Computational <i>Gallerte</i> : Compressions of culture

In Capital , Marx describes ‘abstract human labor’ as a jelly-like, amorphous substance: Gallerte , often translated as ‘gelatinous blob’. Turning from questions of consumption (or outputs) in debates on ‘AI slop’ to the ‘sloppy’ side of AI production (or inputs), this essay draws a speculative line from Marx’s account of labor as Gallerte to how current AI models similarly metabolize the linguistic and cultural labor of the post-industrial worker, creating a new form of computational Gallerte . Charting the entangled, extractivist histories of both labor, gelatine production, and AI models helps rematerialize and reconnect the latter to the violent histories of (in)human and non-human labor under capitalism.