Podcast: Disintegrator (LS 30 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 36. Violence (w/ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney)
Pub date: 2025-09-03
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powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationWe’re joined by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney — co-conspirators of
The Undercommons — to think with us about AI, study, and brutality, and the long histories that place these concepts into relation.
In a lot of ways neither Moten nor Harney require an introduction, they are the sources of major touchstone references made throughout this podcast — from last week’s guest Ramon Amaro to one of our first guests, Luciana Parisi, and plenty of places in between.
The episode starts with a conversation about AI, but it quickly becomes a conversation about change, the question of the necessity of change or even organization, and imposition (that is, the brutal, external application of force against situations that already contain within themselves the lived possibility of alternative futures).
Some important references among many from the episode:
- Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
- Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).
- Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” (2003).
- Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke UP, 2016).
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022).
- Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; later eds. 2000/2020).
- Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music (1968).
- Hua Hsu, “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” The New Yorker (June 30, 2025).
• • Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,”
The Atlantic (July 1945).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.