News from the Collective

By Rok Kranjc

Our times are marked not just by a crisis of facts, but a crisis of reality production. Oligarchs, platforms, reactionary movements and attention entrepreneurs have learned to stage fantastic parallel worlds, exploit all manners of anxiety and alienation, and scale their fictions as power, while the once grander fictions of capitalism and democracy are becoming less relevant by the day. The question is (still) whether and how a collective revolutionary subject can produce and enter better fictions together,¹ and whether these can become effective sympoietic rehearsal spaces for other, pluriversal forms of social, economic and political life. A play-full “fake it till you make it” theory of change, if you will. That’s one way to understand the word worldplay.

WORLDPLAY is the opening move of a network of avantgarde revolutionaries LARPing as some kind of commons economics activists. Or at least that’s what we’d say if we took ourselves a bit too seriously. More plainly, it’s a new network, event series and pop-up hub for prefiguring and prehearsing radical alternatives through fiction, design, performance and play.

The first edition, convened by Rok Kranjc, Carolina Carvalho and Pekko Koskinen through the Crypto Commons Association, takes place June 7–13, 2026 at the Commons Hub in Austria, constituting our first attempt to channel post-something-worse-than-capitalist desire through co-created counter-hegemonic fiction engines and social organisations as games.

Proposed seed threads for this first edition include:

• playing with reality

• socio-economic science fictions

• parallel worlding and guerrilla futuring

• radical games and game commons

• imagination infrastructuring and peerticipation

The claim is not that this is where these currents begin. Artists, designers, game-makers, writers, researchers, activists, weird economists, culture jammers and stewards of imaginary institutions have been probing these waters for many years.² There are already directories of unreal institutions,³ economic LARPs,⁴ game commons experiments,⁵ sci-fi economics reading lists,⁶ post-growth games,⁷ and many other points where imagination meets infrastructure.

What WORLDPLAY attempts is to be one such meeting point. Its initiators believe we need more IRL encounters, but also better ways for distributed peer communities to stay connected after the intensity fades. Anyone who has spent a few days or weeks practising commoning and care face to face with extraordinary human animals knows the feeling. New collaborations are promised, new worlds appear within reach, and the air is thick with commitment. Then comes the harder question: how do we sustain any of it across distance, work, precarity, exhaustion, and the return to our separate little gardens? This is where commoning stops being a buzzword and becomes an actual difficulty. WORLDPLAY is interested in that difficulty. How to generate enough trust, care, structure and shared language for people to lean on each other; how to become less confined to our systemically and self-precariarised corners; how to pull together our coveted, conceptually potent yet mostly performative mutant signifiers, and make something more than the sum of our parts? Not in spite of the present conditions, but because of them.

The revolution will not be gamified. God, no. But it might be that, in some contexts, play is one of the few remaining ways to pierce through worse-than-capitalist realism. At its best, at least for our purposes, play in its many forms can organise imagination into protocols, hold communities of practice, and spring into existence commons of peerticipatory imagineering and imaginaction.

To be defined …

The shape of the first WORLDPLAY pop-up will be co-defined by the people who show up, while acknowledging, plainly, that “showing up” already means having the time, money, documents, health and flexibility to travel to Austria for a week. That is a real limitation, and one we are trying to work with rather than pretend away. The programme will use unconference methods, with enough facilitation to prevent the usual chaordination from becoming either tyranny of the loudest or tyranny of the spreadsheet. The point is not to host a week of just isolated show-and-tells, but to leave behind co-created open designs, living archives, shared project threads, and a peer network for radical worldplay.

We’d also like to experiment with letting formats stack. For example, a collaborative writing or storytelling game session might seed a world. That world might be fleshed out as a set of physical props. Those props might be used in a LARP. The LARP might be morphed into a guerrilla futuring tactic, shareable as a design commons. We may set up a self-hosted living anarchive for its continued distributed practice. One evening, we propose playing out a “parallel economic reality” dinner, with dress codes, odd service norms, alternative currencies, the works. Projects like Alicja Rogalska’s The Feast⁸ and Alix Gerber’s Lemonade 50¢⁹ show how quickly economic assumptions become playable and hackable when they arrive through food.

For such experiments, the Commons Hub¹⁰ carries both symbolic significance and serious infrastructure for peer production value to express itself. It is a convivial, semi-off-grid site in the Austrian Alps, with workshop spaces, a conference room, maker equipment, a 3D printer, laser cutter, book binder, sound system, projector, hiking trails and riverside nearby. There is also a self-made wood-fired hot tub lovingly referred to as the Liquidity Pool, and, thanks to the MVP commoners of the annual Hack the Hub event, a newly built outdoor sauna. The Hub’s longer horizon is a regenerative ecovillage. This matters because WORLDPLAY is not only about imagining alternative infrastructures, but takes place inside one that is itself being built – one island in an archipelago of alternative spaces popping up like mushrooms.¹¹

WORLDPLAY’s crypto commons roots

The Crypto Commons Association grew out of the same question that has animated MoneyLab and related INC conversations for years: how do we distinguish genuinely new coordination possibilities from old wine in fancy new bottles?¹² How do we talk about money, networks and value without surrendering the field to speculation or libertarian exit fantasies?

WORLDPLAY draws on years of gathering practice at the Commons Hub. The initial Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) began as a modest excuse for Felix Fritsch, then deep in doctoral work on the emergence of the crypto commons, to bring scattered thinkers and practitioners to his own backyard rather than chasing them around the world. Alongside his brother Emil, that backyard became the Commons Hub. The gatherings have been described by Martin Zeilinger as an “IRL structure of belonging,”¹³ while Sarah Manski’s report¹⁴ from the 2021 gathering captured it as a productive mess of cooperative economics, blockchain research, movement-building and lived commoning pressed into the same house. Joshua “the Blockchain Socialist” Dávila’s CCG Chronicles¹⁵ recorded another trace of that scene. Since then, the community has conceived and brought to life other event series and one-offs, including Collaborative Finance Gatherings, Regenerative Finance, Playdrive and Solarpunk NOW.

What matters for WORLDPLAY is not only the alternative economic discourses and practices that have met through these events, but the culture and open-ended protocols that formed around them (shoutout to Jeremy Akers and his Liberating Structures). Just as importantly, CCG and its offshoots have also quietly gathered a band of misfit artists and game designers whose work, less quietly, helped inspire WORLDPLAY. Pablo Somonte Ruano’s POCAS¹⁶ prehearses self-service collaborative organisation and mutualist economic tooling through research, speculative design, LARP and local AI. Game-Changers: The Game,¹⁷ developed by Rok Kranjc, has become somewhat of a tradition at events at the Hub, and is part board game, part peerticipatory theatre, feeding the ideas and insights of the event back into further generative play. The XORG¹⁸ community, initiated by Pekko Koskinen, pushes the premise of “games as organisations and organisations as games” into stranger and meta-territories.

Where Crypto Commons Gatherings have helped bring together a mycelium within and beyond “leftist blockchain,” WORLDPLAY asks whether similar international peer communities can form around radical play. Its timing is not accidental. Cultural spaces are closing. Funding is shrinking. Artists, critical researchers and organisers are being pushed back to the ground, back to allies, back to informal systems, back to the mycelium. The question of how to sustain these practices¹⁹ is therefore not secondary to WORLDPLAY, but part of the work.

Accordingly, the programme will also invite experiments with art DAOs, game commons publishing ecosystems, hyperstitional merch coops, non-speculative NFTs, shared treasuries, solidarity funds, licensing models, and other experiments in keeping counter-hegemonic collective imagination alive and felt. None of these by themselves are “the answer.” The old answers are visibly failing, or rather have failed some time ago, and the next ones will have to be created by the people who need them.

After WORLDPLAY

WORLDPLAY is just one gathering at the Hub in a wider 2026 sequence. Later in June comes the 4th Collaborative Finance Gathering,²⁰ bringing together a multigenerational group with decades of combined hands-on experience in mutual credit, community currencies and other monetary experiments. In August, the 6th Crypto Commons Gathering²¹ returns as the annual meeting point for commons praxis and cryptographic technologies, a space for revisiting, among other things, Joshua Dávila’s recent question: why should co-ops still care about crypto?²² After that, the Commons Hub hosts Valley of the Commons,²³ a four-week pop-up ecovillage for longer-format communal living and cosmolocal production prototyping.

But WORLDPLAY is the opening move of its own series.

Besides features in GameScenes (shoutout to Matteo Bitanti) and the blog you are reading now, the team has been busy weaving an underground-ish cybernetic grapevine through which the call could travel. Early partnerships and virtual handshakes include Bread Cooperative, Class Wargames, Furtherfield, International Network for Democratic Economic Planning (INDEP), Regeneration Pollination, Economic Media Lab, Economic Space Agency, School of Commons, Society for the Promotion of Radical Analogue Games, and Sybil, among others. Whispers of foreseeable future pop-ups in Berlin, Slovenia, and a certain theatre in the forest in Sweden are already at play.

More information and registration for the first edition of WORLDPLAY: https://worldplay.art

I recently finished Joshua Gooch‘s Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film, where the author looks at contemporary horror movies and argues that monsters work like mirrors. They reflect whatever sociopolitical anxiety is boiling underneath—economic precarity, environmental collapse, the feeling that the whole system wants you dead. The index itself works as a roadmap to how fictional horror captures and presents to us the horrors of capitalism. 

1. Work Hates You: Antiwork Horror and Value Theory
2. Love Hates You: Feminist Anticapitalist Horror and Social Reproduction Theory
3. Nature Hates You: Psychedelic Eco-horror and Ecological Marxism
4. The Neighborhood Hates You: New Black Horror and Uneven Development
5. Commodities Hate You: Mass- Culture Horror and Commodity Forms
6. The Family Hates You: Elevated Horror and Family Abolition
7. Feelings Hate You: Therapeutic Horror and Emotion Work

What hit me, tho, was how often the monster, as a narrative figure, embodies a symptom. Something bubbling up from below.

Lately, I see that logic everywhere—especially in how we talk/write about the Internet. You’ve probably heard of the Dead Internet Theory, which claims that since around 2016 most online activity has been led by non-human entities such as bots. Of course, such a theory gained force after 2020, when the most recent AI boom made it feel more accurate than ever. No humans left, just automated noise.

Jason Koebler thinks that take is way too clean, especially when addressing the current state of Facebook. The ever‑growing AI‑slop. Bizarre bot interactions plaguing feeds and groups. Our own data bouncing around long after we logged off. He calls it the Zombie Internet.  Facebook, as Koebler puts it, has become a shitshow—you can’t tell bots from humans, fake from real. And the tech company won’t try to stop this. Why would it? There’s too much money in the chaos.

Koebler doesn’t explain why he picked the zombie, but the link is easy to spot. The zombie fits this mess perfectly precisely because it refuses to die. It was human once, then something—a virus, a curse, a bite— stripped its personhood away. Now it shuffles forward, blank‑eyed, hungry for ours. That’s exactly how the Shrimp Jesus side of Facebook feels. Bots that used to be accounts. Feeds that used to be communities. Something that looks familiar but isn’t, and it wants to pull us into the same hollow state.

The problem is that both versions—dead or undead—leave us in the same place. Run. Hide. Log off. Is that really all there is? Or is there a different kind of monster that might send us toward imagining a different Internet?

Spoiler: I think there is.

Let’s look at a monster whose origin is just as hateful, invented to dehumanize and justify violence. But this one got flipped: t h e   c a n n i b a l.

I’ve run into this figure again and again in my PhD research. Every time, it opened a door to a different way of thinking with and through technology (including the Internet ofc). However, to understand how this works, we need to go back to the cannibal’s origin story.

Spanish conquistadors took the demonym Carib (the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, more accurately the Kalinago) and twisted it into caníbal—the word for a man‑eating savage. That single transformation strategically turned a group of people into monsters. The conquistadors knew what they were doing. They picked the most shocking violence they could imagine because it was easy to paint, easy to print, easy to spread. The shock value did the work. Rage-bait, 16th‑century style. Sounds familiar?

This is the very reason why Gooch, in the conclusion of his book, warns against using the word cannibalize (and related concepts). “The term originates in the racist colonial imaginary,” he writes, “and cultural critics shouldn’t adopt it.” He’s not wrong, the word was indeed a weapon… but weapons can be seized.

Consider Caliban, Shakespeare’s enslaved character whose very name derives from cannibal. In The Tempest (1610-1611), Caliban refuses to obey his colonizer, Prospero. Prospero imposes his language and the name Caliban onto the man he has enslaved and robbed, yet Caliban doesn’t just take it. He famously strikes with: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” Caliban fights back, curses, refuses to play the obedient servant. Still, don’t be mistaken, in Shakespeare’s original telling, Caliban is very much the stereotypical savage. A monster who must be tamed and controlled.

That’s the colonial weight Gooch wants us to avoid reproducing. But he backs off too soon—especially because there’s a long tradition of claiming Caliban. In Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969), Caliban becomes the main character, a decolonial force who demands a new identity: “Call me X. That would be best.” This X does not long for a pre‑colonial past; he demands total reinvention on his own terms. Then there’s the Cuban writer  Roberto Fernández Retamar, who traced all the ways Caliban had been reclaimed—in feminist theory, in protest slogans, in revolutionary writings. He asked a much bigger question about the Latin American postcolonial condition: “What is our history, what is our culture, if not the history, the culture of Caliban?” His point was simple: we don’t need to find some pre-colonial fantasy; we need to demystify the monster. From Césaire’s reclamation to Retamar’s reframing to postcolonial readings of Caliban’s curses as empowerment, artists and thinkers have refused to let the word remain a weapon of the oppressor. Avoiding the word leaves it in his hands. Artists, revolutionaries, and many others have spent centuries proving otherwise.

That tradition of reclaiming Caliban wasn’t just a literary or political exercise—it also became an artistic method. Decades before Césaire and Retamar, in 1928, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade had already taken the cannibal in a different direction. His Cannibalist Manifesto called for the “absorption of the sacred enemy.” Ingest colonial value systems. Metabolize them. Assert artistic agency from within. As Andrade put it: “Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.” What these proposals share is the way they reappropriate the figure and turn it from a monster into a method. One that embraces contradiction and refuses to be neutralized by the impending doom of destruction.

Which raises a question: if this reversal worked against colonial narratives in art and theory, could it also work against the colonial logic baked into the internet? To answer that, we need to understand what we’re actually up against. Today, the colonial legacy from which the cannibal emerged has metastasized into the core of technocapitalism, with the internet as one of its main agents. On the surface, its soft power runs on data mining, hyperpersonalized algorithms, and platform monopolies—echoing the active destruction of ways of knowing. Yet, underneath, its material life depends on labor precarity, displacement, rare earth mining, underpaid workers, and the toxic leftovers of planned obsolescence. The internet’s protocols encode a colonial rationale of control and thrive by making themselves feel inescapable.

Remember the zombie from earlier? That monster offered only a diagnosis; the cannibal, by contrast, may offer a way through. So here’s a proposal: what about tracing a Cannibal Internet? Not a new category that needs to be inaugurated, just a name for practices already at work. A way of following the tradition of the reappropriated monster reclaiming its own agency. An ephemeral rupture where artists, thinkers, (hack)activists have deliberately pierced through the internet’s protocols, rewired its platforms, ingested their infrastructures.

These practices are often dismissed as unsuccessful, badly made, or worse, merely resilient. Now, in reality tho, what they manage to do is to create a zone of disturbance, a space where modernization, extraction, and technocapitalism come under pressure from Other ways of knowing. As Mariana Botey writes, a zone of disturbance isn’t about representation but about disruption, opacity, and sovereign poetics. It’s a space where history gets disoriented, and new formations emerge through practices that refuse to play by the rules of progress—and refuse to be measured by its values, like scalability or permanence.

I know, that sounds abstract, but this zone of disturbance isn’t a fantasy, it’s already here (and there). The Cannibal Internet names a mode of counteruse already at work, a hidden genealogy composed by self‑organized peer‑to‑peer networks like the mesh networks in Catalonia or Detroit created to bypass commercial infrastructure entirely; the early Hic et Nunc NFT platform which was built and run by its community (until its founder pulled the plug); the Zapatistas’ use of the internet in the 1990s to escape state media and broadcast their communiqués directly to the world, etc.

Take FloodNet (1998), a net art piece and a tactical poetics tool developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 via a Java applet. You loaded the page, and your browser would keep reloading a target website. You could also leave a protest message. When the server got overloaded and crashed, your message appeared instead of the usual 404 Not Found error. The collective called for a virtual sit-in in solidarity with the Zapatistas and Las Abejas, a pacifist community of Zapatista sympathizers. On December 22, 1997, 45 members of Las Abejas were massacred by a paramilitary group during a prayer meeting in the village of Acteal, Chiapas. On June 10, 1998, over 8,000 people joined the first action, hammering the Mexican government’s site with 600,000 hits per minute. The point was to clog the pipes. To force acknowledgement. And, perhaps against all odds, it worked.

Later that year, they turned FloodNet on the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The Pentagon fought back with its own Java applet, trapping protesters in an empty loop. But EDT declared victory anyway. Their goal, as Brett Stalbaum put it in an interview with Wired, was “to help the people of Chiapas keep receiving the international recognition they need to stay alive.” Political action and art-as-veil fuse into one cannibal gesture: using the web’s own infrastructure—requests, packets, error messages—against its gatekeepers.

That’s the kind of route I’m arguing for. One that avoids both nostalgia for the old web and mindless acceptance of the new.

Now, let me be clear about what this route is not. The Cannibal Internet is not a metaphor for doom scrolling or getting eaten by algorithms. It’s the opposite. It’s about taking the colonial infrastructure of the internet and doing what Césaire, Retamar, Andrade, and many others did—ingesting it, turning it into something else.

Minerva Cuevas‘s Mejor Vida Corp (1997–ongoing) is another perfect example. This non-profit corporation creates and distributes free products and services across contexts: subway tickets, safety pills, printable barcode stickers that lower supermarket prices, self-stamped envelopes, fake student ID cards that grant museum and travel discounts internationally. Everything is user‑reproducible. Cuevas uses the web to coordinate exchanges, bypass censorship, and spread these counter‑tools across borders. She hacks point‑of‑sale databases, identity checks, pricing algorithms. Here, the artist weaponizes the web and turns it into the distribution infrastructure for ingesting corporations, transforming it into free services, and letting users replicate the means of sabotage. Cuevas does not dismantle these systems; rather, she turns its own logistics into tools for everyone else.

The Cannibal Internet swallows the corporate machine’s divisions—between technology and culture, labor and art, us and them. Digests them. Ephemerally turns them into something that works for you, not against you. Now, this doesn’t magically erase power imbalances; it makes them visible. It doesn’t pretend we’re all equal, it insists that making is already a form of thinking, and that the shape-shifting field of art is a fertile ground where Other technics act from within, yet against, the infrastructures that oppress them.

A different kind of ingestion happens when the artist exploits legal loopholes rather than corporate logistics. Such is the case of Núria Güell’s Acceso a lo Denegado (2012–2016). She found a Cuban law that gave internet access to foreign residents but not to Cuban nationals—state telecom companies were forbidden from offering service to citizens. As a Spanish national, she exploited the loophole and brought the internet into Cuban homes. No money changed hands. They got outside information. She got insider knowledge. She’d sit with each family, watching how they navigated shortages, bureaucracy, black markets. They taught her which officials could be bribed, which back roads to take, how to stretch a dollar until it screamed. The result? A decalogue of strategies. A multi‑subjective portrait of Cuban life.

Her project eats the state’s legal apparatus from the inside. What’s important is that the system can’t immediately dissolve it (which made it, momentarily, uncontainable). This kind of cannibalism doesn’t ignore power imbalances; it works with them (asymmetrical privileges and all). That’s what puts Güell in dialogue with local efforts already on the same terrain. Like the Cuban SNET, a grassroots offline network for sharing data and strategies, and El Paquete Semanal, a one‑terabyte collection of digital media (films, TV series, software, advertisements) distributed weekly on the underground market as a substitute for broadband Internet, have long operated through a similar logic, working around state‑controlled infrastructures.

Inside El Paquete, artist Nestor Siré runs !!!Sección ARTE (2015–current), an offline curatorial project. Every month, he compiles a folder of contemporary art files—video works, net art, software-based pieces—and slips it into the weekly distribution. The folder follows El Paquete’s rules: no larger than 5GB, no pornography, no overtly political content. Once it’s in the package, the art moves the same way everything else does. A hard drive passed between hands. A USB stick slipped into a pocket. A distributor making copies for their neighborhood. Siré has been doing this since 2015, reaching an estimated 10 million people across Cuba who might not otherwise see contemporary digital art. The work can be edited, modified, reconfigured. No login. No paywall. No server to shut down.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is all ancient (in internet years) history. While this modest genealogy carries examples that might seem distant time-wise, the insistence on cannibalizing the web is very much alive and well. Look at 13 Scores Against Tech Fascism, an online exhibition hosted at Error 417 Expectation Failed. The exhibition collects 13 instructional scores from artists around the world. V-Ball by kunsf.xyz tells you how to turn tennis balls into protest devices. Annika Santhanam’s spam_risk/ shows you how to spam the ICE hotline. A recipe book for counterstrategies to technofascism beautifully put together by gabe nascimento, Nunca mais: antifa recipes. And yes, instructions for building mesh networks courtesy of Signals Rising’s Meshtastic and alternative tech infrastructures. The whole exhibition is an embodiment of the Cannibal Internet in its totality. Unstable, poetic, subversive. A dispatch from the front lines.

The overthrow of the internet in its most vicious form can never be fully accomplished. But neither can its total victory. The Cannibal Internet is persistent, adaptive, shapeshifting—always too late to pin down. That’s the point. This isn’t a story of winners and losers. It’s about the continuous emergence of Other systems, Other ways of doing, Other imaginaries. Whether the Cannibal Internet has won or ever will win is impossible to determine, and maybe irrelevant. What matters is that it persists and keeps mutating, cracking open the technocapitalist infrastructure just enough to open a zone of disturbance.

El que ríe al último, ríe mejor.

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Doreen Ríos is a curator and independent researcher. Her work focuses on technological counterproduction and new materialities. Ríos is the founder of [ANTI]MATERIA, an online platform dedicated to the study and exhibition of art produced through digital media. From 2019 to 2021, she served as Chief Curator at the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City. She is the author of Medios inestables. De objetos técnicos y arte (2025). Currently a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego, she is also a member of the Leonardo Peer Review Panel as well as the International Selectors Committee for the Lumen Art Prize.

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Bibliography

Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto antropófago.” Revista de Antropofagia 1, no. 1 (May 1928): 3–7.

Botey, Mariana. Zonas de Disturbio: Espectros del México Indígena en la Modernidad. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2014.

Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Adaptation for a Black Theatre. London: Oberon, 2000.

Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Todo Caliban. San Juan, PR: Ediciones Callejón, 2003.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Peter Hulme and William Sherman. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

 

The essays collected in this series (link to the Introduction) trace how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media across distinct but interconnected domains. Across these accounts, listening no longer secures meaning or relation; it becomes a site of contestation, where sound is mobilized, processed, and weaponized within systems that privilege circulation, recognition, and response over truth. Last week, Olga Zaitseva-Herz examines how nonhuman listening operates under conditions of war, where AI-generated voices and deepfakes destabilize the very grounds of auditory trust. Through the case of Ukraine, she shows how platforms and political actors alike exploit algorithmic listening systems to amplify affect, circulate disinformation, and transform voice into a tool of psychological warfare. Listening, in this context, becomes not a means of understanding but a terrain of uncertainty. Today, Houman Mehrabian turns to the dynamics of speech on social media, arguing that platforms do not simply fail to regulate hate but structurally amplify it through forms of proximity that render identity itself as a site of perceived threat. –Guest Editor Kathryn Huether

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During the Cold War, when the world was divided into two geopolitical poles, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was drafted to enshrine individual rights. Article 19 guarantees freedom of expression through any medium, “regardless of frontiers.” The media landscape has significantly changed since then—we have transitioned from an information system where newspapers, radio, and television were dominant communication technologies to one where digital and online media play a central role, especially in transcending national frontiers. The Internet has amplified the right to free speech dramatically. Take, for instance, the decentralized hacktivist collective Anonymous, gliding undetected past gatekeeping mechanisms to route confidential information to the public gaze or to rally digital protests, only to disappear again into the shadows of cyberspace. Yet, Article 19 also insists that this freedom carries “special duties and responsibilities”: expression may be restricted when necessary to protect or prevent harm. The Internet, however, has challenged the enforcement of such laws in unprecedented ways.

What has changed is not only how speech circulates, but how it is heard—now increasingly by automated systems that register patterns rather than consider context. As Kathryn Huether explains in the introduction of this series, this shift marks the emergence of a new form of “nonhuman listening”: a mode of perception in which speech is registered as data, classified and acted upon without ever being encountered as expression. Take, for instance, practices such as trolling, doxing, and flaming. Cyberbullies discover ever-new ways to propagate harmful content without raising the alarm bells of automated systems. Tamar Mitts explains how the digital ecosystem creates “safe havens” for online extremism: extremist groups persist by migrating to more permissive platforms, mobilizing aggrieved users to strengthen their group identity, or reformulating their messaging to slip past automated detection. As major platforms dial back their governance measures, those who disseminate toxic content grow ever more “resilient.”

Digital technologies have opened new pathways for bad actors to take advantage of the protections of free speech. While this helps explain the growing volume of hate speech online, it addresses only the surface, the content itself. Even with robust content moderation tools in place, the deeper problem lies in the design of these platforms. Their very structure enables polarized expression and, its most pernicious manifestation, hate speech—precisely what Article 19 and related human rights frameworks seek to prevent. This severely hinders meaningful dialogue in the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world that these technologies have created.

In the global social media economy, the United States sets the dominant tone. Its major platforms—Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, alongside Google’s YouTube, and others such as X, Pinterest, and Snapchat—shape what is circulated and amplified across the world. These companies operate under the protections of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which places relatively few restrictions on hate speech. By contrast, many other nations impose far stricter limits on online expression—from laws regulating hate speech in countries such as Germany and France to the extensive censorship regimes of states like China and Russia. Yet the question of free expression in the digital age exceeds the legal framework of any single nation, no matter how powerful the prohibition or permission. More fundamentally, the medium of digital communication itself has transformed what speech is, and how it functions.

The era of private thinking and personal reasoning has given way to that of instant, public sharing, and everything shared on networking platforms is processed through algorithms running on binary coding. Algorithms should not be regarded simply as nonhuman—as alien intrusions into daily life—but rather as a sophisticated extension of a mode of human thinking that reduces complexity and nuance to mutually exclusive opposites. At the most basic level, these systems translate speech, images, and interaction into discrete units of data—encoded as sequences of zeroes and ones—and sort them through processes to classify. In doing so, they do not “listen” and interpret meaning in a human sense; they detect patterns and correlations across vast datasets. In this sense, nonhuman algorithms proliferate the dichotomy of “us” versus “them.” They entrench what Keith Stanovich calls “myside thinking”—a widespread inclination to interpret the world through the lens of prior beliefs and loyalties. Appearing in every stage of thinking, across disciplines, and in all demographic groups, “myside bias,” Stanovich argues, is more powerful than other types of bias because it involves “emotional commitment and ego preoccupation.” Its greatest danger is that it prevents communities from converging on shared facts, even when evidence is available.

Algorithmic systems amplify thought attuned to binaries and, in turn, cultivate speech that gravitates toward extremes. Opposition intensifies into antagonism, nuance dissolves into simplicity, and complexity flattens into stark contrasts. To grasp this dynamic, it is essential to examine the underlying mechanisms of nonhuman listening that nudge speech in this direction. An illuminating lens is offered by Judith Butler, whose account of “implicit” or “unspoken” modes of speech regulation reveal how discourse is shaped even before explicit prohibitions limit it. These are conditions of intelligibility, frameworks that determine—in advance—what registers as meaningful speech, what recedes as noise, and what is never heard at all.

Online, discussion is always up and running. Breaking the silence or ending the conversation is almost unheard of in the digital realm. Ironically, this feature of Internet-mediated communication can itself function as speech control. It recalls what Michel Foucault describes as endless “commentary,” in which discourse continually folds back on itself, repeating and reworking what has already been said. Silence becomes nearly impossible. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, the user becomes “undulating,” continuously “surfing” across interconnected spaces, each interaction rippling outward across the network. Repetition is vital for platforms that reward virality. Content creators, for instance, are encouraged to “repurpose” their old ideas and, in turn, encourage their audience to “co-create” their already-recycled ideas. In this sense, nothing truly begins or ends.

Algorithms are not designed to propel free movement; recommendation systems learn from simple behavioral cues—a like or a skip, a pause or a quick swipe away—to incentivize us to go with the flow of hyper-personalized data and to affiliate with echo chambers of like-minded users. Even generative AI replies to each prompt in light of the ones that came before, becoming increasingly “sycophantic.” This explains why a growing number of people, especially younger individuals, are turning to artificial intelligence for friendship. These technologies offer something that mimics attentive listening, a feeling that the user’s words do not go unheard. Artificial intelligence devices such as the Friend necklace are designed to make this type of connection effortless and always within reach.

Under these conditions, free speech comes to mean access to flows of information—the ability to move with them, rather than to analyze, interrupt, or challenge them. Listening becomes adaptive and reactive, attuned less to sound argumentation than to speedy circulation. Within insulated echo chambers, expressions are encountered not as opinions to be evaluated but as signals to be affirmed or rejected. Memes, emojis, and abbreviated forms of expression condense complicated positions into immediate affective cues, eliciting responses of pride, indignation, gloating, mockery, delight, disappointment, disdain. The list goes on. What circulates most readily is not sustained reasoning but intensified feeling, shared across networks of both human and nonhuman participants.

This is not to say that debate has no place in the digital world. On the contrary, platform environments are configured to reduce nearly every issue (controversial or not) into a rigidly polarized dispute. Algorithmic systems, optimized for engagement, sort content into recognizable positions, amplifying contrast and conflict. Issues are framed less as open questions than as preconfigured disputes, with sides already drawn and reiterated across countless iterations. One is either “woke” or dead set against it. Greta Thunberg’s activism is either inspiring or self-promoting. Online, users need only choose a side and signal agreement through simple actions—a like, a repost, a heart, an angry face. Digital debate becomes echoed: each side recycles familiar arguments that reinforce group identity rather than persuade others. This resembles the house war of the Montagues and the Capulets, with no hope of reconciliation.

Even truth is drawn into this binary logic, as its validity now lies in how closely it aligns with one’s viewpoint. Platforms like Truth Social—the social media site launched by Trump in 2022 and described as “free from political discrimination”—reinforce this dynamic by presenting “truth” as something to be claimed by one side, with opposing views dismissed as fake news.

The same pattern appears in responses to deepfakes. Also in 2022, a manipulated video of President Volodymyr Zelensky falsely urging Ukrainian troops to surrender circulated online. While widely debunked, its reception still followed partisan lines: dismissed as propaganda for some, and treated by others as plausible or strategically meaningful within existing narratives. Olga Zaitseva-Herz discusses other examples of AI-generated voices and videos used as psychological weapon in warfare. More broadly, deepfakes are often framed as satire or humor when they support one’s perspective, and condemned as disinformation when they do not. Despite the apparent complexity of digital media, this dynamic reduces debate to a series of rigid oppositions. Under these conditions, dialogue becomes difficult to sustain—or even non-existent—as positions are evaluated less through exchange than through alignment.

Dialogue is often proposed as the answer to hate speech. The United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech describes it as “any kind of communication in speech, writing or behavior, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are.” This definition does not fully capture the underlying dynamic. While hate speech targets the identity of others, it is often driven by the perception that those identities pose a threat to one’s own. Research on hate suggests that this perception is not tied to a single action but to a broader attribution of the other as inherently dangerous or malicious. Hate, in this sense, does not respond to behavior; it calcifies identity itself as a source of threat. Hate thus becomes, as Daniele Battista puts it, an ideal “communicative asset” for driving the digital economy.

Hate speech is the violent defense of an insecure self; it is Iago, ever sensitive to the closeness of the dissimilar other; it is yet another extreme manifestation of the us-versus-them mindset. But we should not confine our understanding of online hate speech to the level of content. The amplification of harmful communication is not merely due to mobilization of verbal violence by political figures or technical failures of content moderation systems—such as hate speech slipping through as free speech—but is more fundamentally a formal effect of the platforms themselves. Collapsing geographic and cultural distances, the Internet brings diverse users into unprecedented forms of closeness. This structure reflects what Marshall McLuhan diagnoses as the “implosive” character of modern media, in which boundaries contract and differences are forced into constant contact. Under these conditions, both users and automated systems are overwhelmed with volume, and listening—human and nonhuman alike—becomes reactive rather than responsive. The patient work of contextual understanding disappears beneath the flood of signals.

By their very design, these shared virtual spaces place the user’s sense of self under continuous pressure. In response, users align with particular influencers and subscribe to particular channels to “strengthen feelings of belonging and opposition.” Speech, then, tends to take on a defensive quality, reinforcing identity against perceived threat. Digital platforms do not simply host hate speech; they develop the very conditions in which it emerges. Prolonged interaction and sustained proximity in polarized environments make communication more likely to be shaped by anxiety than by dialogue. What follows is not a failure of communication, but a transformation of it: speech no longer seeks to understand the other, but to secure the self.

Returning to the framework of this series, we can understand the shift to digital mediation as one in which listening collapses into the reiterative reception of preconstituted positions and oppositions, precipitating immediate, affectively saturated reactions that merely reproduce them. Increasingly “detached from sensation, exposure, and accountability,” listening operates less as an encounter with speech than as a mechanism of bias confirmation by selectively sorting information.

Amid digital closeness in environments marked by binary thinking, the more users are “silenced by speech,” the more listening becomes passive. We need to distance ourselves from communication as an instrument of pacification, or worse, suppression. Dialogue begins with attentive listening—not only to the speech of others, but also for polarizing mechanisms that surround us both online and offline. More importantly, we need to appreciate the formal effects of a listening that is not reduced to a rehearsal for rebuttal, a listening that is an antidote to the restless compulsion to react to speech that our digital devices incessantly fuel. In suspending the immediacy of response, listening evolves into a delaying tactic, a deliberate deferral that carves out an interval within which patient reflection may find form.

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Featured Image by Flickr User Jeff Gates, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Houman Mehrabian earned his doctorate in English from the University of Waterloo (2020), where he focused on the history and theory of rhetoric. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Arts, Communications & Social Sciences department at University Canada West. His research interests include exploring the rhetorical and technological mechanisms that regulate speech. Bringing together perspectives from critical media studies, philosophy, and rhetorical theory, his work investigates how the structural design of digital platforms and their economic logics can amplify harmful discourse, and how appeals to more free speech in online environments can operate as rhetorical cover for the proliferation and normalization of hate speech. Through this lens, his research aims to better understand the interplay between technology, power, and communication in the digital age.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Hate & Non-Human Listening, an Introduction–Kathryn Huether

Mimicked Voices and Nonhuman Listening: AI Deepfakes, Speech, and Sonic Manipulation in the Digital War on Ukraine—Olga Zaitseva-Herz

Impaulsive: Bro-casting Trump, Part I–Andrew J. Salvati

Interview with Sonia Irene Guzman.

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here.

I met Sonia Irene Guzman — a consultant, academic, and activist in the free software and culture movement and a Doctor of Feminist Studies at UAM-Xochimilco — at a public consultation organized by the Agencia Digital de Innovación Pública de la Ciudad de México (ADIP). I arrived there on an Ecobici, an excellent service given its affordable annual fee, on a Saturday morning: the sun was out and I arrived sweaty and covered in dust due to the city’s perpetual, mad traffic.

I am fascinated by this newly formed agency that organizes events on digital sovereignty with a long-term perspective (20 years) and seeks to listen to its citizens; a place where speakers still address each other as compañero, something that in Italy is now only found in the circles of the few remaining socialists and communists. It seems to me they are on the right track, and I managed to interview the titular (director), an interview that will be released later.

Irene was invited to speak at the event, which opened with a video celebrating Mexican culture which by praising the grand urban planning and the ancestors’ advanced techniques for filtering salt and fresh water, it made the current dependence on garrafón (bottled water jugs) feel like a degeneration. But all the speakers were top-tier, the first spoke of technological infrastructure as if it were water, arguing that its protection should be treated like that of water wells—as something strategic, and the discussion lasted more than 2 hours. 

Me and Irene met a few days after the event in another neighborhood, sitting at a bar, to discuss the Mexican context, transfeminism, and free software.

***

What is your trajectory, and why are you interested in digital sovereignty?

I studied design at a public university in Mexico City, at UNAM. Then I did a Master’s in Visual Arts, where I developed research on free software and design. That was my first approach—the first time the light bulb went off for me about what digital freedoms and digital sovereignty meant. Then I began a teaching career, which I would say is the foundation of what I do. I’m a professor, and I really love it. I think that’s where I was next able to identify the needs of both the university and the students, and many of the difficulties of using software that isn’t ours or infrastructures that aren’t ours.

Then I pursued a PhD called Interdisciplinary Studies in Communication and Culture. There I began research on practices that I called “hacker practices.” I looked at how people involved in activism who used free software had particular technological practices—from opening the terminal to using different types of software. I was interested in how they solved their everyday problems or needs with a computer. These practices again brought me closer to ideas of sovereignty and being more autonomous.

Later I entered the PhD in Feminist Studies at UAM, another public university. My research topic was about women hackers; I explored what was happening with women who had these practices because I realized that most were men. I went out to find them, and my thesis was called En busca de las hackers (In Search of Women Hackers). That opened up another world, other ways of seeing that gender studies also permeate technology. I began to like and adopt the term feminism—it took me a while, but I came to identify as a feminist precisely to try to build this dialogue between technological freedoms, sovereignty, and the aims of feminism.

Clearly, this led me to speak about different topics, including technological sovereignty. To me, sovereignty is partly rooted in free software. I always say I entered this social dimension through a computer, through my practices and my use of a machine. These topics have led me to give talks, lectures, and workshops. Someone once said I was a reference point in hackfeminism, and I think that’s where my interest in sovereignty comes from.

What do you think about the concept of digital sovereignty? Do you think it’s a good concept?

That’s a great question because, you see, when we talk about this—not just me, but together with other colleagues—even if we don’t necessarily define the word sovereignty, I feel it’s very tied to state-centered ideas, or to giving control and power to the state. It seems that today we only have two options: that technology and our digital lives are in the hands of corporations, or in the hands of the state. Honestly, I don’t really like either option.

I know digital sovereignty can be useful, but I prefer to think in terms of autonomy or something more collective and collaborative, as utopian as that may sound. I feel closer to certain anarchist principles. The problem with anarchy—or with things being neither in the hands of the state nor corporations—is that it requires taking on a lot of responsibility. Anarchy doesn’t mean “doing nothing”; there is a kind of freedom that comes from personal commitment and participation. It’s hard to explain. That’s why I like free software: I feel it brings us closer to a more autonomous practice, or a closer relationship with our technological devices, so that this becomes a principle or a way of thinking about technology from another place. The term itself makes me uneasy insofar as it pushes us toward the state.

What did you find in your research about the gender perspective within the world of technology in Mexico?

Several things. Since I come from the free software community, I understood technology from that perspective. Gender and feminist frameworks came later for me. It felt natural that most participants were men; even the people who taught me things or installed Linux for me were men. When I encountered this other perspective on what happens with women, the first thing I found was a cultural questioning. There’s always this idea that women aren’t in technology—and in free software even less so—that there are no good Mexican women hackers.

For example, I was introduced as a “user.” When I went to talks, I was always the only woman—like at the event where we met—where everyone else was men and they invited “the woman.” Everyone else was introduced with their CV, and for me it was: “Oh, Irene, who is a user.” I felt like a little monkey there who could do a few tricks—with apologies to monkeys. That’s when I began to notice these signs that there really was a difference in “being a woman.” Free software and this whole environment was very comfortable for men, or offered them many advantages and privileges. The fact that a man could be coding late or solving a technical problem often meant that someone else had washed his clothes, fed him, or taken care of the children. There is always someone, almost always a woman, who takes care of things.

So I said: of course, it’s not that women don’t like technology; it’s that there are many factors that prevent them from moving forward, what we call the “sticky floor” (piso pegajoso). Another thing I found was that I believed code was the most important thing for all programmers. But the women who coded would tell me: “Well, I do it because that’s how it is.” There wasn’t a magical aura around code for them, nor did they idealize it; they were interested in what could be done with it. It didn’t matter as much that it was perfect or that it compiled “en chinga” (super fast), but rather what you do with it. It reminded me of when we tell women they cook really well and they say: “Well, it’s just something I have to do; it’s something that’s always been there.”

I also found it interesting that many women specialized in computing came from certain privileges: white women, European or North American, or in Mexico, women who studied at private universities. Other women without those characteristics had learned through bootcamps or programming spaces and worked in companies doing web development—the famous front-end or back-end. I was interested in what was happening with them. And I also saw that the feminist figure we imagine, the cinematic hacker who knows martial arts and manages to outsmart the villain, doesn’t really exist.

I noticed a disconnect: women with deep technical skills are in places like Google or Facebook, where the pay is good. Meanwhile, women involved in the social side, interested in feminism and technological freedom, sometimes don’t have as many technical skills. I also noticed that some women were what my advisor Giomar Rovira called “free radicals” (radicales libres): isolated women who weren’t part of feminist or activist communities. They know how to do things but are completely isolated because there isn’t that connection with communities interested in digital freedoms. We still have a long way to go toward sovereignty. If it’s a collective issue, then the women who didn’t have technical skills started learning them collectively, out of a need to teach each other. One of my interviewees spoke about “the club of failure” (el club del fracaso), meaning allowing yourself to fail in coding, for things not to come out cleanly, and for that to be okay. That’s a dissonance I found often.

How has the discourse on digital sovereignty changed or developed in Mexico in recent years?

As you know, Mexico underwent a radical political shift a few years ago, toward a left-wing government. The truth is that many of us in activist movements—I was the director of Creative Commons Mexico—had a lot of hope that technological issues would gain ground, but that didn’t really happen. Very little, in fact. My perception is that the community working on digital rights also had its own interests; civil society organizations with a lot of funding from Google and similar companies. At some point they began to criticize the government, and the government responded by isolating them, saying: “Oh, they’re privileged kids (niños bien), we won’t listen to them because they’re against us”.

Some things within the government were framed in terms of sovereignty, but not entirely. There was talk of creating our own Mexican social network, but it was done in a very isolated way. The Agencia Digital de Innovación Pública (ADIP) has an important interest, but it didn’t engage with different communities. Also, the Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación (Secihti) developed the Chapultepec Principles around AI ethics, stating that AI should not be used to the detriment of human rights. It’s good that a government states that, even if some aspects are a bit idealistic.

But in the end, I feel there isn’t a real “match” between the government and those of us who have been working on these issues. There’s always a lag: they are talking about things we’ve already been discussing, but without collaboration. I would even say that in earlier governments, like Vicente Fox’s, there was more use of autonomous servers with free software or open practices. Now I feel there isn’t, partly because it’s seen as something “very American” or colonial. There’s a rejection of it. Free software sounds too much like Global North, and it hasn’t been fully appropriated because it requires a lot of work, and maybe there’s no one to do it. It feels disconnected, even if at least the topic is on the table.

Are there specific aspects in Mexico where the political economy influences digital sovereignty? And how can long-term continuity—like the 20-year plan mentioned at the event—be achieved?

That caught my attention too—I hadn’t even realized it said 20 years. I was like: “¡no manches!” (no way!, very Mexican/CDMX slang). One of the things that happens in this country is that every six-year term everything changes, even if it’s the same political side; new people come in and everything that was done gets thrown away. This is an attempt to prevent that. The problem is how to translate that idea into concrete actions. How do we agree on how to achieve sovereignty? I haven’t seen an open discussion.

There are efforts at UNAM, but I haven’t seen the government take a clear and explicit stance on citizens’ data with these companies. Instead, agreements are made with Google. We have many problems, and technology is not a central axis in Mexico. It’s still framed as “innovation,” a word that bothers me as much as “entrepreneurship.” I feel the government’s position is still to create space for companies to operate. This just happened in Querétaro with data centers; there are already groups discussing how this will affect water resources. Paola Ricaurte is researching the ecological damage, but these are not widely discussed issues. The government doesn’t really address them either.

That’s why I find this Mexico City plan interesting—it’s local, not federal. At the federal level, there have been discussions about AI with senators, but they haven’t reached the level of concrete issues: what happens with companies and data? It’s not strong enough to say, “Google, don’t take my data.” 

In Latin America, unlike Europe’s regulatory approach, there are examples like Brazil’s PIX system as public digital infrastructure. Do you see dialogue or collaboration between Mexico and other states?

My impression is that there isn’t much—there are isolated efforts. Those of us who’ve worked on these issues know that Brazil is a reference point, not just in technological policies but also culturally. I’ve seen forums where people involved in Brazil’s cultural policies under Lula are invited, but at the state level I don’t see a clear technological narrative. It doesn’t seem like a priority; the scale of the issue isn’t fully understood. There are many other pressing problems in Mexico, and if this need isn’t understood within the government, then alliances won’t form. Alliances happen around other “Latin America united” themes, but not around technology. That’s my impression, though I could be wrong.

Looking ahead, what measures can be taken to improve the situation and women’s inclusion?

Without putting everything on the individual level, I sometimes feel like I’m not doing enough. I’ve done activism with women and free software, but there’s a lot of loneliness in this work. I think we need to rebuild something more collective and cooperative. The problem is that when we try to build communities or collectives, we end up fighting. It’s something we’ve discussed a lot: the political includes personal issues.

For example, I ended up very estranged from people at Wikimedia Mexico because they were very territorial and quite rude to me, and I know they’ve been the same with others who don’t fit their ideology. I don’t know if it’s something Latin American or specifically Mexican, but we struggle with cohesion and accepting differences, and movements end up becoming what they once opposed. This also happens within feminism. We need to learn to live with differences and resolve conflicts—or do what capitalists do: it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or Christian; the ultimate goal is capital, money. That doesn’t happen in the Latin American left.

I think we need more cohesion between civil society, academia, and government. And in the case of women, we need more spaces where we’re allowed to make mistakes. I still see a lot of isolation among women in engineering; they don’t reach their full potential because they stay quiet due to lack of confidence. In Mexico, we have this joke: when there’s a tech job posting, men meet one requirement and apply, while women meet all of them but if they lack one small thing, they say “I don’t know this” and don’t apply.

There’s a mindset we need to challenge: that your voice matters, that you can make jokes, that you can dress however you want. This is something individual, but tied to a Latin American machismo that needs to be addressed differently than in Europe or the United States. The Latin American patriarchy is not the same; men here have also been oppressed, and you can’t treat them the same way as in the Global North.

I find it very interesting what Indigenous communities say: many women don’t identify as feminists, but they do embrace a struggle alongside their campesino partner because he is also oppressed. It’s a position opposed to white feminism; it’s more intersectional. Many of these poor men are also programmers, struggling against a system that demands excellence while they have to hold multiple jobs.

Part of technological sovereignty also has to do with technical inefficiencies. Engineering students are taught to work for the market, to use Windows solutions or Microsoft agreements. In Mexico, the Ministry of Finance made an agreement with Microsoft, and it was terrible: Azure handled our invoices and strange things happened—like receiving someone else’s invoice. They’re not taught deep technical efficiencies in coding, but rather how to use tools—like learning how a car works instead of changing the engine.

There are many moving parts, but I think there needs to be a government policy that drives change from education, civil society, Mexican companies, and above all, a cultural and ideological stance to understand the problem posed by these corporations.

The Westerplatte memorial in Gdańsk on Poland’s Baltic coast marks the site where WWII began with a naval assault in September 1939. The day I visited in September 2025 happened to be the same day that Russian drones were shot down over Poland, marking Moscow’s first overt incursion into NATO territory since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Alongside all the usual tourist amenities – toilets, snacks and souvenirs – I found every kiosk lining the memorial ground stocked up on plush toys with some unexpected faces: Tralalero Tralala, Ballerina Cappucina and, of course, the unmistakable oblong shape and leering eyes of Tung Tung Tung Sahur.

This was Italian brainrot, a pantheon of AI generated characters who appeared on social media in early 2025 before seemingly taking over the world for the next few months. A shark wearing three blue Nike trainers, a dancer with a coffee cup for a head, and a humanoid stick carrying a baseball bat emerged as a few of the favourites. Each character had its own pseudo-Italian name, musically pronounced in each video by the same AI text-to-speech voice tool, ‘Adam’.

Seeing these terminally online memes turn up in polyester, here, of all places, gave me an unsettled feeling. Italian brainrot for sale at a Polish memorial to victims of the German Third Reich. On the day that the post-war military order frayed at its edges. It felt like irreconcilable worlds coming together, digital native nonsense spilling into real life, flooding a site of meaningful remembrance, and renewed significance. It was surreal, a waking dream. This is a feeling that novelist Thomas Pynchon named ‘virtuality creep’ in 2013’s Bleeding Edge: when the digital realm overflows into the ‘perilous gulf between screen and face’.

Most internet memes are images wrenched from their original context (TV shows, cultural and political events etc.) then endlessly remixed and repurposed, their meaning flattened in the infinity of the web. With Italian brainrot, the reverse was true: these avatars emerged from the digital ether with absurdity pre-loaded. They never meant anything. Early clips featured Italian ‘lyrics’ for each character which added little context. Some were cryptic origin stories while others were just expletive filled and crassly offensive rants. The clips featured a patchwork of recognisable features which invited interpretation – animals, objects, environments, a vague notion of Italianness itself –but together amounted to nonsense.

Upon going viral, the characters were quickly plucked from their social media habitat and put to work in our world: in cartoons, songs, video games, classrooms and the cheap tat for sale at every stall in Westerplatte. After these bizarre chimeras had captured people’s attention, wily content creators and the machinery of consumerism each seized the opportunity of new IP with untapped potential, in pursuit of clout or commerce. The characters were simple enough to entertain children, weird enough to mystify parents and eye-catching enough to entice the algorithm.

“And the Oscar goes to… Brr Brr Patapim”

Brainrot content is so exaggeratedly fake, the funniest thing to do quickly became obvious: act like it’s real. The initial emergence of Italian brainrot on social media was followed by a wave of painstakingly detailed, completely contradictory, mostly hilarious ‘lore’ videos. Straight-faced explainers recounted character backstories which sometimes sounded like twisty soap opera storylines, like Ballerina Cappucina’s husband Cappuccino Assassino being seduced into an affair by love rival Espressona Signora. Other characters were shrouded in esoteric myth, like Lirili Larila, the most Daliesque of the lot, who has an elephant head with a cactus body and one leather sandal. In most accounts, Lirili Larila is a kind of lonely god, wandering the desert and cursed with the ability to manipulate time itself.

Some lore expanded details from the original Italian lyrics, while others started from scratch. These AI avatars were not-quite-blank canvasses, an evocative visual language ready to be loaded with significance, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Mostly the ridiculous.

My feed was overtaken with videos pitting the characters in battles against one another, alongside deepfakes of King Charles naming his champion as ‘knight of the realm’ or AOC decrying the power of ‘big corporate sponsored fighters’. This content increasingly bled into the real world. I watched Cillian Murphy present an Academy Award to a brainrot character. Creators published live-action videos in the style of a nature documentary or a found footage horror, with titles like “IF YOU SEE LIRILI LARILA WHILE DRIVING, DO NOT APPROACH…’ and ‘DRONE CATCHES TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR ACROSS MY CITY!! (SCARY)’. The trend settled on treating Italian brainrot characters as elusive but real beings.

One of the most popular formats was street interviews, usually involving a young person showing older strangers pictures of brainrot characters and asking if they know who it is: “Ahhh yes, that’s Crocadilo Bombardiro” they reply, deadpan. Instead of plugging our own likeness into AI, to make lame Studio Ghibli imitations or action figures, these prankish videos dump AI images into the physical world. The humour is in the public recognition, brainrot characters unexpectedly recalled like an old friend from school.

This same logic, of the virtual absurd intruding into mundane reality, gave life to the popular ‘John Pork is calling’ trend, where creators share videos of people receiving an unexpected phone call from an anthropomorphic human-pig influencer, his uncanny grinning face flashing up on screen next to the ‘accept’ or ‘decline’ buttons. It’s a goofy ahh Gen-Z reimagining of the ‘red pill, blue pill’ conundrum from The Matrix: will they reject the call and end the story, or pick up and see how deep the brainrot rabbit hole goes.

Death of the author – who owns AI folklore?

AI generated characters, like the Italian brainrot crew and the cast of the John Pork lore, make possible new kinds of storytelling. These figures seemed to appear out of nowhere, largely without claims of ownership and easily reproducible with AI tools, which invited creators to run with it. The John Pork lore evolved into a kind of mass-participation true crime investigation to unravel John’s supposed death. Countless videos on TikTok or Youtube purported to reveal the ‘complete lore’, the ‘real story’ or – my personal favourite – the ‘dark truth’ of John’s disappearance. Often cloaked in a conspiratorial film noir style, this is a search for meaning at its core: ‘the story you think you know, it’s just the tip of the iceberg’.

This anarchic din of narratives crucially existed on a level playing field; no-one had a monopoly on a definitive version of events. Brainrot lore oozed across social media as a rhizomatic sprawl, without any kind of central authority. Attempts to file for copyright and trademarks over Italian Brainrot characters have largely been frustrated by legal gray zones around questions like whether an AI prompt constitutes original authorship, and if AI generated works are entitled to copyright protection. In March 2026, the US Supreme Court delivered a blow to brainrot privatization by declining reconsider a district court ruling that human authorship is the ‘bedrock requirement of copyright protection’.

The current wild west of AI generated content goes against an age of aggressive corporate takeovers and nostalgia-obsessed cultural production, when studios covet intellectual property and write up convoluted loan agreements over who can depict which superheroes and for how long.

The flourishing of brainrot lore echoes a much older kind of entertainment: cultural folklore forged from tall tales, yarns, gossip and rumours, reshaped by anyone with the imagination to tell it. User-generated brainrot lore handles AI with mischievous glee, chaotic creativity and a hunger for shared meaning-making. It’s a messy democratisation of storytelling. These jumbled narratives highlight the intertextuality of meme culture; by refuting or retconning details of the lore, each intervention widens the story further while reinforcing the idea attaining a singular, concrete truth.

‘It wasn’t a conscious pushback against platforms or their algorithms’ argues cultural theorist Daniele Zinni in a recent Brainrot retrospective for the Institute of Networked Cultures, ‘it was more like a revival of the internet’s anarchic prankster spirit, which periodically reemerges’: the fun came from ‘collectively giving attention, for as long as possible, to something so trivial’. The underlying principle is total commitment to the bit, an unwinking verisimilitude no matter how silly things get. It’s no laughing matter when Bob Bacon and Marvin Beak are so close to avenging John Pork’s death at the hands of Tim Cheese. Or perhaps you side with contingent of sleuths who insist that Pork is not dead at all, and that Cheese is an innocent AI-generated anthropomorphic mouse. Deadly serious stuff.

Unreality bites

The impulse to treat brainrot with total sincerity can be read as a playful outlet to a deeper feeling which is creeping into the rest of our lives, particularly for young people. This is a sense of unreality, a nagging sensation that everything is fake now. In so many ways, it’s getting harder to separate reality from fiction, or maybe it’s just pointless. We increasingly inhabit a kind of third-person POV, consciously curating our life as we do our feeds. ‘Authenticity’ is nothing more than a marketing strategy. The rise of unscripted ‘IRL streams’ renders public space a content creation studio. We talk incessantly of ‘performative’ behaviour, NPCs, ‘main character syndrome’, ‘doing it for the plot’. The real has never been so entangled with the virtual, experience never so inseparable from representation.

Marxist theorist Guy Debord sensed early on how an image-saturated culture would shape the way we experience the world and relate to each other. ‘When the real world is transformed into mere images’, he wrote in 1967, ‘mere images become real beings’. From  social media and fitness trackers to smart doorbells and live-feed CCTV screens in supermarkets, we are trained with increasing intensity to grasp life through a dialectic of watching and being watched, always playing to an audience both real and imagined. As Britney Spears said: ‘there’s only two types of people in the world, the ones that entertain and the ones that observe’. In the endless refraction of surveillance capitalism, these types have been folded into one.

British speculative fiction author J.G. Ballard reflected in 1990 that a ‘huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content’, asking ‘how do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant?’. Ballard was of course talking about television and film, but 50 years later the same question lingers over TikTok, Instagram and our short form video addiction. “What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash?’. We’re still figuring it out. At this moment, our inner space is being rewired by a rapacious media matrix, while our outer world – the ‘real world’ – is being revealed as a collective delusion.

Nothing is true and everything is possible

From the pandemic’s global shutdown to the carnage in Gaza and Ukraine, we are living through a dizzying collapse of the old certainties – ideas of security, order, truth and justice – which anchored our sense of reality. The neoliberal exaltation of the market and the fanaticism of the populist right betrays a politics of zealotry. Our ethical sense is overwhelmed as we consume ethnic cleansing as online content and the perpetrators claim victimhood. The Epstein files disclose a cosy conspiracy of transnational elites united by depravity and impunity. Each passing day pulls back the curtain on the world of rules and rationality that we were taught to believe in. It’s a reverse Wizard of Oz where instead of the mundane masquerading as magic, we are gaslighted by absurdity cloaked as sober reality.

And yet nothing really changes. We know the world is burning and the system is broken, yet daily life continues as normal. We go to work and the gym and the shops. This is where the dissonance creeps in. As critical theorist and content creator Louisa Munch recently put it: ‘every day we are performing belief in a system no-one believes in’. This is where I find a subversive streak in brainrot lore: this content is also a ‘performance of belief’ but a conscious one. In its ridiculousness – performing belief in something patently unbelievable – it calls into question the other ways we perform, and suspend, our belief. In a time of mass-cynicism, credulity can be wielded as a scalpel… or a baseball bat.

Disneyland, provocatively claimed French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his seminal work Simulations and Simulacra, is ‘presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real’. It is an exaggerated fantasy which serves to reinforce our belief in the rest of our everyday reality, which in fact now exists only within a procession of images and illusions: ‘the hyperreal order and the order of simulation’. As a performative act, Brainrot lore flips this on its head. Tung Tung Tung Sahur presented as real reminds us that the rest is imaginary.

‘When the world becomes unintelligible, humour grows teeth’ says researcher and UX designer Moreno Nourizadeh, ‘the surreal is always a revelation of the real’. Look back and we see that brainrot (and its discontents) is nothing new. Every generation, writes Nourizadeh, succumbs to an ‘epochal narcissism’; this is the conviction that ‘its particular madness is unprecedented, that its stupidity signals unique decline’. When Lewis Carroll’s nonsense literature poked fun at rigid Victorian hierarchies and the logic of language, literary magazine The Athenaeum wondered if Caroll had ‘merely been inspired to reduce to idiocy as many readers as possible’. The anti-rational Dada art movement grappled with the civilizational impact of WWI’s industrialized slaughter, and met with disdain and disgust.

Brainrot as a cultural form and the set of lore practices which emerged around it, is a product of the AI revolution, a barely processed pandemic and the collapse of the post-1945 world order. It is a contradiction: lore is about shared meaning-making and assembling pieces into recognisable narrative shapes, brainrot is about revelling in nonsense. It pokes fun at our current epistemic crisis, where we are losing our grip on reality itself. Chat, is this real? Is this Large Language Model my friend?

Italian brainrot presents the AI generated image as something excessive, nonsensical and deranged. This, at the same time as Silicon Valley companies are spending billions to naturalize AI and weave it imperceptibly into our daily routines. On every app now we are accosted by AI tools that no-one asked for and no-one can remove. Brainrot introduces a glitch in the AI matrix, a violent jolt in the frictionless world. Remember, the half-frog, half-tyre character Boneca Ambalabu is just as real as the photorealistic AI ‘slop’ flooding social media. This ranges from impossibly curvy OF girls to ‘footage’ of racialized ragebait or sympathy-fishing images of crying children and puppies rescued from floods. You’re not meant to think it’s real, just feel that it could be.

In a taxonomy of AI content, the intentional absurdity of brainrot is its defining feature. It invites interpretation then laughs at our efforts. Brainrot content may be AI generated, Daniele Zinni argues, yet it is ‘anything but statistically probable’ and ‘strange enough to surprise rather than trigger a predictable reaction’. It’s hard to feel that Tralalero Tralala is real, hence the satirical mileage in pretending that he is. Slop is more insidious. It wants something from us. Emotionally coercive slop images leverage our attention for further motives, trading in our prejudices, allegiances and desires. It is the tool of the trade, writes Gunseli Yalcinkaya, for ‘grifters trying to make a quick buck’ and ‘politicians wanting to overwhelm the system with AI cringe edits of themselves as Star Wars characters’. Slop is the medium of narcissistic wish fulfilment, so it makes sense the current White House cannot resist its lure.

Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year, much has been said of brainrot, both as form and function. It is often used interchangeably with slop in public discourse. This mind-numbing material will supposedly destroy young people’s critical thinking skills, turning them into babbling zombies. What if this bleak prophecy was true, but not for us? A slop-heavy digital landscape of fake news, goonbait and synthetic influencers might contain a fatal trap for the AI revolution itself.

The shift to an AI-mediated internet, Kate Crawford argues in e-flux, is shutting out human content creators, who face ‘face dwindling readership, reduced engagement, and disappearing ad revenue’. Yet multiple studies have shown that AI systems ‘degenerate when they are fed on too much of their own outputs’, a phenomenon researchers call MAD (Model Autophagy Disease). In other words, Crawford writes, ‘AI will eat itself, then gradually collapse into nonsense and noise’. Enshittification tolls for thee. In this sense we can see Italian brainrot as an accelerationist provocation: its absurdity simply pushes the current AI regime to its logical conclusion. It’s the demented future waiting in the code. Chat GPT looks in the mirror, nervously, and sees Tung Tung Tung Sahur glaring back.

Seeing was believing

I would argue that it’s not the absurd material produced by AI that we should find repulsive, but anything that we might take, at first glance, as real. In just a few years since we laughed at the nightmarish sketches produced by early image generator DALL-E, we now have tools on our phones, like Google’s Nano Banana Pro, which can conjure entirely convincing synthetic people with the right amount of fingers. This effectively means that photography as means of gathering evidence, documenting real events is finished. Instead we have an exhausting cynicism where every image should now be interrogated with scepticism. Footage which once might have stirred public outrage – of corruption or war crimes – loses its moral authority, dismissed with the wave of a politician’s hand.

It’s not just that AI images undermine the veracity of images, but the troubling new ways they can simulate images. Genealogy site MyHeritage offers (for a monthly fee) to ‘bring dead ancestors back to life’ by using deepfake technology to animate their faces in photographs. The company introduced the ability for these images to speak, just a year after assuring they wouldn’t. Grief Tech is an unsurprisingly fast growing market, because who wouldn’t want to reach out to a lost loved one? Researchers at the University of Cambridge have called for greater guardrails, warning how these deadbots may create unhealthy emotional attachments, stifling the mourning process and making the bereaved prone to manipulation. Imagine hearing your dead grandparent tell you that your monthly subscription price is going up. It’s multiple Black Mirror stories at once.

In a sense, AI image generation is the terminal endpoint of the centuries-long Enlightenment project of illumination. This was the idea that everything in darkness should be dragged into the light, the invisible made visible, scientific reason as the means and the end. The principle of empirical observation and transparency underscores everything from democracy and secularism to mass-media and surveillance. Now AI image generation gifts us mortals the ‘God’s eye view’, all-seeing and therefore all-knowing. We can make whole worlds in 7 seconds. ‘There are eyes everywhere. No dark spots left’ once remarked cultural theorist Paul Virilio: ‘what will we dream of when everything is visible? We’ll dream of being blind’.

The ability to speculate, anticipate, to fill in the blanks, defines our human relation to futurity, to joy and to beauty. ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’ wrote poet John Keats. “Where do you see yourself in five years” we ask ourselves. Our mind’s eye is a hazy, flickering image we must actively grasp for but can never hold. Until now. Our desires wax and wane like the moon, AI crystallizes them into solidity. Technology is marching on one of the last dark enclaves, our imagination, to steamroll into a flat commodity. Brainrot is dreaming’s revenge.

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George Harry James is a London-based writer and cultural critic whose work explores digital aesthetics, online subcultures and what it means to live in the world today. He has a Masters in English Literature from University of Sheffield. You can reach him at georgeharryjames1@gmail.com

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References

– The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music and the Drama, January to June, 1876.
– J.G Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
– Jean Baudrillard, Simulations & Simulacra trans. Sheila Faria Glase, Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
– Francesco Barchiesi & Geert Lovink, The Story of Italian Brainrot – Collective Musings on a Meme Wave, Institute of Network Cultures, 30 September 2025, The Story of Italian Brainrot – Collective Musings on a Meme Wave.
– Kate Crawford, ‘Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop’, e-flux, September 2025. Intensification – Kate Crawford – Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop.
– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle trans. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014.
– Tomasz Hollanek, Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, ‘Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry’, Philosophy & Technology 37, May 2024.
– John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ The Poetry Foundation,
 www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn.
– Jacob W. S. Knight, ‘The Final Word? Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Case on AI Authorship and Inventorship’, Holland & Knight, 3 March 2026, The Final Word? Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Case on AI Authorship and Inventorship | Insights | Holland & Knight.
– Louisa Munch, @louisamunchtheory, Neoliberalism is over pass it on, Instagram, 2 March 2026.
– Moreno Nourizadeh, The Phonemic Flesh: A Phenomenological Analysis of Italian Brainrot, Zenodo, 26 February 2026.
– My Heritage – Animate your family photos, My Heritage – Animate your family photos, MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia, deep learning technology to animate the faces in still family photos – MyHeritage.
– Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, London: Jonathan Cape, 2013.
– Britney Spears, ‘Circus’, Circus, Sony Music Entertainment, 2007.
– Louise Wilson, ‘View of Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio’, CTheory, October 1992.
– Gunseli Yalcinkaya, ‘Digital Dada or Futurist slop? An investigation into brainrot as art’, Plaster Magazine, 11 June 2025, Digital Dada or Futurist slop? An investigation into brainrot as art – Plaster Magazine.

Remembering Steve Kurtz is an evening dedicated to exploring and honoring the life and work of Steve Kurtz, a pioneer in the fields of bioart and tactical media. As co-founder of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an influential collective of radical experimental artists, Kurtz was a frequent visitor to Amsterdam, where he participated in festivals such as Next 5 Minutes and World Information Org as a highly influential contributor to discussions surrounding the social and technological revolutions of the 1990s.

With books such as The Electronic Disturbance (1994), Electronic Civil Disobedience (1996) and Flesh Machine (1998), Kurtz and CAE defined the artistic and activist responses to corporate virtualization techniques. Were video and networks still possible as tools for cultural resistance?

Kurtz and CAE’s radical approach questioned the very foundations of what it meant to be an artist through a willingness to embrace “any kind of cultural hybrid; artist, scientist, technician, craftsperson, theorist, activist.” This hybridity however carried unexpected risks. And in 2004 the danger of challenging institutional boundaries became clear when Kurtz was targeted in an FBI investigation, leading to a wave of grand-jury subpoenas under the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, that took years to fully resolve in his favour. Our event will engage with this difficult phase in his life, in part, through screening key extracts of the renowned film Strange Culture by Lynn Hershman. We are fortunate in that we will be joined by Lynn Hershman and Richard Pell online from the US for discussion and reflection.

Throughout the evening, we will hear from many individuals who knew Steve drawing on previously unseen film footage of interviews, as well as live discussion with distinguished contemporaries. Our explorations will range across key aspects of CAE’s’ output. Finally, we will launch the Dutch translation of Unreality and Its Discontents: The Struggle Against Christian Nationalism, the last book that Steve completed at the very end of his life, in an act that couldn’t have been timelier or more urgent.

Organized by Menno Grootveld, Lucas Evers, David Garcia and Geert Lovink.

May 7, 2026, 19.30-21.30, Waag Futurelab, Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam.

Waag event page: https://waag.org/nl/event/remembering-steve-kurz/.

 

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 6 The Institution Negated? In this episode we are joined by John Foot, Susana Caló, and Godofredo Enes Pereira for a wide-ranging conversation on the publication in English of The Negated Institution, and the radical milieus that shaped it, emerging from the turbulent political and intellectual landscape of the […]