Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
● 26/11/2025
“Trump’s ICE Director wants to run mass deportation ‘like Prime, but with human beings.’”
– Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, highlighting the company’s role as a major cloud services provider to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Palantir. The open letter—signed by over 1,000 workers—demands clean energy data centres, worker input on AI deployment, and an end to collaborations with surveillance and deportation infrastructure.
Amazon Climate Justice
● 03/11/2025
“Data breaches are a perpetual concern with any data collection. Biometrics magnify that risk because your face cannot be reset, unlike a password or credit card number.”
– Attorney Mario Trujillo, framing the irreversible nature of biometric data collection in his analysis of Amazon Ring’s upcoming ‘Familiar Faces’ feature. The video doorbell will scan everyone who approaches Ring cameras—including people who never consented—and retain untagged faces for up to six months.
EFF
● 22/09/2025
“To regulate AI effectively, we have to update our mental model of what AI is. It’s no longer just a chatbot or a website algorithm. It’s a product, a presence, and increasingly, a companion made possible by a quiet transformation in infrastructure.”
– Policy researcher Matt Steinberg, warning that AI-enabled wearables slip through regulatory frameworks. Citing Amazon’s conversation-transcribing bracelets and Meta’s Ray-Ban assistants, Steinberg argues current laws don’t cover AI occupying “physical, emotional, and social space.”
Tech Policy Press
● 04/09/2025
“We call this NIMI—Not In My Industry—which means that I don’t give a shit if I take an Uber, I don’t care if I buy books on Amazon or listen to music on Spotify. However, when something hits my industry, such as AI in comics, I will be very against it.”
– Greek-Belgian researcher and conceptual comics artist Ilan Manouach, on the hypocrisy of artists who lament AI’s threat to creative labour after years of uncritically embracing extractive, manipulative technologies and platforms that served their interests. “The real problem is capitalism,” Manouach emphasizes.
The Comics Journal
● 25/08/2025
“If you’ve never spun up an AWS orchestration diagram how can you possibly critique the state of software today? I don’t understand how academia can critique technocapitalism without having actually done any of that work.”
– Exocapitalism (2025) co-author Marek Poliks, challenging academics to engage the technical realities they critique (like Amazon Web Services). Interviewed with co-author Roberto Alonso Trillo, the duo discuss the scale and mechanics of post-Silicon Valley capitalism. [quote edited]
New Models
● 07/07/2025
“Tech companies, with their ‘Sovereignty as a Service’ offerings, are acting as arms dealers, encouraging the illusion of a race for sovereign control while being the true powers behind the scenes.”
– Tech policy researchers Kate Elizabeth Creasey, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, and Rui-Jie Yew, warning that emerging ‘sovereignty as a service’ (SaaS) products from Nvidia and Amazon Web Services mirror colonial infrastructure schemes.
Tech Policy Press
U
● 29/05/2025
“If you can’t beat ’em, you can at least get paid by ’em.”
– AV Club staff writer Emma Keates, on the New York Times’ licensing deal allowing Amazon to use its editorial content for AI training and Alexa responses. An abrupt shift from their 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, the deal signals media companies may increasingly monetize content rather than fight AI firms in court.
AV Club
● 05/05/2025
“The voice of novel technological communication has been, almost from the beginning, a female voice, which is to say the voice of a helper, a perfect helper, pleasant, unflappable, immune to insults, come-ons and bossiness.”
– Journalist Susan Dominus, underscoring the prominence of female voices in AI assistants and apps—from Siri and Alexa to Jessie, a text-to-speech model used widely on TikTok.
T Magazine
● 28/02/2025
“The pivot is a direct product of the second Trump era and mirrors the president’s own trajectory with the United States government. Become the figurehead of an institution. Try to control it by the old rules. When that doesn’t work, take it by force, break it down, and rebuild it in your image.”
– Tech columnist Charlie Warzel, describing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ increasingly “emboldened” interference in Washington Post editorial.
The Atlantic
● 27/08/2024
OUT NOW:
Craig Gent
Cyberboss
Researcher and editor Gent takes stock of the impact of algorithmic management techniques used by Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo on workers and offers a “politics of resistance in the face of digital control.”
Verso
● 05/08/2024
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
– U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, ruling that Google has stifled competition to protect its 90% share of internet search traffic. The most consequential antitrust case since U.S. v. Microsoft Corp. a quarter-century ago, the designation of one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent players as an illegal monopoly will influence upcoming antitrust cases against Apple, Amazon, and Meta.
New York Times
● 01/03/2024
“So literally, I was like, what the fuck? Get these down. What are you doing? It’s as if I was the head of Gucci, and there’s all these knockoffs.”
– Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, on AI-generated clones of her memoir, Burn Book (2024), flooding Amazon. First reported by 404 media, the rip-offs have since blossomed in variety, sporting alt titles (Tech’s Queen Bee With A Sting), different authors, and illustrious synthetic cover photography. “So I, of course, put them all together, and I sent Andy Jassy [the CEO of Amazon] a note and said, what the fuck? You’re costing me money.”
Hard Fork
● 25/11/2022
“We can keep suppressing the wages of Uber drivers—keep them below the cost of living—because they can always supplement by renting out their apartment on Airbnb.”
– Technology studies scholar Aaron Shapiro, describing the circular logic of worker exploitation under platform capitalism. Chatting about his latest article on dark stores and ghost kitchens, he describes the recent failure of several post-Amazon “flimsy logistical companies.” [quote edited]
This Machine Kills
● 20/10/2022

“Terms & Expectations,” a group exhibition curated by Barbara Cueto & Bas Hendrikx, open’s at Toronto’s InterAccess. Focused on “distribution centres as agents within our natural environment,” the show hones in on critical infrastructure that underpins platform capitalism (e.g. the ubiquitous Amazon fulfilment centre). Featured are artists including Hiba Ali Simon Denny, Sophia Oppel, and Coralie Vogelaar, contributing works in mediums ranging from installation to performance.

InterAccess
● 11/08/2022
“Using fear-mongering about package theft and suburban crime, a surveillance company has convinced countless homes to affix a surveillance network node. Now they want us to laugh about it all in our (ideally) Ring-surveilled homes.“
– Motherboard staff writer Edward Ongweso Jr, on the upcoming launch of Ring Nation, Amazon’s new tv show featuring videos taken from Amazon Ring surveillance cameras
Vice
● 31/05/2022
“For me the phrase was the perfect title for the exhibition, encompassing why Amazon is such a ruthless company, and how they make this fact incredibly overt, both to their employees and customer base.”
– London-based artist, writer, and curator Bob Bicknell-Knight, discussing his current solo show, “It’s Always Day One,” at Office Impart, Berlin. Named after a hyper-capitalist Jeff Bezos phrase the company regularly uses in shareholder letters and press briefings, the exhibition includes, for example, 3D-printed body parts representing soon-to-be automated labour and interviews with Amazon workers.
Coveal
● 04/02/2022
“Enough people purchased the preservative to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts.”
– Megan Twohey & Gabriel J.X. Dance, on a dark twist of Amazon’s ‘frequently bought together’ recommendation engine. The journalists reveal that while eBay and Etsy have stopped carrying a chemical compound linked to scores of suicides, Amazon has dragged its heels.
New York Times
● 06/06/2021
“We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, ‘Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,’ invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet.”
– AI researcher Kate Crawford, on the very real materiality of AI. “It is made from natural resources,“ she tells interviewer Zoë Corbyn. “We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology.”
The Guardian
● 05/06/2021

Work produced during the Toronto-based South Asian Visual Arts Centre’s (SAVAC) ADA-DADA Residency is shared online. Spanning CGI, videogames, and fiction, pieces by CAM Collective, Vishal Kumararswamy, Lingxian Wu, and others are accessible via the RPG-esque gather.town platform. Overarching themes include migration, alienation, and exploitation, with Hiba Ali’s The Real Love Memo V.2 (image) generating anti-Amazon critiques in response to an infamous Jeff Bezos memo.

ADA-DADA
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