Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
“The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centres that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear.”
“The first step is emotional: accept that it’s okay to leave platforms like Google. The next step is to remove your files from cloud drives, and store them locally. Understand what you’re storing and why.”
“There is no path to profitability for subprime AI. These absurd data centers will stand sentinel over the ruins of our fake economy like moai on Easter Island.”
“Under the guise of technological inevitability, companies are using the AI boom to rewrite the social contract—laying off employees, rehiring them at lower wages, intensifying workloads, and normalizing precarity.”
OUT NOW:
Cory Doctorow
Enshittification
Expanding on the deeply resonant term he coined in 2022, Canadian-British internet activist and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow offers a scathing analysis of late-stage platform capitalism, where “online public squares have become places of torment, and online retailers are hellish dumpster fires.”
“Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming” at Modern Art Oxford (UK) traces the British para-disciplinary artist’s enduring fascination with new technologies, power structures, and alternative belief systems. Treister’s first major institutional retrospective spans four decades and includes key works like the HEXEN 2.0 series of alchemical diagrams of big picture histories, with the latest, HEXEN 5.0 (2023-25), linking AI, climate breakdown, and quantum computing.
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OUT NOW:
Suzanne Treister
Prophetic Dreaming
The catalogue of Suzanne Treister’s retrospective at Modern Art Oxford (UK) is a major survey of the British artist’s investigative work connecting technology, power, belief, and futures. It spotlights seminal works and includes new essays by Lars Bang Larsen, Patricia Domínguez, and Val Ravaglia.
“Europe choked its own creative engineering pipeline with regulation and paralysis by consensus. The precautionary delay was successfully narrated by a Critique Industry that monopolized both academia and public discourse.”
“AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”
“The goal is not to react after a major incident occurs… but to prevent large-scale, potentially irreversible risks before they happen. If nations cannot yet agree on what they want to do with AI, they must at least agree on what AI must never do.”
“The overtly patriarchal text glorifies war as ‘hygiene’ and promotes ‘scorn for woman.’ The manifesto also calls for the destruction of museums, libraries, and universities and supports the power of the rioting crowd.”
“Each search helped Google make more advertising money than rivals and gave it more data to improve its ability to accurately field queries. It also gave Apple billions of reasons not to develop its own search engine.”
“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.”
Tech reporter Sheera Frenkel chronicles how Google, OpenAI, Meta, and venture capitalists (VCs) have abandoned their anti-war pledges to embrace the military industrial complex. The transformation includes executives being sworn in as Army lieutenant colonels, companies scrubbing AI weapons bans, and VCs investing $31 billion in defense startups last year. Frenkel notes that a decade ago Big Tech companies “brandished mottos such as ‘connecting the world’ and ‘do no evil.’”
OUT NOW:
Poliks & Trillo
Exocapitalism
Theorists Marek Poliks and Robert Alonso Trillo map capital’s migration into algorithmic territories—from AI to memecoins—developing conceptual tools for navigating life in an era of automated finance and distributed computation.
“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.”
“The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut.”
OUT NOW:
Adam Becker
More Everything Forever
Science journalist Becker critiques narratives of AI superintelligence, Martian colonies, the singularity, and other “profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow” that are espoused by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and other tech billionaires.
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