If the Network Re(a)sonates

Excerpt

A modest programmer is hired by a consortium to work on a chatbot emulating an ancient philosopher called Jacques Derrida. He has never heard of him and would be unable to read any of his work. While his program processes all the philosopher’s writings in order to train itself to speak like him, the programmer stumbles upon a podcast, a reading by Derrida of his own manuscript from 1993, called Circonfession, in which the philosopher imagines a software that is able to model the totality of his system of thinking and predict every statement he could ever produce. He wonders if there is something to be confessed that could elude the software. Puzzled by the coincidence, the programmer writes his own confession.

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