Auto-Immune Algorithms: Toward an Anti-Axiomatic Protocol

The past few weeks I’ve been in bed fighting a foreign bug and obsessively consuming media about the death of Charlie Kirk and in that, I found a glitch of my own. I had never had much interest in his content, mostly because I saw it as a pulse check for how people on the right felt. His blending of liberal economics and constitutional originalism, followed by a shift into the Christian-framed populist ideologism of the 2010s, meant he wasn’t fringe or strange enough to explore, unlike figures like Nick Fuentes or a one-time acquaintance, Jackson Hinkle. His views often reflected the current political order, and so I’m not surprised at the posthumous reading of his horrific murder as cultural martyrdom.

Yet in his death I saw an example of how our politico-digital orthodoxies operate. I tend to see culture wars as religious movements: always originating in the biological and neurobiological, but now mediated through technology and capitalism. If Kirk is a martyr, then what about the canon, the sins, the liturgy?

Here it helps to return to the late 20th-century theorists who first seeded what became the “woke canon.” Writers such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Gayatri Spivak articulated how race, gender, and sexuality are socially constructed, how oppression can produce standpoint knowledge, and how intersectionality complicates identity. Their insights were profound in the classroom and on the page, but they took on a different form once absorbed into media culture.

From college syllabi to digital accelerationism, terms like intersectionality, identity politics, feminist theory, and queer theory became rituals themselves. I studied these authors in high school, but by college they were already circulating online, transmuting into everyday orthodoxy. Tumblr, then Facebook and now Instagram and Tik Tok, hosted the rituals: call-outs and cancellations, hashtags and reposts, public confessions of the privileged self. Whiteness, cisness, and maleness became original sins; rituals became absolution.

In this migration downstream from seminar to feed, our neurotransmitters, long tied to religious practice, were conscripted for platform capitalism. Cortisol spiked with stress, serotonin and oxytocin with social inclusion, dopamine with likes. Confession absolved sin while feeding the poor and huddled tech masses. The oppressed became canonical figures of truth: seen not as people with complexity, but worshipped as flattened symbols. Race and gender lines were said to be where truth lay, but religious figures are never really seen as people. Knowledge was extracted from them, even intersectionally, by reducing them into totems when we lost the ability to question the sacred texts.  To be sure, this isn’t to deny that these movements created real change, but to observe how they circulate now. As Sara Ahmed argues in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, figures like immigrant, queer, or feminist become “sticky”: they accumulate emotion over time and hold affective power. On the left, these terms became sticky with guilt and virtue; on the right, sticky with fear and anger at unrealized economic gains and the sense of national decline.

Kirk helped script this counter-canon. His was not only the canon of Christian scripture but also of reaction. Anti-woke, anti-DEI, anti-trans rhetoric became liturgy. Just as images carried left-wing emotion, they carried the right’s emotion too, glorifying the patriot, the soldier, the nuclear family. For Kirk, the canon began in grief: not getting into West Point as a teenager, transmuted into a lifelong anti-DEI crusade. Algorithms, in turn, acted as priests, amplifying whichever scriptures carried the heaviest emotions. Political, religious, and technological structures are all mediators of emotion like pride, fear, guilt, love, shame. That is how DEI, Kirk’s greatest sin, floats through the circuits. At times it drifts aimlessly and at other moments it crystallizes into symbol.

I like to look at this from a philosophical and neurobiological lens: on social networks, DEI is posted, shared, liked, and commented on. Users get feedback from their friends on the threat it poses or why it must be salvaged and the ego is exhibited as a commodity (mPFC, PCC). Conflict within social circles recedes (TPJ, ACC), replaced by competition over who can best praise or demonize it (OFC). Our dopamine networks fire (nucleus accumbens), compelling us to prove again and again that our ego ideals are intact (mPFC). This networked narcissism locks us in the fourth-order simulacrum. Jean Baudrillard described this order as the realm where signs no longer even pretend to reflect reality; they float free and reference only one another. When we exist in our bubbles we often exist in this space using a signifier but not always needing to tie it to meaning, for example getting “DEI out of schools” or “DEI character.” However when meaning becomes contested, this creates the third-order simulacrum. We argue endlessly, and the profits flow to the tech giants as opposition further confirms the ego ideal.

This was Kirk’s terrain: third-order simulacra, railing against second-order actual policies and regulations contaminated by fourth-order circulation. He saw DEI as identity over merit, ignoring evidence that  marginalized candidates are equally qualified and often outperform when given opportunity. Scholars like William Bowen and Derek Bok, in their studies of affirmative action, demonstrated that such candidates succeed at equal or higher levels. Legacy admissions, donor networks, and athletics explain far more than affirmative action for why white applicants are denied. Studies like the 2004 Lakisha/Jamal résumé experiment show continued discrimination in hiring, though not recently replicated. Neurotechnically, responsibility lies both with platforms that amplify these posts and with the fleeting emotions that drive reposting. Failures get displaced into symbols, and emotions become fuel for simulacra. Fourth-order symbols like DEI gain traction, metabolized into third-order battlegrounds as algorithmic priests exalt scripture into glorious circulation. Meaning emerges by resonance, not at holy creation but by evolution, through circulation and affective investment.  For Kirk, though, the myth was tied to emotion. It was his grief over West Point. Perhaps what he needed was mourning: to feel the loss, to speak with those who say themselves have benefitted from affirmative action, like Michelle Obama or a cadet shaped by DEI. To move West Point out of the decline narrative and into reality, complexity, and real encounter.

This would be an attempt to reverse simulacra orders and move closer to the real. Byung-Hul Han’s advocacy for “slowness” offers clues: face the real, embrace conflict, mourn properly, cut losses, and libidinally disconnect from the symbol while leaving the ego intact. If Charlie had done this maybe Turning Point would have never been created but neuroscience makes clear how hard this is. Posting activates reward loops (nucleus accumbens), social cognition (mPFC, PCC), conflict monitoring (ACC), social imagination (TPJ, pSTS), and fear (amygdala). Beliefs about self and other get hardwired, identities defended at all costs. Moral positioning, social imagination, and belonging all get processed here. It was easiest to continue building this narrative even when he was never going to attend the university. It was harder for Kirk to face West Point and also dive into his family’s precarious financial status at the time which he’s also discussed. Instead that energy was driven into his brand of populism. It is clear that he had legitimate concerns about college costs but not seeing a narrative that confirmed that, he took the sins of the left, being a white cis straight man and drove that into an oppositional canon that was being built across the street.

That is why epistemology cannot rely solely on identity. While complex identities like Kirk are sidelined they carry a danger,  and worship of the most oppressed intersection of identities obscures the very knowledge we seek. People reduced to signs carry not just the guilt and shame of the privileged but also the anger and grief projected by the right which has fueled demonization, as we saw with increasingly negative views on immigrants and trans people at the peak of 2020. Culture wars have actually led to a decrease in views supporting the very people the left is claiming to defend. In my own undergraduate studies(IIT), CRT, Black Feminist Thought, and Postcolonial Studies were absent due to  the school being technical and engineering focused, yet their echoes thrived in activist circles around me, weaponized at times by Ivy or Ivy-adjacent upper-middle class white graduates seeking absolution while retrenching institutional activist power. 

While the bombing threats at black colleges and hangings have been equally horrific, I believe we can learn not from totems as these stories are posted as counter-defenses, but from the suspect himself. Both left and right had their cannons ready, ready to canonize or demonize based on identity. Was he a white Christian gun obsessive? A trans Antifa radical in a toxic love story? Circuits malfunctioned as the suspect made himself clear: he was a cyborg. Here Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is relevant. Writing in 1985, she warned against drawing knowledge solely from identity categories, and instead imagined the cyborg as a figure of hybridity and contradiction. As our minds and technologies entangle, we all become cyborgs. Binaries collapse and while religions crave absolutes, most of us are not that. What we fear most now is the glitch, when answers don’t fit canon. Left and right alike dive into conspiracy to keep scripture intact, only to converge on the same ground that he was somewhere in between our holy books or at the bookends between them. The glitch exposing a man raised on guns and Mormonism, online discord servers, and queer partners. From contradiction, refusal, and hybrid entanglement we can begin to bring knowledge forth. 

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage also helps here: we might ask what relations produced this person, what infrastructures, what economies, what neurobiology?  Algorithms flatten culture, but moments like this show their limits. They can broadcast emotion but not resolve the glitch. I, too, think of myself as a cyborg. My identities are read inconsistently: queer in one moment, accused of reproducing straight male privilege by a manager in another; non-english speaking immigrant delivery driver when socially drained, “basically white” in my Vineyard Vines in the Denver suburbs. Climate extremist at a Sundance event against gun-violence, YAL member and capitalist shill in another space. Too rigid or too laid back; too devoutly religious, too chaotic and unpredictable. My Autism and ADHD blurring into each other into the cyborg creation myth. My strategy has been one of refusal,  to not be totemized against my will. To let illegibility be truth and power. I don’t need to be the most marginalized to participate in knowledge-making. Yet my refusal sometimes renders me unseen, as I suspect is true for many a cyborg.

There is much to learn from centering the most oppressed, but also from the in-between where most of us live. Neuro-ethics points to platform responsibility in radicalization, but we must also look inward at our own relationship with algorithmic orthodoxy like what it gains from us, and what we gain from it. As AI and AR/VR map ever so closer onto biology, designed to spike neurotransmitters and profit, we must step out of loops that have long exploited us.

To move from bronze to gold in  the simulacra, we must encounter the real other: not glorify the theory-driven other, not invoke sin or canon, but dive into relationships. If we fail, we remain outside reality: detached from facts, trapped in symbols, bound to the weaponization of our emotions and neurochemistry for corporate gain. While my religious analogies are less of a science, a project I hope to conduct in the future is how to map these canons. I am thinking about what it would look like to hold focus groups, discussions, as well as neuroscience experiments  to explore just how we remain in the higher order simulacra. FMRi could be used with BOLD signals to map reward circuits, conflict-monitoring, and self-referential networks. PET could be used with tracers for Dopamine or Serotonin, letting us see neurotransmitters binding in action. MRS could be used to look at inhibitory and excitatory signaling like GABA and glutamate to see what happens when we encounter canon content versus the glitchy kind. What parts of our brain light up when we share, post, like or leave hate comments and more importantly can we change? What could we learn from using TMS to pulse target specific cortical areas to disrupt ACC hypervigilance or temporarily quiet the DMN, or tDCS to conduct cathodal stimulation to the mPFC, dampening the ego-ideal reinforcement that makes us need to be seen as virtuous or contrarian?

To be sure, the part of the research that involves the external algorithmic priests that social media companies hide from is very real, and I would hope to be able to study how different feeds replicate different behavior and beliefs but  there’s also the internal ones we hide from ourselves. Long beyond social media our societies have had these same problems. While a nihilistic Ukrainian refugee at Techweek LA for example would say murder is just what humans do, my aim is to trace how politico-digital orthodoxies metabolize emotion, how cannons get weaponized, and how new sites of knowledge can be built out of glitch. If these human truths are self-evident, our body’s need for orthodoxy and ritual-protocols- perhaps they can be disrupted. 

Alexander Galloway says protocol is not freedom but control distributed through networks and like machines I think about the protocols our bodies and minds have. How they have been conditioned and hardwired into neuronal cascades that bring us together but also drive us apart. 

Code, like DNA or RNA, both communicates and enacts as  it is language and command at once. Algorithms inherit this double life by executing instructions while embedding norms. That is why they map so neatly onto our biology, slotting into neuronal cascades that determine behavior.  Wendy Chun then says protocols are axioms, defining what can’t and what can happen , what is possible. They operate invisibly yet are adept at reterritiorialization, reproducing new forms of control as seen in the algorithmic replication of our emotional states, if this is true then we might suggest an anti-axiomatic protocol that is ever-evolving as opposed to a fixed one, one that acts as disruptor to our current autoimmune algorithms, consistently disrupting its own rules to order us down to earth and towards each other.  Other writers like Legacy Russell, Jussi Parikka, and Eugene Thacker talk about this in their writing: how viruses can be metaphors for culture, how glitch can be seen as a refusal of normativity and how paradoxically, it can create space for the underlying truth in a system. Paul Preciado makes some comments here on the fact that these algorithmic regimes, deemed pharmacopornographic, have always existed, yet there is something sinister about its global scale, automated “hits”, and financial aims and ends.  But I think that by staying with the glitch like refusing to post when the canon is demanding it, when you need to offload an emotion, when we are fighting the inherent contradictions of our protocols, can prove meaningful. Staying with the glitch means exploring and confronting our own emotions and feelings and being willing to step out of line.

In exploring this route I’m reminded of examples from our body and mind. Perhaps anti-psychotics- they block Dopamine and Serotonin to reduce hallucinations but at the cost of a flattening affect. While this could block the amplification of the third simulacrum it might make it so that things are never shared or become viral. Another example could be Psilocybin, it kind of acts a circuit breaker in the mind, temporarily disintegrating rigid networks like the aforementioned DMN, that subscribe to this canon, it could be a sort of anti-axiomatic reset, a short window of flexibility or break from our feeds that would allow for glitch or contradiction, like feed breaks -however these might be temporary and might be triggering to our current protocols. Finally maybe a techno-biologic akin to those that exist for Rheumatoid Arthritis or Cancer, TNG-alpha inhibitor or blockers and CAR-T Cell therapy respectively. In RA, TNF-ɑ is a cytokine, a messenger that ramps up inflammation. The body overproduces these messengers much like our emotions overproduce posts on social media that are meant to outrage. Instead of the auto immune- algorithm acting on it and promoting that post into virality, much like Kirk’s posts did and many of the left have performed, we could act like biologics do, this algorithmic biologic binding to TNF and neutralizing it, preventing it from sending inflammatory signals downstream. This could look like slowing re-share rates, capping algorithmic boosts, or rate-limiting how far they spread. In CAR-T Cell therapy, a patient’s cells are collected, they are genetically modified to carry a receptor, and then they are reinfused into the body, the new modified cells hunting down Cancer cells. In this we could train independent AI agents on existing data, and equip them with the ability to detect patterns like growing misinformation, extremism, or amplification circuits and currents and limit their ability to grow or attach explanations such as the now widely-used Grok features on X. While some might distrust these I’ve seen Grok take people out of the third order simulacra and clarify or verify erroneous beliefs especially in the past few weeks.

To be sure, my anti-axiomatic protocol is not a cure but a set of biologic-like interventions, some pharmacological, some algorithmic, all aimed not at erasing the immune system of culture but at modulating its recursive loops so they don’t destroy us. I want to cultivate spaces where contradiction is not a failure of canon but a condition of being human-cyborg altogether, that by staying with the bug we can stay with ourselves not as oppositional to technology or each other but in continuous dialogue-and I think Kirk would have respected that.