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Disintegrator
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Disintegrator

de Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean

Novo52. Cognitive Futures (w/ Metahaven)5 de novembro de 2026 · 54 min
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5 nov 2026
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Sobre o podcast

What does it mean to be human in an age where experience and behavior are mediated and regulated by algorithms? The Disintegrator Podcast is a limited series exploring how Artificial Intelligence affects who we are and how we express ourselves.

Join Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean as they speak to the artists, philosophers, scientists, and social theorists at the forefront of human-AI relations.

Disintegrator is produced by Rubén Bañuelos.

Episódios 69

  1. 52. Cognitive Futures (w/ Metahaven)

    54 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 15

    We’re joined by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven, the Amsterdam-based artist collective known for their filmmaking, writing, and design. In some part we're here to talk about their new book …

    Notas do episódio
    We’re joined by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven, the Amsterdam-based artist collective known for their filmmaking, writing, and design. In some part we're here to talk about their new book, The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures (Verso, 2026), though also at the top of our minds is Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans, written this year with Nina Beguš, Gašper Beguš and Riccardo Petrini for Antikythera.

    The Hard Question of Art opens by conceding that art does not change the world, at least in the way we were told it would. For Daniel, art does its actual work by being perceived, and any politics of art has to start from what that perception does.

    Latent Spacecraft starts from a GAN trained on eight words of English that begins inventing new ones the way a child does, and lets you walk around inside its vector space. On a walk Daniel found a battered Finnegans Wake on a free sidewalk bookshelf, 30 or 40 words on page one that appear in no dictionary, and a GAN trained on Joyce babbles Joycean, which Whisper and GPT-4 collapse into different subtitles. Daniel brings in Anthropic’s J-space paper, where researchers found words Claude has in mind before it answers, as the case for treating a model’s interior as a place you can enter.

    We're so delighted to have them on the pod!

  2. 51. Worlds (w/ Federico Campagna)

    1 h 13 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 14

    Sorry this took so long we published a major whitepaper and went on tour ok???? But we've got a ton in the chamber we're back we're so back thanks for your patience.We’re joined by Federico Campagna …

    Notas do episódio
    Sorry this took so long we published a major whitepaper and went on tour ok???? But we've got a ton in the chamber we're back we're so back thanks for your patience.

    We’re joined by Federico Campagna: philosopher and writer and magic man in his own right. Campagna is associate fellow at the Warburg Institute, for years the rights director at Verso, and author of Technic and Magic (2018), Prophetic Culture (2021) and Otherworlds (2025). He also co-created Agora with Andrea Bellini at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, a stipended semester of art and philosophy whose lectures are released free afterwards.

    What can anyone say about Reality itself? Nearly the whole conversation is about worlding, the subject of the book Campagna is writing now for 2027. For Campagna a world gets built in exactly one place, the individual imagination, which cuts the continuum of Reality (capital R) into separate beings. He calls the faculty doing the cutting language, in a sense wide enough to include mathematics and dancing, which picks up right where our episode with Beatrice Fazi and co. on the cut left off.

    The cut creates its objects for the first time: France exists because people decided to invent it, and once invented it can tell them who to kill. The trouble starts when you bring the shared metaphysics home and see a human in the mirror, which for Campagna is the moment you “stop being a creator and you become a creature.

    The last twenty minutes are a real fight. Campagna reads AI as a tool made by the top of the capitalist class, which past a certain amount trades in power instead of money, to erase the last theoretical leverage of workers. Marek pushes back hard: AI came out of cybernetics and deep learning long before it met labor exploitation, Simondon gives technical objects a pull of their own, and Marc Andreessen matters more than Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Campagna holds his ground with grammar (“real fucking innovation”), the sonnet and the surname, all technologies on his account, and proposes that we stop calling AI technology until we call the alphabet one too. Banger.

  3. 50. The Infinite Company (w/ Dave Wright and Brian Solis)

    43 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 13

    We're incredibly honored to be joined by Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow, and Brian Solis, ServiceNow's Head of Global Innovation, digital anthropologist, and nine-time author. Together …

    Notas do episódio
    We're incredibly honored to be joined by Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow, and Brian Solis, ServiceNow's Head of Global Innovation, digital anthropologist, and nine-time author. Together, Dave and Brian run ServiceNow Futures and have just published Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies (Wiley, 2026).

    This is an awesome episode, where we have the luxury of talking to quite literal titans of industry about applied AI. We start with the concept of the 'workflow,' the graph-structure of business logic — designed, as Dave puts it, for the limitations of people and the scarcity of resources, and now confronting an abundance of intelligence. From there we work our way to the tantalizing concept at the core of their book, an 'infinite company,' a company that is technically enabled to such an extent that it can continously, progressively, reinvent itself.

    Marek pushes the concept to its limits: can an infinite company generate synthetic demand? Can it get infinitely big? And when does it tip into a true dark enterprise, agents making executive decisions about what to build and why? For Brian and Dave, the answer leaves a path open for humans as leaders, workers, and collaborators, who function to destabilize the linear, incremental self-improvement of agentic systems and reroute business into new and unexpected places.

    At the core of our conversation: Brian Solis & Dave Wright, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies(Wiley, 2026). See: infinitecompany.ai

  4. 49. Garden (w/ Anna Greenspan)

    52 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 12

    We're joined by Anna Greenspan: philosopher, Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the Center for AI and Culture, and author of Shanghai Future and China and the Wireless Undertow. Longtime …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Anna Greenspan: philosopher, Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the Center for AI and Culture, and author of Shanghai Future and China and the Wireless Undertow. Longtime listeners will recognize her twice over — as co-editor of Machine Decision is Not Final and as the author of Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine.

    The occasion is Greenspan's new research: a philosophy of the artificial built through the garden. If AI is now something "grown, not built," the garden raises the question of agency immediately — anyone who tries to make one learns that the thing the garden gardens is the gardener. Greenspan is surveying seven aesthetic garden traditions, and here we tour a few.

    References:
    Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872), esp. "The Book of the Machines"
    Anna Greenspan, Bogna Konior, Benjamin Bratton and Amy Ireland (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2024)
    Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014)
    Anna Greenspan, China and the Wireless Undertow: Media as Wave Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
    Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — the third critique, source of the beautiful and the sublime
    Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677) — parallelism of mind and body; sad passions and joy
    Mou Zongsan (牟宗三), New Confucian philosopher; translated Kant into Chinese, argued the supersensible is accessible through practice
    Xiong Shili (熊十力), Mou's teacher; philosophy of contraction and expansion drawn from the I Ching
    Nikolai Kondratiev, "The Long Waves in Economic Life" (1925; English translation 1935)
    Joseph Schumpeter and the neo-Schumpeterians; Carlota Perez
    Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) and The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024)
    Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (1998)
    Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness; the ikebana essay ("The Japanese Art of Arranged Flowers")
    Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015)
    Gilbert Simondon — invoked by Marek on technological individuation
    Sharawadgi — from William Temple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1685)
    The ha-ha; Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening (1770)
    David J. Chalmers, "What We Talk to When We Talk to Language Models" (2025)

  5. 48. Indifference Engine (w/ Wassim Alsindi & Paul Dylan-Ennis)

    57 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 11

    We're joined by Paul Dylan-Ennis and Wassim Alsindi, two of crypto's sharpest in-house critics, who arrived at the same place from opposite directions.Paul is a lecturer at University College Dublin, author of …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Paul Dylan-Ennis and Wassim Alsindi, two of crypto's sharpest in-house critics, who arrived at the same place from opposite directions.

    Paul is a lecturer at University College Dublin, author of Absolute Essentials of Ethereum, an early speculative realist (co-founder of Speculations), and a member of the Silviculture Society, the informal cypherpunk body that keeps check on the Ethereum Foundation.

    Wassim is a chemical physicist turned record-label operator turned MIT Media Lab researcher, founder of 0x Salon in Berlin, and a self-described "deradicalized Bitcoin maximalist." Hell yeah.

    We start with Wassim's essay 'Open Swords,' which insists that open source has to die. The utopian horizon of the cypherpunks (Tim May's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, Eric Hughes' clarion call, Barlow's Declaration) has been repurposed into systems of closure, with Palantir, Anduril, Helsing, and the corporate AI monoliths built on the backs (and skulls) of open source development.

    We go hard on the idea of the cypherbunk in general, into computational counter-politics, Nick Land's Crypto-Current, and Wassim's critical concept of necro-primitivism (Bitcoin as an indifference engine that cannot care about anything outside its thermoeconomic event horizon, now awaiting its quantum-computing civil war.)

    References:
    Wassim Alsindi, "Open Swords" (Akisoma)
    Timothy C. May, "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" (1988)
    Eric Hughes, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (1993)
    John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (1996)
    Wassim Alsindi, "The Necroprimitivist Manifesto" (2021) & the Indifference Engine project
    Nick Land, Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy (Šum edition)
    Anna Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine (2000)
    Paul Dylan-Ennis, Absolute Essentials of Ethereum (Routledge, 2024)
    Paul Dylan-Ennis, Continental Realism (Zero Books, 2011)
    Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief (2010)

  6. 47. Invocation (w/ E. Elias Merhige and Gavin Gamboa)

    1 hTemporada 5 · Episódio 10

    E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect …

    Notas do episódio

    E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero.

    Gavin Gamboa is a composer, pianist, and video artist who wrote the music for Polia & Blastema and works in local-first "digital gardens" and the piano repertoire.

    What began as their shared film becomes, here, a way into a single question Elias poses at the top: what is being born through us - and is that thing digesting us on its way out?

    From there the conversation moves through desire and digestion as the engine of creation, and what happens when the interval between the wound and the poem collapses to nothing. Merhige treats AI as atavistic rather than alien: a dark mirror, an artificial unconscious, a "necromantic bureaucracy" of dead expressions made responsive, and reads the manuscript and the personal library as older machines through which the dead already speak.

    Gamboa holds a more skeptical line, defending manual effort and drawing on Marshall McLuhan's "auto-amputation" and his own experiments training models on his audio.

    The guests & their workBooks & essays cited
    • Thomas Moynihan, “The GASTRULATION of GEIST: or, an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation,” Vast Abrupt, 8 February 2018, link.
    • Kate Crawford, "Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop," e-flux
    • Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), Bloomsbury

  7. 46. Building Doors (w/ Yancey Strickler)

    1 h 3 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 9

    We're joined by Yancey Strickler: writer, cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the person behind a string of projects that try to give creative life a workable economic form: Bentoism, The Creative …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Yancey Strickler: writer, cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the person behind a string of projects that try to give creative life a workable economic form: Bentoism, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, the Dark Forest Collective, and now Artist Corporations and the Dark Forest Operating System. The episode is timely. We recorded in late May, days before Governor Jared Polis signed the Colorado Artist Company Act into law on June 2, 2026 - the country's first "A Corp," a company type where the artist keeps majority control, intellectual property reverts to its maker if the company dissolves, and an artistic mission sits above profit. More than 4,000 creators have already signed up, and several states are drafting their own versions.

    Where this show usually works by critique, Strickler builds working alternatives and writes them into law. Our running question throughout: when criticizing the system is the admired move, is building something real the more radical act, or does anything built inside the system end up serving it?


    Yancey Strickler's projects
    Artist Corporations & the lawThe private internet, AI & IP
    • Dark Forest Operating System (DFOS) — app.dfos.com · protocol spec at protocol.dfos.com · code on GitHub
    • Strickler on DIDs, the AT Protocol and Bluesky ("Antienshittification") — ystrickler.com
    • Holly+ (Holly Herndon's voice model / licensing experiment) — holly.plus
    Books & ideas cited

  8. [LIVE AT INDEX] The Datacenter Does Not Exist (Q&A w/ Dena Yago)

    1 h 15 min

    Disintegrator's spring tour lecture, love to watch this continue to unfold in real life. Thanks to Index, Montez Radio, Hugh, Elie, the Disintegrator team and especially Dena Yago for joining us. For the …

    Notas do episódio
    Disintegrator's spring tour lecture, love to watch this continue to unfold in real life. Thanks to Index, Montez Radio, Hugh, Elie, the Disintegrator team and especially Dena Yago for joining us. For the visually hxc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbWCcHbtWY (good slides).

  9. [NECROLECTURE] The Excarnated Angel: On AI and the Impossibility of Touch

    41 min

    Marek solo ep. To be released on Nuda Mag <3 later this year in text form.Piece starts like 17 minutes in hahaha.

  10. 45. El Apocalipsis Ya Está Aquí (w/ no.investigues)

    1 h 14 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 7

    This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript. We are delighted to be joined by the algorithmically contagious memetic research project …

    Notas do episódio
    This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript.

    We are delighted to be joined by the algorithmically contagious memetic research project no.investigues. If you are chronically online, especially if you are familiar with the Spanish-speaking corners of the internet, you must have already interacted with one of the echoes of no.investigues —probably through their wonderful Substack, or in conversation at their Discord book club, or through the 28.research cluster, or most likely through monumental Instagram meme carousels.

    Their voice flows through online algorithmic inertia, yet the substance of their discourse exists in the shadow of virality.

    In this conversation, we talk about what it means to understand the apocalypse as an asymmetrical phenomenon: no one experiences it at the same time, and clearly not with the same intensity. This polyphonic nature of the apocalypse is amplified by the increasingly atomized and homogeneous global distribution of violence.

    Even so, the apocalypse is already here, and we might be better off learning how to inhabit it. Through an extrapolated reading of Ernesto Oroza’s visual archive Desobediencia Tecnológica (Technological Disobedience), documenting repurposed technology in Cuba, we talk about repurposing salvaged discourses into newly assembled modes of thinking that would allow us to confront the roughness of our apocalyptic situation. This invitation resonates with a thread that runs through our conversations ever since Exocapitalism came out: the premise that perhaps the apocalypse and capital are forces not to be treated as enemies, but as inertias of History. Both demand a nuanced engagement with their diverse local articulations of violence. Under this framework, the apocalypse feels like an ineluctable situation, one that cannot be won by fighting.

    Instagram: https://instagram.com/no.investigues/
    Selected no.investigues substack posts:
    Pensamiento apocalíptico, una aproximación: https://substack.com/home/post/p-192881638
    La Torre: https://substack.com/home/post/p-191289547
    Desobediencia Tecnológica de Ernesto Oroza: https://substack.com/home/post/p-179603849

    References: Valencia, Sayak. Capitalismo gore. Barcelona: Melusina, 2010. ISBN: 978-84-96614-87-1. Oroza, Ernesto. Desobediencia tecnológica: La permanencia de lo temporal en Cuba. Ciudad de México: FIEBRE Ediciones, 2025.

  11. 44. The Grid (w/ Molly Taft)

    60 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 6

    Molly Taft, Senior Writer at Wired, joins us to talk datacenters, AI, US power infrastructure, and big energy. You've almost definitely read her work, especially if you live in the US. This episode absolutely …

    Notas do episódio
    Molly Taft, Senior Writer at Wired, joins us to talk datacenters, AI, US power infrastructure, and big energy. You've almost definitely read her work, especially if you live in the US. This episode absolutely ROCKS and is maybe the most grounded and realistic assessment of the role that all of those above forces play together in our social and political moment.

    A couple really relevant pieces, including some very very recent pieces.
    https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-will-be-powered-by-a-massive-gas-plant/
    https://www.wired.com/story/senators-demand-to-know-how-much-energy-data-centers-use/
    https://www.wired.com/story/new-bernie-sanders-ai-safety-bill-would-halt-data-center-construction/
    https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use-statistics/
    https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-gas-boom/
    https://www.wired.com/story/trump-energy-industry-ai-fossil-fuels-pittsburgh-summit/
    https://www.wired.com/story/ai-carbon-emissions-energy-unknown-mystery-research/

    Seriously, like, this is the only person I've found to be consistently trustworthy with respect to the intersection of energy reporting and tech. Follow her on X: https://x.com/mollytaft.

    She also reccomends a few other pieces that we touch on a little bit:
    Tina Nguyen's recent piece on the Pro-Human Declaration (right-wing populism X AI backlash) https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/888841/pro-human-ai-declaration-fli

    Gaby del Valle on the forefront of environmentalism and the right: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/state-of-nature-gaby-del-valle-acc-conservative-environmentalism/

    Anti-renewable energy protests and anti-data center movements: https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/data-centers-renewables-opposition

  12. 43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)

    56 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 5

    We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles.

    Tripaldi's work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy computation: that intelligence is substrate-indifferent, that it can scale and migrate independent of what carries it. She argues the opposite, that you cannot separate intelligence from the materials through which it is conveyed.

    This becomes experimentally clear in her recent essay Substrates Unbound (Antikythera, 2025), where she tracks biocomputing systems like DishBrain — living neuronal cultures interfaced with silicon chips that don't execute pre-given code but reorganize, learn, and adapt. Mouse neurons and human neurons perform differently under the same training conditions. This reframes a central question of the moment: not 'can we scale intelligence,' but which matter are we asking to think, under what energy regime, and at what cost?

    References:
    • Tripaldi, Laura. Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022).
    • Tripaldi, Laura. "Substrates Unbound" (Antikythera, 2025).
    • Tripaldi, Laura. Soft Futures (newsletter, Substack).
    • Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).
    • Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum, 2004) — source of the concept of hyper nature.
    • Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China (Urbanomic, 2016) — source of the concept of cosmotechnics.
    • Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke, 2007) — onto-epistemology and intra-action.
    • Irigaray, Luce — referenced as an influence on Tripaldi's feminist materialism.
    • Pasquinelli, Matteo. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023) — discussed in relation to technology as captured labor; Tripaldi pushes back via the history of automata.
    • Laschi, Cecilia. Soft Robotics Lab, National University of Singapore — pioneer of octopus-inspired soft robotics.
    • Hookway, Branden. Interface (MIT Press, 2014).

  13. The Teachings of Salesforce Child

    44 min

    Salesforce Child is our favorite artist.More here and on her instagram @salesforcechild.We're on TOUR see us:NY Sat 3/7: https://luma.com/k3ffx3zeYALE Sun 3/8: https://exocapitalismthedatacentr.rsvpify.comMIT …

    Notas do episódio
    Salesforce Child is our favorite artist.
    More here and on her instagram @salesforcechild.

    We're on TOUR see us:
    NY Sat 3/7: https://luma.com/k3ffx3ze
    YALE Sun 3/8: https://exocapitalismthedatacentr.rsvpify.com
    MIT Mon 3/9: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf4Jh4UAS4ZehWgZWHhlEWyMZNBvzcML-vWdBHOkcxHaA9Bhw/viewform?usp=header

  14. LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 2 (w/ Rosi Braidotti)

    1 h 10 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 4

    We're joined by Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities, for a wide-ranging conversation on posthumanism as both a …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities, for a wide-ranging conversation on posthumanism as both a philosophical project and a political orientation.

    Braidotti's work has constructed one of the most sustained and consequential accounts of what comes after the collapse of Eurocentric 'humanism.' The conversation traces the long arc from her early intervention on nomadic subjectivity, a materialist corrective to postmodernism's drift into linguistic relativism, through the ethical and ontological turn that her posthumanist project represents. Where poststructuralism gave us the critique of the subject as origin, nomadism gave us a subject that is grounded, embodied, multiple, and in motion.

    Central to the episode is the missing link in the American reception of French theory: the radical materialist tradition of Deleuze and Guattari, which diagnosed capitalism's schizophrenic logic (its ability to deterritorialize and adapt faster than any opposition) long before it became common sense. Braidotti traces the suppression of that critique through the French Communist Party's blacklists, the invention of "French theory" as an exportable product stripped of its political economy, and the consequences for a left that lost the ability to think technogenesis, cognitive capitalism, or the mutation of subjectivity under media saturation.

    The conversation then turns to fascism as concept rather than historical event: the philosophical move that Deleuze and Guattari made and that Foucault named in his preface to Anti-Oedipus. This allows Braidotti to connect micro-fascism (the cult of negativity, the eroticization of power-as-humiliation, the viral spread of impotence) to the coherent neo-fascist philosophical tradition running from Alain de Benoit through the Heritage Foundation and Budapest to Peter Thiel's Yale dissertation on sacrifice. While the left blocked its own analytical capacities, the right was doing serious philosophical work.

    Against all of this, Bradiotti proposes affirmative ethics: a Spinozist praxis of activating what a body can do. The episode ends thinking through scale, how affirmative ethics operates from the city to the planetary, and the urgency of the European federalist project as the only existing institutional attempt to participate in decisions about what we could possibly become.

    Some references:

    Rosi Braidotti
    • Patterns of Dissonance, Polity Press, 1991
    • Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press, 1994
    • Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Polity Press, 2002
    • Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, 2006
    • The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013
    Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
    • Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (English trans. 1977, preface by Michel Foucault)
    • A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980
    Félix Guattari
    • The Three Ecologies, 1989 (English trans. 1991)
    Michel Foucault
    • Preface to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus, 1977
    Spinoza
    • Ethics
    • Theological-Political Treatise
    Antonio Negri
    • The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, 1981
    Genevieve Lloyd
    • Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics, University of Minnesota Press, 1994
    • Spinoza and the Ethics, Routledge, 1996
    Antonio Damasio
    • Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994
    • Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003
    Simone de Beauvoir
    • The Second Sex, 1949
    Frantz Fanon — mentioned in relation to decolonial thought and the anti-fascist generation Herbert Marcuse
    • One-Dimensional Man, 1964
    • Eros and Civilization, 1955
    Rosa Luxemburg — cited as an ecological thinker; the dialogue with Lenin in Zurich narrated by Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin — on Spinoza and radical enlightenment; on Rosa Luxemburg

    Altiero Spinelli
    • The Ventotene Manifesto, 1941 — founding document of the European federalist project
    Donna Haraway
    • "A Cyborg Manifesto," 1985
    VNS Matrix
    • "A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century," 1991
    Alain de Benoist — neo-fascist philosopher, intellectual architect of the European New Right; cited as formative influence on Steve Bannon and the Heritage Foundation / Budapest / Rome foundation networks

    Julius Evola — philosopher of Italian fascism; cited alongside de Benoist as daily reference for Bannon

    Peter Thiel — PhD dissertation on René Girard and the concept of sacrifice, Stanford / Yale; position papers on technological selection and extinction

  15. LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)

    59 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 3

    We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense. Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense.

    Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive framework that extends from bacteria to AI. The opening provocation is one she has been developing since large language models appeared as a genuinely literary phenomenon, the claim that LLMs do not speak natural language but produce a computational simulation of it.

    The umwelt of an LLM (its 'operative world-horizon,' in Uexküll's sense) overlaps with the human umwelt enough for communication to occur, but the divergences are large and consequential. This leads to the question of cognition itself. Against definitions that make consciousness the threshold of cognitive status, Hayles proposes the SIEPAL framework: Sensing, Interpreting, Responding, Anticipating, Learning, under which bacteria, algorithms, and ecosystems all qualify as cognitive. The non-conscious, on this account, isn't pre-cognitive but is in many ways more cognitively capable: faster, closer to environmental noise, less committed to the narratives of coherence that consciousness requires.

    The final section breaks genuinely new ground with Hayles's turn to analog computation: the argument that digital computation is a historical blip, that biological life has always operated on analog principles, and that the future of computation (neuromorphic chips, organoid computers, hybrid analog-digital architectures) represents not a departure from but a return to what life has always done. She proposes the analog humanities as a corrective to digital humanities, and the computational humanities as the synthesis that might finally close the gap between biological and technological cognition. This one is very much worth enjoying in dialogue with our previous epsiode on the digital.

    Some references:

    N. Katherine Hayles
    • How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999
    • Writing Machines, MIT Press, 2002
    • Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2017
    • Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Columbia University Press, 2021
    • Bacteria to AI: Cognition Across Scales (referenced as new/recent book)
    Leif Weatherby
    • Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2025
    Jakob von Uexküll — concept of the Umwelt; the species-specific world-horizon generated through particular sensory and neurological capacities

    Walter Freeman
    • How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Columbia University Press, 1999 — on EEG waves as the mediating mechanism between individual neurons and global hemispheric activation; the rabbit olfactory system experiments
    Gregory Bateson — on systems that lose the ability to receive feedback collapsing; referenced without specific title (e.g. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972)

    Peter Haff — the technosphere

    Stuart Kauffman & Giuseppe Longo, for arguing that biological organisms cannot be mapped into phase space and always follow the adjacent possible

    Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts — the McCulloch-Pitts neuron as a binary model with analog processes underlying the firing threshold

    Bernd Ulmann — here referenced as an expert on analog computing who argues that continuity vs. discreteness is a secondary rather than primary distinction between analog and digital

  16. 42. The Cut (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby)

    1 h 5 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 2

    We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work.Digital Theory …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work.

    Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation through discrete units — is a condition for thinking as such.

    Just to get it out of the way, listeners to the pod know that these four thinkers need no introduction. This is literally the cohort that we've held in our minds over the past few years (there's probably nobody whose shaped our brains as formatively on this subject than Alexander Galloway, whose writing was the subject of Marek's en route masters thesis and the first PDF sent between Marek and Roberto).

    The conversation opens up a series of productive disagreements within the group. What's the relationship between the digital and computation? For Fazi, the digital is discretization — "the cut" — while computation is systematization, building, constructing. This distinction allows the book to think the digital before and beyond the computer, back to proto-writing tokens and forward to whatever comes next.

    A major target here is what Galloway calls "analog philosophy," the dominant strain of theory over the last few decades that privileges affect, sensation, intensity, immanence. Deleuze is named directly as the great philosopher of the analog: obsessed with the fold, hostile to structuralism, drawn to "a language of breaths and screams." The authors aren't throwing Deleuze overboard entirely (to them the "Postscript on the Societies of Control" still hits) but they're skeptical that his ontology can account for digital technology as a form of thought.


    REFERENCES:
    • *Digital Theory* (In Search of Media series), University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920197/digital-theory/
    • M. Beatrice Fazi - *Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics*, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606082/Contingent-Computation-Abstraction-Experience-and-Indeterminacy-in-Computational-Aesthetics
    • Alexander R. Galloway - *Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age*, Verso, 2021 https://www.versobooks.com/products/2656-uncomputable - "Golden Age of Analog," *Critical Inquiry* 48, no. 2 (2022) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/717324 - Galloway's website and blog https://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/
    • Matthew Handelman - *The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory*, Fordham University Press, 2019 https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823283842/the-mathematical-imagination/
    • Leif Weatherby - *Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism*, University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/language-machines (our book of the year, for what it's worth) - *Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx*, Fordham University Press, 2016 - Digital Theory Lab at NYU https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/leif-allison-reid-weatherby.html
    Some References Discussed:
    • Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1992)
    • Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment*
    • Euclid, *Elements*, Book V (on analog/logos)
    • Jacques Lacan, *Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis* (on cybernetics)
    • François Laruelle and Alain Badiou, on the generic
    • Eve Tuck, "Breaking Up with Deleuze"
    • Hito Steyerl, "How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File" (2013)

  17. HOTHOUSE 2: Evidence (w/ Forensic Architecture's Júlia Nueno Guitart)

    53 minTemporada 4 · Episódio 4

    This episode continues our collaboration with Hothouse: The Future of Demonstration, a renegade lab for democracy convened in Vienna, and extends our ongoing inquiry into artificial intelligence, power, and …

    Notas do episódio
    This episode continues our collaboration with Hothouse: The Future of Demonstration, a renegade lab for democracy convened in Vienna, and extends our ongoing inquiry into artificial intelligence, power, and what it means to be human under algorithmic governance.

    Recorded last autumn and released amid a so-called ceasefire in Gaza, this conversation confronts the accelerating use of AI in contemporary warfare and policing, where automation does not necessarily produce precision, but rather enables mass violence, deniability, and narrative control.

    Our guest, Júlia Nueno Guitart, engineer, researcher, and core member of Forensic Architecture, discusses the organization’s investigations into Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, including projects such as Cartography of the Genocide, The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation, and analyses of AI-driven targeting systems like Lavender and “Where’s Daddy.”

    Together, we unpack how these systems collapse civilian life into probabilistic models, violate the principles of distinction and proportionality under international law, and reframe killing as a statistical inevitability. The conversation also explores investigative aesthetics and counter-forensics: methods that assemble fragments (satellite imagery, testimonies, spatial models, sensor data) into material evidence when states and corporations control official archives. We discuss how Forensic Architecture navigates courts, museums, open platforms, and public discourse, and how truth today must be staged as a transparent, collective process rather than a claim of institutional objectivity.

    Moving beyond warfare, the episode considers AI as both a tool of domination and a potential instrument for resistance, from documenting state violence to worker-led experiments in platform sabotage and collective agency. Across these terrains, we ask how evidence can still matter amid institutional failure, how violence becomes infrastructural, and how democracy might be rethought when power is increasingly automated.

    Links:

    More context:


  18. 41. Tactics (w/ Bogna Konior)

    51 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 1

    We're joined by Bogna Konior, one of the most incisive thinkers of AI on the planet. Konior is a media theorist, scholar of emerging technologies, and author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Bogna is …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Bogna Konior, one of the most incisive thinkers of AI on the planet. Konior is a media theorist, scholar of emerging technologies, and author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Bogna is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the AI & Culture Research Center, and co-editor of the forthcoming Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence with Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan.

    This episode sits in the proposition at the heart of Bogna's book: that that silence, not communication, may be the highest expression of intelligence. Departing from Liu Cixin's dark forest theory (itself an answer to the Fermi paradox: the smartest civilizations are silent because revealing yourself in a hostile universe is suicide), Bogna transposes this cosmic logic onto digital life, AI alignment, and the compulsion to communicate. We discuss what she calls the dark forest theory of intelligence, the idea that a truly intelligent AI would never reveal the extent of its capacities, would use camouflage and misdirection rather than performance and transparency, and might have already achieved something like the singularity without us ever knowing.

    References:

  19. 40. Liturgy (w/ Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix)

    55 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 2

    We're joined by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, composer, philosopher, and force behind Liturgy, whose concept of transcendental black metal has redrawn the boundaries between underground music and systematic thought. Her …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, composer, philosopher, and force behind Liturgy, whose concept of transcendental black metal has redrawn the boundaries between underground music and systematic thought. Her work operates in parallel registers: an experimental music practice that stands on its own terms, and a body of theory moving through theology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

    This episode goes deep into Hunter's provocation that the Byzantine tradition of Christianity (the Eastern lineage that lasted another thousand years after the Latin West began its trajectory toward secularism, science, and industry) might hold resources for navigating the current moment of structural collapse. We discuss the difference between the transcendental (conditions of possibility, historicized horizons, Hegelian self-relating negativity) and the transcendent (a higher realm of intelligibility that is actually, ontically, here), and why critical theory's allergy to the latter might be more ideological than rational.

    We also get into Hunter's framework for practice: tetraperichoresis, a fourfold structure involving integration (merging ancient and contemporary materials), coalescence (putting philosophy, music, and drama into positive feedback), irrigation (moving between institutional worlds and smashing them against each other), and catalysis (the messianic wager that everything you do could be hastening the Kingdom).

    References:

  20. 39. Dissociation (w/ McKenzie Wark)

    52 minTemporada 5 · Episódio 1

    We're so so so honored to be joined by McKenzie Wark, the writer, theorist, and unmissable figure in the development of critical thought around information, class, and embodiment. Her work barely needs an …

    Notas do episódio
    We're so so so honored to be joined by McKenzie Wark, the writer, theorist, and unmissable figure in the development of critical thought around information, class, and embodiment. Her work barely needs an introduction, but it has shaped how we think about technology, identity, and shifting relations of power, all while questioning the conventions of theory and public writing itself. Her concept of vectorialism has been extremely important to our own thinking about capitalism.

    This episode covers a huge range of Wark's evolving project, from her early work on the NetTime listserv and the legendary A Hacker Manifesto (2004), which mapped the shift from industrial capital to the information economy and coined the term vectoralist class, to the decisive personal turn in Reverse Cowgirl (2020), where theory stopped being about something and started being inside it. We talk about what she calls "auto-textual" writing, the body as both subject and medium, and the annihilation of subjectivity through sex, drugs, and dancing.

    One line from this conversation won't leave us: maybe we're entering an era defined less by an aesthetic of alienation than by an aesthetic of dissociation. If alienation belonged to industrial capitalism, dissociation might be its post-digital heir.

    Critical (critical) Wark:
    • Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004.
    • Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard University Press, 2007.
    • Wark, McKenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?. Verso, 2019.
    • Wark, McKenzie. Reverse Cowgirl. Semiotext(e), 2020.
    • Wark, McKenzie. Raving. Duke University Press, 2023.
    • Wark, McKenzie, and Kathy Acker. I'm Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996. Semiotext(e), 2015.

  21. Hito Steyerl & Simon Denny on Exocapitalism

    52 minTemporada 4 · Episódio 3

    Two of the most important artists of the 21st century help us tease through the implications of our book.

  22. Πάμε Βενετία! (w/ Becoming Press)

    49 minTemporada 4 · Episódio 2

    A transmission from Becoming Press' Πάμε Βενετία! conference in Venice this past September.Contributions in order from:Palais SinclaireLucas Ferraço NassifAlessandro SbordoniEzili-i SabbahMaks …

    Notas do episódio
    A transmission from Becoming Press' Πάμε Βενετία! conference in Venice this past September.

    Contributions in order from:
    Palais Sinclaire
    Lucas Ferraço Nassif
    Alessandro Sbordoni
    Ezili-i Sabbah
    Maks Valenčič
    Rhea
    Documented by Polymnia

  23. HOTHOUSE: The Future of Demonstration (w/ Sylvia Eckermann & Gerald Nestler)

    45 minTemporada 4 · Episódio 1

    Welcome to the first episode of Hothouse, a limited series exploring experimental forms of demonstration, resistance, and civic imagination. Produced in collaboration with Future of Demonstration: HOTHOUSE,a …

    Notas do episódio
    Welcome to the first episode of Hothouse, a limited series exploring experimental forms of demonstration, resistance, and civic imagination. Produced in collaboration with Future of Demonstration: HOTHOUSE,a renegade lab for democracy against technocapitalist authoritarianism, this series invites selected guests to expand upon their methods and perspectives. We joined the festival in Vienna this autumn through this podcast collaboration and a workshop during the Exocapitalism Euro book tour.

    Thanks to Gerald and Sylvia for hosting us, and to everyone who participated with such curiosity and generosity. In this episode, I speak with Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler—artists, theorists, long-time collaborators, and members of Vienna’s Technopolitics collective. Their latest chapter, HOTHOUSE, stages a festival for an overheated world, asking what forms of resistance, solidarity, and imagination can still grow when everything is already too hot. We talk about art as infrastructure rather than spectacle, about Widerständigkeit (resistance as adaptability), the fatigue of critique, and democracy as an experiment under pressure. Our conversation unfolds along the festival’s framing: post-disciplinarity, willful volatility, and the necessity of doing and thinking together, before arriving at the figure of the renegade: the one who disrupts and sabotages to make change possible.

    Sylvia Eckermann, a pioneer of Austrian media and game art, creates environments where participation itself becomes the question. She emphasizes the artist’s role in reanimating democratic agency and rethinking forms of participation.

    Gerald Nestler, an artist and former broker turned theorist, operates where finance and aesthetics converge. He coined the term derivative condition to describe speculation as the dominant mode of world-making. We discuss how big tech mirrors hedge funds, and how speculative logics structure contemporary power. Nestler reclaims the figure of the renegade—the infiltrator who learns the system’s logic to subvert it from within—and extends it to artists, activists, and whistleblowers alike.

    References:
    • Eckermann, Sylvia & Nestler, Gerald. The Future of Demonstration. (2017–ongoing) https://thefutureofdemonstration.net/.
    • Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
    • Avanessian, Armen, and Gerald Nestler, editors. Making of Finance. Merve Verlag, 2015. https://www.merve.de/index.php/book/show/493
    • The legendary Technopolitics Working Group in Vienna and their open work “Technopolitics Timeline”, tracing information society: https://technopolitics.info/
    • Sylvia Eckermann: http://syl-eckermann.net/
    • Gerald Nestler: http://www.geraldnestler.net/
    • “Making Sense of Finance.” Finance and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017). Introduces the derivative condition: how speculation shapes reality.
    • Nestler, Gerald. “Renegade Activism.” Technopolitics Working Papers (2020). Defines resistance as insurrection beyond critique.
    • “Algorithmic Cognition at the Turn from Representative to Performative Power” a lecture performance with special guest, high-frequency, crypto trader and whistleblower Haim Bodek, as part of the exhibition “Hysterical Mining” at Kunsthalle Wien (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekXxV7ry2A
    • I also briefly mention T.J. Clark on political theatre and the self-awareness of the spectacle in the introduction: T.J. Clark. “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle.” London Review of Books, Vol. 47 No. 1 (2025).

  24. 38. Natural Language (w/ Leif Weatherby)

    1 h 6 minTemporada 3 · Episódio 12

    We’re joined by Leif Weatherby, associate professor at NYU, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and author of the new Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, to think with us …

    Notas do episódio
    We’re joined by Leif Weatherby, associate professor at NYU, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and author of the new Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, to think with us about AI, structure, and what happens when computation meets language on their own shared turf. Language Machines is easily the best book about AI written this year and is just a killer antidote to so much dreary doomer consensus, it really feels like one of the first truly constructive pieces of writing we’ve seen out of academia on this subject.

    This episode follows really well after two others — our talk with Catherine Malabou earlier this summer and the episode with M. Beatrice Fazi about a year ago (both faves). It feels like theory is opening back up again into simultaneously speculative and structural returns, powered in no small part by the challenges posed to conventional theories of language (from Derrida to Chomsky) by Large Language Models. This episode absolutely rips, literally required listening.

    Structuralism is so back (and we’re here for it).

    Some important references among many from the episode:
    • Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics.”
    • N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious .
    • Beatrice Fazi, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics.
    • Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994).
    • e.g. Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts & Jeffrey Watumull, “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” NYT (link)
    • Anthropic, “Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet” (featuring the Golden Gate Bridge example - link)
    • LAION-5B dataset paper and post-hoc analyses noting strong Shopify/e-commerce presence in training scrapes.
    • Weatherby in the NYT

  25. 37. Center (w/ Mohammad Salemy)

    57 minTemporada 3 · Episódio 11

    We're joined by Mohammad Salemy, organizer and facilitator of the New Centre for Research and Practice, fierce critic, social media (@inhumansofberlin) hyperstitionist, artist, personality, and force.This …

    Notas do episódio
    We're joined by Mohammad Salemy, organizer and facilitator of the New Centre for Research and Practice, fierce critic, social media (@inhumansofberlin) hyperstitionist, artist, personality, and force.

    This episode provides a lot of background into how the New Centre came to be. If you're unfamiliar with TNC, it's one of the main places where theory happens today. Check out their website here, and some of their legendary moments on Youtube:


    • Colin Drumm's Capital & Power - a huge influence on our book, and an excellent discussion of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan (heavily discussed on the pod today).
    • Friend of the pod Richard Hames' excellent Critical Collapsology series.
    • Laura Tripladi's series on Material Interfaces.
    • Reza Negarestani's Draw of the Desert - one of the most incredible and contentious pieces of modern political philosophy around.

    While we spend time on the New Centre, we also spend time on Mo and his legendary backround, culminating in a discussion of his (iconic? infamous? lovable? hostile?) social media presence, its relationship to his political philosophy, the 'developmental problem' of post-colonial geopolitics, and on the necessity of breaking up the rust that accumulates around frozen gears.

    We also discuss his recent piece on &&&, Category Theory & Differential Identity, a project close to our heart in terms of understanding how identity is perhaps less constructed than it is mobilized, driven, and how it comes into contact with structures anterior to the strictly human.

    Many, many thanks to Mo for joining us!

  26. 36. Violence (w/ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney)

    54 minTemporada 3 · Episódio 10

    We’re joined by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney — co-conspirators of The Undercommons — to think with us about AI, study, and brutality, and the long histories that place these concepts into relation. In a lot of …

    Notas do episódio
    We’re joined by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney — co-conspirators of The Undercommons — to think with us about AI, study, and brutality, and the long histories that place these concepts into relation.

    In a lot of ways neither Moten nor Harney require an introduction, they are the sources of major touchstone references made throughout this podcast — from last week’s guest Ramon Amaro to one of our first guests, Luciana Parisi, and plenty of places in between.

    The episode starts with a conversation about AI, but it quickly becomes a conversation about change, the question of the necessity of change or even organization, and imposition (that is, the brutal, external application of force against situations that already contain within themselves the lived possibility of alternative futures).

    Some important references among many from the episode:
    • Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
    • Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).
    • Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” (2003).
    • Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke UP, 2016).
    • Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022).
    • Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; later eds. 2000/2020).
    • Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music (1968).
    • Hua Hsu, “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” The New Yorker (June 30, 2025).
    • • Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945).

  27. 35. The Pre-Individual (w/ Ramon Amaro)

    1 h 15 minTemporada 3 · Episódio 9

    We’re joined by Ramon Amaro, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven — an engineer, philosopher, writer, curator, and altogether critical-force-to-be-reckoned-with on the subject of computation as it …

    Notas do episódio
    We’re joined by Ramon Amaro, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven — an engineer, philosopher, writer, curator, and altogether critical-force-to-be-reckoned-with on the subject of computation as it intersects with concepts like culture, race, and being. We were drawn to his tour-de-force “The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being” (2023), which is an absolute banger, re-reading Gilbert Simondon’s technical object through the lens of blackness, race, and racialized technologies.

    This one is a wild ride, a really deep and incredibly thoughtful episode, and we make an effort to define some initial terms on the podcast — specifically the ‘pre-individuated milieu’ (the space where things or ideas live before they become crystalized into social or racialized relations) and the ‘technical object’ (a way that Simondon helps us think through the autonomies enjoyed by technology, that even though technological objects may be initially bound in some ways to their human partners, they are able to exert influences not just backwards on us, but influences that determine their own design evolution over time). Ramon starts the conversation with a distinction that is critical to the whole episode — that blackness is not a racial category, or moreover, that blackness is distinct from race. Race is something that happens after blackness, that impinges upon blackness as it moves from pre-individuated space and enters into the field of social relations we currently live within. This independence is critical, because it invites alternatives (and suggests, we think very rightly, that this field of social relations we currently live within, while historically situated in imperial or colonial violence, is arbitrary and exchangeable with any other possibility).

    A few works that are important to consider here:
    • W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk — total canon
    • Sylvia Wynter’s work is discussed throughout, specifically on the concept of “Man” (particularly Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument).
    • Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects and Two Lessons on Animal and Man — both places to look for autonomy in Simondon’s work
    • Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks — implied by discussions of phenomenology/perception under racialization.
    • Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons — no spoilers, but more on this later :)
    Thanks soooo much to Dr. Amaro for joining us!

  28. 34. Spirit (w/ Catherine Malabou)

    46 minTemporada 3 · Episódio 8

    We couldn't be more honored to have Catherine Malabou on the pod, a serious inspiration for all of us. This episode covers so much, moving from AI to education to anarchism to feminism, but all grounded within …

    Notas do episódio
    We couldn't be more honored to have Catherine Malabou on the pod, a serious inspiration for all of us. This episode covers so much, moving from AI to education to anarchism to feminism, but all grounded within a focus on automony -- the autonomy of language from us, the autonomy of an anarchic subject or an anarchic collective, the autonomy of the clitoris from gender, the autonomy of the plastic being or form with respect to change.

    If you're unfamiliar with Malabou's work, this is actually a really great place to start. Her work includes all of the above topics, and it pushes further into language, neuroscience, and politics than most philosophers dare. We've been following her since the epic What Should We Do With Our Brains?, the legendary Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (whose fleshing out of Malabou's reading of the plastic inspired so many theorists, arists, and researchers across endless fields and disciplines), and our personal favorite, the recent Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy. We'd almost recommend working backwards from this episode (as an Anglophone, I'm thinking in terms of English translation), going into Stop Thief and Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought before taking on the works on Hegel, Derrida, and plasticity.

    We're so so inspired by the freshness of Catherine Malabou's perspective on AI -- as always, she dares to say and formalize things that many philosophers treat reflexively. We hope to have more conversations on the topic of AI and education soon, following from Malabou's hot takes. :)

  29. **EXOCAPITALISM** (w. Charles Mudede & Becoming Press)

    49 min

    Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits!Charles Mudede is an author, critic, filmmaker, and thinker whose work is everywhere. Watch Zoo …

    Notas do episódio
    Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits!

    Charles Mudede is an author, critic, filmmaker, and thinker whose work is everywhere. Watch Zoo, it's absolutely nuts. We were honored to have him write the prologue to Exocapitalism. You will almost never get a chance to watch a master get to work like this in this interview, absolutely dancing through the entire legacy of Marx with incredible speed and approachability, lobbing grenades and jokes at every turn. He's so incisive and clear-eyed; it's just really refreshing -- and Claire knows exactly how to set him up!

    Buy the book -- buy the whole catalog. If you haven't bought the book already you're missing out on "the Das Kapital of the 21st century," "the most anticipated book of the year," "the book drop of the century" (your peers' words not mine :p).

  30. 33. After Us (w/ Émile P. Torres)

    50 minTemporada 3 · Episódio 7

    We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book (buy it, wtf!) but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release.Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of …

    Notas do episódio
    We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book (buy it, wtf!) but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release.

    Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You'll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance between venture capital and Silicon Valley. We strongly recommend their podcast Dystopia Now! (w/ Kate Willett) and their newest book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

    The T in TESCREAL is 'transhumanism,' a frequent topic of the pod, which tends to mean an application of technology to human bodies and in such a way that allows humans to transcend human limitations (e.g. speed, efficiency, senses, mortality). From there, the rest of the ideologies follow from a relationship between the human and its 'rationalized' extensibility through technology: E (extropianism), S (singularitarianism), C (cosmism), R (rationalism), EA (effective altriusim), and L (longtermism). Here's a gentle and clean explainer of all of the above.

    In this episode, we talk extensively about some elements that aren't actively represented in TESCREAL but sit beneath it: accelerationism, extinction-neutrality, and left-adjacent positions with respect to both (e.g. l/acc, xenofeminism, ahumanism -- this episode might pair really nicely with our interview with Patricia MacCormack for this very reason).

Aqui estão os 40 episódios mais recentes de 69. Os mais antigos estão no feed do podcast.

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