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The talk begins from the contemporary centrality of artificial intelligence in American culture, society, politics and the economy. While often framed in terms of cognition or automation, AI is, at its core, a statistical enterprise: it operates through probabilistic inference, pattern recognition and the aggregation of large-scale data. The apparent novelty of AI thus invites a longer historical question: how has American culture imagined the relationship between individual experience and statistical abstraction? The talk will trace the effort to mediate between personal life and large-scale social patterns through statistical forms of knowledge. Such statistical imagination extends beyond formal statistics as a discipline, permeating also visual culture and aesthetic practice. It reflects a recurring desire to render a complex, heterogeneous society legible by linking the concrete and the abstract, the experiential and the systemic. 

Prof. Ian Afflerbach will present research from his forthcoming book, "Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult." For a hundred and fifty years, "selling out" has been a corrosive insult regularly deployed across American society. A remarkably wide range of communities--from feminist activists, to Black politicians, to punk rockers--have all used "selling out" as a shared rhetoric for monitoring group belonging and betrayal, a way to flag group members whose behavior appears corrupt or inauthentic. This talk will provide an overview of the book's contents and argument and a brief look into one section, on American writers "selling out." Finally, Prof. Afflerbach will discuss his own experience shifting from traditional scholarship to writing for a broader public audience and why anxieties about "selling out" also inflects contemporary academic life. "Selling out," Afflerbach concludes, is a moral anxiety that permeates modern American culture.