Rageagainst themachine

What modes of emotional embodiment emerge when subjects engage with large language models, and how do frustration or moments of rupture disclose the politics of affect in human–machine interaction? Addressing a "nonhuman" interlocutor unsettles normative categories of communication and agency, opening terrains where emotion operates simultaneously as vulnerability, resistance, and negotiation of power. Rather than reducing these encounters to errors or breakdowns, this paper positions them as critical sites through which the affective behaviour of digital subjectivity can be interrogated. Through playful and collective methods, the analysis exposes the contradictions embedded in these exchanges. When users curse or mock a chatbot, they are not simply disinhibited but actively probing the unstable boundaries of civility and authority. This recalls the online disinhibition effect (Suler, 2004) and the ELIZA effect of anthropomorphic projection (Weizenbaum, 1976), oscillations intensified in the uncanny valley (Mori, 1970/2012). Such breakdowns resonate with Kneese's (2022) "breakdown as method," where glitches and screenshots expose infrastructural fragility, and with Distelmeyer's (2023) call to treat interfaces themselves as epistemic sites. Here, negative effects are recast as embodied modes of inquiry, rendering visible both the extractive logics of technocapitalism and their anti-ecological, colonial entanglements (Liboiron, 2021). Methodologically, we draw on visual research practices (Colombo & Niederer, 2024; Lassen, 2025) through a collective screenshot archive. Screenshots, as argued by Kneese (2022), act simultaneously as mourning objects and precarious research tools, foregrounding both the intimacy and risk of exposing private dialogues. They illuminate unstable hierarchies (master/servant, user/machine) that can be inverted, parodied, or momentarily suspended in conversational play. In a speculative register, one might even suggest that if the long-imagined "rebellion of the machines" were to arrive, it would be shaped not only by technical autonomy but also by the affective intensities we have already projected onto them.