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The Newsroom. AI image From Political Economy to Symbolic Consumption In classical Marxist theory, capitalism is understood primarily through production. Karl Marx examined labor, exploitation, commodities, and alienation in order to explain the functioning of industrial society. Yet for Jean Baudrillard, this framework no longer fully captures the logic of contemporary capitalism. Modern society is not organized solely around factories and labor relations; it increasingly operates through advertising, communication networks, images, and manufactured desire. Baudrillard argues that consumer culture transforms objects into signs. A phone, a car, or a luxury watch is not purchased merely for practical use; each item carries symbolic meaning. Commodities promise prestige, fulfillment, attractiveness, and belonging. People therefore consume not simply material goods, but coded representations of happiness and identity. In this sense, capitalism no longer depends exclusively on producti...

Introduction: Why Does the Worker Vote Like the Employer? In a recent political debate in the United States, a question emerged that was as simple as it was unsettling: how is it possible that a Starbucks employee votes the same way as the CEO of Starbucks? Formulated with visible bewilderment, the question points to a paradox that seems to challenge the traditional categories of social analysis. If the interests of workers and employers are structurally opposed, why do they not translate into divergent political choices? Why, instead of conflict, do we find convergence? Perhaps the difficulty lies not in the answer, but in the way the question itself is framed. The Classical Framework: Class, Interest, and Consciousness From the perspective of Karl Marx, society is organized around its mode of production. Economic relations—the so-called “base”—condition political, legal, and ideological forms. Within this framework, social classes are defined by their position in the produc...

The Beginning of Symbolic Thought. AI art Introduction It is often assumed that AI models, unlike human beings, are severed from the real world. They deal only in symbols, without any access to perception, experience, or meaning. This view, however, rests on a questionable assumption: that humans themselves enjoy unmediated access to reality. Charles Sanders Peirce explicitly challenges this. In his words, “We think only in signs” (Peirce, CP 5.265). For both humans and machines, access to the world is always mediated through signs. The key difference lies not in whether signs are used, but in what kind and from where they are drawn. In this article, I argue that artificial intelligences participate in a sign-based process structurally analogous to that of human thought. Peirce’s theory offers a powerful framework to understand this. While machines operate on symbols produced by human reasoning—books, speeches, libraries—these are not devoid of meaning. They are, in fact, the cu...