The production of cheap talk relies everywhere on the depoliticisation of communication. Cheap talk displaces a shared traversal of difference with a technocratic exchange of messages. […] This is a thoroughly sterile ecology of communication: minds making speech to transfer information to other minds. […] It is not [stuttering] but fluency that ensnares life with a type of deathly repetition.

This book explains how information capitalism commodifies and dehumanizes speech through the contrasting examples of speech pathology and television punditry. Written before the explosion in generative AI, the book is helpful for explaining the market logics underlying LLMs and for understanding what such “cheap talk” does to people and society.

There are political and existential questions at stake here that are difficult even to articulate within a surge of cheap talk: What might a dysfluent event become if not immediately managed? How might we relate differently? What might we become?