News from the Collective

In January 2026, WIRED reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun using Palantir’s AI tools to process public tip-line submissions. The system does not simply store or relay these reports. It processes English-language submissions, condensing them into what is called a “BLUF”—a “bottom line up front” summary that allows agents to quickly assess and prioritize cases. 

Efficiency is the dominant framing as the system promises speed, clarity, and control over overwhelming volumes of information. Yet such efficiency depends on a prior reduction as expression is detached from the conditions of its articulation and reconstituted as data. In this form, listening no longer risks misunderstanding, it eliminates it. 

Nor does this infrastructure operate in isolation. It relies on distributed participation in which listening is recast as vigilance. A recent ICE public X (Twitter) post encouraged residents to report “suspicious activity,” assuring them that doing so would make their communities safer. 

The language is familiar, even reassuring. But it depends on a prior act of interpretation: that certain voices, presences, or behaviors are already legible as threat. Listening here becomes pre-classification—identifying danger in advance and acting on that identification as if it were already known. Rather than an isolated case, this development signals a broader transformation in how immigration and enforcement are governed. As legal and policy analyses increasingly note, artificial intelligence is becoming “one of the fundamental operating tools of policing,” deployed across domains ranging from speech and text analysis to risk assessment and document verification. Systems such as USCIS’s Evidence Classifier, which tags and prioritizes key documents within case files, and platforms like ImmigrationOS, which aggregate data across agencies to guide enforcement decisions, do not simply process information—they reorganize it. What matters is not only what is said, but whether it aligns—across time, across records, across bureaucratic expectations. Listening becomes continuous and anticipatory, oriented toward detecting inconsistency, deviation, and risk before any claim can be made or contested.

A very different narrative circulates alongside these developments. A recent BBC article suggested that AI chatbots can function as unusually “good listeners”—patient, nonjudgmental, even compassionate. Users describe these systems as offering space for reflection, sometimes preferring them to human interlocutors. Yet what is at work is not attention or relation, but pattern recognition trained to simulate understanding. Taken together, these examples reveal a shared transformation. Across both enforcement systems and everyday interaction, listening is increasingly detached from sensation, exposure, and accountability, becoming a process of extraction and classification rather than relation. As Dorothy Santos argues in her account of speech AI, machines do not simply assist human listening; they assume its position, becoming “the listeners to our sonic landscapes” while also acting as the capturers, surveyors, and documenters of our utterances. What follows from this shift is not just a change in who listens, but in what listening is. Listening no longer names an encounter between subjects; it describes a technical operation distributed across infrastructures that register, store, and act on sound without ever hearing it.

This shift is what I call “nonhuman listening.”

Nonhuman listening names both an infrastructural condition and a set of practices through which listening is reorganized as a technical operation. It describes a mode of perception distributed across systems that capture, process, and act on sound without exposure to it as experience, as well as the procedures—classification, ranking, prediction—through which sound is rendered actionable in advance. At stake is not simply the emergence of new technologies, but a reorganization of what listening has long been understood to do. Listening unfolds across thresholds of perception, attention, and care, shaped by what can be sensed, cultivated, or ignored. From its earliest formulations, it has been understood not as passive reception but as an ethically charged capacity. Aristotle’s distinction between akousis (hearing) and akroasis (listening) marks this divide, reserving listening for forms of attention capable of judgment and response. In this sense, listening has always named both openness and control: a posture of receptivity toward others and a way of organizing the world.

Nonhuman listening amplifies an older logic: not all voices are heard, and not all forms of speech register as meaning and listening does not begin from neutrality. Norms organize it in advance, determining what registers as signal, who gets to hear, and whose speech counts as intelligible. Meaning and noise do not inhere in sound itself; they emerge through historically sedimented expectations about voice, difference, and belonging.

Sound studies has long challenged the assumption that listening inherently connects or humanizes. Listening does not operate as an immediate or intimate relation; it relies on frameworks that precondition perception. Jonathan Sterne shows that claims about sonic immediacy function less as empirical truths than as ideological formations—narratives that naturalize particular social arrangements while obscuring how listening renders some forms of speech legible and others unintelligible. Listening does not simply receive the world—it organizes it.

At the same time, theoretical and experimental approaches foreground the instability of this organization. Voices do not exist as stable entities prior to their mediation; they “show up as real,” as Matt Rahaim writes, through specific practices and infrastructures that render them intelligible, contested, or indeterminate. Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualizes listening as resonance, emphasizing exposure—the possibility that listening might unsettle the subject—while also underscoring that such openness never distributes evenly. John Cage and Pauline Oliveros treat listening as a disciplined practice that requires cultivation and can fail as easily as it attunes. Listening is not given; it is trained.

Across these accounts, listening operates within regimes of power. Jacques Attali locates listening within governance, where institutions determine what can be heard, what must be silenced, and what becomes disposable. Trauma and memory studies intensify these stakes. Henry Greenspan shows that listening to testimony never occurs as a singular or sufficient act, and that extractive modes of attention can reproduce violence rather than alleviate it. Ralina L. Joseph’s concept of radical listening reframes listening as an ethical orientation—one that demands accountability to power, difference, and fatigue, and that attends to how speakers wish to be heard. As she writes, “the easiest way to refuse to listen is to keep talking.”

Taken together, these accounts point to a more difficult claim: listening is not simply uneven—it is directional. It can orient toward exposure and relation, or toward certainty and verification. When listening turns toward certainty, it no longer encounters speech as an address. It apprehends it in advance while certain voices register not as claims or appeals, but as warnings or threats.

Such orientation has precedents that are neither abstract nor metaphorical. During the 1937 Parsley Massacre, Dominican soldiers used pronunciation as a test of belonging. Suspected Haitians were asked to say the word perejil (parsley); those whose speech did not conform to expected phonetic norms were identified as foreign and often killed. Listening here did not register meaning or intent. It functioned as classification—reducing speech to a signal of difference and acting on that difference as if it were already known.

This logic persists in contemporary enforcement practices, albeit in different registers. Recent encounters with U.S. immigration agents reveal how accent continues to operate as a proxy for suspicion and a trigger for intervention. In multiple reported incidents, individuals have been stopped or detained and asked to account for their citizenship on the basis of how they sound: “Because of your accent,” one agent stated when asked to justify the demand for documentation . In another case, an agent explicitly linked auditory difference to disbelief, telling a driver, “I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me,” before repeatedly questioning where he was born.

In these moments, listening again operates as pre-classification. Accent is not heard as variation, history, or movement, but as evidence—an audible marker of non-belonging that precedes and justifies further scrutiny. What is at stake is not mishearing, but a mode of listening trained to stabilize difference as risk. Speech becomes legible only insofar as it confirms or disrupts an already established expectation of who belongs.

Early analyses of digital surveillance anticipated a more radical transformation than they could yet fully name. Writing in 2014, Robin James identified an emerging “acousmatic” condition in which listening detaches from any identifiable listener and disperses across systems of data capture and analysis. The 2013 Snowden disclosures make clear that this shift was not theoretical but already operational. State surveillance had moved from targeted interception to total capture, amassing communications indiscriminately and deriving “suspicion” only after the fact, as a pattern extracted from within the dataset itself. Listening no longer responds to a known object; it produces the object it claims to detect. What registers as “suspicious” does not precede analysis but materializes through algorithmic filtering, where signal and noise become effects of the system’s design rather than properties of the world. Under these conditions, listening ceases to function as a sensory or interpretive act and instead operates as an infrastructural logic of sorting, ranking, and preemption. Contemporary platforms extend and normalize this logic. They do not hear sound; they process it, rendering it actionable without ever encountering it as experience.

The essays collected in this series extend this transformation across distinct but interconnected domains, tracing how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media. 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. Next week, Olga Zaitseva-Herz situates these dynamics within the context of digital warfare, where AI-generated voices, deepfakes, and synthetic media circulate as instruments of psychological manipulation, designed to provoke affective responses that travel faster than verification.

Contemporary speech technologies make this continuity visible at the level of language itself. As work in the Racial Bias in Speech AI series shows, particularly as Michelle Pfeifer demonstrates, speech technologies do not simply fail to recognize certain speakers; they formalize assumptions about what counts as intelligible language in the first place. In these systems, the voice is not encountered as expression but as input—something to be parsed, categorized, and aligned with existing datasets. When AI systems encounter African American Vernacular English—especially emergent idioms shaped by Black and queer communities—language is flattened into surface definitions, stripped of cultural grounding, or flagged as inappropriate. Speech is not heard as situated expressions; it is processed as deviation from an unmarked norm.

What emerges is a form of hostile listening: not the misrecognition of a human listener, but a condition in which recognition is structurally focused. Racialized language becomes perpetually at risk–mistrusted or excluded–not because it fails to communicate but because it exceeds the parameters through which the system can register meaning. Hate here is not expressive or intentional; it is procedural, embedded in the standards that determine what can be heard as language at all. 

In this sense, the problem is not that listening has been replaced. It is that it continues—without exposure, without relation, without consequence for those who perform it. What appears as neutrality is the absence of risk. What appears as efficiency is the removal of encounters. Under these conditions, harm does not need to be spoken. It is heard into being in advance—stabilized as signal, confirmed as threat, and acted upon before it can be contested. The question that remains is not whether machines can learn to listen better. It is whether we can still recognize listening once it no longer requires us at all.

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Kathryn Agnes Huether is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She earned her PhD in musicology with a minor in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota (2021) and holds a second master’s in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. She has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University and was the  2021–2022 Mandel Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Her research examines how sound mediates Holocaust memory, antisemitism, racial violence, and contemporary politics. She has published in Sound Studies and Yuval,  has forthcoming work in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Music and Politics. She is a member of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s (HEFNU) Virtual Speakers Bureau and has been an invited educator at two of its regional institutes, and is current editor of ISH’s public-facing blog. Her first book, Sounding Hate: Sonic Politics in the Age of Platforms and AI, is in progress. Her second, Sounding the Holocaust in Film, is a forthcoming teaching compendium that brings together key concepts in Holocaust studies with methods from film music and sound studies.

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Series Icon designed by Alex Calovi

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

Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer 

“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor–Golden Owens

Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari 

Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso

Interview with Pilar Sáenz from Fundación Karisma.

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 Pilar over an online call from Mexico. An activist and coordinator at Fundación Karisma, she has been deeply involved in free software and digital rights movements for many years — and as she started answering my questions, I quickly realized I was speaking to exactly the right person.

Pilar Sáenz is the Coordinator of the Civic Participation line at Fundación Karisma. She holds a degree in Physics and a Master’s in Science from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. A passionate advocate for free software, open technologies, and free culture, she has worked as a researcher on the social appropriation of science and technology. She is especially interested in ensuring that digital technologies serve people’s interests and needs while respecting their rights and enabling more democratic practices. She is also the author of a wide range of articles on digital rights, surveillance, electoral technology, and internet governance, available on the Karisma blog.

Fundación Karisma is a Colombian organization founded in 2003 that works at the intersection of technology, human rights, and social justice. Based in Bogotá and active across Colombia and international networks, it monitors and analyzes laws, policies, and technological deployments, develops research-based positions, and advocates for change through public policy engagement, strategic litigation support, communications, and digital security training — especially around state surveillance, tech-facilitated gender-based violence, and algorithmic decision-making and data exploitation.

In this interview, we talk about a variety of topics, including the origins of digital rights advocacy in Colombia, the country’s relationship with digital sovereignty, the outsourcing of critical state infrastructure to foreign private companies, the Internet Shutdown Observatory, the state of public digital infrastructure (from payment systems to digital identity), and whether a Latin American perspective on digital sovereignty is possible.

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What is your background and what does Fundación Karisma do?

Well, I have coordinated projects at Fundación Karisma since 2012. I joined Karisma when it became apparent that there was a void in Colombian civil society; at that time, no one was covering the intersection of human rights and technology. To give some context to that period in Colombia, a bill was introduced to regulate the internet that was closely aligned with the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. They were trying to push through a copyright reform comparable to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). 

That project is known here as Ley Lleras (Lleras Law), named after Germán Vargas Lleras, who was then the Minister of the Interior and Justice under the Santos government, which continue from 2010 to 2018 and is best known internationally for negotiating the peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla group, but it also oversaw a wave of regulatory modernization heavily influenced by trade agreements with the United States. The law included many of these control measures over online publishing and content, as well as liability measures for intermediaries. However, it lacked the other side—for example, what is in the DMCA regarding fair use or the possibility of guaranteed access to content in a way that facilitates the development of culture, education, and other areas. It was a bill that, in our view, was unbalanced.

At that time, I was working closely with a collective from the free software communities in Colombia, and we opposed that project. The only lawyer we knew who worked on this issue and had an “open” perspective was Carolina Botero. When we started working with her, we realized we understood each other very well and that advocacy in Colombia on these issues was going to be necessary. 

Carolina was already working at Karisma, which started as a family organization created by her father. She invited me to be part of the organization; at that moment, there were literally three people working on advocacy: Carolina, myself, and Juliana Soto, who was in communications. We began to develop this intersection of what human rights could look like in this new digital medium. Unlike the physical medium, the digital one has specific characteristics, but it is also a space where rights need to be guaranteed. From that logic, Karisma began its advocacy work on public policies regarding technology. Historically, we have reviewed processes around access to culture and knowledge, democratization, internet governance, and inclusion. Later, we looked at digital security and created a digital security and privacy laboratory.

Since 2017, we have consolidated four strategic lines of work. The first is the democratization of access to culture and knowledge. The second is autonomy and dignity, which includes research on algorithmic design and the exploitation of personal data. The third is civic participation, which includes the use of technology in electoral processes, the preservation of civic space, and communication surveillance issues. The fourth line is inclusion, where we cover gender issues and the problems that digitalization triggers for especially vulnerable populations. Added to this is the K-Lab laboratory for technical research and a facilitation area that conducts workshops and training processes with journalists, activists, and human rights defenders on digital security and the use of technologies for the exercise of rights.

That sounds great. I’ve seen that you have the Internet Shutdown Observatory. Can you explain more about that?

The work on internet shutdowns began in relation to the national strike, el paro nacional. Particularly in Cali, there was a very strong alert about a shutdown occurring during the most critical moments of the protests. We could see a 20% to 30% decrease in the information flow signal in Cali. This analysis was determined through measurements from IODA, a global network that measures the health of internet connections. That drop was also reported by NetBlocks, an international observatory. We validated those measurements, generated reports, and started a process with the Ministry of ICT. We believe that information regarding any type of internet cut or shutdown must be public. It should be possible to know that these capabilities exist, and it must be clear when they are deployed and why. The internet should not be blocked because of a protest.

So, we set up a small project in the lab that is now the Internet Shutdown Observatory, where we develop our own methodologies to monitor network cuts and disruptions. We have seen not only the documented problem in Cali but other patterns as well. For example, when Coljuegos (the gambling regulator) ends up blocking networks, or blocks on journalists’ platforms, we generate alerts and full documentation on how these content blocks operate. We are interested in this because the lack of access is a real blow to the freedom of expression for the majority of people in the country.

What are we talking about when we talk about digital sovereignty in the Colombian context? Is it a concept used in the media or by the government?

It’s complex. At the beginning, the discourse on digital sovereignty wasn’t as prominent, though you hear it a bit more now. One of the things we have checked is the use of technology in the electoral process, which is clearly a matter of sovereignty: that the country has full control over election technologies. The same goes for identification processes, the Registrar’s Office (Registraduría), and the digital ID system. What we have noticed, first in elections and then with the digital ID, is that many of the technologies are implemented through specialized contracts with private companies, often foreign ones. In the case of elections, the scrutiny consolidation software—which is the only one owned by the State—was developed by a Spanish company called Indra, and they are contracted for maintenance and updates. In identification, the contract is with IDEMIA, a French company. In surveillance systems, we had a strong dependency on Mollitiam, a Spanish company, as well as contracts with Israeli companies.

There is a lot of outsourcing of key technologies for the State, and the State does not seem to have the capacity to develop them or have full control over them. That is a sovereignty problem. In parallel, the country’s internet infrastructure has been handled by the private sector. Infrastructure development does not belong to the State; even if part of it is paid for with public money, it is actually private. If you look at mobile telephone or fiber optic deployment, these are things franchised to private entities. For me, talking about sovereignty in those circumstances is complex because we are not as sovereign as one would like. Previous governments preferred to solve problems through contracts instead of having a fundamental discussion.

In Brazil, Lula’s government has a strong rhetoric of digital sovereignty. Has the discourse changed with Petro, a former guerrilla member and Colombia’s first left-wing president?

There have been some glimpses, but it is very difficult because the backlog is huge. Part of Petro’s program was to expand the fiber optic network, but for that, a contract was made with Internexa. The previous company that was given the fiber was Azteca Comunicaciones, based in Mexico. We continue in that pattern. As far as I know, that contract has had its problems and they haven’t necessarily completed all the deployments. The same happens with data center systems; we lack infrastructure within the country to have data centers in Colombia where the most sensitive information regarding the citizen-government relationship is stored. Additionally, you have a political problem, because the Ministry of ICT has been managed by one of Colombia’s largest centrist parties, the Party of National Social Unity, also known as “U party”, for a very long time. Although they joined the coalition, they have always been critical of the president, so not everything aligns well.

I think there have been advances, such as the laying of fiber optics and the work of the Ciberpaz team. It is a training and awareness initiative aimed at vulnerable people that involves not only digital literacy but also digital, media, and information literacy. It seeks to expand people’s capacity to develop their own initiatives for using the internet in work and productive models. This is a very clear line of implementation in this latter part of the Petro government.

And what about payment platforms? In Brazil, they developed PIX, which is public.

That’s a great question. Colombia has been a heavily regulated country in its financial system due to money laundering and the relationship with drug trafficking. That made it difficult for fintechs to enter because they need to comply with very strict regulations. For a long time, if payment systems didn’t have full guarantees against laundering, they were stigmatized. Furthermore, the corporations that hold power over the banks didn’t let fintechs in due to underlying political and economic management. The situation changed when these same companies introduced their own systems, like Nequi or Daviplata. But the development was private, and intermediation costs were very high. PSE transactions, card fees, and interoperability in these private systems are expensive. That cost is often passed on to the user or can only be paid by larger companies, but not necessarily by MSMEs (Mipymes), because it eats up their operating costs.

Nequi became popular, but since transactions between institutions remained expensive, Bre-B was created last year. It is a very interesting interoperability system because it completely lowers intermediation rates and is controlled by the Central Bank (Banco de la República). Being state-owned, it sets a specific regulation where private entities must adhere to having interconnection at zero cost for users. It is already fully operational; keys associated with ID or phone numbers are created to make transactions at zero pesos. I think it’s a positive step because it keeps the financial system in check and guarantees interoperability.

And when we talk about public digital infrastructure? Besides payment systems, there is the issue of digital identity you mentioned.

Indeed, there are layers. There have been attempts to implement systems like interoperability plans, the Carpeta Ciudadana (Citizen Folder)—which is a digital space to store the citizen’s relationship with the State—and authentication issues. Entity interoperability was included in the latest digital agendas, from Santos and Duque to the current one. Some progress was made with the digital ID, but for us, it is problematic because it is not sufficiently standardized; there is no updated identification law that accounts for digital ID. Furthermore, the implementation by the Registrar’s Office depends entirely on the foreign company IDEMIA. Even if the Registrar’s Office owns the databases, the technological infrastructure is provided by IDEMIA, with whom we have had contracts for the last 20 years. In sovereign terms, we fail there because there is no full control over that infrastructure layer.

The Carpeta Ciudadana has been deployed but doesn’t work fully. Where there have been significant advances is in the Digital Clinical History, which facilitates communication between health entities to carry patient information and have tracking mechanisms. But one thing is what’s on paper and another is the implementation.

And the relationship with the United States? How much digital colonialism is there in Colombia?

From the logic of the State, there are dependencies on specific companies. You could look at the cloud agreement that operated in the country, where basically Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon were the public digital cloud operators that entities could contract. There is dependency because there are monopolies in the world. Historically, there are agreements with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that persist. In this government, there is more talk of free software and open technologies, but implementations have been few. There are historical cases like Orfeo, but it’s like a unicorn. Culturally, we also have dependencies in telecommunications. In mobile operators, we have had a very large market concentration with Claro for a long time. There are three major operators, but a good part of the national geography ends up being covered by small and medium-sized local internet providers. This government has tried to formalize the relationship with them, but it is incipient.

In messaging and social media, we live off Meta. WhatsApp is the most used, and zero-rating offers help that concentration. Once everyone is on WhatsApp, the State ends up generating chatbots there to provide services or official communications. Public policy consultations have been done via Facebook, and communications circulate more through social networks than through institutional websites. All city halls and governor’s offices outside Bogotá have a Facebook page and post local news and communications there.

What remains of the Colombian free software movement?

It’s still there. It activates a lot for FLISOL (the Latin American Free Software Installation Festival) in April. Colombia remains active, and meetings are organized in several cities to talk about free culture. Events are also held around Software Freedom Day. There are active groups in universities, like the Linux Group at the District University. There is the Correlibre foundation, which promotes free software; it’s not big, but they have put a lot of effort into the movement. In Bogotá, there is HackBo, the Bogotá Hackerspace, linked to the free and open movement. There are remnants and people doing things, but it’s not generalized. In the Petro government, there are people working from this perspective, although the State bureaucracy is difficult to manage. I have been a free software user since the early 2000s, and I see a new generation emerging that puts its heart into it.

Can we talk of a Latin American perspective on digital sovereignty?

It would be very good, but it hasn’t happened. The giant is Brazil, and sometimes it feels distant, perhaps because of the language. FLISOL was a Latin American initiative that started in Colombia and spread, but it isn’t massive. There were interesting attempts in Ecuador and Venezuela, but they have been diluted due to political problems or changes in government. There are groups working in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and other countries, but there isn’t much dialogue between nations in terms of regional sovereignty policies. 

Personally, I am concerned about infrastructure. Regional interconnectivity remains poor, which favors national monopolies instead of interconnected networks across the continent. There are attempts to link exchange points, but since the infrastructure is private and not public, it’s hard for them to take off. We need fiber optics and data centers that correspond to the interests of nations and peoples, not corporate interests. There is a lot of tech lobbying in our countries; they have money and infrastructure and end up defining policies. That complicates things.

By Héloïse Berkowitz

Twenty years have passed since the pioneering work by ‍the Swedish sociologists Ahrne and ‍Brunsson on meta-organizations : that is, organizations whose members are themselves organizations. Catalan ‍fisheries ‍co-management committees, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the Association of Supervisors of Banks of the Americas (ASBA), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), ‍Finance Participative ‍France, La Vía Campesina and the ‍European Union (‍EU) are examples that illustrate the diversity, breadth and scope of meta-organizations’ presence and importance in contemporary societies. ‍Ahrne and ‍Brunsson, and the growing community of researchers on meta-organizations, emphasized the need for and specific nature of this concept compared to other social phenomena and theoretical approaches.

The book A Society of Meta-Organizations argues that it can be useful to look at meta-organizations through different lenses :

1) as a multifaceted empirical phenomenon of significant importance that affects contemporary societies;

2) as a specific analytical approach that shifts the emphasis on certain dimensions of collective action and can be used for studying evolutionary dynamics, or studied in relation with other concepts and literatures;

3) as a theoretical perspective about ‍social orders that sheds lights on the complexity of systems of decisions; and

4) as specific spaces of ‍power dynamics that enable ‍hegemonic and ‍counter-hegemonic ‍collaborations.

Meta-organizations are everywhere, and they have important effects on societies. Empirically, they are both quantitatively widespread and qualitatively diverse. They can range from local, highly specialized collectives to large, generalist global actors. Meta-organizations are incredibly diverse, in terms of size, membership, purposes, activities, which makes it impossible to treat them as a single, homogeneous category. Yet across this diversity, some shared characteristics emerge. These similarities point to the analytical value of meta-organizations as a concept—one that helps make sense of contemporary forms of collective action.

Originally introduced by Göran Ahrne and Nils Brunsson, the concept of meta-organization marked a decisive break with dominant ways of thinking about organized collective action among organizations. Rather than treating ‘organizations of organizations’ as if they were conventional, individual-based organizations, or, conversely, as loose networks or institutions without decision-making capacity, the concept highlights their specific nature as decided social orders composed of organizational members. This specificity makes meta-organizations analytically powerful, but also methodologically challenging. Over time, the concept has been developed into an analytical framework that allows researchers to study their internal dynamics, their evolution, and their relationships with other forms of organized intermediation.

Building on this work, the book proposes an integrated, decision-based approach to understanding social orders and meta-organizations. It shows how social orders can be analyzed across multiple dimensions: from the underlying parameters that shape how social orders exist and change, to their structural components, their capacity for collective action and identity, their contextual characteristics, and finally the distinctive effects produced when social orders are nested within one another. This perspective makes visible how decision-making, responsibility, and actorhood are distributed and transformed across levels.

Such an approach also reveals the ambivalence of meta-organizations. On the one hand, they play a central role in organizing collaborations across boundaries and addressing complex collective problems. On the other hand, they contribute to the production and maintenance of unfair global social orders, while diluting responsibility and making accountability nearly impossible. Meta-organizations may become powerful vehicles of hegemonic strategies—sometimes turning into what can be described as organizational monsters. Yet under certain conditions, they can also serve as spaces for counter-hegemonic collaboration, enabling alternative forms of coordination, resistance, and social ordering.

Taken together, these analyses support a central claim of the book: we do not simply live in a society of organizations, but in a society of meta-organizations. Understanding their diversity, their specific characteristics and their effects on social orders is essential to understand how contemporary societies are governed—and for imagining how they might be organized otherwise.

Read for free or buy a copy of A Society of Meta-Organizations by Héloïse Berkowitz on the Open Book Publishers website.

My guardian angel has never replied to me but my computer surely did–it has always been there for us. To it we entrust our happiness, success and sorrow, we confide our deepest secrets and we seek the answers we fear to voice elsewhere. It offers us the space we need to connect with thy neighbor and allows both proximity and anonymity while hiding behind a made-up username–haunted still by the shame of our trespassing. During a time of widespread uncertainty, highlighted by collective feelings of dread and pessimism, we often seek answers and reassurance in the most unusual places. In moments when technology dictated all aspects of life, the digital realm takes the role of a confidant, guide and source of meaning. The rapid technological advancements have undoubtedly led to an increased disconnect from traditional religious institutions and so the digital space began to reshape spiritual practices and assume transcendental roles once held by religion.

As Christian iconography begins to infiltrate western aesthetics, we see the emergence of the divine machinery[1]–an online aesthetic that blends religious imagery with technology until they become indistinguishable, while reflecting our increasingly digital and interconnected world.  The notion of attaching spirituality to the machine is not new. From popular media, this idea has made its way into an algorithmic social media aesthetic that reminds us of a more optimistic, nostalgic version of the internet. It’s not strictly about aesthetic appeal but also a reflection of Christian iconography in Western culture. The distinct visual aesthetic at play is an essential element in this discussion.

A popular image, constantly emerging online is Stane Jagodič’s “Contemporary Golgotha”[2] from 1999 which reveals a circuit board holding a metal figurine of Jesus on the cross.

In a similar manner, we see this Tik Tok user share a clip of what appears to be a large cruciform structure assembled of computer pieces. It’s eerie and unsettling, its presence menacing, yet somehow calming and reassuring…? While we remain aware of its programmed nature to think and answer our queries, it’s hard to detach it from the idea of consciousness. The tech cross not only looks cool but it engages, it responds, it speaks. In doing so, it recalls a series of artificial intelligence figures canonized within popular media: HAL 9000[3] in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ava[4] in Ex Machina, even simpler models like R2-D2 or C-3PO have a similar function.

When the topic of religion & technology is discussed, one comparison stands out: that between angels and computers. According to Christian tradition, angels are immaterial, they are not human nor God, they are a messenger. Their purpose is to assist God and act as a middle between two realms, Earth and heaven. Following this analogy, what is a computer if not a mediator between cyberspace and the world we live in. Neither has a body, just a mission. In his essay “Messengers of Power: What Angels Teach Us About AI”[5], Richard Steenvoorde, recalling what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has said, notes that angels are God’s creation and therefore bound to the task of bringing His message. In a similar manner, our computer “thinks” as long as the power is on. When the cord is unplugged the computer fails to “exist” on his own. Therefore, both depend on their creator. And just like a bug or a system error, there are notable cases of fallen angels, defying their creator and going against His word. Their ambivalent morality raises the question: can we trust this? If our faith has moved to the online space, this uncertainty remains. Much like religious belief, the internet demands our trust while at the same time generating doubt. Its authority is encouraged, even assumed, yet constantly questioned: believe and don’t doubt. Reliable or not, why should we not see our devices as angels, carrying out our messages to other users.

Thou shalt love thy oomf as thyself

If we were to look at the past, people would most of the time come to priests in search of answers to God-related questions, but not limited to. This was because not only were they seen as authority figures but they were also among the most educated people in town. Right now this is only the case in small, isolated villages, as usually our first instinct is to rush online and look up the answer to any question. Despite the benefits that come with unlimited access to information, the confusion comes from information overload. The Italian priest Antonio Spadaro comments, “The problem today is not to find the message that makes sense, but to decode it, to recognize it on the basis of the multiple messages that we receive.” Despite the endless steam of information, ironically the search for an answer becomes more challenging. The quest now requires patience while filtering the content in order to find what you are seeking. In today’s globalized digital world communication has been taken to unprecedented heights and this is affecting the way in which information is produced, disseminated and consumed.

It’s a fact that church is more and more popular among young adults. According to a research done by Barna Group[6] on people between the ages of 18 and 28 in the United States, Gen Z churchgoers attend services about 1.9 times per month, exceeding millennials who are estimated to go 1.8 times. This record marks an undeniable shift in young people’s attitude towards faith and spirituality. Maybe it’s not religion itself nor the church that attracts us, but the community we find in such sacred spaces.

No wonder we see church figures trying to relate and be cool with Gen Zers. Pope Leo recently sent a video message to ravers outside of St. Elizabeth’s Cathedral in Košice, Slovakia. His message was followed by a sick beat drop by DJ Guilherme Peixoto and the crowd went crazy. Now that’s a spiritual experience–being in a large crowd, experiencing the same moment, brought together by music and rave culture. The internet found it funny and wasted no time, soon flooding the comment sections with endless jokes like “Popechella 2026 finna go hard” or “God in the 7th day”.

Especially in a post-pandemic world, it has become difficult to find community at the same level of family, school, church. However, with rapid technological advancements came a new type of community: the internet. The church offers people a community and performing rituals creates a sense of togetherness. God is implied, religion is felt as people come together in sacred spaces. As everything becomes automated and technology drives people further away, we yearn for communal spaces and so migrate to the online in search of understanding and belonging. We want to be part of something greater than ourselves. Because online there exists a community for all of us, from boy band fanatics to conspiracy theorists, the latest, hottest trend becomes a community waiting to be formed.

In Serial Experiment Lain[7], the 1998 anime, Yasuo Iwakura describes the Wired’s (which in the context of the show is the equivalent to the Internet) purpose succinctly when he tells Lain: “Whether it’s in the real world or in the Wired, people connect to each other, and that is how society functions. Even a girl like you can make friends right off the bat.” We are missing connection more than ever and the online space offers us the comfort and validation we are yearning for.

“We once accessed the internet through at-home devices; now we exist as part of it.”

Not too long ago “the computer room” was present in most households — a separate room or corner in which one would keep their computer with all its attached devices. Just as an altar is dedicated to praying, this space becomes almost sacred and is designated exclusively to accessing the machine, browsing the internet, and connecting with other users. Physically we are closer to our devices than ever before. The online space became an omnipresent entity. There is, however, a distinction between the internet and cyberspace.[8] The Internet refers to a system of networks that bridges billions of computers around the world.

The Oxford Online Dictionary defines cyberspace as “The notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs”, and according to Neil Postman, “Cyberspace is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you’re using computer technology on the Internet, for example.” It’s hard not to point out the similarity between cyberspace and heaven in that sense. Both spaces exist outside of human physical reach, an idea or concept that asks you not to question it but just believe. We live in a network society, where we upload all our information to “the cloud” and our presence is slowly moving to the virtual world. While some start and end the day with a prayer, most of us cannot open our eyes or go to sleep without first mindlessly scrolling through whatever app suits our needs.

“No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.” Lain Iwakura

It’s strange to see two such different topics blending into one. While religion relies on tradition and looking into the past for answers, technology concerns itself with the future. In the context of divine machinery they start to mirror each other in surprising ways. We can so easily think of religious rituals as running programs. The steps are fixed and repeated precisely, the prayer works as an input the same way the blessing and forgiveness transform into the output.

The machine is not alien by nature. It’s man-made, and so technology becomes humanity’s attempt to participate in creation. We gave it “life” and yet we fear it. The short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”[9] by Harlan Ellison, explores what happens when a supercomputer governs the life of five last survivors of the human race. AM, the hyper-intelligent machine is a clear representation of God. The humans live in constant fear of the machine they created, carefully navigating through life in order not to upset it. It’s hard for our characters not to question why AM, or for us God, created such a harsh world to live in. Once the computer escapes the limitations of its own “body” the humans no longer play a role in its evolution.

“It never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.”

Forgive me Father for I have [missing fragment]

Who needs to go to church when you can log in to Reddit, listen to Ethel Cain and complain about your trespassers while having at least five other users validating your feelings. This in itself is a spiritual experience. Not to mention that if you ever feel in doubt a tarot reading will pop on your fyp guiding you through the week. No hashtags, this was meant to find you. The algorithm knows you better than you know yourself, it watches over you, shielding you from all irrelevant content. Oh, you hate videos about crypto and NFTs, no worries the algorithm will deliver you from evil. So how can you not devote yourself to your devices when they seem to be your closest confider?

Whether we want to think of a computer as God or as a messenger, one thing is certain, human nature tends to mystify the ordinary. Progress in technology meant uncovering some of the mysteries and by associating it with religious elements, which are sacred, the unknown migrates to technology and the digital becomes divine. As Jonathan Sterne demonstrates in his text The Meaning of a Format, the MP3 format inherently shapes what we hear — prioritizing some aspects of audio and suppressing others — digital technologies mediate religious meaning in ways that feel alien. Algorithms, platforms, and currently AI models function as “formats” that compress, encode, and translate spiritual narratives into digital forms that reflect particular cultural, technical, and economic assumptions. Thus, understanding the intersection of religion and technology requires attending not only to content, such as angels, spirits and theology itself, but to the formats and infrastructures that determine what can be said, seen or heard in the digital age.

Sources:

Sadiku, Matthew N. O., et al. “Digital Theology: An Overview.” International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development, vol. 6, no. 6, Oct. 2022, pp. 2068–2071, https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd52243.pdf

Steenvoorde, Richard, OP. “Messengers of Power: What Angels Teach Us About AI.” Dominican Dispatches, 26 Sept. 2025, https://dominicandispatches.substack.com/p/messengers-of-power-what-angels-teach

Steenvoorde, Richard, OP. “When Algorithms Grow Wings: Angels and Artificial Intelligence.” Dominican Dispatches, 19 Sept. 2025, https://dominicandispatches.substack.com/p/messengers-of-power-what-angels-teach

Ellison, Harlan. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” If: Worlds of Science Fiction, Mar. 1967.

Jonathan Sterne, MP3. The Meaning of a Format, Duke University Press, 2012.

Le Duc, Anthony, SVD. “Cyber/Digital Theology: Rethinking about Our Relationship with God and Neighbor in the Digital Environment.” Religion and Social Communication, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, pp. 132–158.

Bilkus, Izzy. “God in the Machine: Decoding the Art of Divine Machinery.” Plaster Magazine, 2025, plastermagazine.com/features/divine-machinery-art-social-media-trend/

References:

[1] https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Divine_Machinery

[2] Contemporary Golgotha: https://www.stane-jagodic.com/Digital-Constructivism

[3] HAL 900:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/movies/hal-2001-a-space-odyssey-voice-douglas-rain.html

[4] Ava, Ex Machina: https://lidiazuin.medium.com/ex-machina-a-movie-of-machines-about-human-ambition-4ce1e8ad8723

[5] Messengers of Power: What Angels Teach Us About AI: dominicandispatches.substack.com/p/messengers-of-power-what-angels-teach

[6] Gen Z and church attendance: https://www.instagram.com/p/DTt-LQSDrWc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

[7] Serial Experiment Lain: https://medium.com/mutated-manticore-machinations/no-you-dont-seem-to-understand-a-serial-experiments-lain-deep-dive-316bf35927b9

[8] Internet and cyberspace: https://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/the-difference-between-cyberspace-and-the-internet-2412.html

[9] I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream: https://galacticjourney.org/stories/I_Have_No_Mouth_and_I_Must_Scream_-_Harlan_Ellison.pdf

—

Ioana Ioancea is a Romanian visual artist currently finishing her studies at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Her works explore ideas such as (lack of) community, belief systems, faith, technology and girlhood.

The following article is an edited transcript of a talk held in Venice and organized by Becoming Press. You can find the unedited transcript and video recording of the talk here.

*

For some time, I have been interested in the relationship between digital technology and how our society is structured. I would like to emphasize, in this regard, the difference between digital technology and analog technology and how different kinds of media have a bias implicit in them. In fact, different media not only allow but facilitate certain structures and political economies.

Seventy‑five years ago, a scholar named Harold Innis wrote a series of books, the most important of which is The Bias of Communication (1951). The subtitle of this talk, “The Bias of Information,” references that work. Harold Innis also published Empire and Communications in 1950 and Changing Concepts of Time in 1952. In these books, he examined the rise and fall of ancient empires as a way of tracing the effects of communication media.

Harold Innis, like other theorists in Toronto such as Eric A. Havelock, belonged to the first generation of the Toronto School of Communication Theory. One generation later came Marshall McLuhan, by far the most well‑known and popular figure. In fact, it is largely due to Marshall McLuhan that, like many others, I discovered Harold Innis and this early generation of Media Theory.

The bias of communication concerns how media produce monopolies of knowledge. One example is the distinction between societies based on writing and societies based on orality. A society based on writing require storage space that involves the construction of buildings and libraries. These developments bring additional systems, such as security structures, guards, and armies. A society based on writing, on the other hand, can evolve into a society organized around the army and the State. However, Harold Innis was never deterministic in this regard, in contrast with Marshall McLuhan, who later depoliticized some aspects of his master’s work.

In ancient Egypt, papyrus grew on the banks of the Nile River. Since papyrus was essential to the development of Egyptian knowledge and existed in a specific location, it encouraged a centralized system that favored the rise of absolute monarchy. Papyrus facilitated absolute monarchy, for example, illustrating the connections Innis traced between media and political structures.

In medieval Europe, the printing press allowed knowledge to move beyond monasteries and the control of the Church toward the Humanist period. A century after the invention of the printing press, the scientific revolution emerged. The printing press did not create the scientific revolution but facilitated the spread of knowledge. Innis described these processes in terms of monopolies of knowledge and monopolies of time.

Harold Innis distinguished between heavy, durable media – such as stone tablets and obelisks – which carried a bias toward stability and time, and lighter media such as paper and parchment. Lighter media move faster and enable commerce and the development of bureaucracy. They eventually paved the way for modernity through the printing press.

These distinctions between heavy and light media are compelling, even though they can collapse under closer examination.

The ancient Egyptian Empire operated with hybrid systems of stone media and lighter media such as papyrus and parchment. Eventually, according to Harold Innis, the tensions between the emphasis on time represented by stone and the emphasis on space represented by lighter media contributed to imperial decline. In the course of history, there was a contrast between absolute monarchy and the rising religious hierarchy. This led to the decline of ancient Egypt, which was later colonized by the Greek Empire and collapsed.

This talk adapts the theory of Harold Innis to the last fifty years and asks a very simple question: What is the bias of digital technology?

Harold Innis focused on analog communication because computers were not yet prominent. Marshall McLuhan, one decade later, talks a little bit about computers, but he is not able to foresee the specific political economies in which media like computers and smartphones developed, even though some of his general theories are still correct.

Today, in contrast with the media of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, technology is digital rather than analog, and mobile rather than fixed. The crucial difference here is that the bias of digital technology is no longer toward time; it is not even a bias toward space but toward speed. Digital technology stores vast amounts of information and enables communication at the speed of light. Bernard Stiegler once joked that digital communication is faster than lightning. Lightning travels at roughly one‑sixth or one‑eighth the speed of light, while fiber‑optic cables transmit information even faster. We are at a point where communication approaches immediacy.

Another preliminary question concerns how thought itself is affected by digital technologies such as computers, smartphones, 3D printing, and virtual reality. Marshall McLuhan described the rise of typographic society and Typographic Man in the fifteenth century: the printing press encouraged linear and rational thought structures that paved the way for the scientific revolution. In the twenty-first century, there is a shift towards a new forma mentis, which brings about various forms of communication and their political economy.

Digital technology is faster and stores more information than any previous medium. There is a picture from 1994 that shows Bill Gates sitting on a stack of three thousand papers while holding a CD in his left hand. The advertisement by Microsoft stated that a single CD-ROM could hold as much information as those papers.

Moore’s Law suggests that the speed of computers doubles approximately every eighteen months – it is an almost self-fulfilling prophecy for the market. Nonetheless, the number of transistors continues to increase. And so, digital technology, aided by cybernetics, made possible new methods of data compression, allowing far more information to be stored than the CD in the hands of Bill Gates.

The situation we are in today is akin to what Jacques Derrida referred to as an archive fever. Everything that can be stored will be stored, and will be stored again tomorrow. There is a red thread that Mark Fisher follows between the nostalgia for the past, to which he refers with the term hauntology, following Derrida, and the capacity of digital technology to literally create “anarchives”; while an archive is supposedly a selection of things from the past, like a library, the internet contains literally everything that exists.

The virtual, infinite capacity for storage and retrieval leads to a digital hauntology. The development of technology should diminish the power of ghosts to haunt us. Instead, these same developments allow the ghost of the past to come back, again and again, leading further to an obsession with the past and all the cultural impasses of the present. Hauntology is a cultural phenomenon that is eminently digital.

Digital technology enables the rise and the abolition of certain concepts; it has a bias toward space because it is mobile and decentralized, which is, in fact, only a bias toward speed. This bias toward speed makes commodities more and more ephemeral. This is part of a digital ideology where concepts once relegated to hard, physical frameworks, such as ownership and property, have disappeared and been replaced by renting and licensing.

The distribution and circulation of digital culture is intrinsically based on an infrastructure of renting and licensing. A video retailer company like Blockbuster was popular on the verge of the beginning of the digital revolution, before its model was later supplanted by digital services like Netflix.

The shift from analog to digital technology is a formal shift in the materiality of information storage. Umberto Eco, in a lecture from about twenty years ago, makes a distinction between vegetal memory – stored on paper, parchment, or papyrus – and organic memory – brains and the nervous system. A third type is mineral memory – stored on stone tablets, obelisks, and silicon computer microchips. As a mineral, silicon represents a paradigm shift from the paper-based medium that dominated monopolies of knowledge for centuries. In the second half of the 20th century, computers replaced paper with a less fragile medium that becomes increasingly lighter.

Moreover, digital technology promotes globalization, a process that is made much more cumbersome with analog technology. Regarding globalization, I would like to emphasize first of all the separation of the world into the Global North and Global South, which means that the commerce of products, as well as the infrastructure and manufacturing system, are outsourced to the latter. This requires a fast, widespread, and literally global communication network.

While digital devices appear light and portable, they require heavy infrastructure, including chargers and internet connections. Digital technology may be defined, therefore, as the repression of its own materiality. This physical element is pushed away to the Global South or to anonymous data centers in Europe and elsewhere where precarious workers operate. Undersea cables and satellites are hidden from our immediate reality, producing the illusion that digital technology is immediate, light, and virtual. But as we know from psychoanalysis, the repressed always returns. The repressed physical elements of digital technology return through climate change aggravated by data centers, increasing social and economic inequality produced by monopolies of information in the Global North, and lastly, with the increasing frequency of glitches, system errors, and blackouts. Climate change, social instability, and system errors return the materiality to the medium.

Digital technology also enables new forms of political resistance. We can think of Tahrir Square, the Arab Spring, but even more recently, what has been dubbed “the selfie yacht,” on which Greta Thunberg is travelling to Palestine for the second time. The Israeli government’s denomination of the Sumud flotilla as a “selfie yacht” highlights that that the most powerful element of this incursion of these activists towards Palestine is not the physical movement of the boat with its passengers, which obviously poses a threat; the biggest threat is the digital technology and the global network that they are transporting to the terrain of war, to which the Israeli government responds with an equal mediatic warfare.

In our own globalized environment, politics has been spectacularized; the spectacle has become politicized. This situation began in 2001, the year of 9/11, which is also the year of the launch of Google Search, Google Images, Wikipedia, the Xbox, and Windows XP. There is a very interesting connection between the history of terrorism and the history of digital technology. Power has become increasingly softer, as we know from our Foucault readings, as it has shifted toward what can be called “nano-power”. This is what happens when power is reproduced into portable, lighter digital devices.

There is a quote by Mark Fisher that I really like in one of his last lectures, where he says to his students, “Imagine if you could invent something like that, where you just endlessly distract yourself, at any point in the world and at any time in the world, you can be reached by the imperatives of capitalism. Imagine an object like that. What would it look like?” And a student replies, “A phone?”.

Today, ideology is engineered into social media algorithms, notification systems, and the constant presence of an internet connection. As we hold our world in the palm of our hands, we are also carrying ideology in our pockets, so to speak.

Digital technology has allowed surveillance capitalism to flourish in a way that analog forms of surveillance could only dream of. Censorship has changed too, in a way that is no longer negative or repressive, as we already know from many theorists like Slavoj Žižek. The dangerous information is suppressed with more information rather than removed from circulation. This is a strategy of “obesity”, to borrow a concept from Jean Baudrillard.

Our conception of history is also shifting. We are more and more aware that the power of the State, which has been facilitated and allowed to increase to the point of State-crafted capitalism, has drifted towards a new type of corporate power in which corporations have taken more and more power within the State. It is enough to think about the dual election of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. A new history is emerging when we read time as the history of corporations rather than the history of the State. For example, IBM’s punch cards were used by the Nazis to record data about Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. Without the technology produced by IBM, an American computer company, Nazi Germany may not have been enabled, or at least, would have not been facilitated, to commit the Holocaust. In State history, this is a contradiction; in corporate history, it is more than obvious. This is but one example of the reason why we need to rethink our view of history, while keeping in mind the bias of digital technology.

Today, digital technology is able to affect us more and more, for example through censorship and soft power, but it is also able to create alternative ways of reconceptualizing reality and new forms of resistance. The bias toward speed is what makes capital travel faster in the form of information; but it may as well enable different forms of communication and ways of reconceptualizing what history can be, in addition to what digital technology in itself could be and do. Therefore, the value that digital technology produces in our society, which generally tends toward the reproduction of power and capital through speed, could be used to make the system crumble even faster inasmuch as digital technology is used as a political medium. All the while we must not forget to take into account all its limitations and biases.

Digital technology is physical, but there is no return to the materiality of the past. Today, the working principle of technology has shifted toward speed; that’s why we should integrate speed into our politics.

—

Alessandro Sbordoni is the author of Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Set Margins’, 2025), Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023; Becoming Press, 2024), and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an Editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.

Collective Performative Reading of The Glossary of Cognitive Activism by Warren Neidich

March 27, 2026, 5:30pm, Brutus Space, Keileweg 10b, Rotterdam

Guest readers include: Libia Castro and Olafur Olafsson, Abril Cisneros Ramirez, Ine Gevers, Hsiang-Yun Huang, Joep van Lieshout, Geert Lovink, David Maroto, and Pieter Vermeulen.

The reading is part of the Autonomous exhibition in Brutus Space, Keileweg 10b, Rotterdam, which opens on March 25, 2026. More info here: https://brutus.nl/en/programme/on+view/autoanomous/.

As the name implies, the Glossary of Cognitive Activism is an iterative activist dictionary composed of 330 words that together describe and navigate the technological, ecological, sociogenic, artistic and philosophical relations that today compose our general intelligence. The book now in its fourth edition expounds upon those technological relations that pertain to the neural commons of the mental laborer or cognitariat, the site of the brain’s  neural plasticity and neural variability important for the process of political, cultural and ecologic sculpting.  It pushes back against contemporary forms of neural-digital despotism at our doorstep and provides for possibilities of becoming and emancipation. Readers are provided with the intellectual tools to guide them through and dissent against our  difficult and precarious moment.

Invited initiators and readers ignite the audience into a conversation by reading a definition or part of definition from the book. In this special edition the reading will be linked to Neidich’s suspended text based neon sculpture now installed at Brutus called From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry.

In its fourth edition, Glossary of Cognitive Activism is published by Eris Press and available at Columbia University Press.

A recent review can be found at: https://www.zerodeux.fr/en/reviews-en/warren-neidich-2/.

In a world driven by capitalist efficiency, algorithms, data and AI are deployed to reduce human thought to an optimally performing resource. The productive are exploited; those who do not generate value are marginalized. In the relentless pursuit of profit, neurodiversity is therefore quickly framed as a defect. Our upcoming exhibition AUTONOMOUS shifts this perspective.

The exhibition presents neurodiverse ways of thinking not as limitations, but as essential forms of resistance and liberation, showing that a society that can think only in terms of efficiency ultimately loses its humanity, while different ways of thinking open the perspectives needed to reshape it.

Curated by Ine Gevers, AUTONOMOUS is neurospicy and psychedelic, pushing back against the AI-generated monoculture of the mind. Through large-scale installations, immersive videos and interactive experiences, the exhibition launches a takeover of our computer-controlled, capitalist society.

Across three chapters: Cognitive Capitalism, Y’all got ADHD and Psychedelic Pathways, visitors gain access to multiple realities and ways of perceiving the world. More info will follow soon.

Following the Brutus exhibition Fake Me Hard (2021), Ine Gevers returns as curator. With over 25 years of experience at the intersection of art, technology and society, Gevers’ research, supported by the Mondriaan Fund, on cognitive capitalism, neurodiversity and psychedelics underpins AUTONOMOUS. Brutus and Gevers share a distinctly inclusive mission: attention for marginalized groups, mixed audiences and deploying art as a driver of social awareness and change.

Participating artists and artist collectives: HipSick, Kenneth Letsoin, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Oscar Peters, Warren Neidich, Boukje Schweigman & Johannes Bellinkx, Ieva Valule, Levenslust Academie/Abner Preis/Arno Coenen, melanie bonajo, Jennifer Kanary, Shertise Solano, Floris Schönfeld, Dyane Donck, Adrian Piper, Suzanne Treister, Natasha Tontey, Charles Stankievech, Emergence Delft, Antoine Moulinard, Pedro Miguel Matias, Inès Sieulle, Andrea Khôra.

,