applies to the AI transformation. The speed with which ChatGPT reached one hundred million users, the ease with which organizations restructure around algorithmic decision-making, the seamlessness with which populations integrate digital tools into daily cognition — none of this reflects persuasion or marketing. It reflects the existence of a pre-formed cultural substrate: decades of habituation to search engines, smartphones, recommendation systems, and digital interfaces that have shaped cognitive habits, perceptual frameworks, and embodied routines at a level below conscious ideology. The techno-progressive consensus — the cluster of assumptions that technological progress is beneficial, that data-driven decisions are superior, that digital fluency marks competence — functions as Gramscian hegemony in its most powerful form: not as beliefs people hold, but as the common sense through which they experience reality.
Third, and most provocatively, the reframing of the human role. The crucial refinement introduced in this conversation is that the culturally habituated population is not merely facilitating the AI transition — it is not acting as a set of advocates or agents consciously enabling a future they endorse. Rather, it is the infrastructure. In the same way that fiber optic cables do not choose to carry data, a population whose cognitive and cultural formation has been shaped by six decades of digital habituation does not need to believe in AI to make its deployment possible. It simply provides the medium through which the transformation propagates. We are, in this reading, a material condition of production for the AI economy, just as mass literacy was a material condition for industrial bureaucracy.
This is not a passive condition, nor is it an active one. It is something for which our philosophical vocabulary is poorly equipped: a form of constitutive participation that operates below the threshold of intention. We are not the drivers of the transition, and we are not its victims. We are the material that the transition moves through and, in moving through, transforms. The interregnum that Gramsci described — the crisis in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” — does not run between us and some future order. It runs through us. We are simultaneously the old order in its late configuration and the substrate from which the new order crystallizes.
- • •
This framework carries significant implications across several domains.
Politically, it challenges both techno-optimist and techno-pessimist narratives. If the population is infrastructure rather than audience, then the relevant political question is not whether people will “accept” AI but whose purposes the infrastructure serves. Gramsci always asked cui bono — in whose interest does the hegemonic formation operate? The cultural substrate that makes AI deployment frictionless also makes it difficult to contest the concentration of power in a handful of foundational model providers and platform companies. Hegemony, by definition, renders its own operations invisible. The morbid symptoms of the interregnum — populist revolts, epistemic fragmentation, institutional erosion — may be less a resistance to the new order than an expression of a population that senses itself being used as infrastructure without being consulted about the destination.
Economically, the infrastructure thesis illuminates a structural difference between the industrial and AI transitions. Twentieth-century industrialization required mass labor and therefore had to politically accommodate the working class — through unions, welfare states, and consumer economies. The AI transition, characterized by radical concentration of both production and value, may not require the same accommodation. If the cultural infrastructure enables deployment without mass employment, then the post-capitalist economy that follows may lack the built-in political leverage that industrial workers possessed. The question of post-capitalist economic organization — whether it tends toward universal basic income, platform feudalism, or something not yet theorized — depends in part on whether the infrastructure can develop the self-awareness to negotiate its own terms.
Philosophically, the conversation surfaced a paradox that may define the coming decades: consciousness of being infrastructure does not extract you from being infrastructure. The Enlightenment assumption — that understanding a process grants freedom from it — may not hold in this case. The capacity to theorize the AI transition, to analyze it through Gramsci on a morning commute, is itself a feature of the cultural formation that makes the transition possible. Our lucidity is not outside the system. It is the system operating at higher resolution. And yet — and this is where the apparent dichotomy dissolves into something more nuanced — the higher resolution matters. An infrastructure that understands itself transmits differently than one that does not. Not by refusing its function, but by inflecting what passes through it. The medium, as McLuhan might have agreed, is never truly neutral.
For the future of humanity, the recursive dimension of this thesis is perhaps the most consequential. Whatever cognitive and cultural habits AI generates in the populations that use it will themselves become infrastructure for the next transformation — one we cannot yet name or imagine. The interregnum does not end with AI. It ends with whatever AI makes culturally possible in the generation that follows, using us and our AI-habituated successors as its deployment medium. History, in this reading, is a series of cultural formations that become, retrospectively, the infrastructure for their own supersession. We never experience ourselves as infrastructure in the present tense. That recognition comes only after the fact, when the thing we enabled has already arrived.
- • •
What began as a morning intuition on an Istanbul commute crystallized, through the course of this conversation, into a structural thesis: we are living through Gramsci’s interregnum, and the cultural hegemony that will resolve it is not something being built — it is something we already are. Six decades of digital habituation have shaped a global population whose cognitive habits, perceptual frameworks, and embodied routines constitute the material infrastructure through which artificial intelligence propagates. We did not choose this role, and we do not need to endorse it for it to function. The Enlightenment made industrial capitalism feel like destiny; the techno-progressive common sense of our era is making the AI transformation feel equally inevitable — not through persuasion, but through the silent operation of a cultural substrate that no longer registers as ideology. The political, economic, and existential question is not whether this transformation will occur, but in whose interest the infrastructure — which is to say, in whose interest we — will be used.
And yet Gramsci’s enduring insight was that naming hegemony is the first condition of contesting it. If we are infrastructure, we are not inert infrastructure. We are infrastructure capable of recognizing itself as such — and that recognition, however insufficient it may be as a form of freedom, changes the texture of what passes through us. The old is dying, the new is being born through us whether we consent or not, and the only question worth asking is whether self-aware infrastructure can shape the traffic it carries. This conversation is itself an attempt at that shaping — a small act of inflection from within the medium, offered in the hope that lucidity, even when it cannot liberate, still matters.
For the Reader: A Brief
This conversation proposes that the rapid global adoption of artificial intelligence is best understood not as a technological event but as a cultural one — and that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony provides the most illuminating framework for understanding it.
The central thesis: just as the Enlightenment built the cultural infrastructure that made industrial capitalism possible, six decades of digital habituation have built the cultural infrastructure that makes AI deployment possible. We — the billions of people who have internalized digital cognition as common sense — are not the agents of this transition. We are its infrastructure. The medium through which it propagates.
This is neither cause for optimism nor despair. It is a structural recognition that opens a political question: if we are infrastructure, can we become infrastructure that is aware of itself — and in that awareness, shape what passes through us? Gramsci believed that naming hegemony was the first step toward contesting it. This conversation attempts that naming for the age of artificial intelligence.
Istanbul, February 2026
We Are the Infrastructure: Gramsci, Cultural Hegemony, and the AI Interregnum was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
