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.