Hera Hyeonseo Lee, "Brain Rot: Cognitive Decomposition as a Structural Externality of Attention Assetization" (DOI: 10.1177/14614448261448834/), New Media & Society, Forthcoming
This article theorizes "brain rot" not as a cultural malaise or individual failing but as a systemic condition of platform capitalism. Integrating world-systems analysis with attention economy critique, it argues that cognition has become a new frontier of intensive accumulation. As platforms assetize attention to stabilize speculative valuation, engagement-driven design restructures the neurological conditions of sustained thought. The article analyzes this process through its class-stratified distribution and its institutional collision within the university, where deep learning confronts the high-frequency logic of extraction.
Hera Hyeonseo Lee, "Infrastructural Locking: Financialization, AI Infrastructure, and the Reorganization of the World-System" (Under review)
This paper examines the TSMC–Nvidia–CHIPS Act nexus to show how financial markets and state policy co-produce irreversible AI infrastructure concentration. It develops the concept of accumulation by infrastructural locking, a mechanism that converts speculative expectations into material fixity, transforming uncertainty into dependency and dependency into rent. The paper argues that this represents a structural mutation within the current systemic cycle, not simply a speculative bubble awaiting correction.
Hera Hyeonseo Lee, "Contradiction Relocation: Labor, Environment, and Geopolitical Displacement in Financialized AI Infrastructure" (working paper)
This paper frames the U.S.–China semiconductor rivalry as an arrested hegemonic transition in which both powers pursue the same mechanism, infrastructural locking, through competing systems. It traces how the costs of this regime are displaced onto East Asian geopolitical flashpoints, ecological degradation through data center energy demands and rare-earth extraction, and Global South labor in data labeling and content moderation.
Hera Hyeonseo Lee, "Too Entangled to Fail: The Financial Infrastructure of Generative AI and the Political Economy of Alignment” (working paper)
This paper reframes AI alignment failures as structural outcomes of financialized infrastructure rather than technical problems awaiting engineering solutions. It reconceptualizes hallucinations as analogous to synthetic liquidity and RLHF as a form of credit enhancement, diagnosing the generative AI ecosystem's epistemic insolvency as a consequence of the financial circuits sustaining it.
My dissertation argues that post-2008 financialization has taken a new form: speculative valuation now embeds itself directly in material infrastructure, producing dependencies too entangled to unwind. I call this accumulation by infrastructural locking. The dissertation traces this process through the self-referential financial circuits of AI infrastructure, the state's role in underwriting and exporting private monopoly, the coupling of retirement savings to AI valuations, the feedback loop between attention extraction and compute demand, and the displacement of systemic costs onto ecological, labor, and geopolitical peripheries.
Political economy of AI, AI governance and tech policy, digital infrastructure and compute governance, financialization, world-systems analysis, historical capitalism and hegemonic transition, platform capitalism, attention economy