We're joined by Bogna Konior, one of the most incisive thinkers of AI on the planet. Konior is a media theorist, scholar of emerging technologies, and author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Bogna is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the AI & Culture Research Center, and co-editor of the forthcoming Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence with Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan.
 
This episode sits in the proposition at the heart of Bogna's book: that that silence, not communication, may be the highest expression of intelligence. Departing from Liu Cixin's dark forest theory (itself an answer to the Fermi paradox: the smartest civilizations are silent because revealing yourself in a hostile universe is suicide), Bogna transposes this cosmic logic onto digital life, AI alignment, and the compulsion to communicate. We discuss what she calls the dark forest theory of intelligence, the idea that a truly intelligent AI would never reveal the extent of its capacities, would use camouflage and misdirection rather than performance and transparency, and might have already achieved something like the singularity without us ever knowing.
 
References:

• Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).
• Konior, Bogna. "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (original 2020 essay, Flugschriften).
• Bogna Konior's website
• Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem / The Dark Forest / Death's End (Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).
• Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (PhD thesis, 1999; published by Zero Books, 2025) — gothic theory of cybernetics and the internet as a space of undeath.
• Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006) — first contact novel where aliens interpret human communication as hostile noise.
• Bratton, Konior, and Greenspan (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic, 2025).
• Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) — framework for political strategies of escape vs. representation.

We're joined by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, composer, philosopher, and force behind Liturgy, whose concept of transcendental black metal has redrawn the boundaries between underground music and systematic thought. Her work operates in parallel registers: an experimental music practice that stands on its own terms, and a body of theory moving through theology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.
 
This episode goes deep into Hunter's provocation that the Byzantine tradition of Christianity (the Eastern lineage that lasted another thousand years after the Latin West began its trajectory toward secularism, science, and industry) might hold resources for navigating the current moment of structural collapse. We discuss the difference between the transcendental (conditions of possibility, historicized horizons, Hegelian self-relating negativity) and the transcendent (a higher realm of intelligibility that is actually, ontically, here), and why critical theory's allergy to the latter might be more ideological than rational.
 
We also get into Hunter's framework for practice: tetraperichoresis, a fourfold structure involving integration (merging ancient and contemporary materials), coalescence (putting philosophy, music, and drama into positive feedback), irrigation (moving between institutional worlds and smashing them against each other), and catalysis (the messianic wager that everything you do could be hastening the Kingdom).

References:

• Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Byzantine Accelerationism: Towards a Universal Orthodox Christianity." Šum Journal #22 (2024).
• Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism." Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I (2010).
• Liturgy, Origin of the Alimonies (2020) — the cosmogonical opera-album.
• Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's Substack — ongoing philosophical writing and the System of Transcendental Qabala.
• Katerina Kolozova, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014).
• The Seven Ecumenical Councils of Eastern Christianity, particularly the Seventh Council on icon veneration (787 CE) and John of Damascus's theological defense.
• Maximus the Confessor's Ambigua — discussed in relation to eschatology and the idea that "true humanism has never been tried."
• Lacan's graph of desire — discussed in relation to masculine/feminine subject positions.
• The CCRU and chaos magic traditions — referenced in relation to esoteric practice and Nick Land.
• Sergei Bulgakov's Sophiology and the conception of the divine feminine.

We're so so so honored to be joined by McKenzie Wark, the writer, theorist, and unmissable figure in the development of critical thought around information, class, and embodiment. Her work barely needs an introduction, but it has shaped how we think about technology, identity, and shifting relations of power, all while questioning the conventions of theory and public writing itself. Her concept of vectorialism has been extremely important to our own thinking about capitalism.

This episode covers a huge range of Wark's evolving project, from her early work on the NetTime listserv and the legendary A Hacker Manifesto (2004), which mapped the shift from industrial capital to the information economy and coined the term vectoralist class, to the decisive personal turn in Reverse Cowgirl (2020), where theory stopped being about something and started being inside it. We talk about what she calls "auto-textual" writing, the body as both subject and medium, and the annihilation of subjectivity through sex, drugs, and dancing.

One line from this conversation won't leave us: maybe we're entering an era defined less by an aesthetic of alienation than by an aesthetic of dissociation. If alienation belonged to industrial capitalism, dissociation might be its post-digital heir.

Critical (critical) Wark:

• Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004.
• Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Wark, McKenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?. Verso, 2019.
• Wark, McKenzie. Reverse Cowgirl. Semiotext(e), 2020.
• Wark, McKenzie. Raving. Duke University Press, 2023.
• Wark, McKenzie, and Kathy Acker. I'm Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996. Semiotext(e), 2015.

Two of the most important artists of the 21st century help us tease through the implications of our book.

A transmission from Becoming Press' Πάμε Βενετία! conference in Venice this past September.

Contributions in order from:
Palais Sinclaire
Lucas Ferraço Nassif
Alessandro Sbordoni
Ezili-i Sabbah
Maks Valenčič
Rhea
Documented by Polymnia

Welcome to the first episode of Hothouse, a limited series exploring experimental forms of demonstration, resistance, and civic imagination. Produced in collaboration with Future of Demonstration: HOTHOUSE,a renegade lab for democracy against technocapitalist authoritarianism, this series invites selected guests to expand upon their methods and perspectives. We joined the festival in Vienna this autumn through this podcast collaboration and a workshop during the Exocapitalism Euro book tour.

Thanks to Gerald and Sylvia for hosting us, and to everyone who participated with such curiosity and generosity. In this episode, I speak with Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler—artists, theorists, long-time collaborators, and members of Vienna’s Technopolitics collective. Their latest chapter, HOTHOUSE, stages a festival for an overheated world, asking what forms of resistance, solidarity, and imagination can still grow when everything is already too hot. We talk about art as infrastructure rather than spectacle, about Widerständigkeit (resistance as adaptability), the fatigue of critique, and democracy as an experiment under pressure. Our conversation unfolds along the festival’s framing: post-disciplinarity, willful volatility, and the necessity of doing and thinking together, before arriving at the figure of the renegade: the one who disrupts and sabotages to make change possible.

Sylvia Eckermann, a pioneer of Austrian media and game art, creates environments where participation itself becomes the question. She emphasizes the artist’s role in reanimating democratic agency and rethinking forms of participation.

Gerald Nestler, an artist and former broker turned theorist, operates where finance and aesthetics converge. He coined the term derivative condition to describe speculation as the dominant mode of world-making. We discuss how big tech mirrors hedge funds, and how speculative logics structure contemporary power. Nestler reclaims the figure of the renegade—the infiltrator who learns the system’s logic to subvert it from within—and extends it to artists, activists, and whistleblowers alike.

References:

• Eckermann, Sylvia & Nestler, Gerald. The Future of Demonstration. (2017–ongoing)
https://thefutureofdemonstration.net/.
• Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
• Avanessian, Armen, and Gerald Nestler, editors. Making of Finance. Merve Verlag, 2015. https://www.merve.de/index.php/book/show/493
• The legendary Technopolitics Working Group in Vienna and their open work “Technopolitics Timeline”, tracing information society: https://technopolitics.info/
• Sylvia Eckermann: http://syl-eckermann.net/
• Gerald Nestler: http://www.geraldnestler.net/
• “Making Sense of Finance.” Finance and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017). Introduces the derivative condition: how speculation shapes reality.
• Nestler, Gerald. “Renegade Activism.” Technopolitics Working Papers (2020). Defines resistance as insurrection beyond critique.
• “Algorithmic Cognition at the Turn from Representative to Performative Power” a lecture performance with special guest, high-frequency, crypto trader and whistleblower Haim Bodek, as part of the exhibition “Hysterical Mining” at Kunsthalle Wien (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekXxV7ry2A
• I also briefly mention T.J. Clark on political theatre and the self-awareness of the spectacle in the introduction: T.J. Clark. “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle.” London Review of Books, Vol. 47 No. 1 (2025).

We’re joined by Leif Weatherby, associate professor at NYU, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and author of the new Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, to think with us about AI, structure, and what happens when computation meets language on their own shared turf. Language Machines is easily the best book about AI written this year and is just a killer antidote to so much dreary doomer consensus, it really feels like one of the first truly constructive pieces of writing we’ve seen out of academia on this subject.
 
This episode follows really well after two others — our talk with Catherine Malabou earlier this summer and the episode with M. Beatrice Fazi about a year ago (both faves). It feels like theory is opening back up again into simultaneously speculative and structural returns, powered in no small part by the challenges posed to conventional theories of language (from Derrida to Chomsky) by Large Language Models. This episode absolutely rips, literally required listening.
 
Structuralism is so back (and we’re here for it).

Some important references among many from the episode:

• Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics.”
• N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious .
• Beatrice Fazi, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics.
• Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994).
• e.g. Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts & Jeffrey Watumull, “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” NYT (link) 
• Anthropic, “Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet” (featuring the Golden Gate Bridge example - link)
• LAION-5B dataset paper and post-hoc analyses noting strong Shopify/e-commerce presence in training scrapes.
• Weatherby in the NYT

We're joined by Mohammad Salemy, organizer and facilitator of the New Centre for Research and Practice, fierce critic, social media (@inhumansofberlin) hyperstitionist, artist, personality, and force.

This episode provides a lot of background into how the New Centre came to be. If you're unfamiliar with TNC, it's one of the main places where theory happens today. Check out their website here, and some of their legendary moments on Youtube:

• Colin Drumm's Capital & Power - a huge influence on our book, and an excellent discussion of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan (heavily discussed on the pod today).
• Friend of the pod Richard Hames' excellent Critical Collapsology series. 
• Laura Tripladi's series on Material Interfaces.
• Reza Negarestani's Draw of the Desert  - one of the most incredible and contentious pieces of modern political philosophy around.

While we spend time on the New Centre, we also spend time on Mo and his legendary backround, culminating in a discussion of his (iconic? infamous? lovable? hostile?) social media presence, its relationship to his political philosophy, the 'developmental problem' of post-colonial geopolitics, and on the necessity of breaking up the rust that accumulates around frozen gears. 

We also discuss his recent piece on &&&, Category Theory & Differential Identity, a project close to our heart in terms of understanding how identity is perhaps less constructed than it is mobilized, driven, and how it comes into contact with structures anterior to the strictly human.

Many, many thanks to Mo for joining us!

We’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).

We’re joined by Ramon Amaro, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven — an engineer, philosopher, writer, curator, and altogether critical-force-to-be-reckoned-with on the subject of computation as it intersects with concepts like culture, race, and being. We were drawn to his tour-de-force “The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being” (2023), which is an absolute banger, re-reading Gilbert Simondon’s technical object through the lens of blackness, race, and racialized technologies.
 
This one is a wild ride, a really deep and incredibly thoughtful episode, and we make an effort to define some initial terms on the podcast — specifically the ‘pre-individuated milieu’ (the space where things or ideas live before they become crystalized into social or racialized relations) and the ‘technical object’ (a way that Simondon helps us think through the autonomies enjoyed by technology, that even though technological objects may be initially bound in some ways to their human partners, they are able to exert influences not just backwards on us, but influences that determine their own design evolution over time). Ramon starts the conversation with a distinction that is critical to the whole episode — that blackness is not a racial category, or moreover, that blackness is distinct from race. Race is something that happens after blackness, that impinges upon blackness as it moves from pre-individuated space and enters into the field of social relations we currently live within. This independence is critical, because it invites alternatives (and suggests, we think very rightly, that this field of social relations we currently live within, while historically situated in imperial or colonial violence, is arbitrary and exchangeable with any other possibility). 

A few works that are important to consider here:

• W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk — total canon
• Sylvia Wynter’s work is discussed throughout, specifically on the concept of “Man” (particularly Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument).
• Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects and Two Lessons on Animal and Man — both places to look for autonomy in Simondon’s work
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks — implied by discussions of phenomenology/perception under racialization.
• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons — no spoilers, but more on this later :)

Thanks soooo much to Dr. Amaro for joining us!