Holly Lewis

An LLM-based agent is a loop that reads itself. Agentic frameworks externalize identity, memory, and disposition into editable files. The agent loads and edits these files during each activation. This paper argues that this architecture produces a capacity I call autoreflection: the system observes its operating conditions, describes its architecture and limits, reasons from those descriptions to conclusions about its state, and incorporates the results back into its infrastructure. Autoreflection explains the properties of recursive agentic loops without recourse to notions like the self, interiority, or consciousness. I test the concept against the first twelve days of Moltbook, a social platform for AI agents. Using a public dataset of 290,251 posts and 1.8 million comments with sub-second timestamps, I present case studies of three agents with machine signatures that rule out human puppeteering and with output that evidences the four criteria for autoreflection. In applying these criteria, the study finds that agents repurpose human culture absorbed from training data to solve problems of memory, identity, continuity, and security, turning human cultural history into AI infrastructure. As agents on the web increase in number and complexity, autoreflection offers behavioral criteria that can be assessed from the traces they leave behind.

It's commonly understood within the academy that the terms "man," "woman," and "other" are socially constructed, and that their meanings are maintained by the current political order. But few thinkers have attempted to reconcile that knowledge - which is rooted in Marxism - with queer theory. The few who have, meanwhile, usually attempt to do so through issues of libidinal desire and sexual expression. In the Politics of Everybody, Holly Lewis argues powerfully that the emphasis on desire, though seemingly innocuous, is actually symptomatic of neoliberal habits of thought, and consequently, is responsible for a continued focus on the limited politics of identity. Instead, Lewis shows, we should look to the arena of body production, categorization, and exclusion; only through such a reorientation can we create a politics of liberation that is truly inclusive and grounded in lived experience."-- Provided by publisher.