Francesca Bria and XOF Research launch The Authoritarian Stack, an interactive data visualization tracking Silicon Valley’s ascendant “patriotic tech” coalition. Drawing on an open-source dataset of 250+ actors (Alexander Karp, Palmer Luckey, Peter Thiel, etc.) and $45 billion in financial flows, the research traces how cloud platforms, AI, and defense tech, are converging into privatized infrastructure around core state functions—a system where “corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.”

There might be hope for the internet after all: In a piece for Mozilla Foundation’s Nothing Personal imprint, co-matter strategists Severin Matusek, Nick Houde, and Paloma Moniz chart an emerging ecosystem of radical networks and alternate digital infrastructures that prioritize values and community over growth. Are.na, Metalabel, New Models, Subvert, or the Cyberfeminism Index are all examples of a “post-naive” internet era and builders determined to change the status quo.

In “Stuck? Click Here,” an Aksioma online exhibition via KUNSTSURFER, Dutch artist Lotte Louise de Jong replaces the web ads in your browser with slowed down “stuck” clips, a niche fetish genre where female bodies are wedged into sofas, office chairs or washing machines. A metaphor for our entrapment in digital platforms, de Jong’s intervention “reminds us that ‘stuck’ is no longer just a fetish but a default mode of existence online,” writes curator Hsiang-Yun Huang.

Deprecated API keys, banned bots, revoked permissions: Everest Pipkin’s solo exhibition, “Hostile Platforms / Beloved Margins,” at Berlin’s panke.gallery reveals the web’s fragility under platform capitalism. The retrospective of browser-based works, some live, some dead, some waiting to fail, reminds us that connections of personal meaning last, even if platforms crumble. “The history of the internet is a history of people constructing homes together, even temporarily in the margins,” Pipkin writes.

Net art veterans Cory Arcangel, JODI, Dirk Paesmans, and UBERMORGEN playfully probe the gamified mechanics of the attention economy in “Entertainment at all costs” at Wouters Gallery Brussels. UBERMORGEN contributes slogans decrying platform dynamics—“Drama Marketing,” “Trauma Dumping”—while Paesmans’ Pokemon Go Museum (2025) uses AR to riff on the commodification of cultural spaces. The show dissects how leisure has been weaponized into perpetual engagement—the churn of an endless content economy.

“Ambient Propaganda” at Utrecht’s IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture examines the shift from top-down to ambient influence, a new regime “where ideology is subconsciously incorporated into everyday digital culture.” From TikTok trends to political fandoms, the featured works by Noura Tafeche, Lesia Vasylchenko, Total Refusal, Paolo Cirio, Fantastic Little Splash and others highlight “how the boundaries between self-expression, performance, and ideological reproduction have blurred.”

In advance of Ars Electronica, Mario Schmidhumer reflects on how platform capitalism looms over European digital sovereignty. Citing the 2025 S+T+ARTS Prize winners—AI War Cloud Database, Sensing Quantum—as exemplars, Schmidhumer positions artistic inquiry as essential for democratic engagement with (contested) AI futures. While clearly a festival programming preview, the missive argues for cultural institutions to serve as sites of technological resistance rather than mere exhibition spaces.