Issue 164

It’s not just that His Holiness recently released an extensive encyclical urging the global community to place AI and other “new things” at the service of human dignity, solidarity, and the common good. It’s that we can’t be sure how much technology turbocharges tendencies that are much older, established, and embedded in our habits, minds, and lives. Indeed, multiple authors in this issue of e-flux journal have similar critical misgivings about AI, but also push its critique beyond the appeal to a universal humanism. Do stock fears about AI (from Skynet to HAL 9000) obscure critiques of its present role in technocratic governance and militarist infrastructures? 

This is not the first time Pope Leo XIV has commented on AI. In February he also urged priests to stop writing sermons using AI, warning that our brains can, like muscles in the body, atrophy and die without regular use. While it’s comforting for a spiritual figurehead from a two-millennia-old institution to place guardrails on AI, a more terrifying and fascinating prospect comes into view for religions based in their own large language models of scripture and canonical text. As countless industries grapple with the automation of labor and thought, the Catholic Church may face an even more imposing question concerning the automation of the spirit.

Just a few hundred meters from the Vatican last March, billionaire venture capitalist and MAGA ideologist Peter Thiel gave a series of closed lectures on the Antichrist—a key recurring figure and concept for today’s fascist techno-fundamentalists, according to Giorgio Cesarale and Matteo Pasquinelli. In this issue, Cesarale and Pasquinelli dive deep into the juridical theory that has been bastardized by Silicon Valley “intellectuals” and made into the shaky foundation of Thiel’s illiberal “moral vision.” At its center lies Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of the “katechon,” a theological and political concept originating in a New Testament figure or force that restrains the advance of the Antichrist. 

In lieu of gods and masters, Stevphen Shukaitis and David Wengrow speak with anarchist researcher Bima Satria Putra, who is currently incarcerated in Indonesia. While inside, Putra has undertaken research on the histories of stateless communities throughout Indonesia that organized society and governed themselves through consensus rather than top-down, inherited power structures. Since societies organized along anarchist lines have existed before, Putra theorizes, they can exist again. 

Andrew Sungtaek reminds us that Donald Judd was stationed with the US military occupation in Korea in 1946–47, just before the Korean War broke out. While Judd anecdotally acknowledged that his time in Korea was influential, the minimalist forms of his work were nonetheless taken up as strictly non-referential. For Sungtaek, more than the question of influence, this occlusion opens onto an aesthetics of war and colonial occupation whose expression comes in amnesia, in always suppressing its own origins even while making art from war-surplus production lines. Paradoxically, it was in trying to render Judd’s austere minimalism legible to the growing Korean art market in recent years that his Korean influence gained tactical value towards prospective sales, and more explicit acknowledgement in turn. 

Martabel Wasserman argues that Alcatraz—the common name for the infamous former federal prison in San Francisco Bay—is not only an idea but an image, one whose densely layered history makes it “uniquely available for reactivation as spectacle,” as recently exploited by Trump’s proposal to reopen the prison. Wasserman traces the formation of Alcatraz as image, from Gold Rush–era photographs that translated land into property, to the imprisonment of the Hopi 19 for refusing to send their children to boarding schools, to the Red Power occupation and other marks of resistance inscribed on the island itself. “To reclaim Alcatraz from the Trumpian imagination,” she insists, “is not to fix its meaning but to insist on its multiplicity.” 

Aldo Kempen investigates some of the assumptions underlying the emergence of art and theory that engage with quantum theory. But Kempen encourages us to retain a critical impulse rather than fall into a new ontology, and to engage with all the different interpretations of quantum mechanics. Following Karen Barad, he argues that we need “to meet the universe halfway” and resist the temptation to think that “science simply reveals preexisting reality.” 

For Elvia Wilk, Alex Rivera’s 2008 film Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk fable in which Oaxacan workers sell their labor to operate a border they cannot cross, remains startlingly relevant. Wilk reads the film as a diagnosis of how extractive capitalism treats the body clock as “an inconvenience to be overcome.” Sleep, “crucial, ungovernable, universal,” emerges as the limit to capital’s drive for total subsumption. We are not lacking in popular imaginations about the coming technological apocalypse: from Karel Čapek to Arnold Schwarzenegger. But, as Vinícius Portella explains in this issue, existing narratives about the end of humanity by way of intelligent machines have not properly prepared us for the enshittified version, in which faulty and exploitative automated systems are given control of a technocratic society. Killer drones are already making decisions. Portella suggests that to think about ways of breaking out of techno-governance, to liberate technology for the common good, we must first understand how we got here and how our greatest fears are not necessarily the scariest possibilities. 

In two groupings of short reflections in this issue, friends and colleagues remember artist Steve Kurtz (1958–2025), who passed away last November. In 1986, Kurtz cofounded Critical Art Ensemble, an art collective focused on cultural research as political action. The group pioneered what came to be known as tactical media—a term closely associated with Critical Art Ensemble’s approach to independent and antiauthoritarian digital media. Their critical work has also extended to ecological struggle and biotechnology, for which Kurtz may have been targeted in an especially alarming case during the paranoid aftermath of 9/11, when he was wrongfully detained by the FBI on bioterrorism charges. Thanks to artist Brooke Singer, a former student turned lifelong friend of Kurtz, the short remembrances brought together in this issue show how a sympathetic energy in Kurtz’s politics reverberated through those around him, turning the work of building a common project between people in various cities and countries into an infrastructure that holds together in spite of, or because of, the dark times. 

—Editors

Martabel Wasserman—Alcatraz as Image: The Trumpian Politics of Carceral Spectacle
As a National Park, Alcatraz offers a liberal embrace of social movements, which can conjure trust in social progress—a sense of calm amongst the choppy seas of the San Francisco Bay. However, the fleeting hope for a widespread understanding of the prison industrial complex’s inhumanity gives way the moment the cellhouse tour shoots you out into the gift shop, where you can purchase kitsch items such as beanie hats printed with “Property of Alcatraz Psych Ward.” The store offers replicas of lunch trays and cups, as well as correctional-officer badge pins. It is precisely this friction—these overlapping histories embedded in the island’s infrastructure—that makes Alcatraz so available for ideological capture.

Andrew Sungtaek—Architectures of Amnesia: Donald Judd and America’s “Forgotten War” in Korea
The Judd Foundation highlighting this specific architectural aspiration while promoting Judd’s work to Korean audiences suggests a complex negotiation: acknowledging influence for market appeal while simultaneously maintaining that Judd’s work transcends cultural context. The tension lies in how Judd studied and absorbed Korean philosophical building principles—deeply rooted in historical, spiritual, and cultural significance—into a supposedly neutral formal vocabulary while removing any sense of cultural origin. This obfuscation becomes further complicated by the circumstances of Judd’s exposure to these concepts during his US military service, which directly involved him in redesigning Korean infrastructure in service to American military control. 

Giorgio Cesarale and Matteo Pasquinelli—The Algorithm and the Antichrist: Political Theology at the Sunset of Silicon Valley
Thiel’s operation follows a certain logic: It is a marketing cover-up for the privatization of signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the US and Western countries, with the promise to secure digital supremacy in the AI arms race with China. In this sense, Thiel’s operation is an extension of the Obama doctrine on SIGINT and is part of the long history of operations research and cybernetic analyses of the “ontology of the enemy” in US foreign policy. Meanwhile, Thiel’s company Palantir benefits from generous public contracts to assist in several dubious enterprises: helping the US’s ICE profile migrants, Israel’s IDF target Palestinians, and the UK’s NHS “treat” patients.

Vinícius Portella—Do Androids Dream of AGI?
As many people have pointed out—from the journalist Émile Torres to the philosopher Fabian Ludueña—techno-utopian dreams are often just secular transfigurations of familiar religious tropes. Many transhumanists are just disappointed Christians looking for a new daddy, or gnostics with mommy issues. Some of the most eccentric types say it quite explicitly. Asked if God exists, the most notable proponent of the singularity, Ray Kurzweil, famously answered: “Not yet.” 

Elvia Wilk—Against the Clock: Remote Work, Stolen Sleep, and the Limits of Extraction
By now Sleep Dealer is a classic—if it’s a cult classic, its cults are plentiful. I’ve heard about it from sci-fi aficionados, labor historians, contemporary artists, and plenty of insomniacs. Rivera’s handling of technological novelty and his aesthetic choices make it a natural touchstone; it’s also solid entertainment with a clever script and satisfying plot. But what strikes me most is the way the movie portrays disjunctures in time. The way time feels is, I think, one of the hardest things to express.

Aldo Kempen—Thank God Science Is Queer Now
The assumption that quantum mechanics carries inherently progressive ontological content reproduces the very same naturalizing gesture that earlier critical traditions taught us to question. What emerges is more atmospheric than argumentative—a cosmology of convenience in which reality is suggested to already embody the values we hold, without anyone having to demonstrate the entailment. Science appears not as a site of contestation but as ambient confirmation: The universe was progressive all along, the suggestion runs, and we just needed the right formalism to feel it. The radicalism is entirely ontological, which is to say it demands nothing from us. This forecloses the messy work of interpretation and some of the labor of political organizing.

Bima Satria Putra, David Wengrow, and Stevphen Shukaitis—Fire Tribes and Stateless Worlds: A Conversation
If anarchy broke out after the dissolution of ancient kingdoms, will the scenario be similar in the collapse of modern global civilization? Or will it be anarchic chaos as imagined in pop culture, i.e., Mad Max–style or zombie apocalypses? Whatever the form of society and whatever the answers to these questions, all historical and anthropological studies show that the state is not eternal, and anarchy always looms, waiting at the end of the timeline of ancient civilizations. It begins with chaos, abandonment, and various new societies.

Nato Thompson, Claire Pentecost, Brooke Singer, David Garcia, Rich Pell, and Lucas Fortunato—Remembering Steve Kurtz (1958–2025) of Critical Art Ensemble, Part 1 
Many people turn to the metaphysical as they near death. Steve did it in a way that is consistent with the ethical method he used throughout his lifetime. Through keen observation, panoramic perspective, revelatory analysis, and empathy, he looked at what the metaphysical means to people drastically different from him. He saw the suppression of the metaphysical as a bigger problem than what he confronted in his personal journey. It was typical that he would want to put his own feelings into a much larger context, yielding insights he could share.

Nicola Triscott, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Samuel Ashford, Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Trevor Paglen—Remembering Steve Kurtz (1958–2025) of Critical Art Ensemble, Part 2
Almost forty years ago, I was invited by Steve Kurtz, as a member of the then-just-forming Critical Art Ensemble, to visit Tallahassee, Florida and speak about Group Material. I prepared a short talk for a formal academic setting but soon discovered that it wouldn’t be delivered at any kind of lecture hall, but at the local bar that night. My work at the time was oriented around expanding the idea of both audience and artwork to include the everyday and rejecting the formalisms and elitisms of the industrial art system, so giving a talk about Walter Benjamin in a rented warehouse full of people drinking beer was a dream come true.