NOTE: This will make sense if you read the Wikipedia on 1000 Plateaus first if you're new to Deleuze and Guattari
It has been interesting watching the concept of Artificial Intelligence escape the territory that it had previously occupied. That territory was a strange, vibrant, semi-coherent mess of obscure labs, niche forums, IRC channels, LessWrong threads, half-baked simulators, cracked libraries, and deeply opinionated weirdos who were arguing about alignment and intelligence takeoff curves while the rest of the world was still trying to figure out how to update HTML for their Myspace to make it sparkle. Then all of a sudden the Zeitgeist gets injected with ChatGPT and now everyone is acting like they just discovered fire... except the fire is already a distributed industrial process that has been developing since the invention of the term (At the 1955 Dartmouth Conference) and now the Boy Scouts have arrived to map it like it’s some undiscovered continent.
AI, as a practice, deterritorialized out of its original enclosure and became rhizomatic (this is where understanding 1000 plateaus helps). Before GPT-2, AI existed in what Deleuze and Guattari would call a "territorialized" assemblage, aka an affinity or social group with some social hierarchy. That meant you had to pass through specific gates to even participate: you needed access to papers, you needed to speak the dialect, you needed to know why backpropagation mattered and why everyone was arguing about transformers versus LSTMs vs etc.., Because of that, the discourse was not accessible and was frankly not a space for anyone not rabidly interested in the intersection of neuroscience and computing with little other interests.
Then ChatGPT happens and that formerly territorial interface collapses into the "text box that's going to make all the money."" This is the equivalent of taking a highly specialized experimental system and replacing it with a slot machine that your grandmother can poke at while half-watching Saved by an Angel (or whatever grandmothers today watch.) That was the moment of deterritorialization, because the barrier to entry for participating in "Artificial Intelligence" dropped to near zero. AI moved into being an ambient property of the social field which laypeople have no depth on.
Now it's 2026 and teachers, lawyers, teenagers, artists, bureaucrats, soldiers, founders, grifters, doomers, accelerationists, and every flavor of internet goblin all plugging into the same underlying capability but with completely different priors, completely different incentives, and completely different models of what the hell they are interacting with.
Welcome to the world of psychedelic fragmentation of meaning where “AI” simultaneously means productivity tool, existential threat, cheating machine, creative partner, surveillance apparatus, job killer, and toy, all at once. Oh and all of those interpretations are feeding expectation data back into real systems which, because they are based on the embedded narratives of their data then inform the direction of the technology.
Of course people are confused, misusing it, overhyping it, underestimating it, projecting onto it, moralizing about it, and generally making a mess of the whole fucking thing. Thanks to 1000 Plateaus we can be confident to conclude then: this is what it looks like when something "escapes" a specialized territory and enters general circulation. Much like physics did 100 years ago like clockwork, humans are so predictable it's a joke.
If however, you’ve been inside the AGI discourse for years, this phase is uniquely disorienting.
I'm watching conversations that were hashed out a decade ago get rediscovered in degenerate form. I liken it to watching a group of loud enthusiastic amateurs stumble into a specialized library where all the books are dogeared, out of order and half of them are missing pages. This new group is now confidently debating questions that were already explored, rejected, and mutated multiple times by people who had far more context.
The instinct to grab these clowns by the throat and say “you are about ten iterations behind the state of the art and missing half the variables,” is tempting but misses the point of deterritorialization. Once the system/meme/structure is rhizomatic interpretations, infrastructures, and power structures dominate the narrative, and the thing that persists is whomever generates the most density of the connections (market share, thought leadership, blah, blah...) as they redefine what was, if not a conclusive, at least an orderly way to have the conversation.
So now what...well:
You may also know reterritorialization as, wait for it::::: Colonization! What a classic. This is where states, corporations, and really whatever institutions have power attempt to reimpose structure on these runaway flows. We get API pricing, we get enterprise wrappers, we get compliance layers, we get safety regimes, you get “acceptable use” policies.
Entire industries forming around controlling, auditing, and monetizing access to these systems, and suddenly the wild rhizome starts getting channeled into something that looks suspiciously like the old structures but with new capabilities embedded inside them. Who could have possibly predicted that other than every revolutionary economist, historian, philosopher and engineer. The production of meaning, analysis, and decision support is no longer exclusively tied to human brains, and once that decoupling reaches a certain threshold, the rest of the social system has to reorganize around it whether people like it or not.
From a Thousand Plateaus perspective, the current moment of confusion, excitement, fear, and outright stupidity is evidence that "the thing" has already escaped, and that we are now living inside the early stages of a rhizomatic expansion that is going to be messy, contested, uneven, and very likely co-opted in a dozen different ways. If there's something that WONT happen it's that it gores back into the box.
And if you’ve been around long enough to remember when this was all still contained to a group of oddfellows in corners of labs, when the conversations were obscure and the stakes felt abstract, the correct reaction should be of success! We collectively pushed hard engough that AI/AGI/ASI went from niche group of weirdos to where the world plays for power struggle, like every revolutionary technology ever. Who captures which parts of it and how that reshapes everything downstream is the only reminaing question. Unfortunately basically nobody has the ability to propose answers and even if they did the population is so incapable of understanding it they can't differentiate anyway.
Bonne chance my fellow old school AIers it's wild out there
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrew Kemendo