Alle afleveringen
68 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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51. Worlds (w/ Federico Campagna)
26 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
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. Lees meer
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 technolog…
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50. The Infinite Company (w/ Dave Wright and Brian Solis)
27 augustus 2026 · 43 min
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). Lees meer
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
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49. Garden (w/ Anna Greenspan)
12 augustus 2026 · 52 min
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. Lees meer
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; … -
48. Indifference Engine (w/ Wassim Alsindi & Paul Dylan-Ennis)
22 juli 2026 · 57 min
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. Lees meer
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) -
47. Invocation (w/ E. Elias Merhige and Gavin Gamboa)
8 juli 2026 · 1 uur
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. Lees meer
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 work
Gavin Gamboa: composer, pianist, video artist gavingamboa.net
E. Elias Merhige: filmmaker; his 1989 debut Begotten anchors the "Begotten trilogy" - Begotten on Wikipedia
Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022) — premiere Q&A with all three (Vimeo)
Books & 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
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46. Building Doors (w/ Yancey Strickler)
29 juni 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
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. Lees meer
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
Yancey Strickler — ystrickler.com
Bentoism — bentoism.org
The Creative Independent — thecreativeindependent.com
Metalabel — metalabel.com
New Creative Era (Strickler's podcast with Joshua Citarella) — metalabel.com
Artist Corporations & the law
Artist Corporations — artistcorporations.com
The Colorado Artist Company Act (SB 26-133), annotated full text — artistcorporations.com/law/annotated
Strickler's TED talk, "Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation" (2025) — ted.com
News coverage of the signing: The Colorado Sun · The Art Newspaper · ARTnews
Frieze, "Can A-Corps Save the Struggling Artist?" (skeptical take, also previews DFOS) — frieze.com
The 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.co…
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[LIVE AT INDEX] The Datacenter Does Not Exist (Q&A w/ Dena Yago)
9 juni 2026 · 1 uur 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 visually hxc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbWCcHbtWY (good slides). Lees meer
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[NECROLECTURE] The Excarnated Angel: On AI and the Impossibility of Touch
28 april 2026 · 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. -
45. El Apocalipsis Ya Está Aquí (w/ no.investigues)
23 april 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript. Lees meer
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 a… -
44. The Grid (w/ Molly Taft)
8 april 2026 · 1 uur
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. Lees meer
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-fliGaby 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
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43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)
11 maart 2026 · 56 min
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. Lees meer
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 (Ve…
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The Teachings of Salesforce Child
2 maart 2026 · 44 min
Salesforce Child is our favorite artist.
More here and on her instagram @salesforcechild. Lees meerWe'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 -
LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 2 (w/ Rosi Braidotti)
18 februari 2026 · 1 uur 10 min
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. Lees meer
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 it…
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LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)
18 februari 2026 · 59 min
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. Lees meer
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 wor…
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42. The Cut (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby)
4 februari 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
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. Lees meer
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. Be…
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HOTHOUSE 2: Evidence (w/ Forensic Architecture's Júlia Nueno Guitart)
21 januari 2026 · 53 min
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. Lees meer
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 …
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41. Tactics (w/ Bogna Konior)
22 december 2025 · 51 min
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. Lees meer
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:
Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).
Konior, Bogna. "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (original 2020 essay, Flugschriften).
Bogna Konior's website
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem / The Dark Forest / Death's End (Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (PhD thesis, 1999; published by Zero Books, 2025) — gothic theory of cybernetics and the internet as a space of undeath.
Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006) — first contact novel where aliens interpret human communication as hostile noise.
Bratton, Konior, and Greenspan (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic, 20…
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40. Liturgy (w/ Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix)
9 december 2025 · 55 min
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. Lees meer
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:
Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Byzantine Accelerationism: Towards a Universal Orthodox Christianity." Šum Journal #22 (2024).
Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism." Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I (2010).
Liturgy, Origin of the Alimonies (2020) — the cosmogonical opera-album.
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's Substack — ongoing philosophical writing and the System of Transcendental Qabala.
Katerina Kolozova, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014…
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39. Dissociation (w/ McKenzie Wark)
2 december 2025 · 52 min
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. Lees meer
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.
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Hito Steyerl & Simon Denny on Exocapitalism
17 november 2025 · 52 min
Two of the most important artists of the 21st century help us tease through the implications of our book.
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Πάμε Βενετία! (w/ Becoming Press)
3 november 2025 · 49 min
A transmission from Becoming Press' Πάμε Βενετία! conference in Venice this past September. Lees meer
Contributions in order from:
Palais Sinclaire
Lucas Ferraço Nassif
Alessandro Sbordoni
Ezili-i Sabbah
Maks Valenčič
Rhea
Documented by Polymnia -
HOTHOUSE: The Future of Demonstration (w/ Sylvia Eckermann & Gerald Nestler)
28 oktober 2025 · 45 min
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. Lees meer
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 infi…
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38. Natural Language (w/ Leif Weatherby)
24 september 2025 · 1 uur 6 min
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. Lees meer
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
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37. Center (w/ Mohammad Salemy)
17 september 2025 · 57 min
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. Lees meer
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!
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36. Violence (w/ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney)
3 september 2025 · 54 min
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. Lees meer
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).
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35. The Pre-Individual (w/ Ramon Amaro)
19 augustus 2025 · 1 uur 15 min
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. Lees meer
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 “M…
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34. Spirit (w/ Catherine Malabou)
8 augustus 2025 · 46 min
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. Lees meer
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. :)
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**EXOCAPITALISM** (w. Charles Mudede & Becoming Press)
31 juli 2025 · 49 min
Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits! Lees meer
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).
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33. After Us (w/ Émile P. Torres)
30 juni 2025 · 50 min
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. Lees meer
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).
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VESPERS Pt. 2 (w/ Millaze)
12 juni 2025 · 1 uur 26 min
CW: eating disorders are discussed a few times in this episode. Lees meer
Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail.
For this episode, we're joined by Millaze -- an iconic face and musical voice on Instagram. We talk about love, cringe, the open-endedness of her craft (we barely scratch the surface here), and performance.
Favorite Millaze-core:
Ramen
Override
Driveways
Bedside Table
Viscera
But I really recommend her Instagram in general (as well as the fountain of Youtube Shorts)
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VESPERS Pt. 1 (w/ RayonBase)
27 mei 2025 · 48 min
Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail. Lees meer
For this episode, we're joined by RayonBase. If you've opened TikTok or Instagram over the past few years, you recognize RayonBase's face, voice, instrumental composition, and video editing style. This is an open-ended conversation about character, craft, love, innocence, and the future. <3
Favorite RayonBase-core:
The Swagger Song (Badder Than You)
EVER CLOSER PT. 2
Shelter
Can Eye Kiss You?
Innocence Found
^ The above are videos / shorts primarily used as teasers for full songs, all of which is available on any streaming platform.
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32. I Put a Post on You (w/ Dana Dawud, feat. Open Secret)
20 mei 2025 · 1 uur 22 min
Artist and curator Dana Dawud joins Disintegrator to talk about Open Secret, her touring platform for internet cinema, and her evolving film series Monad. Lees meer
We discuss the blur as a visual device and trend, the impossibility of representing Palestine, being trained by AI and building myth in the age of the feed.
The audio is laced with reflections by collaborators orbiting Open Secret: redactedcut @redactedcut, Palais Sinclaire @palais.sinclaire, Mischa Dols @mischaapje, 0nty @the.ontological.turnt, Angel Kether @user_goes_to_kether.
References mentioned:
Gore Layer by Alex Quicho in Spike (July 2024): https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho,
The novel Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus: https://www.semiotexte.com/aliens-anorexia-new-edition,
Further reading on CoreCore by 0nty (July 2023): https://becoming.press/corecore-the-return-of-speculative-irony-by-0nty,
We spoke about Serge Daney’s observation that “there is no image of Palestine” (or, more precisely, that there is “no complex image of Palestinian reality”) which arises from his deep engagement with the politics and ethics of representation, particularly in the context of Jean-Luc Godard’s film ‘Ici et ailleurs’ (Here and Elsewhere). Read more in Serge Daney’s seminal ‘Before and After the Image’ (1999): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389528.,
Watch ‘The Sight is a Wound’ (2025), a visual essay by Parham Ghalamdar: https://www.ghalamdar.com/tsiaw,
‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’ (1988). In this work, Deleuze interprets monads not as isolated points but as folds of space, movement, and time, each containing the world within itself as a unique point of view.,
Jaques Rivette’s almost-13hr-long-film: ‘Out 1’ (1971),
Sven Loven at No Gallery: https://www.nononogallery.com/exhibitions/sven-loven-humiliation-ritual/#press-release,
Links to explore Dana’s work:
Monad+ : https://hybrida.space/monad,
PalCoreCore: https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/dana-dawud-pal…
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31. Incarnation (w/ Pete Wolfendale)
1 mei 2025 · 1 uur 5 min
We’re joined by philosopher Peter Wolfendale — a singular voice in contemporary theory, known for his work on autonomy and the metaphysics of cognition. In this episode, we dive deep into the philosophical problems behind artificial general intelligence, not from the angle of safety or speed, but from the standpoint of what it means to think, to revise, and to reproduce.
Peter’s blog and twitter account are legendary (@deontologistics) — more Peter here: Lees meerThe Laruelle Thread
‘Artificial Bodies and the Promise of Abstraction’
An excellent thread on Bayesian Solomonoff on his blog
‘The Reformatting of Homo sapiens’
The Pete Wolfendale Nick Land Debate
An excellent interview with Peter on Gradient
Page for Wolfendale’s new, yet unreleased book The Revenge of Reason
SUPPORT THE POD :) -- preorder our new book!
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LONGUE DURÉE Pt. 2 (w/ Timothy Morton)
7 april 2025 · 1 uur 16 min
CW: There is some brief discussion of abusive familial relationships at several points within this episode. Lees meer
Two titanic figures in contemporary theory join us for two separate and strongly divergent episodes on the status of revolutionary thought in political philosophy today.
Timothy Morton is one of the most outspoken and controversial voices in the discourse, someone whose impact punched hard into the artworld, defining a decade of new ecological and object-oriented aesthetics. For almost the entire 2010s and much of the 2020s it was hard to read a single exhibition text without recognizing Morton’s impact.
Timothy joins us for an expansive conversation that moves through Buddhism, Christianity, communism, trauma, poetry, and the question of whether “love your neighbor as yourself” might actually be a planetary-scale software instruction. Morton describes communism and Christianity as radically entangled modes of relation, both grounded in care and unknowing.
We strongly recommend:
Most people should already be familiar with Morton's most iconic concept and contribution: Hyperobjects
Timothy’s book Ecology Without Nature
Their more recent Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology
And we spend a lot of time talking about Spacecraft
In the episode, we also touch on the work of Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Thomas Merton, Raymond Williams, and Simone Weil.
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LONGUE DURÉE Pt. 1 (w/ Ray Brassier)
7 april 2025 · 1 uur 8 min
Two titanic figures in contemporary theory join us for two separate and strongly divergent episodes on the status of revolutionary thought in political philosophy today. Lees meer
Ray Brassier influenced a generation of philosophers not only with his outstanding and highly rigorous writing, but also his absolutely stunning translations of Quentin Meillassoux and François Laruelle, and in so doing is subcutaneously responsible for literally a decade of earthquakes in the discourse. Ray joins us to evaluate the status of Marx in the 21st century.
Ray traces the long arc from Nihil Unbound through Marx, Sellars, and the inferentialist tradition, opening up an unapologetically rationalist framework for understanding both science and emancipation, without reducing either to liberal platitudes or metaphysical fantasies.
We discuss the seductive dangers of naive anti-humanism, the legacy of German idealism, the automation of reason, and why political theory today needs to be deeply embedded in materialist accounts of scale, finance, and abstraction. Ray shares a trenchant critique of both the empiricist and idealist strands of Enlightenment thought, offering instead a dialectical, normatively grounded, socially embedded concept of rationality that returns to Kant and Hegel by way of Wilfrid Sellars.
We strongly recommend:Ray’s book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
His essay “The View from Nowhere”
His exceptional piece "Politics of the Rift" on Théorie Communiste in e-flux
Work from the journal Endnotes (https://endnotes.org.uk/)
In the episode, we also discuss theorists such as Badiou, Larouelle, Meillassoux, and Marxist reinterpretations by Moishe Postone, Théorie Communiste, and the German “New Reading” school. Ray elaborates on how capital’s increasing abstraction—especially in financialized regimes where labor is decoupled from value—is not the end of Marx, but a reason to read Marx more seriously and materially than ever.
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28. Imperative Pythagoreanism (w/ Giuseppe Longo)
18 maart 2025 · 1 uur
It’s such an honor to welcome Giuseppe Longo to the pod! Professor Giuseppe Longo is the Research Director Emeritus at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His work spans mathematics, computer science, biology, especially through the connective theoretical tissue of epistemology. Lees meer
Our conversation orbits around the limitations (or specific capacities) of computation, especially as computation becomes more and more central to mainstream theories of thought, being, life, and even physics. Longo pushes back on computationalism, grounding his critique in the sciences and in mathematics, especially as it becomes more and more established as an ideological foundation underneath applied biological research. No, for Longo the body is not a computer, the brain is not a computer, the world is not a computer, and the universe is not a computer — a computer is something altogether very specific, and should be afforded the dignity of its specificity.
The title of this episode (imperative pythagoreanism) refers to pythagoreanism (the ancient worship of numbers in the 6th-4th century cult of Pythagorus, specifically the idea that the universe is fundamentally made of and reducible to numbers) and the imperative mode of computation (a determinative command structure).
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27. Critique as Commodity (w/ Morgane Billuart)
4 maart 2025 · 59 min
We’re on with Morgane Billuart, a writer and artist and a researcher whose work engages critically with technologically mediated and determined worlds — not least within her exceptional book “Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed: Inquiries in Female Health Technologies.” Morgane joins us to talk about a large, recent research project on a particular character that many of us identifies with, what Geert Lovink calls the “critical internet researcher” — a figure who engages in a kind of postdisciplinary media theory while at the same time producing and publishing their work through the very media they are studying, the Online.
We strongly recommend: Lees meerMorgane’s podcasts Becoming the Product and Girl Employee with Carmen Hines
Morgane’s substack Becoming the Product
Morgane’s book Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed: Inquiries in Female Health Technologies on Set Margins
In the episode we discuss the work of Geert Lovink and the Institute of Network Cultures and Joshua Citarella (and the associated entity Do Not Research), and we briefly touch on Yancy Strickler (and the associated MetaLabel), Trust, the New Center for Research and Practice, Are.na, New Models, and RADAR (https://www.radardao.xyz/). All are mentioned in the context of being institutions undertaking the extremely admirable charge of iterating upon new vehicles and structures for the exchange of information.
Marek also briefly mentions the blogger RM (@NilsEdison) and the artist Maria Tsylke.
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26. The Great Outdoors (w/ Gordon White)
19 februari 2025 · 1 uur 1 min
Gordon White is a chaos magician, shamanic practitioner, and permaculture designer based in Tasmania. He podcasts and teaches through the vehicle of Rune Soup, the world's largest magic academy, and he writes prolifically -- not only on the Rune Soup blog but in several incredible books. Gordon's breadth and depth of knowledge is unbelievably humbling, and it was an honor to spend an hour or so with him. Lees meer
We came to Gordon for perspective, to some bring context and breadth and dimension to our relatively narrow world. Disintegrator sits in a kind of para-academic space, where we tend to limit the things we allow ourselves to write and think in terms of what's acceptable in mainstream academia. And there are so many people in this space, squashed between the outer walls of the academy and a totally vast, teeming ocean of different ways of thinking and being.
((An academic might chastize us for using 'outside' as a kind of euphemism for an alien or an other, but we'd push back -- it is the inside that we're all kind of bunched up against, like feudal serfs huddling for protection and warmth. As we look outside, we've started to speculate about what might be out there, inventing our own 'pseudosacreds' that preoccupy our minds without forcing us to change anything about ourselves.))
Gordon brings sledgehammers from magical practices and shamanic tradtions around the world, alongside a potent alternative canon of Western, and, well, pummels our walls a bit.
Tons of references packed in here, but a good place to start would be his books Chaos Protocols and Ani.Mystic (in order). Marek fell in love with Gordon's world through these three podcast episodes (one, two, three) and this lecture at the Guggenheim (with visual media from friend of the pod Refik Anadol).
Further references:
A big and loving shoutout to Jay Springett, who just absolutely rules in every possible way, you gotta be a JayMo fan fr.
Gordon references Dr. Jeff Kripal on the subject of the 'imagina…
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25. CRIT (w/ Avocado Ibuprofen)
4 februari 2025 · 47 min
You already follow @avocado_ibuprofen. His memes IV-ed into the arm of the artworld, circulating through the DMs; they are acidic and thereaputic, they throw up solidarity through critique and gentle negation. We talk about art education, disappointment, exhaustion, glamour, and a beautiful idea (automating the viewer) he began to expand upon in an interview with Valentinas Klimašauskas here. Lees meer
Buy his mugs.
Memes we discuss:
(Selling Mugs Galaxy Brain)
(Phone/Pocket/Lineage)
(AI Meme 1, AI Meme 2)
Ambient track is 'Respect for the Medium' by friend of the pod They Became What They Beheld, show them some love on Bandcamp.
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24. A Girl is a Gun (w/ Alex Quicho)
23 januari 2025 · 1 uur 9 min
Few people have done more to define the contemporary media theory landscape than Alex Quicho @amfq, an indefinable thinker and artist and intellectual force who brought Girl Theory to the front and center of The Discourse. Lees meer
One note, friend of the pod Morgane Billuart has also just released an interview with Alex on her excellent podcast Becoming the Product. We don't believe there's such a thing as too much AMFQ. Morgane is an upcoming guest for us too, so it's a nice trifecta!
In terms of Quicho-core:
Everyone is a Girl Online (September 2023) -- if you haven't read it, HARD RECCO.
The Aura Points lecture (December 2024)
Small Gods: Perspective on the Drone (May 2021)
GIRLSTACK at BODYSTACK
The amazing girlstack substack -- because everyone is a girl and everyone is online ;)
Key references and concepts from the pod include:
Helena shouts out Bogna Konior whose work is absolutely at the top of the top atm. We love her lecture ANGELS IN LATENT SPACES omg.
When identifying AI with/as a girl, Alex leverages concepts from K Allado-McDowell on model-as-self.
Alex references Sayak Valencia's Gore Capitalism and Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty on media representations of violence
We briefly chat about Maya B. Kronik and Amy Ireland's "cute accelerationism" paradigm and their year-defining book on the topic.
Alex grabs some concepts from Paul Virilio and Susan Sontag's foundational work on photography, violence and war, Edward Glissant's work on opacity and resistance, Benedict Singleton's traps and levers, Helen Hester and the Laboria Cuboniks collective's xenofeminism, Tiqqun's young girl, and (IYKYK) Luciana Parisi's absolutely singular "Abstract Sex" (the book that brough Roberto and Marek 2gether).
Marek shouts out master of blur Dana Dawud's Monad series.
Helena references artist Zein Majali's work "Propane" and Jennie Livingston's generation-defining "Paris is Burning."
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[Superlecture]: Nobody Listens to Music Anymore (Marek)
30 december 2024 · 53 min
On finishing the project of music, on TikTokCore and SpotifyCore, on music as cosplay and the technicity of cultural imperialism, on the bureaucratic turn in the arts, on being dangerous. Lecture given for my beloved DMR at Columbia University at the beginning of December. Lees meer
Feeling a bit bolder than usual on this one, but it's cuz my toddler is sleeping good. <3
Shoutouts included at the top. Shoutouts to EPFL Pavilions and especially Jonathan Impett, who I revere, for giving me an initial platform for my obnoxious ideas.
Also — Liz Pelly’s new piece for Harpers is extremely relevant here: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/. Thanks to Micah Silver for pointing me to it, and for introducing me to Alex Reisner, who completely blew my mind open on the subject of copyright law.
Thanks to the Wire for distilling this entire thing into one sentence.
Reinforced shoutout to New Models we <3 u. Don't listen to this, listen to their interview w/ Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst instead.
2025 babyyyyyyyy
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23. The Club (w/ Li Zhenhua)
11 december 2024 · 51 min
No notes, pure vivid realness and realism. Lees meer
Li Zhenhua is a major force in the art world, especially in film.
A tone poem from Torino.
Marek's favorite episode.
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22. Janky (w/ Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung)
25 november 2024 · 55 min
Two of our discourse besties from UAL's Fashion Media Practice & Criticism -- experiential designers Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung -- join us to talk Janky Capitalism (the obvious falling-apart weirdness of the world while capital spins off farther and farther away from it, leaving us behind), Roblox, and neural media. Lees meer
You probably know their work from the iconic 'The Metaverse in Janky Capitalism' on Dis and its associated 'Literally No Place' and 'Always on My Mind' -- or from associated speaking / discourse production all over the internet (++ more on Jenn (link) and Daniel (link)).
References from the pod include:
Ruba Al-Sweel's awesome piece for SQD: 'Sandbox Semiotics' referenced in the intro.
Jenn references artworld queen Anna Uddenberg (e.g. 'Continental Breakfast'), Harvard's GSD's Guide to Shopping, and Ian Bogost (whose critique of anthropomorphism in video games we really relate to).
Daniel references Sam Cummins from Nymphet Alumni, a favorite podcast that everyone should already know and spend all their time listening to.
Daniel references Catherine Malabou's concept of plasticity (throughout her work, typically referencing neuroscientific plasticisty, here used in its more generalized form).
The second half of the episode spends some time with the theory of K. Allado-McDowell, specifically the concept of neural media. We could not recommend this episode of our other favorite podcast (New Models) more strongly.
Roberto mentions Zachary Horton's 'Cosmic Zoom', which is our obsession atm.
Ok enjoyyyy byee!
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21. LIFE (w/ Blaise Agüera y Arcas)
14 november 2024 · 1 uur 3 min
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is one of most important people in AI, and apart from his leadership position as CTO of Technology & Society at Google, he has one of those resumes or affiliations lists that seems to span a lot of very fundamental things. He’s amazing; the thoughtfulness and generosity with which he communicates on this episode gently embraced our brains while lazering them to mush. We hope you have the same experience. Lees meer
References include:
Blaise’s own books Who Are We Now?, Ubi Sunt, and the upcoming What Is Intelligence?
He references James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which we strongly recommend, Benjamin Peters’ How Not to Network a Nation, and Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.
Strong recommendation also to Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World.
Roberto references Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex (our favorite book!) and the work of Lynn Margulis with respect to biology and reproduction.
Blaise references James E. Lovelock’s project “Daisyworld” with respect to the Gaia hypothesis.
He also references the Active Inference thesis, e.g. that of Karl J. Friston, and the work of Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercer on reason.
The cellular automata work referenced here involves the Von Neumann cellular automaton and the Wolfram neural cellular automaton.
Wish us a happy 1 year anniversary of the pod!
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20. Low-Power Mode (w/ Tega Brain)
31 oktober 2024 · 51 min
A very warm welcome to Helena McFadzean, who is joining the Disintegrator wrecking crew. Lees meer
This week’s episode features one of our favorite artists, Tega Brain. In this episode, we talk through two of our favorite pieces, both of which are not just great exercises in conceptual design, but are actual practical engineering projects whose artistry consists in real solutioning.
References from the pod:Sam Lavigne is an artist and engineer and educator whose collaborates frequently with Tega Brain. Both his creative technical work and his writing are highly recommended.
The two pieces we talk about most are Cold Call, a collaboration with Sam Levine, and Solar Protocol, a collaboration with Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella, among others.
Tega references the Critical Engineering group (Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, Danja Vasiliev), whose manifesto is very much worth reading, and 100rabbits, whose blog and methodological work are super super engaging.
In climate-related discussions, we talk about Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Breeding Sweetgrass, Holly Jean Buck’s Ending Fossil Fuels, the concept of ‘feral computing’ from Austin Wade Smith, and the data work by Crowther Lab on forest development.
Marek briefly mentions Joshua Citarella’s absolutely phenomenal ‘A Public Option for Social Media’.
Thanks for your patience while both Roberto and Marek were in mega-travel mega-project mode. We will be releasing something very large in the next few weeks to make up for it. :)
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19. Anamnesis & Prosthetic Imagination (w/ Jonathan Impett)
16 september 2024 · 37 min
Here’s a gem from our archive, a recording with Jonathan Impett — Director of Research at the Orpheus Instituut. Lees meer
Impett has had a MAJOR impact on Roberto and Marek, a kind of intellectual godfather to the two of us. His staggering breadth of knowledge continues to blow our minds. You can find more about Impett's work here.
A number of references from the discussion include:
Impett's chapter in Choreomata is awesome. Buy our book! :)
Impett references Alexander Nagel and Chris Wood's Anachronic Renaissance an unbelievably ambitious tome that delves into the situatedness of art both inside and outside of the Renaissance.
A few California references -- Jonathan tags in Swarm and references the composer Brian Ferneyhough.
We're all Reza Negarestani fans here -- for more about computational interactionism, check out Reza's epsiode of the pod, Anil Bawa-Cavia's episode of the pod, and Reza's absolutely mondo Intelligence and Spirit.
At the time of the interview, Matteo Pasquinelli's influential The Eye of the Master had not yet been released and is referenced as an upcoming release.
For more information on the "waste product" -- Alain Badiou's Immanence of Truths is actually pretty forthcoming in this respect.
Jonathan also references After Sound, a very timely read by G. Douglas Barrett.
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18. What is a World? (w/ Patricia Reed)
5 september 2024 · 1 uur 12 min
Majorly excited to have Patricia Reed on the pod. This is a beefy episode! If I was looking for a major reset in my relationship to the world around me, I'd start here. Lees meer
Here’s a list of the references we make throughout the interview:
Here's that e-flux diagram I talk about in the intro, and here's a lecture in which she discusses this diagram. Here's the Diagramming the Common piece, which is older but I really like it.
Here's a must-read interview with Denise Ferreira da Silva where the concept of "the end of the world as we know it" is postulated.
When Patricia Reed refers to the "logics of worlds" in a Badiousian sense, she's referring to Alain Badiou's work on truth and world. Unless you're down for a real rabbithole, you're likely good with Reed's description here.
Reed references Margaret Morrison and the Black-Scholes model in the context of finance.
Reed references Sylvia Wynter's work consistently, specifically her discussion of humanism and of Frantz Fanon.
Check out Beth Coleman's work on Octavia Butler AI, as well as da Silva's "Unpayable Debt" (inspired by Butler's Kindred) -- and if you somehow haven't read the Lilith's Brood Trilogy after we discussed it with Luciana Parisi, go read it (aka Xenogenesis). It's like idk the most important work of fiction in the last 50 years idk!!!
Ofc big shoutouts as always Anil Bawa-Cavia -- this is the book we discuss toward the end of the episode.
If you aren't aware of Laboria Cuboniks and the XFM, stop listening and read it!!!
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17. Computation is Computation (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi)
20 augustus 2024 · 51 min
This episode features one of our most anticipated guests: M. Beatrice Fazi. Lees meer
M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working in philosophy of computation, philosophy of technology and media philosophy. In this episode we mostly cover some key definitions relating to computation and its onto-epistemology grounded in Fazi’s landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics published in 2018. But our discussion doesn't end in 2018.
Now more than ever, Fazi`s work on computation holds unbelievable importance with wide-ranging implications. Philosophy is becoming a major foil to technocapital and technopolitics, forcing us to seriously (re)consider fundamental questions about technology and correlated fundamentals of knowledge and being.
Ever wondered what computation actually is? According to Fazi, it exists and unfolds not only as a function, but also as a creative modality forming its own conditions for existence. This episode dives deep into the concept of computation as an autonomous form of thought and creation, that is nevertheless contingent, i.e. not independent from the material conditions of the world.
We move further into Fazis more recent work in ontology: the triangulation of abstraction, representation and thought. This pushes us into massive questions - what does computation mean for the future of thought? How should we conceptualize the relationship between humans and technology? And why should we rethink the idea of technology as merely an extension of ourselves?
Relevant Links & References:
Fazi’s landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics—still essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of technology. About the fundamentals of what computation does and what material, ontological and epistemological consequences this holds.
Brian Cantwell Smith’s essay, “The Foundations of Computing” (2003)—a text we explore, ev…
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10 augustus 2024 · 55 min
𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑚01 𝑗𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑠 𝑢𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑒
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16. Sh*tshow Theory (w/ Mattin & Inigo Wilkins)
30 juli 2024 · 50 min
BACK with some of the world's foremost experts on NOISE: Mattin & Inigo Wilkins. Lees meer
Relevant links include:
The Noise Research Union (NRU) which involves both Mattin and Inigo alongside founding members Cécile Malaspina, Martina Raponi, Miguel Prado, and Sonia de Jager.
Mattin's AWESOME book Social Dissonance (out on Urbanomic).
Mattin's podcast Social Discipline.
Inigo Wilkin's UPCOMING book, which is obviously going to be amazing, which will be released on Urbanomic: Irreversible Noise (here's a sneak peak from an interview with Nina Protocol).