Liviu Poenaru April 2026 No, we are not facing only an erosion of epistemic trust, but an epistemic shift. The problem is not simply that people trust less; it is that they increasingly trust differently. The collapse of confidence in institutions, science, journalism, images, and expert systems does not produce a population of lucid skeptics calmly examining evidence. More often, it produces subjects who are epistemically disoriented and therefore newly available to substitu

Excerpt from L. Poenaru, LOST IN SELF-CONSUMPTION. Blackout Selection and the Anti-Darwinian Regime of Extraction (in press, Cambridge Scholars) What kind of system selects individuals only to erode the very capacities it depends on? What form of selection no longer aims at preservation, stabilization, or reproduction, but instead organizes the progressive depletion of those it identifies as most functional? And what does it mean, biologically and structurally, to live with

What kind of technology claims to connect the world while quietly training it to disintegrate from within? Social media are atomic bombs with a slow temporal logic: they do not flatten cities in a second, which is precisely why they remain socially acceptable. Their devastation is cleaner, more profitable, and easier to deny. Instead of immediate ruins, they produce chronic erosion: of attention, of sleep, of self-worth, of trust, of developmental stability. The usual defense

What if the most dangerous shift is not that machines produce falsehoods, but that they produce credibility without ever passing through truth? The empirical trigger for this reflection lies in a report published in Nature by Chris Stokel-Walker (2026), documenting a controlled epistemic contamination: researchers deliberately fabricated a fictitious disease, Bixonimania , embedded it within counterfeit academic articles, and subsequently observed that several AI chatbots re

Liviu Poenaru, PhD What if Global [Dis]order is no longer primarily produced by external conflicts, but by the progressive internalization of validation systems embedded in everyday interactions with artificial intelligence? Sycophancy - the tendency of AI systems to excessively agree with users' beliefs, including inaccurate or biased ones - signals a transformation in epistemic regulation. Instead of generating contradiction or cognitive conflict, these systems privilege al

THE MENTAL FORECAST Recent neuroeconomic findings on addiction become more intelligible — and more troubling — when they are situated within the broader ecology of digital consumption and what we conceptualize as unconscious economic codes. Neuroeconomics shows that decision-making is not neutral but continuously shaped by valuation processes: the brain assigns subjective value to stimuli, updates this value through reinforcement learning, and selects actions accordingly. Wha

THE MENTAL FORECAST AI psychosis and AI neurosis are not formal diagnostic categories, but emerging conceptual tools designed to capture how interaction with generative AI systems becomes entangled with existing psychopathological processes. They function as analytical lenses rather than fixed clinical labels, allowing clinicians and researchers to detect transformations in subject–technology relations before they are stabilized within diagnostic systems. The distinction rema

Feb. 2026 MENTAL FORECAST The much-discussed “war of intelligences” between humans and artificial systems did not unfold as a confrontation. Almost immediately, the predicted conflict was transformed into something psychologically more complex: a large-scale dynamic resembling a global Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome refers to a psychological response in which victims develop emotional attachment, loyalty, sympathy, and sometimes even affection toward those who capture

Feb. 2026 Could a biological signal circulating in the bloodstream influence whether people interact with others face-to-face or through social media? And more specifically, does inflammation push individuals toward digital social environments, or could social media use itself contribute to inflammatory stress? A recent study by Lee, Jiang, and Way (2026) examined whether systemic inflammation predicts the type of social interaction individuals prefer. Using C-reactive protei

Feb. 2026 What is a digital phenotype? It is the behavioral “fingerprint” generated by our daily interactions with smartphones — patterns of movement, typing speed, sleep timing, app switching, communication rhythms, and sensor-derived data that, when aggregated, can reflect psychological states. Because many of these variables are proxies for biological rhythms — sleep–wake cycles, motor activity regularity, autonomic arousal inferred from usage bursts — smartphone apps or p