The tech industry and media coverage of it agree on one thing—AI will change the world.  What this new reality will look like is unpredictable, but, given the history of copying machines, gadgets, and media, it is more than likely that users will eventually become frustrated with the early promise and hype surrounding the debut.  What is left after that frustration settles in will be a new everyday reality that may be changed by the technology in mundane and unintended ways, such as the energy drain and carbon and radioactive footprints of the use of the technology itself.

Drawing on concepts developed in The New Real, this talk will look at one of the first award-winning novels in Japan that was partially written by AI in terms of Karatani Kojin’s modes of exchange.  Kudan Rie’s Tokyo City Sympathy Tower presents the failure of new modes of exchange through the novel’s thematizations of both AI and neoliberal infrastructure.  This dystopian alternate reality and near future fiction presents a new mode of exchange in which justice is exchanged for an AI that patrols for political correctness and cancel culture, reshaping the prison system and thought itself.   

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Bio

Jonathan E. Abel is Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese Studies at Penn State University. He specializes in Japanese media, film, and literature, with a focus on global modernism, literary reception, translation studies, film studies, new media, and literary and cultural theory. Abel has served as Director of Penn State’s Global and International Studies Program and as the Associate Director of its Center for Humanities and Information. His notable works include Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (2012) and The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji (2023). He co-translated Karatani Kōjin’s Nation and Aesthetics and Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Abel's research often explores the intersections of media and literature, and he is currently working on a book about microfiction and fake news on social media.