Han, Huiwen: Cyber-Grooming: AI-Mediated Phatic Communion and the Ritual Evacuation of Semantic Content

We develop a sociological account of how AI-mediated cognitive decoupling is insti- tutionalised and rendered invisible through ritual practice. Drawing on Malinowski's phatic communion, Collins's interaction ritual chain theory, Goman's dramaturgi- cal framework, and Baudrillard's theory of simulacra, we argue that the Expansion Compression (EC) loop identied in Paper 0 does not merely fail to transmit se- mantic content it actively substitutes a social ritual for a communicative act in a mann