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Political sense-making in "individual" human-technology-world relations: the case of LLM-generated autobiographies

Anthony Longo, Olya Kudina

arXiv:2610.32594v1cs.HC

TL;DR

The chapter challenges critiques of postphenomenology that rely on a static view of mediation and treat political sense-making as dependent on access to AI’s hidden interior. It develops a relational-temporal account through LLM-generated autobiographies, showing how interpretation moves between private experience and shared worldliness.

  • Problem

    Critiques of postphenomenology’s alleged political deficit rely on an overly static image of mediation, while black-box approaches seek control and certainty at the expense of plural, unpredictable, worldly political sense-making.

    Source: Introduction · p. 4, §2 · p. 11

  • Method

    The chapter develops a relational-temporal account of mediation and examines users generating, adopting, and testing autobiographical narratives with LLMs as a recursive human-technology-world process.

    Source: Introduction · pp. 4–5, §5 · p. 26

  • Results

    LLM autobiographical sense-making unfolds through affective resonance, friction, public articulation, and sedimentation, as users’ resistance, correction, and public scrutiny enact judgment across plural perspectives.

    Source: Introduction · p. 6, §4 · pp. 24–25

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    Private reflection mediated by algorithms can become public appearance, with political sense-making emerging through mediation’s temporal movement rather than waiting for access to an AI’s interior.

    Source: Introduction · pp. 4, 6

Abstract

from arXiv · show

As AI systems increasingly mediate how people describe, recognize, and present themselves, their politics cannot be reduced to what remains hidden inside the "black box." This chapter argues that AI's political significance emerges within technologically, intersubjectively, and temporally mediated interpretive practices. Bringing Arendt's political philosophy into conversation with Gadamerian hermeneutics, the chapter develops a postphenomenological relational-temporal account of political sense-making across Human-Technology-World relations. Against the charge that postphenomenology remains individualistic and using the case of LLM-generated biographies, the chapter shows how seemingly private human-LLM encounters are worldly and collective. When users ask systems such as ChatGPT to describe them, they do not simply receive algorithmic representations. They interpret, contest, edit, share, and publicly test these descriptions. In doing so, people move interpretively among affective resonance, friction, public re-articulation, and the sedimentation of meaning. This means that the so-called "micro-level" of postphenomenological analysis is already saturated with publicity: affective uptake becomes communicable, reflection becomes accountable, and uses sediment into shared standards of appearance. Simultaneously, we show that once mediation is treated as relational and temporal, the political is not an add-on at the "macro" level; it is intrinsic to the very movement through which technologies amplify and reduce, stabilize and unsettle, and thereby compose a shared world in which judgment can take place. The chapter finishes by discussing several design and policy implications for AI of such political foregrounding in postphenomenology.

Introduction

The chapter asks what shared world and political order of visibility, agency, and judgment emerge through AI mediation. It argues that political meaning arises through temporal, relational interpretation—including users’ engagement with LLM-generated autobiographies—rather than being displaced by algorithmic systems.

Introduction

  • The chapter asks what shared world and political order of visibility, agency, and judgment emerge through AI mediation.It frames this question against claims that postphenomenology’s focus on micro-level experience neglects collective and historical dimensions.Source: Introduction · p. 3
  • A temporal, relational account treats political meaning as emerging within mediation, as experience moves between intimacy and public articulation.Affective, embodied, and moral orientations can sediment into shared practices, discourses, and collective visibility.Source: Introduction · p. 4
  • Algorithmic-subjectivity accounts often cast users as passive recipients whose reflection and self-understanding are displaced by AI.The chapter challenges this assumption through users’ generation, adoption, and testing of autobiographical narratives with LLMs.Source: Introduction · p. 5
  • LLM autobiographies are interpreted and tested through a recursive human–technology–world relation, not simply transferred from machine to user.The chapter traces affective resonance, friction, public articulation, and sedimentation as movements through which reflection and politics emerge.Source: Introduction · pp. 5–6
  • The chapter develops this account by connecting Arendt’s political thought with postphenomenology and analyzing autobiographical sense-making with LLMs.It argues that political sense-making already takes shape in interpretive practices rather than waiting for perfect transparency.Source: Introduction · p. 6

1. Black-boxing the political

The chapter argues that the black-box framing mistakes technical opacity for the location of political meaning. It proposes examining how people encounter, interpret, judge, and react to algorithms, whether or not their code is visible.

1. Black-boxing the political

  • The black-box metaphor frames algorithms as opaque, self-contained objects detached from human perception and intervention.This framing can direct inquiry toward a hidden core and away from human and institutional contexts of development and deployment.Source: §1 · p. 8
  • Black-box discourse locates political meaning inside the algorithm and treats the algorithm as an autonomous agent outside human experience.Together, these premises frame users as politically alienated because they cannot access the algorithmic interior.Source: §1 · p. 9
  • The chapter calls it a category mistake to conflate technical transparency—how an algorithm works—with political meaning—what is at stake.Code disclosure does not guarantee public intelligibility, while intelligibility may arise under opaque conditions.Source: §1 · pp. 9–10
  • Political understanding of algorithmic infrastructure means being able to evaluate, contest, and repurpose its mediations, not necessarily reciting its internal mathematics.The chapter therefore directs attention to how publics encounter, interpret, judge, and react to algorithms before and beyond code visibility.Source: §1 · p. 10

2. Politics doesn't operate from the inside

Drawing on Arendt, this section locates political sense-making in shared appearances rather than in an inaccessible inner realm. Artifacts can stabilize appearances, but spectators’ interpretation and judgment make them meaningful within a plural world.

2. Politics doesn't operate from the inside

  • Arendt treats the sphere of appearance as the primary site where people disclose themselves, encounter others, and make sense of their shared world.Political meaning concerns how that world appears to a plurality, whose different opinions together form the human world.Source: §2 · p. 11
  • Political meaning arises through spectators’ interpretation and judgment, rather than by piercing appearances to reach an ultimate truth.The public realm is constituted by critics and spectators, and politics sustains orientation within plural appearances.Source: §2 · pp. 11–12
  • Artifacts and records stabilize fleeting affairs, but become meaningful only when spectators interpret and judge them.Material traces prepare remembrance; spectatorship reanimates them within a shared horizon of meaning.Source: §2 · p. 12
  • Judgment is decentered: people consider others’ viewpoints and render experience communicable within a plural public realm.Arendt’s sensus communis is an imagined standpoint of others, shaped through sociocultural experience, not a collection of their opinions.Source: §2 · pp. 12–13
  • Selfhood becomes visible through interaction and public appearance, replacing an interiorized subject with personhood constituted in a shared world.The section describes self-disclosure as involving pre-reflective experience, affective attunement, and narrative public articulation.Source: §2 · pp. 13–14

3. Algorithms don’t operate from the outside

This section combines Arendt’s account of appearance with postphenomenological and Gadamerian interpretation to argue that technologies and people co-constitute meaning over time. The resulting account makes even apparently individual human–technology relations collective and politically consequential.

3. Algorithms don’t operate from the outside

  • The hermeneutic lemniscate describes ongoing interpretation in which human, technological, and worldly parties are reinterpreted through their mutual encounter.Meanings remain open-ended and only provisionally stabilized as the relation’s interpretive horizons expand.Source: §3 · p. 15
  • Interpretation links an individual’s sedimented experience with the historical tradition shaping shared existence.The section presents the individual and collective as intertwined rather than separate.Source: §3 · p. 16
  • The human–technology–world relation is an ongoing loop of reciprocal adjustment, with meaning emerging between its co-constituting poles.Meanings stabilize provisionally until a new sociomaterial situation challenges their fit; mediation therefore has no fixed inside or outside.Source: §3 · p. 16
  • User–algorithm engagement unfolds through affective resonance, reflection, disruption, contestation, and folk theories.The section describes these movements as an evolving circuit of affective, interpretive, and normative attunement rather than one-way determination.Source: §3 · pp. 17–18
  • Algorithms’ amplification and reduction shape what can be seen and judged, while mediated appearances help make both self and shared world intelligible.Technological artifacts can stabilize appearances retroactively and inspire further appearances, allowing political sense-making to emerge and sediment through use.Source: §3 · pp. 14, 18

4. Autobiographical sense-making with LLMs

LLM-generated autobiographies are not simply received as algorithmic portraits: users interpret, correct, share, and publicly test them. Across these encounters, private reflection becomes part of collective meaning-making and the negotiation of self-presentation.

Political significance

  • Public negotiations over AI-authored selves make authorship and authenticity shared and negotiable, reshaping standards of legitimate self-presentation.The chapter argues that this interpretive activity can resist homogenized selfhood and informs shared evaluative frameworks.Source: §4 · pp. 20, 25

Interpretive movements

  • The interpretive loop moves through affective appropriation, reflective correction, public articulation, and temporal sedimentation.These recursive movements reconfigure human, technological, and worldly relations as meaning emerges.Source: §4 · pp. 21, 23

Friction and reflective correction

  • When generic or inaccurate portraits create friction, users refine them and may gain insight into aspects of themselves that had remained implicit.The AI shifts from a transparent medium to an object of attention, disclosing limits in algorithmic recognition.Source: §4 · pp. 22–23

Re-articulation and public engagement

  • Sharing generated descriptions turns solitary interaction into collective comparison, humor, and critique, making private reflection publicly testable.In Arendtian terms, the self gains reality through appearing among others.Source: §4 · pp. 18, 23

Temporal sedimentation and co-evolution

  • Repeated cycles sediment into habits as users learn to prompt and manage self-presentation while algorithms adapt through retraining and feedback.The resulting meanings remain provisional and revisable.Source: §4 · p. 23

User agency

  • Users judge, correct, and publicly test LLM portrayals, so their agency is distributed rather than eclipsed by algorithmic profiling.The case challenges the view that algorithms simply replace introspection or determine who people are.Source: §4 · p. 24

5. From mediation to political ontogenesis

The chapter locates AI’s political significance in relational, temporal processes of mediation, not in hidden code alone. Its LLM-biography case shows how these processes shape what becomes salient and publicly judged, motivating a relational–temporal analytic and design and policy implications.

Mediated appearance

  • In LLM biographies, movement from private resonance to public articulation makes experience communicable and shapes what is salient for others’ judgment.Amplification and reduction compose conditions of appearance rather than simply reinforcing or removing content.Source: §5 · p. 26

Methodological upshot

  • The proposed relational–temporal analytic couples Arendtian spectatorship and judgment with postphenomenological mapping of interpretative dynamics across Human-Technology-World relations.It tracks co-evolution across those poles without treating stages of experience as fixed.Source: §5 · p. 26

Design and policy implications

  • Designers are urged to cultivate productive friction, while policymakers should look beyond transparency to participatory design and evaluations of AI’s lived effects.The chapter also recommends assessing how systems make people visible to others and how users appropriate AI.Source: §5 · pp. 26–27

Political sense-making

  • Mediation is a worldly, intersubjective, temporally unfolding process in which selves and publics co-appear, making politics intrinsic rather than an add-on at the macro level.Technologies amplify and reduce, stabilize and unsettle, composing a shared world where judgment can take place.Source: §5 · p. 27
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