The AI-Induced Subjectivity Crisis Series, Paper 13: How Individual Closure Becomes Civilizational Decline: The Social Transmission Mechanisms of the AI-Induced Epistemological Crisis

This paper constitutes Paper 13 of the AI-Induced Subjectivity Crisis Series. This paper This paper argues that the epistemological crisis induced by large language models (LLMs) cannot be understood as the simple aggregation of individual cognitive effects. Between individual-level cognitive closure and civilizational-scale epistemological decline, a social transmission layer has been almost entirely absent from current discourse. This paper fills that gap by arguing for three social transmission channels through which individual cognitive closure is synchronized, amplified, and institutionalized into a civilizational-scale crisis. The first channel is the heterogeneity sealing of platform domestication loops: LLMs transform the self-media-era tripartite conditioning circuit—which weakened but preserved cognitive heterogeneity—into a structurally sealed system by simultaneously eliminating creator productivity bottlenecks and providing users with unlimited personalized self-confirmation. The second channel is the institutional migration of meaning supply: the authority to define meaning has migrated from institutional monopoly through self-media democratization to the complete privatization of the AI age, reducing the cost of meaning generation to near zero and systematically weakening reality’s power to correct cognition. The third channel is generational metacognitive rupture: LLMs systematically shorten the uncertainty exposure required for metacognitive development, and a generation that never develops metacognitive capacity will not recognize or transmit what it lacks, producing a self-referential disappearance of the metacognitive threshold from generational reproduction. The paper reframes the aggregation problem itself, arguing that for the vast majority of human epistemological practice, institutional standards are not exogenous constants but the institutionalized expression of collective cognitive states—individual cognitive drift, at sufficient scale, directly constitutes institutional drift. The three channels operate not in parallel but in mutual acceleration, forming a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop that degrades Epistemological Infrastructure with the gradualism, invisibility, and self-referential repair difficulty characteristic of structural decay. The paper offers a structural diagnosis with traceable transmission pathways, not a normative prescription or a deterministic prophecy.