What’s the Use? Entanglement, Indebtedness, and Minor Socialities

In this episode, we speak with Erin Manning and Giovanni Marmont for a conversation about how use might be detached from productivity, mastery, and measurable achievement. Moving between studious use, the pragmatics of the useless, colonial property, football, maple syrup, improvised infrastructures, and the struggle to reclaim time, they explore forms of collective life grounded […]

Flat World Theory

(expanded version of talk given at the opening evening of INC Exit Fest at UvA Spui25 in Amsterdam, June 22, 2026)

Tonight, I would like to cast the idea of flat world theory to you and introduce the concept of the logistical episteme. Flat world theory – this is not to be confused with the Latourian world of flat ontologies where conflictual confrontations of the political evaporate into a chain of empty signifiers and relational assemblages. But we might be talking about what Anna Kornbluh in her critique of the immediacy of style in too-late capitalism calls “Knausgaard’s acid-brilliant flat ontology: everything is everything.”[1] To be sure, everything is everything is just another variation of flat ontologies. It’s the acid-brilliance that unsettles the order of things.

Flat world theory takes the world for what it is in the logistical age of AI: flat as a mat.

Screenshot from the ChatFOS research experiment by Zoe Horn, Anna Munster, and Liam Magee, 2023.

As much as we might find purchase in the idea of performative actions constituting the propensity of things, such a precept disavows the media question, which we can extend to the infrastructural question: namely, that propensities may in fact precede actions. This is not to say there’s an underlying essence, say, to something like ‘the internet’, or radio, or newspaper for that matter. But it is to acknowledge that materialities of communication have signalling capacities inherent to both their design and the matter of their composition. And it’s also to acknowledge that there are histories – in ideas about how to do things and in technological forms and artefacts that have, for instance, legacy architectures that infuse and carry over from one update to the next.

History precedes and is also baked into the scene of encounter where things perform actions and build relations. History is anathema to the theatre of flat ontologies.

Melbourne logistics zone. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2025.

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Certainly, there is strong scientific truth and conceptual merit in the notion of the Earth as a system. But do we call it media? At a smaller scale, are elemental media (clouds, fire, wind, sun, oceans) really media? For sure, we recognize and experience the ways in which these components of planetary life have mediating capacities. But is this the same as saying they are media? Do they communicate in ways that engineer our cognitive capacities, as Bernard Stiegler was at pains to argue?

Stiegler, by the way, was not the first to make this observation – we find a long tradition in France that takes an interest in the relation between technology and material conditions, specifically as they pertain to cognitive processes. The early- to mid-twentieth century anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan was particularly influential for Stiegler’s thinking. Stiegler notes that “Leroi-Gourhan in fact says that it is the tool, that is, tekhnē, that invents the human, not the human that invents the technical. … the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool – by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” in the form of tools.[2] Further, “‘externalization’ is the continuation of life by means other than life.”[3]

We can also call that tool infrastructure.

Let’s turn this idea around to help clarify what we mean by the media question. Media, indeed, are another tool or technical device external to the human, even when organically integrated into our very bodies as chips, implants, and the like. Our bodies and brains have little control over these devices. Power of this kind resides outside the body and is typically concentrated in what the Canadian communications theorist Harold A. Innis termed monopolies of knowledge.[4] In other words, the media question also requires attention to the political economy of technology.

Digital Free Trade Zone, Malaysia. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2025.

This matters for how we consider the politics – indeed the geopolitics and also geoeconomics – of critical infrastructures and their organization of society and culture.

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It almost goes without saying that in analysing the ever-shifting ground of the present we are in a kind of constant diagnostic battle to identify substantive tendencies in the face of unrelenting contingencies. For all the market hype around AI and associated infrastructures, massive builds in data centres chief among them, an event as destructive as the US-Israel war on Iran makes clear how fragile any such certainties may previously have seemed. Infrastructure might be concrete until it is blasted away by a ballistic missile (or a drone).

Jurong West, Singapore. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2017.

These days we discover it’s not only bombs that turn bunkers to dust. We read that the feasibility of data centres is seriously in question across the Gulf states, as well as elsewhere in the world, due to the impact of energy cuts.[5] Sure, electricity grids can be powered by coal, nuclear, and increasingly more sustainable energy sources. But data centres are backed up with diesel generators and many power stations require gas turbines to generate electricity. And power plants and electricity grid networks are managed by computational systems that often incorporate AI systems to forecast and optimize energy load, distribution, and demand in near real-time.

War, then, is a central part of the current infrastructural conjuncture. Think, for example, of helium. Whoever heard of it before? Now we all know how critical it is to the manufacturing of wafers for microchips. And we know that around 38.8 per cent percent of the world’s helium comes out of Qatar – a key ingredient for the coolant derived from waste liquid natural gas (LNG) plants, which is then used in the etching of wafers during the manufacture of semiconductors in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. As we know well, these chips are then used in many commercial applications and digital technologies such as AI, smartphones, EVs, MRI scanners, data centres, and the production of fibre optics and satellites in telecommunications and aerospace industries.

Source: X

And we know that Trump’s failed blitzkrieg of Iran has resulted in massive blockages in shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, wreaking havoc on livelihoods and economies in pretty much every country you can think of. And we know that all those AI data centres piling up around the world are in jeopardy – not only because they are blowing bubbles that are gonnna burst, but much more directly they are at huge risk of not being built at all precisely because of the nexus between war, infrastructure, resources, and the economy. The horrendous annihilation of civilian life and environmental devastation are considered merely as collateral damage on the sidelines of mission control within the logistical episteme.

Whether it is the tropics of AI that we might associate with data centres and chip manufacturing and packaging in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia’s Batam Island, or investment by Chinese firms such as Huawei and ByteDance in Brazil’s data centre and AI sectors, from a logistical perspective these AI climate zones are inseparable from the Middle East’s deserts of war.

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So what, then, is flat world theory? It’s something that emerges from the media question as it pertains to computational interoperability. The fantasy of integrated hardware and software systems that comprise vertical stacks all the way down. It’s the promulgation of a conviction that computerization is equivalent to networking rather than notworking (Lovink). Flat worlds are found across many of the organizations, companies, and government agencies we might work in. They all bought into the seduction trap of Silicon Valley. Install the system and efficiencies and organizational optimization will follow. Total bullshit!

Electronic waste site, Hong Kong. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2017.

Flat world theory is the mirror of control. We can use it to call out the crap. Let’s produce the memes and flood the feeds with next-level nonsense! Here, we can find inspiration in Gabriele de Seta’s wild and nutty work on Italian Brainrot. Along with truly stomach churning digital culture he digs up in kooky corners of TikTok insanity, Gabriele points us to something critical for our understanding of the geopolitics and geoeconomics of production networks and related infrastructures.

Indeed, there’s an entire field in economic geography that investigates global production networks and material political economy.[6] A chief interest in this literature is to identify spatial dependencies across sites of production, distribution, and supply necessary for the manufacturing of microchips, for instance. Here we can find out about the international division of labour as it relates to the extraction of rare earths elements. Palladium, cerium, neodymium, and holmium are among the thirty or so critical minerals required by AI and digital technologies. We learn also about the factories across South East Asia where low-end manufacturing and packaging of microchips happens as part of industrial-organizational geographies usually centred around East Asia’s top foundry fabs of Samsung and TSMC in South Korea and Taiwan.

Gabriele de Seta shows us how something as trashy and freewheeling as Italian Brainrot also moves across global production networks with animated AI replicants getting churned out in a frantic fashion in dedicated AI data centres then finding material form as junky tourist kitsch in $2 shops in Mongkok. Gabriele also happens across more Italian Brainrot, this time in Oslo from a toy dispensing machine. Noting the many labels stitched into the figure, he was able to trace its journey across manufacturing sites and global supply chains, having been knocked out of a factory in Guandong, filtered through a toy company based in Dubai before importation in Denmark. Much weirder and perverse synthetic characters are mushroomed out by social media users and AI slop factories in China. Italian Brainrot tells us the remarkable story of distribution and transmutation unhinged from proprietary forms of control.

My point in bringing in the Italian Brainrot story is that it tells us that whether it’s the high-end billions of dollars market of chip manufacturing or the down-at-the heels world of AI kitsch-culture, similar networks of production and supply are at work. It’s all about infrastructure and logistics, regardless of price point.

Digital Free Trade Zone, Malaysia. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2025.

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As the complexities of AI systems multiply across notionally distinct domains of governance and markets, engineering and law, we start to get a sense of an infrastructural drift toward what Berlin-based artist and writer Hito Steyerl calls “the political economy of entropy” – the point at which order and organization tip over into noise, randomness, disorder, instability, and disruption.[7] For Steyerl these kinds of entropic conditions push societies toward “political fragmentation … targeted identification, micro-labelling and desolidarisation.” Combined, such forms of “entropic engineering,” writes Steyerl, make “workers in digital industries” assume the role of “noise particles,” “burnt out,” and “vulnerable to exploitation.” These are the sorts of machinic conditions Steyerl associates with the political economy of entropy in the age of AI.

She finds inspiration in Bernard Stiegler’s concept of negentropy, a hope or belief or political commitment that strives to “create order by way of organisation,” that considers “denoising” as a technique of protests and strikes that “are not just disruptions of ordinary routines and procedures but effect the disruption of disruption.” In other words, a form of what Steyerl also calls “reverse entropy” or “organisational negentropy” in which the protagonist “appears in absence and negation: as a hole in the fabric of entropic engineering.”

By my reading, the idea of negentropy is imbued with a certain nostalgia for a era that never existed. As an appeal for a return to some kind of balanced existence in a world well and truly out of kilter, such yearning is no real surprise. But might it not be another variant of flat world theory? To counter the disorder of entropy with the ordering propensity of negentropy is something of a zero sum game, an assertion of equivalence where there is none. Yet there is something in Steyerl’s proposition of reverse entropy in as much as it constitutes a political intervention aimed at puncturing the flat world of entropic engineering.

Digital Free Trade Zone, Malaysia. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2025.

What I’ve tried to sketch here is a parable for INC 2.0. As an autonomous organization at the cross-roads, INC needs to make a decision about the path ahead. How does INC excavate the future without also taking into account the critical question of designing infrastructures of possibility? These are not flat worlds, but exactly the opposite: a hostile refusal of and attack against the power of flatness.

Might we find in the midst of this disruption of disruption a radical exit from the logistical episteme and its insistence on the optimization of performance and the ordering of disorder?

Beijing. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2026.

[1] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2023), 151.

[2] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 141.

[3] Bernard Stiegler, “Leroi-Gourhan: The Organised Inorganic,” Cahiers de Mediologie, no. 6, 2e Semestre (1996).

[4] Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).

[5] Indranil Ghosh, “Big Tech’s Gulf megaprojects are trapped between two war choke points,” Rest of the World, 4 March, 2026, https://restofworld.org/2026/us-iran-war-gulf-ai-submarine-cables/.

[6] See Henry Wai-Chung Yeung, Interconnected Worlds: Global Electronics and Production Networks in East Asia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2022).

[7] Hito Steyerl, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (London and New York: Verso, 2025).

The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI

The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI

By Giuliano Pozza

"What should we choose, heaviness or lightness?"

Our collection of essays, The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI, starts from this question, contained in the unforgettable The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera, to try to reason about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an unconventional way. Some might wonder if there is a need for another book on AI, but we believe that this contribution can offer something original to the discussion of a vast and complex topic.

Through the lens of Kundera’s question, the book explores themes of sustainability, inclusion, ethics, digital sovereignty, education and learning, work and organizational impacts, security and medicine of the future. For each of these areas, both lightness and heaviness are analysed, showing that, as Kundera said, in heaviness there is sometimes a depth that allows us to better appreciate lightness as well.

The authors position themselves, taking a cue from Plato, as "sceptical believers" and they searched for positive deviants in each of these areas. The book invites us on an adventurous journey and, as J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us, in every adventure there are sometimes uncomfortable situations.

The central theme running throughout the book is the tension between the challenges posed by AI and the opportunities it presents when developed and governed responsibly. Each chapter explores this duality by pairing a significant societal challenge, such as environmental sustainability, exclusion, inequality, loss of digital sovereignty, or barriers in healthcare and higher education, with a corresponding promise of AI, including more sustainable innovation, greater inclusion, improved health outcomes, stronger institutional autonomy, and the transformation of education. Rather than presenting AI as inherently beneficial or harmful, the authors examine the conditions under which it can become a force for positive change. Across diverse topics, the chapters demonstrate that the impact of AI depends not only on technological advances, but also on human choices, governance frameworks, and societal values. Together, these essays offer a balanced perspective on how AI can help address some of society's most pressing challenges, provided it is designed, deployed, and regulated in ways that prioritise fairness, transparency, sustainability, and the public good.

The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI is freely available in PDF and HTML; it can also be purchased in paperback, hardback and EPUB formats.

The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI

Let’s Play Image Type Charades!

Proceedings from my presentation during EXIT FEST on the 24th of June 2026, in celebration of Geert Lovink and the Institute of Network Cultures’ departure from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) on September 1, 2026.

The Digital Image is Non-Static

While we usually think of images as static objects, they are in fact never completely stable. Processing, use, and semiotics may all affect the life of the image: a photograph may exist as a momentary render, while also becoming evidence, or a symbol, depending on how, where, and by whom it is used or seen.

In contemporary digital imaging environments, this instability becomes more significant because the image is continuously (re-)processed. Within these environments, the image is both a surface activated through semiotic interpretation and an asset subject to technical, institutional, and operational procedures such as compression, classification, or moderation, just to name a few. Since these procedures are distributed across standards, platforms, and institutions, infrastructure is not external to the image. Instead, it forms part of the conditions via which the image processed, made available, and put to use. After these transformations, the visible surface of the image may remain the same (or appear similar), while its conditions may have changed. By “conditions of the image,” I thus mean the technical, institutional, and operational relations through which its accessibility, editability, and legibility are configured.

About the Proliferation of Image Types

The different ways in which images are (re-)processed, circulated, and put to use have contributed to a proliferation of image types.Technical images (as theorized by Vilém Flusser), poor images (Hito Steyerl), operational images (Harun Farocki), forensic images (Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture), post-photographicimages (William J. Mitchell), invisible images (Trevor Paglen), nonhuman photography (Joanna Zylinska), softimages (Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie), and poor chroma images (Michael Dieter) are just a few examples of this sprawling typology.

image composite of many image types

Each of these image types focuses on a particular condition (or configuration of conditions) of the image. Although historically and theoretically useful, they neither describe equivalent categories nor approach the image through the same theoretical framework. Different image types are therefore not aligned along a single axis. While the technical image centers its apparatus-based production, the post-photographic image describes a broader historical and technological transformation of photography. The poor image is defined primarily through its relation between circulation, degradation, accessibility, and value, while a poor chroma describes the sacrificial role of green within the temporal and composite conditions of tactical live video. So rather than forming a stable taxonomy, these types articulate different, yet sometimes overlapping, conditions.

Moreover, the same image may be described via different image types: a machine-readable CCTV stream may be used for facial recognition without being shown to a human viewer. The same stream may later be introduced as evidence in a court of law. Operational, invisible, and forensic images thus describe different conditions of the same image, some of which may coexist while others emerge from a specific context. When an image that functioned operationally is later treated as forensic evidence, it does not necessarily imply a visible change in the surface of the image. It instead reflects a shift in the conditions through which the image becomes legible. This shift also changes the criteria according to which the image is judged a ‘adequate’.

Fidelity as Accountability to a Particular Mode of Use

In signal processing, fidelity usually describes the degree to which an output reproduces an input. In imaging, however, this comparison becomes more complicated. Image fidelity may describe the relationship between a processed image and a source image or signal, but it may also concern perceptual quality, or the ability to discern provenance, required for an image to function, for instance, as evidence or assign ownership.

I therefore use fidelity more broadly to describe the relationship between how an image is expected to function and what it must preserve in order to do so. As such, fidelity is closely related to affordance and compromise. While affordance refers to the actions or uses that a system enables or makes easier, compromise describes how competing qualities and demands are negotiated within the technical and operational conditions of a processing pipeline. Fidelity describes the criteria
according to which these compromises are evaluated. The criteria that make these compromises acceptable may be specified or enforced by users, platforms, institutions, and technical standards and determine what counts as adequate detail, tolerable distortion or sufficient evidentiary continuity. Thus, fidelity is always accountable to a specific definition of adequacy.

For instance, lossy JPEG compression may reduce visual detail to enable faster transmission, while preserving enough perceptual information for the image to remain recognizable. In a forensic context, by contrast, the source image is usually be retained in its original form, even when access to it depends on obsolete technology. Any processing is performed on a copy, since forensic adequacy depends on maintaining an accountable relation to the source file and its provenance. Different imaging contexts thus answer to different definitions of fidelity. A resolution negotiates the compromises by which these different definitions of fidelity are met.

From Image Types to Resolutions

While resolution is often reduced to a number or quantitative metric, it should not be conflated with a fixed technical specification or density value. Following Jonathan Sterne, ‘definition’ could be a more precise term for the measurement of density of information. Resolution instead describes a broader process through which an image becomes a rendered instance.

During the process of resolving an image, compromises are negotiates following particular constraints, thresholds and modes of fidelity. The resulting configuration enables certain actions and forms of legibility, while other possibilities may be reduced, excluded, or deferred. Changes in technical, institutional, or operational conditions will re-resolve an image render. These changes may also affect the image’s epistemic status; for instance, compression artefacts, glitches, and synthetic aberrations, may be read as traces of the thresholds, incompatibilities, or failures involved in a particular process of resolution.

A process of resolution may be organized toward a particular use and may therefore make certain image-types more common. When a similar configuration recurs across images, it may be recognized as a broader technical, institutional, or historical pattern. This may lead to the particular image condition to be theorized, and eventually the coining of a new image type.

However, an image type does not correspond directly to a specific process of resolution. Instead, each image type centers certain relations within the configuration of a resolution, while leaving others less visible. The same rendered image may therefore receive a different image-type designation without being re-resolved: when an operational CCTV stream is introduced as evidence, its forensic status follows from a change in institutional use rather than from a visible or technical alteration. Image type thus describes the relation between an image andthe conditions under which it is understood as put to use as a particular kind of image.

Topologies of Compromise

Resolution Studies follows the image through the different situations in which it is processed, circulated, displayed, interpreted, and used. At each stage, different compromises may be made and different modes of fidelity may come into play. These decisions shape the image render that becomes available, while other possible configurations are reduced, deferred, or excluded.

Resolution Studies can thus develop a topology of compromise around a particular image render. These topologies describe the sites and stages at which compromises or trade-offs alter what a momentary image render can disclose, preserve, make available, or enable.

In this sense, Resolution Studies offers image theory a way to read the proliferation of newly coined image types through the resolution problems they articulate. Technical, poor, operational, forensic, synthetic, and other image types do not occupy equivalent positions within a single framework.  Instead, each of them centres on different sites or configurations of compromise. A topology of compromise makes these image types comparable without requiring them to be arranged within a fixed taxonomy.

Spelling, Prescriptivism, and Benjamin Franklin

Spelling, Prescriptivism, and Benjamin Franklin

By Alice Battersby

In a recent debate in Parliament, MPs spoke about the pressure on people to change their accents to advance in their careers. People are keenly aware that others judge them according to their accent, and that employers may view regional accents as a sign of unintelligence or unprofessionalism. As MP Ian Lavery pointed out, accent discrimination is far more acceptable in society than discrimination on the basis of other characteristics. When this extends to categorising certain accents as incorrect and enforcing use of the standard, it is known by linguists as prescriptivism.

This is not new. People have a strong tendency to ascribe social meaning to accents, and to judge people according to how they speak. Those whose own accents are judged incorrect can be ashamed of them. One example of this comes from a perhaps unlikely source – a spelling system devised by Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s (along with his related writings), and discussed by Gary German in his recent two-volume open access study, Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician.

First drafted in 1768, then published in 1779 in an anthology (Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces Written by Benjamin Franklin), Franklin's spelling system reveals a lot about what he believed to be correct and proper English: not his own Boston accent, and nothing American, but the contemporary London way of speaking.

The spelling system had several purposes. Franklin believed it would make English easier to spell, by ensuring each letter corresponded to one sound, and that the sound was always the same. Franklin particularly envisioned it allowing children to learn to read and write more quickly. However, according to Gary German’s research, Franklin did not base this system on his own Boston accent, but instead on a London accent of the time. The spelling system was therefore intended to function not only as a reflection of what was spoken, but also a method of presenting the ‘correct’ accent of English to speakers of other accents.

Evidence for the spelling system reflecting London pronunciation comes from several sources. German argues that Franklin’s letter to Polly Stevenson, his confidante and a Londoner, shows that Franklin wished to use her London speech as a model for his system.

‘I wish you to consider this Alphabet, and give me Instances of such English words and Sounds as you may think cannot perfectly be expressed by it. I am persuaded it may be completed by your help.’

This suggests that in his mind, her way of speaking was the proper way of speaking English, and the one he wished to promote.

Franklin’s transcriptions using his spelling system also indicate his attempts to bring the system closer to London speech. One example of this is the spelling of the sound written <y> in words such as ‘perfectly’ or ‘hurry’. Franklin’s original transcriptions of this word in his 1768 letters to Polly Stevenson indicate a pronunciation as a diphthong, a sound formed by moving from one vowel to another. The vowel here seems to have been pronounced similarly to the word ‘lie’. In later works, however, he transcribes this as a monophthong, more similar to the ‘ee’ pronunciation used today. German suggests that the initial transcription is an error reflecting Franklin’s Boston English, which he later corrected to reflect the pronunciation in London, perhaps on Polly Stevenson’s advice. Further evidence for this comes from his poems, where he rhymed ‘die’ and ‘manfully’, suggesting the final sounds were the same for him. This shows that Franklin wanted to replicate what he viewed as the standard. Regional variations such as his own were not to be included in his spelling system. The London pronunciations, to him, were the ones worthy of being taught – not anything uniquely American.

Considering the context of the time, this could be viewed as surprising.  When Franklin initially drafted his spelling system, the relationship between Parliament and colonial American legislatures was worsening, and the book of Franklin’s writings was published during the War of Independence. Why would Franklin, in this political context, have based his system on London speech? Not everybody made the same choice. The lexicographer Webster, writing a few years later, argued against the idea of using the language of contemporary Great Britain as a model. And Franklin also had a lot of affection for his native Boston accent. Late in life, he wrote that ‘the Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice, and accent in pronunciation’ were all pleasing to him, and were part of the reason why he wanted to visit his hometown again.

But though Franklin was hostile towards political aspects of Britain, such as the monarchy, this did not extend to its speech. Despite liking his native speech, Franklin seemingly believed it was simply inferior to that used in London. In his Autobiography, Franklin states he was ‘a bad speaker’ and ‘hardly correct in language’, and in earlier letters, he states he will ‘give up as bad’ words that were not in common use among Londoners.

Why would Franklin have thought this? German cites Looby, who suggests that Franklin would have become keenly aware of the social value of his accent when arriving in London to work as a printer’s apprentice. The differences between his own speech and the speech of those around him would have been obvious. Significantly, the speech he heard would have been the speech of the powerful and educated elite. As people do today, Franklin would have viewed the speech of these people as ‘correct’, making his own ‘incorrect’.

In this way, Franklin faced the same struggle in the 1700s as so many face today, including the MPs taking part in the recent debate. He spoke in a way that he believed to be inferior, but that he still liked and perhaps viewed as part of his identity. And as is the case today, the way of speaking that he believed was correct was largely arbitrary. Prescriptivism has existed for a long time. Perhaps it’s time to let it go.

Gary German's two-volume study is freely available in PDF and HTML, and available at a reasonable price in paperback, hardback and EPUB:

Body is a Lost Media, Pixels Are All You’re Gonna See – Reframing the Blur and the Body across Palestine Online

I remember scrolling the Instagram account @eyeonpalestine for months, and how you start to feel like when you stay there long enough and become doomed by a sensation, becoming a fog. The feeling is both physical and emotional. It’s like being somewhere after an explosion. You got blurry vision, your ears are buzzing.

Some images are clear, unfiltered, and painful as they were meant to be: bodies, rubble, blood. Others are covered. Blurred. There is apparently no legible criteria, no consistent logic you can extract from what gets blurred and what does not. Extremely violent images sometimes appear in full while others, less graphic, less explicit, are swallowed by a grey screen, a pixelated veil, and a sign that resembles a blinded eye, an eye with an arrow upon it. The signs of what Instagram calls “sensitive content warning.”

From Exactly That Body: Images Against Oppression, Kateryna Iakovlenko, e-flux Journal, Issue #133

If you scroll long enough, it seems like you are exactly in the fog, part of the fog. Again, a doomed state where the blur starts to become the content itself: pixelled little squares and a never-ending blind eye staring back at you. A blind eye reminding you that, if you really want to, proof of atrocity can be accessed with just a click, a declaration of willingness. But let’s be clear. All of this can be accessed only if you really want to, only if you are brave, or voyeuristic enough to click.

Why would you want to, tho? Why are you still looking for destruction, atrocity, death? Why, scrolling on a feed through image after image of painful destruction, would you stop specifically on the blurred one and choose to unlock it? What are you trying to see?

The platform has already answered for you. We all know what you are looking for: proof, evidence, reasons. The platform is sorry, but all of these are really hard to find: evidence becomes too much to be allowed. Let’s keep it safe here: evidence is lost media; pixels are all you’re gonna see. Don’t worry though: we have evidence at home.

When something is too bad, there is always AI with a polished and less disturbing version of what you thought you were looking for. Flags, sad faces, refugee camps with orderly rows of tents, clean skies, no smoke. Remember All Eyes on Rafah, an AI-generated aerial image of a camp, shared 47 million times on Instagram in May 2024? The image’s creator acknowledged: “Real photographs of Gaza tend to have limited reach on Instagram, while the picture from AI can spread faster in a short time.”

Evidence that never existed in the first place is way safer. It’s just a matter of pixels put together or put apart and acting in different ways. Some are erasing, some are inventing–speculating. Both are making something else of the living. But before the AI fills the space, something else has to clear and make room for it. The blur has to come first.

But who is blurring? And why does the platform allow it?

In Meta’s policy language, the blur does not directly exist. If you search on meta.com for the word “blur”, what comes back is just information about Ray-Ban Meta, their smart glasses that the website is promoting right now. The website is a commodity, an augmented reality commodity. Instead, the grey screen, pixelated veil with an eye with an arrow upon it in the policy language is referred to as the ‘sensitive content warning’. Meta’s official position on graphic content is documented in their Transparency Center, under what is called a three-part enforcement approach: remove, reduce, inform.

  1. Content that violates Community Standards gets removed.
  2. Content that does not violate Community Standards but is considered ‘problematic’ in some way gets reduced, meaning that its distribution is limited
  3. In this case (2), users get informed with what Meta calls ‘additional context’: extra information so the user can independently ‘decide what to click, read or share.

The blur, that sensitive content warning, lives in the reduce and inform category, a category Meta has maintained since 2016 as a grey zone between what is allowed and what is not. A category where content exists but cannot be easily found, where a body is technically present but functionally invisible. And most importantly, where the responsibility of the life of the content seems to be put completely on the user: it is you, scrolling, having the power to decide if that image exists or not.

For graphic content specifically, Meta is clear: “We do allow people to share some graphic content to raise awareness about current events and issues. In these cases, we may hide the content from people under 18 and cover it with a warning for those over 18, so people are aware it is graphic or violent before they choose to view it.”

In Meta’s words, the warning screen, the blur, is neither censorship nor moderation. It is just a design choice and a more-agency-to-the-user operation. A design choice written into policy, applied selectively to content Meta considers simultaneously worth keeping for someone and too much to show for someone else.

The ‘inform’ part of the three-part enforcement approach (remove, reduce, inform) claims that the warning screen exists to enable awareness for those who are looking for it—a helpful strategy to let graphic content circulate while protecting users from encountering it without consent. But the ‘inform’ doesn’t come without the ‘reduce’ part, and the helpful strategy produces the opposite effect: content behind a warning screen reaches fewer people, it circulates less, and the algorithm deprioritizes it. The awareness is technically there–just one click away–but the enforcement approach is built to make sure most users never make that click.

The closest thing Meta has to an internal court on these questions is the Oversight Board, an operational body that Meta itself created in 2020, ”funded through an independent trust, whose members are appointed to review the platform’s most controversial content moderation decisions”, as you can read on their page. Meta presented it as an “independent check on its own power,” and the Oversight Board’s official website explains that the Board’s role is to examine whether Meta’s decision to remove or leave up content was in line with its policies, values, and human rights commitments.

“While we refer to Meta’s content policies and values as we consider cases, we sometimes question those policies when we believe they do not comply with Meta’s own commitment to protecting freedom of expression and other human rights. When we come to a decision on a case, it is binding on Meta, unless implementing it could violate the law. As part of our decisions, we also make recommendations on the rules that apply to billions of Facebook, Instagram and Threads users, and how those rules are enforced.”

Moreover, in the ‘Governance’ section on the website, the Oversight Board claims that “Transparency, accountability and independence are central to the mission of the Oversight Board. Our governance structure allows the Board to reach independent decisions on matters of content moderation, which is critical to our success.”

Unsurprisingly, nowhere on the official website is it clearly declared that the Board was created by Meta itself in 2020. Nowhere is it stated that the Board can be seen as a washing PR system. It is claimed tho that “Recommendations also form part of our policy advisory opinions, which we started publishing in 2022 to provide guidance to Meta on specific issues.”

In 2022, Meta’s own Oversight Board examined the logic of the ‘sensitive content warning’ in a case involving a graphic video from Sudan documenting what was declared by the Board as “human rights abuses”. In that case, the Board found that Meta’s existing policy failed to“adequately protect content shared for documentation and accountability”. It recommended that Meta “amend its Violent and Graphic Content Community Standard to explicitly allow videos of people or dead bodies when shared for the purpose of raising awareness of human rights abuses”.

Apparently, this is where the final choice comes from: graphic and explicit content should be allowed when shared for the purpose of raising awareness of human rights abuses, but with a warning screen so that people are aware that content may be disturbing.

When I pitched this article to INC, the editor answered that “the images are not blurred by Meta itself, too much work. They delegate. Zuckerberg could not care less. Indeed, the act of blurring is a distributed system, layered and designed so that basically no direct actor can be held responsible for what disappears and gets moderated.

As Meta’s own Transparency Center states, generally the first level of moderation (1) is the users themselves. When other users report content, platforms flag it for review. Instead, the second level (2) is automated. Meta declares it uses AI and machine learning to detect and flag content before users even report it, based on a system trained (nowhere is explained how) “to identify graphic or sensitive material”. Needless to say, the system is biased. Especially when the ‘trained system’ is busy dealing with non-English text (and particularly Arabic texts). The systematic moderation of the word ‘shaheed’(martyr, in English) is just an example, and here we go again; even the Oversight Board quoted this example as a problem. To continue, the third level (3) can be the creators themselves. For example, Instagram allows users to pre-apply the sensitive content warning to their own posts. The idea is to blur your own content before the platform does it for you, hoping in this way it’s gonna be ‘reduced’ but not ‘removed’.

In charge of all of this is a small and unidentified group of workers. In 2024, Zuckerberg declared at the US Congress that Meta had approximately 40,000 people working on safety and security. When asked for details, he declined to answer written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about how many employees were specifically working on content moderation. This happened right after that, in 2023, Meta published what they proudly called the “Year of Efficiency”: an internal memo announcing the reduction of Meta’s workforce by approximately 10,000 people, with 5,000 additional open roles closed. One of the small pieces of information available, as reported by NBC News, is that “in January 2023, Meta’s primary content moderation subcontractor in Africa cut 200 employees, stepping back from content review entirely.”

Portrait Mode, from Portraiture, Surveillance, and the Continuity Aesthetic of Blur, Stefka Hristova, Frames Cinema Journal, 2021

In her essay ‘Portraiture, Surveillance, and the Continuity Aesthetic of Blur’ (Frames Cinema Journal, 2021), Stefka Hristova traces the genealogy of the blur and of the ways it has been used. Initially, because of the first technology for photography and technical limitations, people were photographed in sharp focus while backgrounds receded into a soft blur. Years later, when blur was no longer technically required, Apple shifted the language around blur to make it explicitly part of the photographic portrait aesthetic with its “portrait” mode.

What connects these moments, Hristova argues, is what she defines as the ‘aesthetics of continuity’: visual technologies that mask their function as control mechanisms by mimicking the appearance of more neutral, natural technology. As the ‘iPhone portrait mode’ blur imitates the depth-of-field effect of a camera lens, the grey screen on Instagram looks like a loading error, a technical glitch—something that’s harmless, designed for you rather than something that was decided.

The relation between “pretending to be natural” and “pretending to be for you” becomes perfectly understandable if we think that most images today are not made for human eyes but directly by machines and for machines. As argued by Trevor Paglen in Operational Images (e-flux Journal, Issue #59, 2014), images become operational rather than visual: they stopped being communication practices and have become infrastructure. In this way, “Instead of simply representing things in the world, the machines and their images were starting to ‘do’ things in the world.” And the blur is the only moment in which that infrastructure makes itself visible to the human eye, to protect itself. The platform blurring, the ‘sensitive warning’, is the precise instant when the system pretends to remember the design choice of the platform is directed to the human on the other side and, for not being held accountable, asks them to take a position. But, as said before, let’s be clear: the presented choice is just a performance of choice, not a real choice. By the time the blur appears, the image has already been reduced. As explicit in the three-part enforcement approach (remove, reduce, inform), you are not choosing anything. You have been informed. Actually, someone just chose what is ‘sensitive’ for you.

What does “sensitive” actually mean and who decides this meaning? In a genocide, when does a body stop being political and become sensitive? Writing from Kyiv during the Russian invasion, Asya Bazdyrieva in ‘Exactly That Body: Images Against Oppression’ asks precisely this. “The notion of ‘sensitivity’ is always political. Who determines our exposure to ‘sensitive’ images? Who controls the mechanisms that distribute them? Is it tech companies, the state, or the individual who has survived the tragedy depicted in the images?” Cruel images and images of war are considered obscene and then blurred, accompanied by warnings, marked as sensitive. “But in reality, especially in the reality of war, ‘sensitive’ does not mean offensive.”

Drawing on artist Oraib Toukan’s work on cruel images, Bazdyrieva argues that, on the contrary, when words do not help, images can protect and defend. “A dead body does not cease to be a political body.” And so, let the image scream. Let the image be seen, even if it’s poor. Even if it’s hurting. Even if it’s sensitive. As argued by Hito Steyerl in ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, “the poor image, pixelated, compressed, degraded by circulation, is not a failure but a political condition.” The pixel is the trace of movement: an image that has traveled, been copied, shared outside official channels, and survived despite its low resolution. “The poor image is a copy in motion; its quality is bad because it has been used.”

Thomas Ruff, jpeg rl104, 2007

However, the movement becomes a barrier on platforms. The blur on Instagram produces pixels too, but, contrary to a popular image pixelated because it has circulated too much, the content behind Meta’s warning screen is pixelated so that it will not circulate that much.

In The Perilous Potential of the Blur: Digital Cultures Within Zones of Indistinction (MAST Journal, 2023), Tony D. Sampson and Jernej Markelj describe the blur as a zone of indistinction, neither fully visible nor fully erased, neither present nor absent. A zone that implies “overlaps, collisions, interference, non-locations, vacillations, insensibility, inseparability, fuzziness, ambiguity, and even mess.” A zone not completely accessible and not completely remembered, functioning as a memory technology aiming to delay recognition, fragments recall, and turning past into something that can only be remembered through friction—a condition of seeing under occupation, exile, and historical erasure.

Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba’, Razan AlSalah, 2017

In ‘Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba’ (2017), a short movie by Razan AlSalah, Oum Ameen, a Palestinian grandmother, returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Maps Streetview, the only way she can still see Palestine. Here, Haifa only exists as a mediated memory, through an image system that is itself owned, partial, unstable, and obstructed. The longer Oum Ameen searches and tries to remember, the harder it is. The faster Oum Ameen tries to go, the slower the platform responds.

Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba’, Razan AlSalah, 2017

Looking for Ameen, when she finally finds someone that could be him, Ameen is blurred. Visibility in blur is never transparent, never innocent, never whole. It is always compromised, possible only as a visual failure, as a broken interface between memory and territory. The image is compromised by distance, by displacement, by the technical and political conditions of seeing.

‘Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old and So Was the Nakba’, Razan AlSalah, 2017

The image is no longer a stable repository of facts, but a blurred space where memory is forgotten and, potentially, fabricated again. In ‘We can make rain, but no one came to ask’ (2004) by The Atlas Group, blur becomes a form of historical pressure. It marks the image as damaged, incomplete, or mediated. Still, in doing so it also works inside loss, using fragmentation, opacity, and technical interruption as ways to keep memory from being closed off by erasure.

We can make rain, but no one came to ask, The Atlas Group, 2004

In every case and in every application, blurring is an effect of infrastructural and systemic violence. In Disruptions, Taysir Batniji archives evidence of infrastructural inequality, arriving at the blur from external constraints. Displaced in Paris and unable to travel from Paris to Gaza, Batniji maintained contact with his mother and family through WhatsApp video calls constantly interrupted by poor connections. Network instability would dissolve faces, streets, and rooms into clusters of pixels, blurred lines, and solid blocks of color. A moderation not imposed directly by a platform’s content policy but produced by the infrastructure of power: who owns the internet they are trying to connect to? Meta owns the platform.

Disruptions, Taysir Batniji

The result of this process is to create a new aesthetic, a platform-friendly aesthetic: an aesthetic of absence, an absence-core, where the image is evoked while depoliticizing the scene, just with a reminiscence of the scene itself. In this way, the images allow empathy to emerge without engagement with the structural causes of suffering. The suffering is suggested, not shown; the cause is removed, and what remains is affect without accountability. And, in this process, the blur acts as the mechanism that prepares this aesthetic of absence, as an infrastructure of erasing. What is left behind the grey screen is a now- absent body, a pixel, a space that has been cleared and prepared for something else. Because cleared spaces, in the logic of platforms, cannot stay empty: they have to get filled. If Palestinian photographic and video testimony, real images of bodies, destruction, and resistance, are consistently subjected to ‘reduction’, blurring, sensitive warnings, and algorithmic suppression, AI-generated imagery can circulate freely, algorithmically preferred because, as Meta explained, the platform removes content that is “particularly violent or graphic, such as videos depicting dismemberment, visible innards or charred bodies”. And AI content lacks the bodily specificity that exactly triggers content moderation systems.

In her upcoming book Speculative Violence, Donatella Della Ratta defines AI images as “something subtler, more insidious than fake news: harder to detect by algorithms, easier to accept as no apparent harm was involved, and perhaps far more pervasive and disruptive in its potential consequences.” The speculative violence is described as “an emerging politics of vision, in which power operates by capturing through imagination the not-yet to shape and orient beliefs and actions in the now.” And, obviously, Generative AI is central to this dynamic because of its unprecedented ability to give, in a seamless way, visual form to almost any imagined future, even the most violent and exclusionary, making it a particularly suitable device for rendering annihilatory and supremacist agendas.

Gaza as a beachfront resort, A Third Temple built where Al-Aqsa stood: visual prototypes preparing the ground for future policies, desires, and consensuses. “The synthetic visual regime emerging with generative AI is one in which plausibility, repetition, and virality determine legitimacy. In this new order, circulation itself becomes a form of validation, and visibility replaces verification. They do not seek to pass as real, nor do they operate within a logic of truth versus falsity. These images are speculative by nature, and so is the violence they suggest and enact. Their power lies not in deception, but in anticipation: in making a violent future imaginable, plausible, and increasingly acceptable before it ever occurs.”

“In a highly visual — indeed hyper-visual — culture such frames operate as performative blueprints: they prepare the imagination for what is to come”, Della Ratta continues.

Della Ratta’s starting point is Nick Land’s concept of hyperstition, defined as “effective culture that makes itself real”, a fiction that succeeds in projecting itself into reality. If a vision is seen enough times, by enough people, it can begin to function as social reality before it materially exists. “Projections that do not simply represent imagined futures but actively participate in bringing them into being.”

Here, the role of blur is not parallel to the speculative violence, but it works as its perfect infrastructure. Absence acts as a condition of new possibility, erasing the image and cleaning the space before it gets filled. The body has to disappear first. The testimony has to be made inaccessible. The warning screen has to be applied. The image has to be forgotten–or, at least, very hard to remember. As Della Ratta quoted, Arjun Appadurai writes that speculation operates in “the zone of the invisible”, the most profound location of which is the future. It’s in this context that the absence-the bad remembering-the ‘reduction’ of the image prepares the ground for the speculation to come. Again, as written by Donatella Della Ratta, “photorealistic surfaces of AI do not merely imagine a future Palestine; they visually construct the preconditions of that future, training the public to accept it as inevitable”.

Blur and speculation form, in this way, a sequence where the present is obscured so imagination is yet to come.

Geremia Trinchese is a PhD candidate in the Joint International Doctorate in Social Representations, Culture and Communication at Sapienza Università di Roma, the University Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Iași and the University of Pécs. His research critically examines algorithmic suppression and platform governance.

The Uses of Embarrassment: Gossip, Testimony, and the Unmaking of Heteronormativity

Screenshot from danamarijuanaa’s post on TikTok

If you’re chronically online, you probably have come across the Vogue article titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?initially published in late October 2025. At the time of publication, the controversial title sparked viral curiosity. Within a few days, influencers, writers, and internet researchers alike had started to reflect on its broader analysis and implications. But what was truly so novel and exciting about such a statement? As such, the denunciations around heterosexual fallacies aren’t new. Over the past centuries, ruthless efforts to deconstruct the heterosexual myths have been underway. Through public declarations, trials, YouTube testimonies, the critical examination of heterosexual dynamics has entered the cultural mainstream. Scroll through the internet today and immerse yourself in self-taped stories centered on embarrassment and disillusionment surrounding heterosexual partnerships. In that context, does this Vogue article truly signal a revolutionary shift in how relationships are perceived, or does it simply mark the tipping point of a critique that has been circulating and steadily gaining visibility for years, now taking a novel, condensed, and viral form?

In 2019 already, writer Asa Seresin had taken on the task of analysing the rapid growth of a discourse she coined as “heteropessimism,” quoting Maggie Nelson’s words in The Argonauts: “Heterosexuality always embarrasses me.” In this text, Seresin argued that pessimism often becomes a form of performative detachment, a way of appearing to withdraw from the expectations and attachments of heterosexual dynamics. As she writes, “faced with the possibility of disappointment, anesthesia can feel like a balm.” Six years later, when the Vogue article came out, it presents, even in its simple reading, as a new proposition, one that goes beyond detachment. Instead, it points to the idea that through public and viral expressions of critique, heterosexual dynamics, seen as disappointing, extractive, and above all, soul-stretching, could be reassessed. In that light, it is relevant to wonder how embarrassment, beyond its self-punishing nature, becomes the starting point for cultural and social change. If being embarrassed is a performance glitch, a rupture in the social script, can it be stretched a little longer, a little further, and render a possible form of empowerment?

The Stages and Processes of Embarrassment

 

Screenshot from Grandma Droniak’s reel on Instagram

Embarrassment as Failed Alignment

Across both historical and contemporary contexts, feminine embodiment and lived experience are continually negotiated through regimes of perception. The expected, the obvious, and social contracts delimit what may be expressed or requested. Reading the room, analysing the situation, and eternally assessing one’s role is almost an unconscious state for female-identifying individuals and women at large. The infamous text Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Mobility, and Spatiality by political philosopher and feminist Iris Marion Young highlights how, even in the most physically intense moments, young girls tend to withhold their full corporeal potential, acting from a learned caution that reflects broader cultural narratives about femininity and perception. So when the girl throws up, when she cries, and when she bleeds, she is always perceived, aware of an external gaze that precedes and frames her every gesture. What is felt when a young woman is asking for a menstrual pad, when she senses her reluctance to disclose debilitating pain during menstruation or during sex, or her hesitancy to ask a partner to assume responsibility for domestic labour, reveals a long-standing economy of gendered silence and performativity. This economy depends on the internalisation of discomfort to preserve the smooth functioning of social relations. In this framework, women’s bodies are shaped by both internal control of emotions and the outward performance of gender roles. Their experiences move between hiding and being highly visible in society, always aware that they could be publicly embarrassed or punished at any moment.

In Philosophical Embarrassment, philosopher Daniel Stoljar begins by defining what embarrassment is and how it always relates to the perception of oneself in a particular state: “In general, to perceive something is to be in a state that plays a distinctive constellation of representational, phenomenal, and functional roles; hence to be embarrassed is to be in a state that plays such roles.” Although this text focuses on the dynamics of embarrassment within philosophical reasoning, it is relevant to understand the dynamics at play in the logic and unfoldings of such an emotion. Following Daniel Stoljar’s argument, it becomes visible that, perhaps, the so-called ‘boyfriend embarrassment’ concerns the scenery and role expectations constructed around a relationship and the roles within those, rather than presenting an attack against the boys themselves. Stoljar, too, attempts to differentiate embarrassment from shame, arguing that “one proposal is that shame is self-directed in a way that embarrassment is not. (…) A different suggestion is that shame is directed at an object, yourself, your country, your religion, while embarrassment is always directed at a situation.” In that framework, embarrassment is understood as a scene, a glitch, and a moment that perhaps can be resolved or moved away from. Shame, on the contrary, lingers; it reconfigures the self’s relation to itself, inducing withdrawal, hiding, and self-minimization. Lighter than shame, embarrassment therefore operates on a social perceptual level, revealing a constructed veil that has been removed.

Quickly, it becomes more and more apparent that the “the boyfriend embarrassment” isn’t always about the boyfriend in itself, but rather about the defined situation one finds oneself in with the boyfriend. This situation, too, speaks volumes to the positionality of the ‘girlfriend’ (if in a heterosexual dynamic) or largely the partner accompanying the boyfriend. Although boyfriend, partner, and husband are different terminologies that stipulate a different level of engagement and commitment, the sake of this argumentation relies on heterosexual dynamics at large, and how they have been, and are currently being deconstructed. No matter the arrangement between two people, the other is embarrassed when they fail to perform the semiotic or performative roles unconsciously assigned to them. This is especially the case when a performative value has been attached to their essence. To be embarrassed is therefore a failed alignment of self-presentation, a semi-fictional social evaluation, a moment of exposure to normativity that leads to deception. But it is also a blip; it passes once the situation re-synchronizes. Although in order for that to happen, the support of all participants is needed to remodel the situation.

 

Screenshot from Brut India Interview: ‘It is embarrassing to have a boyfriend now?’

The Revolutionary Nature of Embarrassment

Embarrassment has long been studied and analyzed in sociological and performance studies. Erving Goffman, in Embarrassment and Social Organisation, examined both its manifestations and mechanics, noting that “An individual may recognize extreme embarrassment in others and even in himself by the objective signs of emotional disturbance: blushing, fumbling, stuttering, an unusually low- or high-pitched voice, quavering speech or breaking of the voice.” Beyond the physical expressions of this state, Goffman emphasized that such moments were initiated by clear relations to the real or imagined presence of others, reinforcing that embarrassment is inherently connected to a scene, a socially constructed contract. He writes, “Embarrassment has to do with unfulfilled expectations but not of a statistical kind. Given their social identities and the setting, the participants will sense what sort of conduct ought to be maintained as the appropriate thing, however much they may despair of its actually occurring.” In this sense, Goffman indirectly suggests that embarrassment carries a critical force, possibly the artificiality of social order.

Throughout his investigation, Goffman introduces the concept of “role segregation,” later suggesting that the experience of embarrassment can be overcome and resolved through a cooperative effort of “face work,” in which participants work together to realign the situation. This may involve tactics such as ignoring mistakes or helping individuals recover from a situation, allowing social interactions to continue smoothly. In that light, embarrassment carries a distinctly political dimension: it not only exposes the structure of social interactions and expectations but also requires all participants to be aware of what is currently at play to be resolved. Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, similarly argues that emotions are not private, internal states but relational forces that circulate between individuals and groups. Embarrassment, therefore, is not simply “felt” by one woman; it is the effect of a social script that positions her in relation to norms of intimacy, sexuality, and gender. If embarrassment circulates to enforce roles, what happens when the social order is broken, and the embarrassment lingers, or worse, is rendered public? What occurs when partners refuse to engage in the “face work” that Goffman described?

Multiple avenues exist for exploring where this embarrassment originates and who, or what, initiates it. It is evident that years of public deconstruction of the intimate sphere online, whether in health, sexual, or educational spaces, have allowed a statement as simple as “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” to resonate so strongly. Surely, this is due to the growing rise of heteropessimism, but, as we will expand later in this text, it is mostly due to the previous groundwork made by authors such as bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir in exposing patriarchal structures. As such, it is thanks to a lineage of women who dared to show, in front of the entire world, that the narratives around heterosexual romance were, for the most part, a game that primarily served men. Figures who faced the embarrassment of being in a heterosexual dynamic, and who, instead of trying to conceal it, went above it and rendered it public. Online, these new contemporary figures are not only discussing the unpleasant emotions associated with posting about their relationships and later being cheated on, nor are they only concerned with the potential negative publicity such situations might generate. Instead, they are shedding light on the many assumptions, narratives, and inherited tales surrounding the supposed benefits of romantic heterosexual arrangements. While certain aspects of these dynamics may indeed be positive and rewarding, many others are now being critically examined. Incels (involuntary celibates), for example, often get irritated and label these women as “red-pilled” and accuse them of contributing to men’s misery, leaving enraged online comments, threatening them with a “You’re ugly anyway… and you’ll end up alone!” to which the women reply, “Ending up alone? Don’t threaten me with a good time!”

Redesigned Substack note from Emily Tisshaw

Rendering Embarrassment: Gossip or Testimonies?

The Power of Online Spaces Against Institutions’ Structures

In Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed, one of the main arguments I developed is that medical misogyny, once considered the norm, has, over the past ten years, been slowly deconstructed through the gathering of communities on social media. This shift occurred thanks to the internet, initially through Reddit channels and Facebook groups, where women came together to publicly and collectively share their experiences and pain. In doing so, they rendered visible parts of a reality that had long gone unacknowledged. Admittedly, it was embarrassing to articulate the many symptoms, effects, and processes of humiliation associated with medical misogyny. Yet it is through the accumulation of such taboo testimonies and shared feelings online that many menstruating bodies were able to realize they were suffering from similar conditions. While it now seems commonplace to scroll through reels, documentaries, and posts about endometriosis, pelvic pain, or various forms of sexual discharge, this was not the case just a few years ago. Thankfully, these topics have now become widely discussed and illustrated on social media, enabling millions of women and menstruating bodies to share their experiences and transforming what was once taboo, embarrassing, or repressed into visible conversations and collective strategies. Although such practices do not replace medical counselling, they have played a great role in shifting the dynamics within consulting rooms and in public spaces.

Similarly to women’s health subjects, the spread of “embarrassing” and “taboo” topics on social media has also helped dismantle other mythologies, such as the idea that loving motherhood is a natural or universal instinct, or that having a husband is the ultimate life hack. The emergence of online testimonies on such matters revealed that, had they truly understood what such a contract entailed, people might have made different choices. Scrolling through online platforms, one now finds a landscape in which marriage and mothering can be experienced as either magical or profoundly challenging; a space where these experiences and desires, positive and negative, are acknowledged and validated. Yet, it would be too simple to say that online spaces have solved many of women’s life issues. If they gave them a platform to express their lived experiences and facilitate discourse emancipation, these spaces have also facilitated erasure and deletion, as well as violence and harassment, making it harder and scarier for some individuals to express themselves freely.

This argument, foundational to the book Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture by Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller, demonstrates that digital forms of resistance and challenge can function as powerful tools for condemning rape, sexism, and other forms of oppression, while facilitating others. Researchers indeed emphasize that such online denunciations frequently provoke backlash and harassment, making this form of activism difficult, or, in some cases, impossible to pursue. As they note, “Women being subjected to sexism, abuse, and hostility, then, is not a new phenomenon—the internet and digital technologies have simply provided new avenues for this abuse to be transmitted.” In this context, it is also important to acknowledge that the public articulation of rape carries a far heavier and deeply shame-laden burden than disclosures related to health or companionship. Nevertheless, contributions such as Digital Feminist Activism demonstrate how publicly alleging forms of abuse and oppression can generate new modes of awareness and activism, even if not everyone can, unfortunately, afford to make such gestures.

Returning to the concept of embarrassment in heterosexual dynamics, while no comprehensive studies have yet been conducted, the wave of online discourse deconstructing heterosexual relationships appears remarkably diverse. Although it is difficult to discern the social class or privileges of those contributing to this public denunciation, there appears to be a clear articulation of disillusionment with the false promises of heterosexual fairy tales across multiple spheres. Of course, discourses as they are produced online remain hard to gauge, given that negative experiences with partners and critiques of life paths are widely shared, while the perpetually happy often remain silent and offline. Yet the viral and persistent circulation of such content marks a significant shift. Even in middle-class or bourgeois environments, and within art school contexts, it was clearly taboo in 2015 to admit publicly that being in a relationship with a man could feel draining or disappointing. Discussions of libido, desire, or the absence of desire were similarly difficult to voice. Singleness was regarded as abnormal, and societal pressure to find a partner quickly was pervasive. Times have changed.

Screenshot from YouTube video ‘Marriage Drains Women’, TikTok compilations

The Power of (Auto) Gossip and Its Redefinition

When watching TikTok and Instagram Reels recounting heterosexual disillusionment, there is much to consider in analyzing how embarrassment is recorded and performed. Following Goffman’s argument, these individuals, by refusing to resolve an embarrassing confrontation and instead making it public through social media platforms, confront the roles being played and the scripts assigned to such situations. Such individuals often adopt a confessional, intimate, and story-time-like narrative, one that does not rely on scientific or historical arguments but is instead grounded in personal and social experience. In a certain manner, these narratives resemble gossip, a secret within an intimate relationship that suddenly happens to be revealed to a broader community. If there exists a power in this “gossiping” force, in the reliance on such an informal way of sharing information, there lingers, too, a strange hesitation in using this exact term. Why is that so? When researching  a little more, one can observe that the Cambridge Dictionary itself defines gossip as “conversation or reports about other people’s private lives that might be unkind, disapproving, or untrue.” Could this definition need revisiting, particularly in light of gossip’s socially assistive potential?

In the article Gossip as a Communication System, researcher Sarah Hamerman extensively researched how gossip was, for long, cast as a “historically maligned form of communication, frequently cast as idle, feminized chatter in contrast to the masculine public sphere. But gossip’s bad reputation speaks to its power.” Through historical and literary references, the research invites us to reconsider how, perhaps, gossip can actually be framed as a language for female resistance and an indispensable ‘form of emotional labor’, arguing that “For marginalized people, gossip has a dual function: it works to both affirm communal bonds and unsettle the positions of those in power.” Referring to anthropological studies, the researcher emphasizes a very central point to our argumentation: gossip and rumor emphasize the ways that information is transmitted in social networks: “Writing in 1967, Robert Paine defined gossip as ‘information management’: a mode of informal communication leveraged to advance and protect individual interests.” As argued in the article, while contemporary notions of gossip are often associated with fake news and viral nonsense, it is useful to examine the historicity of the term. This allows us to understand how female allyship has been framed over time as falsified or irrelevant information, particularly in contexts where it challenged figures of authority or the status quo.

In her essay “On the Meaning of ‘Gossip” Silvia Federici, too, took a closer look at the origins of this word and strategy, underscoring the underlying concepts of friendship and allyship that were initially associated with such a term. If, in the early 14th century, no specific judgmental sentiments were attached to this term, it is only a century later that, under a more and more rigid patriarchal system, the word ‘gossip’ started to be associated with dangerous practices exercised by women, which, quite often, challenged the status quo. At that time, what most men wanted was for women to be quiet and obedient wives, and if possible, not to question or share the practices that were undergoing in their respective marriages: “women were […] brought to court and fined for ‘scolding,’ while priests in their sermons thundered against their tongues. Wives especially were expected to be quiet, ‘obey their husbands without question’ and ‘stand in awe of them.” From this lineage, it is relevant to highlight how the concept of gossip is inherited from these falsified, dangerous practices. However, at its core, it was a means to relay information for marginalized groups and to share insights and perspectives on intimate experiences.

Screenshot from TikTok Section Gossip is Taking out Patriarchy

The previous intuition that the term “gossip” could be a misused or inappropriate word is an interesting redirection for our argumentation. As previously argued, one can quickly imagine how its mainstream definition is the result of patriarchal and institutional forces’ censorship of informational systems between minorities, rather than the actual spread of “false information” in itself. If, for quite some time, sharing intimate and personal experiences about relationships was forbidden or avoided, the visibility of ‘gossiping practices’ on the internet has greatly facilitated the normalization of oversharing, especially when it serves to prevent and condemn patriarchal structures and dynamics. But how does gossiping about heterosexual dynamics really connect to the concept of embarrassment? Perhaps, here, the mechanisms of gossip change. On the internet, the process of oversharing personal and sometimes embarrassing experiences starts with the realization that one must first have been deceived and fooled by the script. In that context, the internet, and more specifically, social media, is the exact place where the embarrassment is not being fixed or forgotten, but instead, it is the exact stage where it is being projected and prolonged. The gossip, in that framework, moves from the private sphere to the public and is willingly exposed, instead of simply being leaked. As such, in this online theater of heterosexual dynamics and their pitfalls, rendering embarrassment through public gossiping might become empowerment, if only a few have enough courage to start sharing what happened to them.

Not Even a Gossip: The Long Lineage of Heteropessimism

Screenshot from viral Instagram Interview on Briefbutspectacular with Betty Reid Soskin

Earlier Warnings on Heterosexuals’ Disillusions

The demise of heterosexuality, as we are exposed to it, unfolds across multiple stages: the domestic private one, the public social one, and the exposed media-driven one. Beforehand, the disillusionments of heterosexuality had a few occasions to be publicly denounced, and yet, most of the time, it was gently collected and put back together with the support of patriarchal institutions. Yet, most of us could clearly see and experience its profound dysfunctions. In the book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality Sexuality, writer Jane Ward states on the very first page: “I am worried about straight people. And I am not the only one. Queer people have been concerned about straight culture for decades, not only for our own sake—because we fear homophobic violence or erasure of queer subculture—but also because straight culture’s impact on straight women often elicits our confusion and distress.” As such, the book isn’t a courtroom for heterosexual downfalls, but rather about straight culture and the pretentious smoothness and ease it promises: “Let me quickly assure you that this book is not so much about straight people themselves but about the straight culture in which they are embedded and to which they are held accountable.” Ward emphasizes the long-lasting pain and oppression embedded in heterosexual dynamics, particularly at a time when women had little to no freedom at all. She writes: “Eugenicists such as Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, William Robinson, and Harland Long made clear what they understood to be the marital status quo of the time: men and women commonly wished harm on each other, found each other disgusting, and were made utterly miserable by marriage,” reminding us that even a century ago, the conditionings of certain forms of partnerships was despiscable, yet carefully concealed.

Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Occasion’d by the Duke and Dutchess of Mazarine’s Case, 1700

Ignoring the earlier works that contributed to this growing awareness of heteropessimism would mean overlooking the genealogies of feminist critique, confessional writing, and cultural production that made this shift possible. Throughout history, women in relationships or dynamics marked by deception have attempted in different ways to speak out, often only to be silenced. Beyond the well-known authors mentioned above and others who have since been forgotten, several key events help retrace the lineage of what now appears “brand new” and “viral” in contemporary critical discourse. In Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Occasion’d by the Duke and Dutchess of Mazarine’s Case published in 1700 by Mary Astell, the writer argued rather clearly how women’s lack of education left them vulnerable to manipulation and dependence within marriage, but also how, marriage, as practised in her time, often resembled a form of servitude, one where wives were subject to the will of their husbands. While this text, written in an older form of English, is rather complex to translate, some parts areand clear: “To be contradicted in everything one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority… denied one’s most innocent desires for no other cause but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master,” a piece of writing that remains highly relevant to revisit in the context of the growing right-wing trad-wife ideology and its emphasis on financial dependence on men. A paradigm which suggests to young women that to be depending on a rich, generous provider, and and being fully devoted to a man is not a form of submission but a return to a supposedly natural order. Yet, as this historical account reveals, such arrangements have long been intertwined with the loss of the self, and of autonomy.

 Twitter Screenshot @cessonmute on X

Any reflection on heterosexuality and its critique would be incomplete without invoking Simone de Beauvoir and her seminal work The Second Sex, a monumental text in which she maps the historical structures that have framed, confined, and legitimized womanhood. Written in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir was audacious for naming and writing a history of womanhood defined by the patriarchal structures of its time: “Now, woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today, women are heavily handicapped, though their situation is beginning to change.” Thankfully, Simone de Beauvoir, who was already a well-known public figure at the time of publication, did not suffer from publisher censorship.

De Beauvoir not only frames the myths and structures built around women, but she also very directly criticises the marital walls in which women are endlessly ‘enslaved’: “Man has succeeded in enslaving woman, but in the same degree, he has deprived her of what made her possession desirable. With a woman integrated in the family and in society, her magic is dissipated rather than transformed; reduced to the condition of a servant, she is no longer that unconquered prey incarnating all the treasures of nature.” By bringing about romantic dynamics with different philosophical concepts, the intellectual argues as to why patriarchal systems of possession and commitment are dooming women to figures of passivity and disappointment. This book, surely a precursor at its time of publication, is to this day a foundational text for understanding how heterosexual marriage operates as both a social ideal and a mechanism of containment, revealing the enduring structures that continue to shape women’s affective lives. While marriage, particularly at that time, remained a particularly rigid and oppressive form of legal partnership, the critical assessment of heterosexual dynamics continues into the twenty-first century. Today, although these two statuses entail different levels of commitment, whether one speaks of a boyfriend or a husband, both remain embedded within the same system: that of expectations surrounding a heterosexual script. As relationships progress, they enter new stages of assumptions, ideals, commitments, and potential disappointments.

Rebuilding with What’s Left: the Feast and the Grief

 

Screenshot from YouTube Video ‘Stop Telling Us about Your Loser Husbands’ by the Financial Diet

Heterosexual Pessimism with Leftovers of Romantic Fantasies

Beyond the algorithmic logic that renders hateful content viral, the cascades of comments, agreements, and reshared stories about boyfriends and husbands suggest that the pre-existing narrative of heterosexual dynamics may be approaching a turning point. Instead of brushing up on the different circumstances and moments of embarrassment or humiliation, these are now turned into occasions for public gossiping and reflections on the tales and myths sold to women in our current societies. And yet, if boyfriends are, to some extent, embarrassing, and if the institution of the happily ever after is now being partially deconstructed, is it really that simple to let go of that wishful romance and of heterosexual thinking? As de Beauvoir wrote, the belief of a happily ever after encounter that could, down the line, permeate a lifelong union, runs deep in our minds: “Un jour mon prince viendra… Some day he’ll come along, the man I love – the words of popular songs fill her with dreams of patience and of hope.” As such, it is not only heterosexual dynamics in their details that need to be scrutinized, but also the long and complex lineage of Western romantic ideologies and imaginaries.

In her book Consuming the Romantic Utopia, sociologist Eva Illouz guides us through the historical lineage of romantic love as it was once produced and imagined: “Romantic time” is constructed to mark out “special things,” and as such it is explicitly opposed to the “ordinary” time of everyday life.” Rendered as special occasions, curated ones that take us outside of the mundanity of things, romance, specifically in heterosexual contexts, has been extracted and turned into an entire economy of capitalistic practices and performances that best serve our liberal societies. Even if we might feel stuck, or perhaps slightly displaced as we think of those practices, their lineage of ‘magical’ and ‘extraordinary’ nature takes us to a place where we will seek such adventures or dynamics, Illouz writes: “Romantic is exotic (Hawaii), fun (the trip, the party), affluent (a plane ticket, dressy clothes), magic (the “spell”), and relaxed. The romantic stands above and outside the stream of everyday life, conceived of as effortful, practical, routine, and unplayful.”

Very few are immune to the charms and the promises of romantic love for its rare and evocative nature. After all, romance is what drives us to do the impossible and to fight for what our hearts desire. Having a boyfriend or a lover is not often embarrassing in the first phases, and for some, the magic transforms or remains. After all, having someone to count on is a very healthy and necessary component of human’s nature, and as Simone de Beauvoir argued, despite her ongoing criticism of marriage as an institution: “Marriage is not only an honourable career and one less tiring than many others: it alone permits a woman to keep her social dignity intact and at the same time to find sexual fulfilment as loved one and mother.” Perhaps our societal confusion was to intertwine concepts of magical and wishful thinking with longer-term and more serious dynamics, a dreamscape that most individuals, no matter the gender or sexual affiliations, can easily sustain.

Post-Embarrassment: Letting Go of the Fantasy and Dynamics to Rebuild

Romantic tropes and ideals sold in Disney movies and mainstream movies are imprinted in our generation’s mind. In the research paper Lessons in Love: Countering Student Belief in Romantic Love Myths, researcher Jeff Standley studied how current romantic love concepts produced through literature, films, or social media currently impact the perception of romance in young adults. He also examined how these concepts directly impact their relationships, highlighting that empirical literature suggests belief in love myths is common among young people and often harms relationships: “There is empirical evidence to support the claim that unwarranted positive beliefs about relationships can have a positive self-fulfilling effect. It makes sense that if someone believed their partner was “the one” and that love could overcome any hurdle, they may be more likely to persist through difficult times to develop a deeper and more fulfilling relationship, thus seemingly proving the myths true (though conversely, one may be willing to remain in a harmful relationship for longer, too).” As such, the researcher argues that the myths associated with romantic love and partnerships need to be reassessed to temper some of the potential harms of love myths while respecting the right of students to freely hold and pursue their own conceptions of love. A change of narration that, as I argued throughout this piece of text, is clearly rendered visible online, and that hopefully, the next generation can shapeshift with different imaginaries.

Screenshot from Vaginal Davis – “The Revolution Is My Boyfriend”

We should have never hyped boyfriends up so much in the first place,” one can read in the comments of the YouTube video of The Death of Boyfriend Culture. From online strangers to influencers, from researchers to philosophers, everyone seems to emphasize the need to rewrite the expectations that come with relationships, specifically within the context of heterosexual dynamics. This revolution has a strong and empowering nature: one to let various kinds of expectations and formations arrive, instead of simply letting oneself be disappointed by a script that failed to arrive, or simply needs to be updated. For many, it is a breath of fresh air not to feel pressured to date or to be labelled abnormal for not wanting to be around men. Yet it would be dishonest to suggest that some heterosexual women are not also grieving the loss of a life they genuinely wanted, including a union and the desire to build a stable, healthy family. A desire that cannot simply be dismissed as nostalgia, soft power, or social conditioning.

And yet, this post-embarrassment momentum, a clear horizon emerges, including a refusal of poor treatment, higher expectations from partners, and a renewed investment in oneself, one’s pursuits, and platonic relationships. On the bright side of things, if these dynamics are being publicly deconstructed and criticized, it is also to open up the possibility of reimagining them. The questions our generation is left with are not only how to move beyond embarrassment toward a more positive paradigm, but how to reorganise expectations and the self within a world still structured by older narratives and illusions. This shift already seems underway. In both personal conversations and on social media, partnership is increasingly less presented as an ultimate need or ideal. Rather than an illusion to sustain or a stage to keep functioning, it is framed as something to be actively shaped. What emerges from this plurality of perspectives is a more diverse way of living and loving, one that moves beyond the constraints of normative and conservative thinking. By negotiating and reinventing together what heterosexual dynamics can become, we hold the possibility of moving beyond inherited scripts of dependency and domination toward relationships built on reciprocated care and growth, and not predetermined, suffocating roles.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09x4q.

Astell, Mary. Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Occasion’d by the Duke and Dutchess of Mazarine’s Case; Which is Also Consider’d. London: Printed for John Nutt, near Stationers-Hall, 1700.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-85715-137-4.

Goffman, Erving. “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3 (1956): 264–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2772920.

Hamerman, Sarah. “Gossip as Communication System.” Are.na Editorial, July 11, 2017. https://www.are.na/editorial/sarah-hamerman.

Illouz, Eva. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. 1st ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Paperback and e-book. ISBN 9780520205710.

Joseph, C. “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” Vogue, October 29, 2025. Accessed January 19, 2026. https://www.vogue.com/article/is-having-a-boyfriend-embarrassing-now.

Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller. Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture. Oxford Studies in Digital Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Online edition, Oxford Academic, February 21, 2019.

Paine, Robert. “What Is Gossip About? An Alternative Hypothesis.” Man, New Series 2, no. 2 (June 1967): 278–85.

Seresin, A. “On Heteropessimism.” The New Inquiry, October 9, 2019. Accessed January 19, 2026. https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/.

Standley, J. “Lessons in Love: Countering Student Belief in Romantic Love Myths.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 56, no. 5 (2022): 739–51. https://academic.oup.com/jope/article/56/5/739-751/7000128.

Stoljar, D. “Philosophical Embarrassment.” Manuscript. Accessed January 19, 2026. https://philarchive.org/rec/STOPEX.

Ward, Jane. The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. New York: New York University Press, 2020. E-book EPUB. ISBN 978-1-4798-9506-9.

Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3, no. 1 (1980): 137–56. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02331805.

Enduring Otherwise

In this episode, we talk with Ferdiansyah Thajib about his book Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic research in Aceh, Yogyakarta and Jakarta, Ferdi explores how queer and trans Muslims build meaningful lives within social, religious and political conditions that often refuse them recognition. The conversation moves through Indonesia’s […]

Duckrabbits Talk Back #5: Hegemony and Complexity w/ Nora Sternfeld

What is really political art? What is the relation between art and hegemony? And how to be an uncompromising antifascist in a complex, multipolar world? To discuss these deep question, we are joined by Nora Sternfeld, an independent curator and Professor of Art Education at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Expect no clear-cut, simple answers, but in-depth discussions about the opposition between simplistic complexity and complex simplicity, para-institutionality, counter-monuments, sober coalition-building, and the notion of propaganda. Please join us in the labyrinth of concepts, because it will be worth your while.

Listen to Duckrabbits Talk Back

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About

Duckrabbits Talk Back is a podcast about postartistic antifascism, hosted by Aria Spinelli, Kuba Szreder, and Sepp Eckenhaussen. The series is inspired by the comic treatise Duckrabbits Unveiled: A Sneak Peek at the Postartistic Theory and Practice (2025).

This episode is hosted by Kuba Szreder and Sepp Eckenhaussen.

Production: Anielek Niemyjski
Cover art: Kacper Greń
Jingle: Olka Dąbrowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, 2026

Report: Creative Resistance Against AI Assembly

Friday June 26 we organized a Creative Resistance Against AI Assembly during the INC Exit Fest. Some of you were there. It was hot, it started a bit too late, we might not have properly invited everyone, and honestly: we pretty much improvised on the spot because of the circumstances. But we loved to do it, we met some great people, and we want to just share with you that it happened and that it will happen again later! We decided to continue exchange and collaboration around creative resistance to current tech systems.

Below a small recap with some links to materials that were shared. We took resisting and refusing AI as an inherently collective, defiantly promising, and inherently creative field of research and experimentation.

At 10 o’clock in the morning we gathered at the OT301 in Amsterdam, it was more than 30 degrees Celsius, and we already had an evening and full day of great talks and nice people. But we were determined to go ahead with it and take our time to discuss and find common threads.

We went outside into the park. We sat down and exchanged all kinds of materials and ideas; we shared the experiences and discussed what we all have been working on lately. Just to state the obvious: we don’t really like AI as a term, we are very concerned about it use as part of violent military technologies, and we hate the related ecological destruction and its immense energy usage. We furthermore certainly do not like techno-fascist cyberbosses and much of the AI slop and hype bullshit. We are already exploring multiple ways to resist and oppose it. But there is much more to say about it. We don’t just want to disengage and let it be. And we certainly keep imagining how to do things otherwise. We refuse to take recent tech developments for how they are presented to us. We think there is much potential on building on resistance and refusal to create alternative sociotechnical configurations, to imagine radical different kind of computational infrastructures, and to experiment with ever more ways to halt or confuse the devastating systems that are currently imposed on us. So, we gathered to talk about active forms of resistance and creative subversion.

We shared and mapped out ways we are already doing this. We very much enjoyed hearing about all kinds of experiences for resisting AI, refusing tech solutionism, tech worker protests, building alternatives, and other kinds of defiant artistic experimentation. We looked for possibilities to collaborate and reinforce practical tactics.

We took all kinds of different zines and booklets with us. Some were made by us, and some were created by others and reproduced for the occasion. These zines were printed so they could be handed out on the spot, but they were also shared these through a simple Arduino local wifi fileshare. We can bring it with us to further events or workshops, but in the meantime, we now also made a concise online collection of zines so you can already check them out, download them, or distribute them. It also includes the AI_Anxiety zine!

We also developed a typology of resistance, which was discussed and elaborated on during the gathering. We will work on a new version of it, and we will experiment with in art & design education. But it seemed helpful for some to reflect on their own practice or think about new forms of creative opposition, so we already wanted to share the draft version. We hoped to establish the richest and boldest possible vision of creative resistance (but let’s keep working on that!): for now, the most interesting work is probably done when combining different types of resistance or when you go through different types of resistance in different phases of your work. Maybe the ‘epistemic refusal’ can fuel the other types of resistance. We hope it can help to inspire further research and action!

Also, finally, we made a tablecloth – or rather picnic cloth, as we happened to go to the park – full of recent investigations of tech systems (in broad sense of the word). It was printed in black on a big white sheet. It combined multiple complex visualizations, for example parts of work by Crawford and Joler, some by Estampa and Sarah Ciston, and also Disnovation and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. A picture of this cloth is now also posted online with links to the different visualizations that were included and with several pictures of us using it during the event. It might be an interesting tool for further brainstorming and a great conversation starter for discussing new points of intervention or topics to further explore. We scrabbled all kinds of practices and ideas on top of it, which made a rich visualization of practices and possibilities.

Anyway, this is just a quick recap, but it will give you some ideas what we have been up to. We want to come together and continue our exchange after the summer break, preferably again in a rather informal AI_Anxiety style. If you would like to host or prepare with us, do get in contact! There were already some suggestions for this. So let’s conspire and get together again after the summer. We are now even more determined to keep thinking together how to strengthen the somewhat scattered but defiant field of creative resistance.