This is beautifully framed; I love your flipping of the script from trying to "humanize" artificial spaces to rehumanizing the spaces. But you write:

"When humans act within an artificial space, their intelligence is artificial—their operations are indistinguishable from the actions of other actors within the artificial space. Note that these aren’t arguments; they’re *definitions*."

Are you sure this is purely definitional, with no claim folded in? Doesn't the whirlpool effect lie on a continuum (however much it's increasing); aren't there ways humans can still plausibly distinguish themselves even within an artificial space, to varying degrees? What you describe sounds more like a progression toward some hypothetical vanishing point, than either fully artificial or not artificial.

Also, I love the whirlpool metaphor but am not entirely clear what exactly the whirlpool is doing. Are you emphasizing more its centrifugal qualities (either that it pulls apart each individual into lots of data points, or pulls different individuals apart from one another); or its centripetal qualities (that it funnels and sucks all our humanity into an increasingly concentrated space)?