An interpretation of Trans-Asia Critical Humanities based on generalizable notions of hybridity, interconnected flows, and horizontality evokes the principle of nested, generative feedback functions, which increasingly undergird finance capital, machine learning, and data governance today. A diagram of loops easily conjures the recursive fantasy driving our economic infrastructure, which claims that everything belongs to the same kind of network. In view of this cultural logic of self-generating networks, even our prized notions of scholarly self-reflexivity, and by extension, complicity, may be inadequate. Despite this preliminary cynicism, my talk inhabits different scales of thinking to argue that the crucial difference between a speculative, heuristic loop and an automated, systemic one remains one for the critical humanities to make. “Asia in Loops” maps the trajectory of my research beginning from my first book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1896-1906 (Duke UP, 2021). From there, I share my ongoing research that attempts a version of Trans-Asia, which does not reproduce the curves and lines of interconnectedness found in any Belt-and-Road-Initiative-related infographics. Ultimately, “Asia in Loops” raises a very old problem: can culture or critique still assert its autonomy in the face of the recursive principles driving such varying political-technical-commercial assemblages or network forms: And can we do so without worrying excessively about method?