Postdigital backlash: The phantom premise

This is an expanded version of a talk I gave at the Postdigital backlash conference in Zagreb in June 2026. My proposal is that while the backlash (refusal or resistance) to Gen AI is commonly based on notions of stolen labour underlying this is a powerful reaction to the simulation of Person. The, in some terms, successful simulation of Person in mainstream forms of Gen AI extends the hyperreality of the digital environment to a point at which it approaches saturation. This all encompassing hyperreality has no exit as the final referent to the real of ‘Person’ has now been…