Hera Hyeonseo Lee, "Brain Rot: Cognitive Decomposition as a Structural Externality of Attention Assetization" https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448261448834 , New Media and Society, Preprint ver: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ps5f2_v1
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.
Lee H, "Contradiction Relocation: Labor, Environment, and Geopolitical Displacement in Financialized AI Infrastructure" (working paper)
Lee H, "Extractive Defaults: Asymmetrical Friction and the Interface Architecture of Financialized Attention” Under review, Available at SSRN https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7447662
Lee H, “The Epistemic Liquidity Crisis: Post-2008 Finance and the Political Economy of AI Alignment” Under review, Available at SSRN https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7447678
Lee H, "Held by Default: Retirement Finance, Index Fund Architecture, and the Self-Insulation of AI Capital" (working paper)
Lee H, “The Cost of Scope: World-Systems Analysis and the Limits of Relational Critique” (working paper)
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 extending AI infrastructure concentration, 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, economic sociology, attention economy