Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
● 02/12/2025
“A society that uses automation to ‘build shareholder value’ while impoverishing everyone else will not be successful.”
– Tech publisher and pundit Tim O’Reilly, on the deeply problematic direction of the AI economy. Venture capitalists are largely to blame, he argues, observing they are “consciously whipping up a media bubble rather than fostering real growth.”
Big Think
● 04/08/2025

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.’”

New York Times
● 01/07/2025
“They are seen widely as leaders, respectable investors, and futurists and have all these markers of being a technological elite. When in reality they are ideological scumbags.”
– This Machine Kills’ Jathan Sadowski, deriding Alexis Ohanian, Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, and other venture capitalists backing embryo-screening startup Nucleus. Their ideologically motivated investment in questionable science “should be enough to be cast out of the realm of serious, respectable society,” notes Sadowski.
SoundCloud
● 03/06/2025
“There is a Latin America testing ground for products. If they are successful, they tend to be deployed in other jurisdictions, oftentimes with additional safeguards, sometimes not.”
– Tech policy researcher Ayden Férdeline, on how Latin America has become a hotbed for workplace surveillance startups. The venture-capital funded bossware technologies include biometric tracking, AI-powered productivity monitoring, and predictive analytics that continuously collect worker data.
Rest of World
● 08/08/2023

Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a $5 million seed raise with venture capital firms and angel investors including Tezos Foundation, PunkVenturesDAO, Casey Reas, and thefunnyguys (Le Random). The funds will be used to hire more team members, support development of a 2.0 release (integrating Ethereum) and tools for art institutions, and bolster the platform’s mission of “empowering anyone, anywhere, to artistically express themselves with code,” they tweet (image: Zancan Garden, Monoliths, 2021).

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