That Which Can Be Tokenized

Bratton's working definition, from the 57 Ideas lecture, of what language and culture become under cognitive infrastructures: "language is now that which can be tokenized. Anything that can be tokenized can count as language" — a functionalization that "is not only changing what you do with language, it's changing what language is," blurring language into data and calculation. The studio info session makes the same move for culture: culture is whatever can be included in a model, and once tokenized the model is "not only a representation of a culture" but "the medium through which the culture senses and models and simulates and acts back upon itself," a role previously reserved for natural language. Generative Topolinguistics works the same ground from the other side (tokenization "produces a space of social meaning"). Whether tokenization bounds culture or merely samples it is left open.