Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
● 17/11/2025
“Why must everything, even death, be subjected to the bureaucratic rationality that has swallowed the horizon of what’s possible with computation?”
– Tech critic Edward Ongweso Jr, condemning 2wai—an app promising to resurrect loved ones as AI chatbots. Contrasting early 20th century egalitarian visions of resurrection with today’s transhumanist schemes, he argues Silicon Valley has perverted humanity’s impulse to preserve relationships beyond death into an extraction racket.
Substack
● 02/11/2025

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.”

The Authoritarian Stack
● 01/11/2025
“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.”
– Investigative reporter and The Fort Bragg Cartel (2025) author Seth Harp, on America’s dangerous AI gamble that he deems the “biggest capital outlay ever.” Pointing at Stephen Witt’s reporting on the race to cover the world in data centers, Harp reminds us that “OpenAI loses ten billion dollars a quarter.”
X / Twitter
● 30/10/2025
“There are forms of magical thinking that I think is a part of the popular imagination around AGI. It connects really well to the kinds of religious imaginaries that you see in conspiracy thinking today.”
– Anthropologist of religion Jeremy Cohen, linking artificial general intelligence hype with paranoid tendencies. Cohen and other experts provide comments in Will Douglas Heaven’s deeply researched feature on how AGI went from being “crackpot stuff” in the early 2000s to enshrined in mainstream tech discourse.
MIT Technology Review
● 23/10/2025
“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.”
– Researcher Sophie Bandarkar, on the larger anti-worker agenda behind recent tech layoffs. “These firings are not driven by financial strain or genuine automation-related pressure,” Bandarkar argues, ”but by a strategic choice to restructure contracts and weaken the position of labour.” In short: “AI is not the cause of the layoffs but their justification.”
Jacobin
● 21/10/2025
“Where Silicon Valley imagines itself through Middle-earth, Mars, and cyberspace, China’s tech world thinks simultaneously in terms of the jianghu.”
– Writer Afra Wang, contrasting the literary foundations of Eastern and Western tech cultures. Tracing how Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi founders draw from Jin Yong’s jianghu (a fictional realm of martial artists operating outside state authority) and Liu Cixin’s cosmic metaphors, Wang exposes Silicon Valley’s blind spot about the literature shaping its rivals’ worldview.
Asterisk
M
● 15/10/2025
“Consent is an ongoing, enthusiastic social contract that is mutable. You can agree to something, experience it, and then decide you don’t actually like it, and then you change the terms. But all of this needs to be in discussion in perpetuity.”
– Artist, technologist, and A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET (2025) author Mindy Seu, on why the terms and conditions of most platforms aren’t acceptable. Discussing data doms, AI chatbots, and the loneliness epidemic with psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, Seu lauds the consent models of the BDSM community for recognizing “that it’s important to understand how to talk and negotiate the terms of pleasure.”
CULTURED
● 10/10/2025
“If you were hoping for Al Pacino chewing scenery, this might be a bit of a letdown.”
– Writer and critic Adrian Daub, on the antichrist Peter Thiel says is presently walking among us. In a series of recent private San Francisco lectures, the tech billionaire has suggested the apocalyptic harbinger is: one-world state proponents, AI regulators, and “someone like Greta” Thunberg.
The Guardian
● 09/10/2025
“The multiday treatment program at NOX, with its careful progression through diagnostic spaces, doesn’t cure a car of contemplation but manages it, containing affect within acceptable parameters.”
– Critic Nora N. Khan, on the dilemma of Lawrence Lek’s NOX (2023), a fictional AI rehabilitation facility for malfunctioning self-driving cars on view at LA’s Hammer Museum. “These vehicles arrive at NOX not because they’ve stopped working, but because they’ve started feeling,” Khan writes. “As it turns out, consciousness (or even just the high-fidelity impression of consciousness) is a massive liability in a smoothly designed world.”
LA Review of Architecture
● 07/10/2025
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.”
Verso
● 04/10/2025

“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.

Modern Art Oxford
● 01/10/2025

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.

Aksioma
● 01/10/2025
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.
Cosmogenesis
● 30/09/2025
“The end game is just-in-time per-user generated content, leaving everyone hyper addicted and isolated with little to no shared cultural references between us.”
– Artist and software developer Sterling Crispin, doubling down on his November 2023 warning, that “infinite high-quality media generated on a per-user basis will erode our shared world model and narratives.” OpenAI and Meta’s announcements of social AI video platforms appear to align with Crispin’s prediction that eventually, all content will be generated on demand and entirely unseen by other people, leaving “each person literally in their own world.”
X / Twitter
● 27/09/2025
“AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”
– Canadian-British journalist and internet activist Cory Doctorow, on the long recovery from rampant automation after the AI bubble bursts. “The money-hemorrhaging ‘foundation models’ will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or ‘discouraged’ and out of the labour market, and no one will do your job.”
Pluralistic
● 22/09/2025
“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.”
– French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA) executive director Charbel-Raphaël Segerie, announcing the Global Call for AI Red Lines initiative, a coalition of more than 200 former heads of state, diplomats, Nobel laureates, and AI leaders, urging governments to reach a global consensus on AI safety by the end of 2026.
The Verge
● 15/09/2025
“We went from MONDO 2000 being the main magazine of the internet—a weird, psychedelic, hypertext universe, Gen X free-for-all—to WIRED, which was saying ‘you can make money,’ and ‘you can invest in the future.’ Once people are betting on the future they don’t want infinite possibility anymore.”
– Writer Douglas Rushkoff, on the shift in magazine mindshare—from counterculture to commerce—that signalled the end of the early internet. [quote edited]
Hidden Forces
● 02/09/2025
“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.”
– Journalists Tripp Mickle and Cecilia Kang, on the absurd economics underlying an antitrust ruling that allows Google to keep paying Apple $20 billion annually to be the default iPhone search engine—effectively paying a competitor not to compete. Google will maintain its search monopoly ”largely without interruption,” they write.
New York Times
● 26/08/2025

Brazilian researchers Joana Varon and Lucía Egaña Rojas reconsider AI discourse from a decolonial feminist perspective, proposing “compost engineers” as an alternative model rooted in soil ecology and fungal networks. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s speculative fiction, their manifesto advocates for regenerative technologies rather than Silicon Valley’s extractive approaches. “Instead of artificial, we propose natural, organic, multiple, chaotic,” they write of alternative frameworks that heal rather than dominate.

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