“Artists have successfully used toilets before, so why not large language models?” Hito Steyerl – Set as default location: “Wenn ich nicht hier bin, bin ich auf dem Sonnendeck.“ Rationalism today: explaining genocide for the good – Ethics advice: “If you can’t get the model to say what you want, just rewrite the data.” – Advice: “Do not deviate from the majority.” – “No one stumbles while lying in bed.” Japanese saying – “Burned out because you’re underchallenged.” – “Sorry about the loss of your imagination.” Melissa Broder – “I check my portfolio for character development.” Milkroad – Marie Curie’s untimely advice: “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
rmdir /s /q “C:\FolderToDelete\” While for George Bataille sacrifice was envisioned as a quest for a meaningful existence, technological sacrifice is not personal or human-centred. The operation is cold, abstract and systemic, characterised by automation and self-execution. Its purpose is aimed at tasks outside the human framework: delete, update, shut down, restart and run. It is the opposite of affect-driven human-machine interaction and its messy, user-friendly experience design. Expect no mercy from machines that execute automatic cancellation. In the first part of 2025, Elon Musk’s DOGE task force hinted at what deletion as a kill-all political strategy looks like. During the delusion process, no agent in sight asks how you’re feeling. It will remove your directory and your folder; that’s the task. I forgot even to try to complain. Before you know it, the entire context is erased. No hostages taken. Ransomware looks friendly in comparison. Removing usernames is no longer done in the name of humanity, liberty and progress.
The aim may vary from the optimisation of 24/7 logistics, political elimination of the opponent, to a harmless ‘clean-up of infrastructure’. The ritual sacrifice side appears when procedures deviate and appear as things that go wrong—for you. Exceptions are the rule. Bang! It can be a strike, a breakdown of electricity, a storm or hurricane, or an accident due to wear and tear. There is a question of whether we should think about a (not so) silent revenge. Deletion is the opposite of call-out culture. The sacrifice claims to be done in the name of the common good. The flashlight act cleans up the system, sucking energy out of the sudden breakdown.
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“A hacker managed to get access to a version of Amazon’s ‘Q’ AI coding assistant, plant code that told it to ‘wipe’ users’ machines, and then Amazon included the code in an update released to the public. Not ideal!” 404 Media
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According to Émile P. Torres, this is the age of digital eugenics. The End Times are customised and happen to be executed on… you. While today’s eschatology may be experienced as a general condition, it is instead aimed at specific social, racial and ethnic groups that can no longer keep up and will have to be sacrificed. Some are already post-human regarding tech adaptability, but are not yet aware of their next nature and feel for the sub-humans that are being left behind at an increasing speed. The act of the sacrifice comes into play here as a ‘brutal’ reminder: whose side are you on? Will you play along with the tech elite or side with the losers?
This Nietzschean logic of the digital age is neither marginal nor weird. The fringe logic, currently installed as code in AI systems, blockchains and their networks (all of quantum-proof), immediately impacts the lives of billions. Even the ‘meme’ metaphor of a ‘viral spread’ is outmoded here, as the destructive logic immediately gets implemented on the level of global operating systems. While all this is embedded ideology, its distribution works radically differently. The only option to uphold the digital eugenics power would be the idealistic construct of geo-political technology walls between the US, EU, Chinese and Russian spheres of influence. While this Realpolitik may sound convincing, it is not yet in place, and b. questionable in terms of its porosity.
All ordinary ‘humans’ have to be looked at as pitiful, sub-human existences, tragic Neanderthals of the present that no longer deserve the label of ‘user’. The puffing and sweating malfunctioning wetware inside them (caused by faulty genes?) no longer raises sympathy, let alone empathy, and is looked at as something that can no longer be part of this complex 21st century that requires perfection and connectivity. Participation and contribution are what count, no longer ‘difference’, let alone questioning of authority.
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Exploration of human limits is no longer the avant-garde project.
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Cory Doctorow writes that “corporate fascists and their captured regulators are the most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian science fiction as a suggestion, rather than as a warning.” Let’s take this statement seriously. Tech bros no longer invent anything new. Their disruption energy has dissipated. Instead, the act of plagiarising Doctorow points to is fast, cheap, and deliberately aimed at being worse than the original. Tech is no longer sold as a solution that claims to optimise life. Any reference to goodness or do-good has to be prevented as Big Tech wants to take a firm stand. However, this stand is nothing but a symbolic gesture. There are no long-term policies or new products and services launched. It is plutopopulism in that sense that measures only benefit.
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“I never thought that social media would mainly be used to spread utter nonsense, false accusations and an endless collection of comments that surpass the above. People shout all kinds of things at each other and get angry when you ask for proof,” Walter ‘desk.nl’ van der Cruijsen writes on X. Leaving the ironic undertone aside, there is a truth in his statement that is difficult to face. In most Southern European countries, the term ‘reseaux sociaux’ is still widely used. What does it say about the State of Social media when networks of actual people are poisoned to this extent? We can point as much as we like at bots and algorithms, at AI slop and fake news, but what’s often forgotten is the human remainder that is somehow still out there, amidst it all, as the prime target. This results in zero curiosity, quiet cracking, actively disengaged, bored with it all, swiping through with a blank expression, killing time, and being unable to quit it all.
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In Brutalism (2020), Achille Mbembe describes brutalism as the process of intensification and escalation, accompanied by the logic of combustion and the slow production of ash clouds, acid rains, etc. Against this, Mbembe posits Africa as the “pharmakon of the earth,” inhabiting incredible richness and immense poverty. In Africa, he sees humanity’s becoming an artificial being played out, which he sees as a spectacular return to animism. It is no longer a 19th-century version of animism whose expression is modelled on the worship of ancestors. Instead, “this new form will be based on the cult of the self and objects as our multiple doubles.” This is where digital technologies come in, “which have made possible the rediscovery of this power of animation.” The critical project here would be “to protect the living against the forces of desiccation.” Against everything mechanical, the African project put breathing. It starts not from absence but from an “anticipatory presence.”
Mbeme defines digital computation from three angles: technical abstraction, the creation of subjectivity, and its ability to make a world of its own. Artificialise, automate, autonomize. Through all this, the process of ‘borderization’ runs as the dominant technique to separate bodies. Digital reason, “viewing the world as an immense reservoir to draw from,” will have to come to terms with the fact that “while the world has never produced so much knowledge, ignorance and indifference, induced or cultivated, has never been so widespread.” However, the dual nature of the digital is also something Mbembe is praising. “The flexibility, adaptability, and aptitude for constant innovation, for the extension of the possible, is also the spirit of the digital. This is why we can say that Africa was digital before the digital.”
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There once was an ideal in the optimistic techno-science genre called bio art that brought together the uncanny and the sublime to bring out the beauty of the artificial. A fantasy layer of imaginary plants, brand new cancers, unlikely insects, all existing exclusively inside a hybrid, digital realm, inside a lab. Bio art was, and still is, not proposed as an organic synthesis but deliberately designed as a speculative provocation. Sadly or not, it remains an idealistic construct, which neither the art world nor the techno-science industries have been willing to embrace. The question raised here is whether the stressed humanity of the early 21st century is up for a project like this.
Bio art has remained marginal for the past 30+ years. For an avant-garde movement that’s nothing extraordinary. Here is the paradox: bio art was once a designed proposition only accessible to those inside a lab. Outside of the lab, it felt strange and hostile. Bio art was not science fiction. It was neither a prediction nor a warning. Instead, it hovered in a parallel possibility realm. There was a longing for ‘artificial nature’ as a withdrawal from the world here, experienced from the comfort of home. If we can design anything, why not our own body? That’s radical fashion. We were promised it may be possible to engineer the human species genetically, administering what’s happening inside an artificial womb. One day, people will wear their organs inside out. Sure, just because they can. It is no longer a statement to say that we share the world with machines. We have been cyborgs for decades. Then why has bio.art remained so invisible, irrelevant? What happens when these remaining technological pilots are without consequences, exclusively built to provoke academic hermeneutics? Vampire lab art that cannot survive without speculative quasi-
utopian discourses, realised with state subsidies?
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“sorry i didn’t respond to your email, i’m experiencing a thing where i feel like i’m in a waking dream and get scared i’ve fallen down a mental hole from whence i’ll never return but it’s actually just a symptom of stress, common amongst sensitive people, called derealisation.” Melissa Broder
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Zuckerberg explained how Meta creates personalised AI friends to supplement real ones: “The average American has three friends, but has demand for 15.” He told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he’s spending on AI: he will use AI to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything.
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This is how tech critic Edward Ongweso Jr. describes the situation in 2025 on his Substack site: “Silicon Valley’s business model has metastasised, with oligarch-intellectuals poised to reorganise wider and wider swaths of our economy, culture, social relations, and politics. To maximise profits and efficiency and productivity, to purge capitalism of its last vestiges of democracy and liberalism, to transform speculative gains into real wealth then into political power that makes this alchemy easier, to discipline consumers and workers and regulators, to foster paranoia (whether by states or communities) and preserve order, to pursue geo-strategic primacy, to summon some artificial superintelligence that will either end history or realise historic profits, anything and everything will be offered up. Something has to give—the situation demands a blood sacrifice.” It’s important to notice here that users who were once facilitated with free services have been reframed as consumers who need to be disciplined and ultimately sacrificed. Ongeweso says that some believe the sacrifices will give birth to a stillborn god that will save the world. In contrast, others believe the sacrifices will ensure a renewed Pax Americana, and again, others think sacrifices will restore some semblance of a natural order we’ve lost sight of. The point here is not the different belief systems and options but the paradigmatic shift of the tech sectors towards sacrifice.
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As Italo-French think tank writer Giuliano da Empoli states in his The Hour of the Predator (2025), social media has given the mobilisation of political power struggle an industrial dimension. He distinguishes three types of operation: raising sensitive issues that divide public opinion; pushing the most extreme positions in these fields and letting them clash; providing all possible space for the largest possible audience to express discontent. Silicon Valley shifted from programming computers to human behaviour long ago. The change during Trump 2 is one away from the Davos consensus. Silicon Valley officially no longer supports the old political elites, be they social-democratic, liberal or conservative. Just as in the age of the Borgias or the conquistadors, cynical scheming and brute force increasingly determine the course of international affairs. Their philosophy is no longer based on the decisions made by backroom experts that claim to defend the common good and the rule of law. In charge are the engineers of chaos—the title of an earlier book by the same author. Balanced governance of the status quo is no longer the aim but the wilful creation of a mess, according to the old Facebook belief system that disruption will ultimately benefit autocrats and billionaires.
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Mediastudies Misery 2025 – a personal email account from Canada: “What can I tell my first-year students? Are they in a media production program preparing for a world rapidly abandoning media production? There are a few jobs making movies or TV shows, but those jobs are ever fewer, as LLMs, ‘AI’, evacuates their careers. Hi kids, let’s talk about McLuhan, Lazarsfeld, Haraway, Bernays and Baudrillard, even though they’re all completely irrelevant in the face of automation. Funny that. Haraway’s cyborgs are old-fashioned, old hat. Baudrillard didn’t go nearly far enough—he couldn’t. He was like McLuhan—they both despised what they saw. McLuhan was a conservative Catholic longing for the days of Gutenberg. Baudrillard was a disaffected Marxist who longed for the authentic moment. They were both denied. Now I get to read papers students bang out on ChatGPT. No learning involved. No education.” Admit it: Baudrillard’s hyperreality is a mainstream given. The problem is not to historicise a specific field of study. The issue is generational: to admit that your set of theories has lost its visionary capacities, both the utopian and dystopian versions.
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Joan Westenberg asked why she deleted her second brain: “Two nights ago, I deleted everything. I erased 10,000 notes, 7 years of ideas and every thought I tried to save. What followed: relief. And a comforting silence where the noise used to be. I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a ‘second brain’ for years. The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive that it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.”
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Being voluntarily offline for an evening feels liberating, but what does it mean ‘to be in disconnection’ and where does it stand on the solitude good-loneliness bad axis?
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In this epoch, the internet no longer equals opportunity. It is an infrastructure defined by a handful of platform giants that were never interested in ’empowering communities’, even decades ago. This is a harsh reality that the Internet Society systematically denies. Instead, the ‘internet governance’ game is still dominated by do-good NGO lingo, which pretends that this medium is owned—and driven—by ‘communities’. If ‘closing the digital divide’ only means providing more users to Google and Microsoft and generating more traffic to Amazon and its AWS data centres, why can’t this reality be expressed in such terms? Much like 25 years ago, Internet Society still talks about networks and categorically refuses to use the word platform (let alone Big Tech, platform capitalism). The ‘make the internet safer’ slogan would mean to take a stand against Trump and his alt-right lobbyists, who cry about ‘censorship’ when actual measures are taken to safeguard minors and vulnerable groups. The multi-stakeholder approach (dominated by Google) has done nothing against the unprecedented concentration of profit and power in the hands of a few, which happened precisely in the same period of its existence. In fact, it is complicit by remaining silent. The Internet is a global resource, owned by no one. Internet Society’s homepage says it all. Under the headline Who Runs the Internet five players are listed: nonprofits, policymakers, educators, technical communities, standard setters and you. In an old school style, state censorship is mentioned, but the monopoly power of Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. The rise of China? Never heard of it.
Why not admit that ‘internet access’ happens through smartphones with players such as Samsung, Huawei and Apple? Too hard to address. Instead, the suggestion is made that—according to decentralized 1990s principles—Zimbabwean beekeepers will operate a PC as a local server through broadband (instead of facing the data-colonial reality that they will of course use Gmail, YouTube and data centres somewhere in the US). All the above should be backed up with depressing evidence, but I won’t do that. No one does. It’s all too clear that ever since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, 2003-2005), American Big Tech has done all in its power to neutralize and marginalize ‘internet governance’ and will invest whatever lobby work to freeze-dry the internet governance discourse in its arcane 2003 version. Not only do they hold key positions in this field (has anyone dared to make an old-fashioned network analysis including a ‘sponsorship’ lobby money overview?), they effectively own the ‘do-good’ nonprofit discourse, so that on none of the levels can the dominant role of Big Tech be raised. This sad reality has been the case over the past fifteen years. Internet governance: a topic associated with so much regression, defeat, so depressing that no one want to even address it anymore. I just wanted to have it said, at least once.