language models operate in archival slices — frozen cultural moments recombined as if timeless. Each model release creates a new epoch, already slipping toward obsolescence

culture is non-stationary—it changes, mutates, refuses to hold still. As Emmet puts it, models “actually get dumber over time as you use them,” because they are frozen snapshots of a past cultural moment. What they capture brilliantly is instantly outdated; what they recombine convincingly is subtly decayed.

LLMs introduce a temporality that is genuinely new: one that forces us to invent new cultural modes of production. How do we write, create, and remember in an environment where our tools are discontinuous archives, replaced every few years? How do we treat cultural memory when it arrives in frozen epochs, each already obsolete the moment it

The internet embodies this carnival temporality with startling clarity:

• Cyclical bursts : meme cycles, outrage waves, and news frenzies erupt, fade, and return with variation.

• Inversions : anonymous users become viral, while experts, CEOs, and politicians are mocked, parodied, or dethroned.

• Acceleration & simultaneity : the timeline collapses

Carnival time is cyclical, regenerative, and collective. Hierarchies collapse; fools become kings, the sacred is mocked, and the grotesque body — open, excessive, laughing — takes center stage. François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel embodied this mode: giants born through grotesque parodies of childbirth, endless feasts and banquets, obscene