(introduction to this series of interviews can be read here)

I met James Gorgen, a public functionary at the Brazilian Ministry of Development and Industry, over an online call I did from Rio de Janeiro while he was connecting from Argentina where he currently lives. James has long been a thoughtful commentator on digital developments and continues to curate an intellectually stimulating presence on LinkedIn, X, and especially on his personal blog.

Our conversation took place the day after the publication of an important article on how Big Tech has transformed sovereignty into a product—a topic explored in depth in Rafael Grohmann’s excellent piece, “Sovereignty-as-a-service: How big tech companies co-opt and redefines digital sovereignty.” Like many other Brazilians I have spoken with, James highlights a core contradiction at the heart of Brazil’s digital sovereignty agenda, itself the outcome of compromises within the leftist government: given the existence of public telecommunications companies, why is the state contracting U.S.-based platforms to build and operate its data centers?

What do you mean when you talk about “digital sovereignty”? What is the meaning of the word in today’s debate? 

Before we start, a quick clarification. I’m speaking as a public servant and practitioner, but I’m not representing the Ministry of Development and Industry. Everything I say is my personal opinion. On the digital sovereignty as a concept, I think that the entire world is still searching for the best definition.  We have national sovereignty, with a long historical journey around this type of concept. For me it’s very related to self-determination: the adoption and use of technologies to have autonomy, and some control over data and infrastructure. But beyond this, the central point is that we need to build national capacity to manage all these things. The main three pillars are: data, infrastructure, and algorithms. 

I think we have a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about the concept, in South America, Europe, and other regions. At the same time, companies have developed marketing approaches and narratives about “digital sovereignty”. Firstly, they were applied to the cloud, and now to artificial intelligence. They offer solutions for cloud, for example, and governments accept them without questioning or critically assessing these options. We first need to clarify what we are talking about. It’s an important discussion in South America but also in Europe and Asia, which are entering very quickly into this debate against the market approach. We need to debate and reflect on it.

We don’t have too many people writing about this in South America. I am not an academic scholar, but I consider myself an evangelist of this topic because I’m trying to create more literacy about digital sovereignty. Around the world, I follow Marietje Schaake. Francesca Bria is also interesting, more of a practitioner, and Cecilia Rikap is the best for me, very concerned about digital sovereignty and cloud sovereignty. I am working on this concept that I call “digital diplomacy”. To me, the success of Big Tech narratives is because they have corporate diplomacy: not just lobbying, but political diplomacy across institutions and channels. It’s a new lens we can use.

At the same time, Big Techs are under pressure: digital sovereignty narratives and alternatives are emerging. They’re losing a bit of space, and they are very concerned about this. In the first leftist government we had in Brazil, we never talked about digital sovereignty. Even the Trump-era dynamics helped accelerate this against their propaganda. I wrote about the new digital geopolitics. We need to enjoy this moment to write and lead projects. Brazil is in a very good position: we’re not a small republic; we’re among the top markets in social media adoption, we are the fifth market in terms of streaming adoption. We are early adopters of most digital services, around 85% of the people connected. As a democratic statesman, President Lula has a different view and leadership in terms of digital speech, and he has been talking about this in the UN General Assembly and in BRICS and Mercosur. We support a lot of things related to digital sovereignty, AI, and misinformation. 

For me, the other side of the coin of digital sovereignty is digital public infrastructure (DPI) – another keyword that’s increasingly being used. Are they related?

Yes and no. This is another problem with these concepts. For me, if you discuss digital public infrastructure but do not discuss the physical infrastructure, it’s a trap. You give the physical infrastructure to private companies and focus only on apps and platforms, in terms of identity, payments, data interoperability, but you lose autonomy and self-determination. By physical infrastructure I mean what’s behind the cloud: the cables, the hardware, the chips that allow for connectivity, processing and storage. We need to discuss the two things together, and almost nobody is doing this. India started with this concept in the G20, and after that there has been a lot of interest around these projects, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Microsoft, and other financial institutions and companies are creating some consensus around the DPI concept. To me, this is a trap if it ignores the physical layer. 

I understand, however the other day I was on the boat from Niterói to Rio de Janeiro when a deaf man asked for money and gave me a little paper. In the paper there was his Pix number. For me PIX is a very concrete and pervasive example of digital public infrastructure from Brazil. What do you think about PIX?

In Brazil we had a very low access to banks before that. Now we have a lot of people using fintechs and also Pix. This is obviously a progress. But the problem is that, for example, recently there was outage of Amazon Web Services, and Pix experienced issues related to this, because the physical and processing infrastructure is under Amazon and other international players. To me PIX it’s not complete. If you accept it without critical thinking, you can enter this boat and have misunderstandings, because you show the population a good thing but lack control of the infrastructure and data. Don’t get me wrong, I also think it is a good thing, but the problem is what we have below this. For policymakers and lawmakers, we need to know everything, not only have an enchantment for technology. I’m not Luddite, but I’m also not integrated uncritically into the market.

What do you think about what the Brazilian government has been doing? Is it really buying “sovereignty as a service”? And can you tell us something about the efforts underway?

My personal view is that the Brazilian government is working on two levels. On one side, we are incorporating physical and processing infrastructure using what the market offers. It is a very pragmatic approach. Unfortunately, we have chosen this path; this is one thing we are doing, and to me it’s an error for the future and the long term because of legacy, lock-in, and path dependency.

At the same time, Casa Civil, which is Brazil’s powerful presidential chief of staff office, coordinating governmental and strategic policy, is trying to clean the field, engaging our own state tech and telecom companies: Serpro, Dataprev, and Telebras that run core government IT, data, and network infrastructure, including hosting the Gov.br DPI. They are purchasing and contracting services from Big Tech, but at the same time, civil servants are trying to convince them and the ministries involved to create alternatives, so we can avoid lock-in and dependency in the future, in the medium and long term. I think we have an ambiguous relationship with these companies.

President Lula is talking everywhere about digital sovereignty, and I think he strongly believes in this concept. But below that level, there is misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what he is talking about. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, or a matter of awareness, or capture. It’s not clear what some public servants are doing, because they are purchasing solutions from all the Big Techs, even the Chinese ones, like Huawei. I don’t know what the strategic goal is.

What are the trade-offs Brazil is facing? What possible pragmatic moves can South America make for the next five years?

It’s a difficult question. We have path dependency, lock-in, and security problems about data control and control of physical infrastructure. This is the heritage we risk leaving for the future, and it’s the same across countries around us. To try to escape this, we need regional alliances to create another trail. We need to try to build this. Unfortunately, this depends on a lot of things: semiconductors, GPUs that we need to import, and cloud capacity. But we need to create capacity here, maybe with the help and support of BRICS members and other countries. But even China has similar objectives to U.S. Big Tech, so that’s a risk; even so, we should try to do something.

We can try to do something in Mercosur, which is the South American trade bloc including Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and others, and it is now under our presidency, as it is with the BRICS until December.  We can try to restart initiatives as sovereign data centers. Even with LLMs, we can build models in our languages, and develop national models. But this is very embryonic. For example, Chile has taken steps back on data center policy, leading to Big Tech domination, both around the narrative and the infrastructure itself. In Colombia there are similar issues. Argentina is receiving a lot of money from the U.S., and I think Milei will do everything the U.S. wants even in this area. OpenAI is starting a Stargate’s arm here. We don’t have Argentina as an ally. But with Colombia, with Mexico, maybe with Russia and Indonesia, we can start something. Here in Brazil, we have a private national cloud service, Magalu, and we’re trying to talk with them to create a data center ecosystem for a sovereign cloud.

When you say sovereign cloud, I guess your idea goes beyond data localization and towards something more like a public-utility model, where national companies in strategic sectors provide services and control infrastructure. Is that what you imagine, or more public–private partnerships?

We need both. For strategic data and public assets, for instance about security and defense data, we need to build infrastructure totally owned by the state. We’ll still need to import components—cards, processors, semiconductors—and have servers, but under total state control. For example, base-income programs like Bolsa Família, a program that provides income support to low-income families, and the Cadastro Único, the unified registry that identifies and enrolls low-income households for social programs, should be under state infrastructure. 

But we also need to develop national infrastructure and an ecosystem to compete with Big Techs. We’re not talking about expelling Big Tech from Brazil, but we need competitors and coordination to create what I call a Brazilian digital ecosystem. We have a bit of this already, but without political or institutional coordination, and that is a risk. 

In the EU, changing the infrastructural power faces the challenge of existing competition rules and free movement rules; we used to be the colonizer, now we are completely colonized. How do you see the EU approach?

We have academic authors in Brazil, including former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, writing about dependency theory in South America and Latin America. The European Union is now doing something similar. In my view, it is a historical error. Since around 2016, Europe started to walk in the direction of regulation as the only alternative to avoid Big Tech domination. That’s one path, but they forgot industrial policy and trade policy. Now they’re trying to restart or retrieve these.

Brazil is trying to do both at the same time. Lula sent to Congress draft bills related to economic regulation, protection of kids and teenagers online, and tariff regimes to import infrastructure and components for data centers. We also have Nova Industria Brasil, the industrial policy working with digital transformation, and we are trying to create, around data centers, a value chain under this umbrella—building something more complete. Under the Casa Civil there is the CIT-Digital, initiative and a Digital Economy Chamber that is starting to build things related to infrastructure and a national policy for data economy. We will start a public consultation about this last topic. To me, this completes the package: regulation together with infrastructure, industrial and development policies, and data. The problem is, of course, the implementation. We have different views, we need more public coordination, and the state needs to put resources into leading this. But I think this stack is the best solution now to avoid Big Tech power and control over our digital infrastructures.

(first, introduction posting of this series can be read here)

I met Oscar D’Alva, a researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), at  a bar in Botafogo during the pre-conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) that took place in Rio de Janeiro in mid-October 2025. Oscar’s PhD thesis, entitled “Estatísticas oficiais e capitalismo de plataforma: a transição para um regime de dataficação no Brasil” has received multiple major  social sciences awards in the region, including a prize from CAPES, Brazil’s federal agency for  graduate education and research, ANPOCS, the national association of advanced studies in social  sciences, and AoIR. When Oscar realized that the conference was (modestly) funded by Microsoft – as it has been for the past twenty years – he decided to turn down the latter prize, sparking a debate inside a conference held for the first time on the Global South and whose main topic was anti-colonialist perspective on digital sovereignty. The interview took place at a dim, wood-lined bar  behind Praia do Flamengo in Rio. 

What is your trajectory and how did you get interested in statistics and platform capitalism? 

I have been working at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistic (Instituto Brasileiro de  Geografia e Estatística, IBGE) for the past fifteen years. Official statistics is a very traditional exercise: we use structured methodologies and established research practices, and we carry a public service ethos. After a decade or so in that world, I began to notice how new technologies and new data  sources were creeping into our routines: mobile phone data, satellite imagery, data from connected  sensors… I wanted to understand whether these new sources and methods truly demanded a transformation in what we do. 

That curiosity took me to a PhD in sociology on official statistics and platform capitalism. It let  me examine the meeting point between a long-standing public field and a newer, corporate-driven  data ecosystem. My earlier path had taken me somewhere else. I did a master’s in geography on  carnaúba palm extractivism in Ceará, where I am from, after years working with social movements  and an NGO focused on rural development. It sounds far from statistics, but it taught me to watch  how states and markets refashion old practices under new regimes. I studied an old activity, palm  extractivism, which goes back to the colonial period, and looked at how the state tried to manage  it through policy and how it fit into capitalist development and waves of change. With official  statistics you can tell a similar story. It is an old activity tied to the emergence and centralization of  modern states. What interests me is how the production of information changes over time and  whether we are entering a new regime of quantification. 

What your thesis is about, and what was your interest in that topic? 

The research is about official statistics in platform capitalism. Empirically, I focused on IBGE and  on the implementation in Brazil of a project initiated at the UN Statistical Commission, the UN  Big Data project. The plan envisioned four regional hubs in the Global South: Brazil for Latin  America; Rwanda for Africa; the United Arab Emirates for the Middle East; Indonesia for Asia.  The goal was to ‘modernize’ official statistics by introducing big data and AI into national statistical  offices. The hubs gave me an entry point into the present, where old methods and new infrastructures overlap and collide.

To make sense of this I used the work of Pierre Bordieau, and its concepts of field, habitus, and  capital. My hypothesis is that big data and machine learning created an intersection, often a  collision, between two fields of practice. On one side is the statistical field, historically linked to  nation states, with its public service orientation, the census, the autonomization of the state, and  the work of centralizing informational capital. Then it takes also the Foucauldian of biopolitics and  how statistics are important for the organization of the state. But this is a field with its own codes,  structures, and ethos. The ‘state statistician’ is the symbol of this profession that was embodied on this field; it was oriented by an epistemology of statistics which is the frequentist epistemology.  

On the other side is what I call the algorithmic field, linked primarily to private corporations, especially  big tech but not only them, because it is the whole chain of activities, spanning data extraction,  management, and analysis. It is where data science appears as a hybrid of statistics and computer  science. These fields come from different genealogies and values. Where they overlap, we find a  transition toward a new regime of quantification, that I call the datafication regime. 

What do you mean by frequentist, and how does Bayesian thinking fit into this? 

In statistics there are mainly two branches: frequentist and Bayesian. It helps to consider how each  field treats probability and evidence. Frequentist statistics, dominant in official statistics of the 20th,  understands probability as something real and objective: the long-run frequency of events in a well defined population. Its strength is structured data, designed samples, and clear frames. Bayesian  reasoning treats probability as a degree of belief that is updated with new evidence. 

In Bayesian statics there is a kind of inversion. You still talk about events that you observe, but you  don’t know the cause. It is often more comfortable with prediction, unstructured data, and contexts  where the population is not well defined in advance. When you have new pieces of information  you can add them. Those are conditions that are common in big data and AI. The growing use of  model-based inference with data that were not designed for representation is a key part of the  intersection I am describing. The Bayeasian ideas are very important to this kind of method.  

You develop a historical account of quantification regimes. Could you outline it? 

Before the current datification regime, there were earlier statistical regimes. Building on Alain  Desrosières’s work in the sociology of quantification, I argue that as the state’s actions—and the  ideas and theories about the economy and society that inspire them—change over time, so do the  statistical tools it uses. I also take the ideas of the French Regulation Schools, which points out that  capitalism has its periods and crisis, and the latter are good moments to understand changes and  capital accumulation patterns.  

In period of crisis, the statistical regimes is always demanded to give answers. I trace five regimes. First, a pre-statist regime of accounting, where numbers serve monarchical finance and remain largely  secret. With the rise of nation states and the bourgeois revolution in the nineteenth century, we  enter the enumeration regime, when censuses and descriptive statistics make populations legible within  territories. Since political tools are always combined with epistemological tools, the census here is  the tool, and the idea is to create a Bernulli earn that was equal to the state. 

The grid to see the reality.  

Yes, but you have to enumerate everything, we are talking about descriptive but not yet inferential  statistics, which is the fourth regime. After the 1929 crash, in the 1930s and 1940s, inferential  statistics and sampling theory became central as states tried to manage economies and society at  scale. They needed to intervene quickly. I call this the precision regime, consolidated after World War II alongside the creation of the UN, and two years after the Statistical Commission, which gather  all the representative. You also have the modernization of statistical offices, the use of computers,  and nation accounts. The system of official statistics was built in this period, which is the period of  managed capitalism and Keynesian macroeconomics.  

The crises of the 1970s and 1980s – oil, petrodollar, etc. – with the emergence of neoliberalism I  understand this to create a new regime with the influence of financialization on all aspects of life.  With finance as a driver of capitalism, you have this idea that everything needs to be quantified.  There is a new politics of indicators that are used for everything. 

Up until the OECD which tells poor countries which indicators need to be used. 

Yes, and the indicators that go into people’s lives and work. This is what I call the commensuration regime. The 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the mirror of this  commensuration regime: the idea that you can solve big political problems by quantificating  everything. We have measures for every single social problem. It’s interesting that this technocratic  ideal can be traced back to the political creation of the statistical field in the mid-19th century by  Adolphe Quetelet, who is the father of this kind of statistics. With the international statistical  conference in the beginning of the 1830s, the idea was very similar to SDGs, that we can unite all  statisticians from the world and create technocratic government by measuring everything. It was a  big failure. Finally, after the 2008–2011 crisis, we see the transition to a datafication regime: large scale data infrastructures, AI/ML methods, and platformization. The UN Big Data Project  presented as a “data revolution for sustainable development” is an important player for its  diffusion. 

And how did the UN Big Data Project play out in practice? 

After 2008 the UN became more dependent on private funding and corporate money. Big tech,  especially Microsoft but also Google and Meta, gained influence in statistical initiatives. At the UN,  the data revolution narrative argued that national statistical offices were not prepared to measure  the SDGs and therefore needed help from private corporations in order to use the whole potential  of big data. The platformization agenda proposes to bring state statisticians together with corporate  data scientists, often through public and private partnerships (PPPs), aiming to create new data  markets in a field that historically manages data as public goods. But PPPs often produce conflicts  of interests on activities that are based on trust. 

The UN has created a platform, controlled by an NGO called Global Partnership for Sustainable  Development Data created in the USA and linked to the UN Foundation created by Ted Turner,  founder of CNN, which comprises a lot of big corporations that both do donations and lobby  within the UN. The global partnership is the manager of the platform that comprises the four regional hubs in the Global South. 

Can it get more colonial than that?  

It actually can. I did an interview with the person responsible for this idea. He was saying that they  use cutting-edge tools and experts from the Global North and from big tech, within a federated  cloud so agencies in the Global South can upload data and benefit from analysis. In return,  corporations and Northern institutions build APIs, products, and legitimacy for institutions around  that data. It is an alluring vision, but it produces conflicts of interest in a domain where public trust  is foundational. 

Are you pointing out a case of corporate capture? 

They are trying to do that, but the process is only beginning. This also happened in the first wave  of neoliberalism, when companies tried to do that but there were reactions. But I see two main  obstacles to this transition to the datification regimes. The first is ontological, what data is. In  official statistics, data collected from people and firms to produce public information is treated as  a public good. In the algorithmic field, data is a commodity to be extracted, traded, and optimized  for private value, whether advertising, product development, or market advantage. When these  ontologies collide, tensions and practical problems multiply. 

The second is epistemological, how knowledge is produced. Official statistics proceeds deductively,  from societal questions to carefully designed data collections that represent populations. Much of  data science proceeds inductively, feeding models with large, often non-representative data and  inferring patterns, reconstructing representation after the fact by modeling. When statisticians and  data scientists work side by side, they bring different logics, methods, and purposes, and the friction  is political as well as technical.  

Are there counter-movements to this commodification? 

Following Karl Polanyi, I would say that commodification tends to trigger protective counter movements. In Europe, early enthusiasm for public–private experiments with big data around  2014–2017 gave way to the realization that such pilots go nowhere without access to what is now  called “privately held data” rather than big data. The European Statistical System has since pushed  for a regulatory route—recognizing certain privately held data as public-interest data to which  statistical authorities can have access under clear legal bases and with strong safeguards. The Data  Act has a provision that goes in this direction. It’s imperfect and contested, but it signals a path  that does not simply subordinate public statistics to market logic.  

In Brazil, I also found internal resistance within IBGE: a preference for regulatory solutions—say,  to access mobile phone data—and for developing in-house capabilities, rather than relying  primarily on corporate partnerships. 

This introduces the topic of statistical sovereignty. How does it relate to digital sovereignty, especially in Latin  America? 

I am developing the concept now. The thesis touches on sovereignty as state capacity to produce  public information, but the concept itself needs elaboration. In Latin America, with our histories  of state-building and national development, the public character of official information carries a  different weight than in many European debates, which often emphasize limiting state power in  the name of civil liberties. My starting point is people’s sovereignty. Citizens are squeezed between  governmental power and market power. Statistical information should be a right, high-quality,  reliable public information about the economy, society, and the impacts of platforms on work and  life, so that people can understand and govern their collective existence. If we lose a trusted public  provider, or if access becomes priced, fragmented, or corporately captured, people’s sovereignty is  diminished. Statistical sovereignty, understood as a right to public knowledge about our collective  life, is a necessary strand within broader digital sovereignty. 

Now, the debate on digital sovereignty has become much more concrete. It is clearer where  corporations stand, that they align with the USA government that can use this data infrastructure  as a tool of power. You can close the server, and you don’t have access to your data anymore. This  is a huge thing. With Trump’s government, it became crucial that governments build their own digital infrastructure. 

But for instance, what we are seeing in Brazil is the whole speech of sovereignty from the  government which is being captured by the corporations again. We have a project of “sovereignty  cloud” with SERPRO, the national server of technology. It is a federate cloud, very similar to the  project of the UN, aggregating providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google, Huawei. The new  president of IBGE is signing a contract to move large datasets, census microdata, survey files,  economic statistics, from secure in-house data centers into this “sovereignty cloud”. If public data  is migrated into big tech infrastructures under a sovereignty label, we should acknowledge the  contradiction and debate it. 

So when we say digital sovereignty, what do we mean? Keeping data within a certain territory?  Legal guarantees of safety and access? Public infrastructures? Trustworthy use of international  infrastructure under strong regulation? The answers vary and must be clarified, otherwise  sovereignty becomes a slogan that anyone can appropriate. 

In Europe we tried something similar to a sovereign could with Gaia-x, which was quite a failure. Finally, what do  you think are practical steps a country can take in the next five years? 

We have already missed opportunities. In Brazil, public universities had their own data centers and  moved rapidly to corporate clouds, accelerated by the pandemic, without a coordinated public  strategy. It solved short-term constraints but created long-term dependency. You had an  opportunity to build a network of public services, but you need incentives. If you leave the decision  to a single IT responsible for a university, it is easier to go to Google.  

That is also because platforms thrive by offering easy solutions where capitalism has already created structural  problems and a lack of resources.  

Yes, and in this case, we have lost opportunities. Now it is also happening in health. We should  have a public policy that at least understands the strategic statecraft areas that are important to  protect: defense, official statistics, health, education. I think that is why I decided not to receive the  AoIR prize: the goal of big tech is to anticipate critical thinking, and we need to work to avoid that.

—

See also Statistical Sovereignty, Democracy and Big Tech: Challenges of Datafication for National States, Evaluating the impact of trajectories of digitalization in official statistics on statistical sovereignty in the Global South by Oscar Arruda d’Alva and Edemilson Paraná.

”Those who challenge the capitalist order tend to be publicly labelled as criminals generally falling into the terrorist category.” Steve Kurtz (World-InfoCon Brussels (2000): An Annotated Report)

In memory of Steve Kurtz [1958-2025]

Steve Kurtz was an American artist, professor and co-founder of the pioneering art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Formed in 1987, CAE is a collective of tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.

Kurtz was caught in the post-9/11 gears. He fell into the crack between security and paranoia — a crack that widened after planes hit the Twin Towers.

In the fall of 2018 I contacted Steve Kurtz, founding member of Critical Art Ensemble, to ask him for permission to translate The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere, a chapter taken from Molecular Invasion published in 2002, a transgressive book that developed biotechnology as a contestational tool for the expansion of Flesh Machine Control; after all the kind guidance and approval, I mentioned that the book is a key anchor to track the hell Steve had to go through from 2004 to 2008. Years later the answer Kurtz unravelled about CAE being targeted by the FBI didn’t disappoint.

Every time I revisit Critical Art Ensemble’s work, I immediately remember the footage that circulated in news outlets in 2004 of the FBI, specifically the Joint Task Force on Terrorism wearing hazmat suits, making effective a search warrant, purposefully turned into a media spectacle of fear.

The Kafkaesque nightmare as described by Kevin Jon Heller, started in May 11th 2004, when Steve called 911 to report the sudden death of his wife, Hope Kurtz, editor, writer, and member of CAE. As The Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office clearly stated, Hope died of natural causes, heart failure at the age of 45. As soon as the paramedics arrived and found petri dishes, lab equipment and bacteria samples for an upcoming exhibition, not convinced with Kurtz’ explanation, they decided to contact the Buffalo Police Department to investigate further, which led them to call the FBI. What followed cemented the real intentions of the FBI to justify a baseless prosecution: illegal detentions, dubious allegations and a search warrant.

With the seal search warrant approved, the FBI had full access Steve’s personal belongings, computers, lab equipment, documents, passports, books, networks, notes and CAE’s archives, enough material to elaborate a profile that fulfilled the Department of Justice’s agenda. The case had international media exposure, with some media outlets eating federal agents suspicion of Kurtz and Dr. Bob Ferrell as a potential bioterrorists.

Even though the charges evolved into mail and wire fraud under the PATRIOT Act, these early accusations targeting Kurtz worked perfectly for the launch of a post 9/11 era of surveillance and punishment, his case was unprecedented and weaponized as a public effort to intimidate and criminalize Critical Art Ensemble’s practice and the communities attached to it. The message was clear and loud, anybody who holds “anti-American sentiments” and everything that doesn’t fit into the white cube gallery model, will become the primer example of the what to NOT to do, of what NOT to say, the enemy. As Steve shared in a phone call in May of this year talking about the subject: “They can bring ridiculous charges and still make your life miserable, even if at the end the charges are dismissed.”

This case also showed how communities can overcome control and authoritarian  amage, CAE Defence Fund emerged as a definitive collective force that allowed Kurtz to get financial, legal support and proper media exposure, Strange Culture (2008), the documentary directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson helped to defy the narrative the FBI tried to impose in the press, audiences understood the obscene amounts of tax money wasted to prosecute Kurtz and Ferrell, and most importantly, this created a chain effect regarding the alarming threats towards freedom of expression in cultural, scientific and academic institutions in the USA under the Bush Administration.

Yes, Steve was cleared of all charges by the DoJ in 2008, finally vindicated, but the four years taken from his life never returned, the press release was painful to digest:

“I don’t have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?”

Not allowing Steve Kurtz to mourn Hope Kurtz as any of us  eserve, all the stress, the abuses, the pressure, the public scrutiny, his private life, health and anonymity compromised…

Twenty years later after, I often wonder:Who got more resources?
Who got handsomely rewarded?
Who got promoted?

THE FBI OWES STEVE KURTZ AN APOLOGY

José López / H C-(M)

Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080914150359/http://caedefensefund.org/releases/cleared_6_11_08.html
http://critical-art.net/defense/press/BuffNews_BigBrother.pdf
http://critical-art.net/defense/press/BuffNews_Dabkowski.pdf
http://critical-art.net/defense/press.html
https://opiniojuris.org/2008/05/25/the-collapse-of-the-bioterror-case-against-dr-steven-kurtz/
https://www.lightresearch.net/interviews/kurtz/kurtz.pdf
https://www.wired.com/2004/06/twisted-tale-of-art-death-dna/
https://fnewsmagazine.com/2004/09/steve-kurtz-artist-patriotfelon-2/

 

Theory on Demand #59

    

Paritance: A Philosophical Investigation Behind Cognition and Simulation

By Henry Warwick

This work advances the idea of Paritance—the acceptance of parity—as a funda­mental operation of human cognition and culture. Warwick argues that the capacity to recognize a copy, model, or simulation as ontologically sufficient to its referent underlies cultural practices, such as simply hearing a recording as music up to the plausibility of artificial intelligence. Far from being a merely technical phenomenon, this acceptance reveals deep continuities between modern technologies of reproduction and premodern metaphysical and occult practices.

Through a critical and sometimes deeply personal genealogy spanning medieval necromancy, ritual evocation, and demonology, the book demonstrates how contem­porary uses of computers recapitulate occult logics of animation, invocation, and resurrection. In this framing, AI appears less as an unprecedented rupture than as an uncanny rearticulation of an ancient aspiration: the conjuration and “resurrection” of a dead god in machinic digital form.

Grounded in both philosophical analysis and experiential insight derived from Zen training and decades of musical practice, Paritance situates cognition and simulation within a transhistorical discussion on thought, representation, and creativity. It accesses a wide variety of disciplines including philosophy of mind, media theory, occult studies, and critical technology studies, offering an original account of the hidden logics that structure contemporary human invention.

Henry Warwick is an Associate Professor in the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University where he teaches media theory and sound synthesis. His research often focuses on media infrastructures, information politics, and the cultural history of electronic sound. He is the author of The Radical Tactics of the Offline Library (INC, 2014). Alongside his scholarship, he has released more than twenty albums of ambient and avant-garde electronic music, maintaining a practice that bridges theory and sound.

Edited by: Tripta Chandola

Cover Design: Katja van Stiphout

Design and EPUB development: Klaudia Orczykowska

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2025

ISBN: 978-90-83520-98-8

Contact:
Institute of Network Cultures
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

Order a copy or download this publication for free at: www.networkcultures.org/publications

This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0./

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I have always found it quite reasonable to think that the large-scale use of do-it-all machines produces collective value that deserves to be fairly distributed. In my cyborg anthropology, citizens, now emancipated thanks to the reprogrammable infrastructures that they always carry with them, are economically supported by the state to be able to contribute to the management of public affairs. Constantly reeducated by the informational reverb they feed on, like arendtian Greek aristocrats they move into action to fulfill themselves in the public sphere. At the same time, they contribute to the real-time emergence of the volonté générale in a perfect synthesis between direct and representative democracy. The good news is that this redistributive universal basic income already exists. In Italy, it takes the perverse forms of early retirements, permanent positions with an extremely low productivity rate, and in my case, of modest unemployment benefits for precarious university researchers. Having now reached the age of Our Lord and guided by a well-established antiwork faith, faced with the devastating idea of spending yet another winter in northeastern Italy, with the fog and particulate levels far above the legal limit, I remind myself that the scraps of the sweet welfare state are urging me to travel abroad to affordable destinations. That little bit of extra passive income helps; all that remains for me is to organize a local network of people. I chose the South American continent for linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical reasons. The big question the native asks Jared Diamond — why does Europe have so much cargo? — is explained by Cortés’s competitive advantage: the conquistadores arrive in the Americas with steel weapons and immunity to disease thanks to livestock domestication. Fascinating geographical determinism. South America, a vast and messy continent, ends up looking sufficiently uniform to European eyes. Go to South America, thus my friend Jordi, and you’ll see what capitalism without a welfare state looks like. A modern Chatwin with a smartphone and the fear of having it stolen, I tell myself as I pedal over the cobblestones of the limited traffic zone in a former Renaissance city. In search of the Milodon and on the threshold of the breakdown of the United States’ accumulation cycle. Empires in decline have always fought tooth and nail, thus Fidel Castro to Allende who, faithful to democratic principles, sacrificed his life to fascists backed by the CIA, I tell myself as I sit at lunch at my aunt’s, an excellent menu unchanged for generations: tagliatelle, sides simmering in pots, Merlot. Yes, researching the trajectories of digital sovereignty in the region has many advantages; it’s a good story, captivating, marketable. Understanding its struggles, its spaces of resistance and emancipation, the stories of those who live in it from a pharmacological perspective. Even better, its tribulations, I tell myself, a special word when pronounced in Veneto dialect by my creationist grandmother with Parkinson’s: no sta farme tribolar – where, because of the tremor, the sentence seemed to emanate not from her mouth but from her hands. A phrase later taken up by my mother: te ghe trent’ani e anca adesso te mantengo; par mi te sì na preocupassion; te me fa tribolar. (You’re thirty and I still have to provide for you; you’re a burden on my mind; you make me struggle). A word present in Revelation 7:14, where the Great Tribulation is the period our Lord speaks of to indicate the time of the end. Which I read as the end of the suffering arising from the concern of having to sustain oneself financially, from the specter of having to stay soto paròn (under a boss) in a region where the too rapid shift from a peasant society to wealth, the Catholic inheritance, and the land consumption of a choke-chain progress have led to immense disasters. There is no real work without suffering. It’s better to think of a Plan B.

There is something obvious with our obsession with computation. With the invention of the wheel, humans began to imagine the entire world as a spinning wheel, an endless cycle of seasons, lives, and realms. In Indian cosmology there is samsara, the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through which living beings pass. With the invention of writing, the whole world becomes a book. In Judaism, God is the Author of Being and inscribes our names in the Book of Life. Saint Augustine speaks of the Liber mundi as the incarnation of the divine word, with human beings as sentences running between margins already drawn. The parchment medium becomes the message: in the beginning was the logos. With the invention of the engine, a gear turning on other gears, the entire world becomes mechanical. God is the Divine Watchmaker, the planets revolve along predetermined trajectories, and the universe is reduced to a precision machine. Leibniz imagines the cosmos itself as a calculating machine. It is no accident, then, that we now ask what computation means for the organization of society, what are the consequences of computation, and that we are inclined to think of the world as simulacrum. Truth be told, it took very little for us to fall in love with digital technologies in the name of efficiency. In North America, in 1964, during the Berkeley protests, Mario Savio still used the metaphor of the bureaucratic and military machine in a negative sense, calling on people to throw their bodies upon the gears to stop it. But only a few years later, the computer had become a tool of emancipation and community-building, celebrated by the counterculture of experimentation. In the Soviet Union, computers moved, starting in the 1950s, from being dismissed as a product of American pseudoscience to being hailed as machines of communism. Nowadays’ calculation, central both to centralized planning processes and to the market economy, operates at planetary scale and at the speed of electrical immediacy. And Stafford Beer’s early‑1970s insight remains unsurpassed: to use computation only to optimize and streamline firms is a great waste. It must be collectivized to rethink the bases of sociality and to guarantee freedom that is effective and computable. A project naturally implemented by the malign genius of capital through advertising in a formidable process of self‑renewal that has made both users and state forms dependent on digital rentiers. In this journey, digital tribulations name the lived struggles created by platforms whose business is to arbitrage human time, certain states’ attempts to redirect platformization – the quest for digital sovereignty – and popular organization that seeks to reclaim time and autonomy.

There is something mesmerizing about the artworks currently exhibited at POST Arnhem. In the exhibition ‘Embodied Encryption’ you will find weirdly morphing videos of deepfake drag performances, abstract closeup visualizations of motherhood based on poetic scripts, and gender non-binary portraits generated from archive paintings of the Qajar dynasty. However, the exhibition in general does not come across as conceptually complex or abstract as this may sound. The overall decor is simple and the atmosphere at POST is rather serene. What stands out is the intriguing visual quality of the topical work, still on display until mid-December. 

Like with previous POST exhibition in Nijmegen, I think the particular relevance of this exhibition should be emphasized. We currently live in a time of strict image regimes that confine and police how we see ourselves and others. Patrick Nathan described this in his book Image Control and points at the current resurgence of fascist aesthetics. In the brochure of the exhibition, Lieke Wouters uses the example of a 2024 twitter post by Geert Wilders with an AI generated false ‘epitome’ of the traditional white family. The post coincided with a government’s agreement on the most restrictive asylum procedures ever. The AI system can as such becomes an extrapolation and feedback loop for oppressive worldviews. We definitely need creative interruptions to counter invasive and politically fraught images and specific image environments. Better flagging generated content or further improving the existing regulations and data moderation is not enough. We have to be more inquisitive and experiment with creative resistance that actual deals with underlying structural political issues and systemic injustice. How can we take artistic experimentation with encryption and glitching towards reimagining political alternatives? The presented artworks can be seen as preliminary artistic answers to this question, and that is exactly what makes the POST exhibition so intriguing. Especially as the works seem to revive interesting lineages of performative experimentation and artistic interventionism for current algorithmic society.

A clear example is the work ‘in transitu’: by posting bare chest photos on Instagram while transitioning Ada Ada Ada probes the interpretation of gender by algorithmic platforms. The work combines brave and vulnerable experimentation with generative models and critical investigation of platform categorizations. Also the work of Jake Elwes called The Zizi Show is a case in point, involving the London drag scene to create a new datasets of specific movements form drag performances. Elwes’ exhibited life size videos were produced with mutual consent, drag kings and queens were synthesized through deepfakes, exploring ‘what AI can teach us about drag, and what drag can teach us about AI’. It activates performative queer art in relation to current generative AI and algorithmic platforms. It unemphatically and cleverly interrupts binary notions and uses glitches and generated visuals to oppose reductive technological imaginations.

Still, if these artworks merely offer critical perspectives or stimulate discussion, this would be rather unsatisfying. The reference of Legacy Russels ‘glitch feminism’ in the catalogue helps to set the tone for a more clear political stance, but Russels manifesto risks encompassing too vague and somewhat fragmented notions like ghostly, cosmic, shady, virus like, refusal. The reception of the exhibited work could benefit, I think, from emphasizing more concrete lineages of creative resistance and more explicit political ambitions. 

As Dominique Routhier suggests in With and Against, “our own spectacular moment in time – where automation discourse is yet again a defining feature – has a history, and, more importantly, a history of contestation”. He traces such history from the surrealists to Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis with a specific focus on the work of the Situationist International. Recent forms of glitch art or engagement with technical failures indeed also can be understood as deriving from this ‘avant-garde’ history (even if they were working in analogue media then) as Michael Betancourt stresses in his book Glitch Theory. Part of this history is also the work of the surrealist women recently described as Militant Muses which are especially important in relation to the exhibited work at POST. Specifically, the work of Claude Cahun which consists of shifting portraits also with a mesmerizing and haunting quality, that resolutely intervened in the imagination and ideologies of the time. During fascist oppression, through secrecy and dangerous subordinations, Cahun and others created false documents and ‘paper bullets’ and experimented with performative identities, intriguing depictions, and indirect action. Cahun’s work and life interrupted codes and identities, and “reveled in ambiguity and sought disruption”, writes Gavin James Bower, as “a way to reconceptualize society”.

The strategic interruption of codes and identities to reconceptualize society, related to what José Estoban Muñoz calls disidentification, is different from the more limited pleas for more visibility for queer and marginalized groups or calls to expand rich data sets for more inclusion. The latter would mean further adaptation and cooptation into what still will be a “heteronormatively constructed and oppressive social system” as the Queer AI introduction of the seminal Queer reflections on AI book phrases it. According to these reflections, artistic experimentation should rather be a “notion of refusal that articulates itself against binaries of all kinds”. Or more positively framed, like in Shabbar’s project Queer-Alt-Delete, art can interlace “algorithmic uncertainty with subjectivity in ways that facilitate an experimentation with new political becomings”. 

This can push the works in the exhibition even more fascinating directions. Like the abstract visual narratives with evocative and visceral images of motherhood that Beverley Hood presents. The work becomes especially poignant when it helps to redefine what counts as motherhood and actively opposes naïve and regressive imaginations of what a mother is and should be. Just like the surrealist militant muses that already used different tropes to fight restrictive labels put on women, and countered prejudices around childcare and stereotypical women work, as surrealist covens summarized. We could see reimaginations of motherhood then having everyday implications and constitute more profound personal and political consequences. Maybe this could be further provoked by imagining radical alternatives like the “queer polymaternalism” proposed by Sophie Lewis, that speaks to “all those comradely gestators, midwives, and other sundry interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction”. 

Or as a final example, this could push Rodell Warner’s Artificial Archive, also part of the POST exhibition, to even more firmly engagement with anticolonial work. Historical colonial databases that Warner works with often reaffirm stereotypical aesthetics of spectacular, exotic, otherworldly views and landscapes that await exploitation and subjugation. The exhibited work imagines what could have existed outside this extractive gaze. Taking a queer and surprising turn in relation to for example Albuquerque Paula’s work with colonial archives included in the just published Slow Technology reader, it use a similar more slow and deliberating approach, remediating inherent bias and stereotypes, resulting in the type of ideation that also the AIxDesign festival On Slow AI seemed to praise. Just like Moreshin Allahyari’s generated portraits of ‘moon faces’ it is a shame if this lacks any more substantial idea of what invokes ‘genderless’ spiritual experiences or abstains from the political implications of more firm anticolonialism. Surrealists ‘scorning of white supremacy, patriotism, religion, colonialism’ that Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley highlight, can be a reminder to work towards more elaborate and politically solid but still seductive and enchanting creative resistance. 

As I already proposed during EsArts in Barcelona, expanding on surrealist experiments of symbolic sabotage and war on work we might furthermore subvert the creative industries’ rush towards enhancing commercial creative work with algorithmic technologies. Artistic experimentation to exist otherwise  and readapting the surrealist look for today’s algorithmically mediated world can counter image recognition and surveillance of the eye of the master. The radical surrealist dreams that already resurfaced in later cultural countermovements and riots of the 60s and 70s, as Abigail Susik and Elliot H. King argue in their beautiful recent book, could resurface again as part of current radical investigations and creative disruptions of today’s high-tech world. And for opposing the fascist resurgence within the current pervasive image regimes, we can benefit from surrealists creative legacy of resistance and persistent antifascism, central to the late Lenbachhaus exhibition impressively documented in the companying anthology.

Future artistic experimentation thus should, I think, embrace the impulse of militant muses to develop a firmer embodied antifascist and anticolonial queer and poetic resistance. Maybe not all the artists presented at POST are willing to engage in such a thing. Maybe some of the works now fail to live up to such promise. But if it fails, let it be a queer art of failure (taking Jack Halberstams famous assertion somewhat out of context). Especially in exhibitions like this, far removed from the more usual pretentious immersive and hyped experiential places like NXT Amsterdam and more intimate then the spacious artworks currently on display for Gogbot x RMT at Rijksmuseum Twente, this inconclusive experimentation can be sympathetically pushed and possibly further politicized. This should certainly not become yet another (oppositional) image spectacle. The attentive, accessible, but still gripping and glitchy moving visuals at POST might just one of the gateways towards future bold imaginations and generated visualizations for what could end up as embodied radical political alternatives. 

 

I began reading Marisol Negrón’s Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings (Duke University Press, 2024) in earnest this summer, as Bad Bunny’s “NUEVAYol” flooded New York City streets. Whole generations of people had never heard El Gran Combo’s “Un Verano en Nueva York” (1975), perhaps not-coincidentally celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. The song is a staple in this city, particularly in the weeks leading up to the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. Instagram and TikTok were inundated with videos of Bad Bunny fans, many of whom were millennials and Gen Z, dancing with their grandparents to “NUEVAYoL” and “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” Bad Bunny had successfully ushered in a resurgence of interest in salsa, a genre that has remained vibrant since its founding. The archipelago’s superstar celebrated the city that was, beginning in the early 1890s, a major site of Puerto Rican migration for decades; in several of the videos for songs from DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025), he honored the Nuyorican community and all they had contributed to the culture.

In that vein, Negrón has written a book that is, shockingly to me, one of the very few books that center salsa in general and the role of New York in its creation specifically. In this, she joins Juan Flores, Frances Aparicio, and Christopher Washburne to produce book-length studies that examine this genre. She also depends on the magazine articles of long-gone local publications such as Latin N.Y., which ran from 1973-1985, and journalists such as Aurora Flores, Adela López, and Nayda Román, women who recorded what at times feels like an incredibly-male environment. Here, she is focusing on the record label that is synonymous with salsa, Fania Records, which, at one point had signed such singers and musicians as Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Hector Lavoe, Ruben Blades, Ray Baretto, and Eddie Palmieri, whose passing this summer marked the end of an era, in many ways. Founded by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci in 1964, Fania reached its heights in the 1970s, securing a distribution center in Panama in 1974, establishing its own recording studio in 1976 – the first “Latin” label to do so – and purchasing a manufacturing plant in 1977. Yet by the end of the decade, many of the original artists had moved on, as had Masucci, who sold the catalog and created several other businesses that continued to do business using the name “Fania” (20). Nevertheless, the music that emerged from that critical historical moment in New York City continues to impact subsequent generations.

Citing Caridad de la Luz, La Bruja, a Nuyorican legend of the spoken word scene who currently serves as the executive director of Nuyorican Poets Café, Negrón defines NuYoRico as “that place somewhere between the Empire State and El Morro” (9), the latter being the fortress originally built in the sixteenth century that is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Made in NuYoRico is divided into two parts featuring three chapters each; the first part, “Anatomy of a Salsa Boom, 1964-1979” marks the cultural history of salsa for those fifteen years, while the second part, “After the Boom Is Gone, 1980s-2000s,” charts a fascinating examination of the salsa boom in various contexts, including a futile attempt by insular government officials to attract foreign investment by citing salsa as an impactful cultural artifact. In doing so, they offended a faction of the archipelago’s elites who distanced themselves due to the genre being created in the diaspora.

Negrón reviews the 1972 documentary classic Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa Latina) in her first chapter. This movie served for many as the introduction to the Fania All-Stars. Featuring footage from a 1971 concert at New York’s Cheetah Lounge, it features Barretto, Larry Harlow, Willie Colón, Ismael Miranda, “Cheo” Feliciano, Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez, and LaVoe (whose name appears in this way throughout the book recalling his nickname as “La Voz”).  In chapter two, “‘Los Malotes de la Salsa’: Salsa Dons and the Performance of Subjecthood,” Negrón looks at the imagery Colón and LaVoe create in their lyrics and the cover art of their albums, while the following chapter, “Salsa’s Dirty Secret: Liberated Women, Hairy Hippies, and the End of the World,” focuses on their performance, together and individually, of a virile masculinity dependent as much on the portraits of insubordinate women, unruly yearnings, and queerness. It is this chapter that speaks fleetingly of Celia Cruz and La Lupe, the two Afro-Cuban women who were the only women signed to Fania. In a study that examines how very much a masculinist world this was, I was looking for the counterpoint that both Cruz and La Lupe offered, only to be met with two pages of reference to them. A deeper discussion centering these women remains opportune.

The fourth chapter “Puerto Rico’s (Un)Freedom: The Soundscape of Nation Branding,” charts the moment in 1992 when, ahead of the celebrations within the Spanish-speaking world of Columbus’s voyage, Puerto Rican governor Rafael Hernández Colón sought to brand Puerto Rico using salsa as the premier Puerto Rican cultural export, only to be met with opposition from elites on the island. With the last two chapters, “Entre la Letra y la Nota: Becoming ‘El Cantante de los Cantantes,’” and “(Copy)Rights and Wrongs: ‘El Cantante’ and the Legislation of Creative Labor,” Negrón examines the last years of LaVoe, his improvisational contributions to what many consider to be his signature song, “El Cantante,” and the legal struggle between Rubén Blades, the writer of the song, and Masucci, for recognition of Blades as sole author of the song.

Made in NuYoRico is a fascinating book, one that encourages the reader to have their streaming service within reach. With the conversation of every album, one can pause and listen to the songs accompanying the album and the art under discussion. In this she joins countless scholars of music, but I was especially reminded of Mark Anthony Neal’s most recent book, Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (NYU, 2022), which was fundamentally dependent on the reader listen to the songs he was referencing in real time. It is a theoretical book published by an academic press, and so discussions about abjection and subjecthood may not reach the general reader; nevertheless it is a worthwhile addition to the library of any salsa aficionado, who will undoubtedly learn something new while revisiting the past.

On August 23, 1973, only two years after their sets at the Cheetah Lounge, the Fania All-Stars played Yankee Stadium. Having attained a certain level of success with the release of Our Latin Thing, the concert at the celebrated ballpark secured legendary status for these singers as they played before more than 40,000 spectators. Four months later they reprised the concert in San Juan’s newly-built Coliseo Roberto Clemente. In September 1974 they played in the Zaire 74 music festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the country’s premier stadium, the Stade du 20 Mai: the Fania All-Stars were global.

Fifty-one years later, in September 2025, the National Football League announced its selection of Bad Bunny as the performer of the Super Bowl LX halftime show, taking place in February 2026. The championship game is set to air exactly a week after the Grammy Awards, where Bad Bunny is nominated in six categories, including Best Record, Best Song, and Best Album of the Year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos. With an expected viewership of more than one hundred million people, he and his repertoire of reggaetón, dembow, Latin trap, boleros, and yes, decidedly Puerto Rican bomba, plena, and salsa, will be at the center of yet another international cultural moment.  Debemos tirar más fotos.

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Featured Image” “Jibaros Con Salsa” by Flickr User Lorenzo, Taken on July 27, 2011, CC BY-NC 2.0

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Vanessa K. Valdés is a writer and an independent scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. She is the author of three books, Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2014); Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Schomburg (SUNY Press, 2017); and with David Pullins, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (Yale UP, 2024). You can learn more about her at https://drvkv23.com/.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:

SO! Reads: Licia Fiol-Matta’s The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music–Iván Ramos

SO! Reads: Danielle Shlomit Sofer’s Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music–Verónica Mota

As Loud As I Want To Be: Gender, Loudness, and Respectability Politics–Liana Silva

Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States–Vanessa Valdes

Dear Geert—

Greetings from a Los Angeles that while no longer reeling from assaults like the devastating fires, appalling abductions by masked federal agents, and occupying troops, cannot be described as having recovered from these past ten months. Instead, we are numbed and in remove. Southern California feels very far from Washington where the lords of chaos flood the zone with shit every day. Yet, we feel equally distant from Northern California where the next round of techno-social disruption is being beta-tested, as well as from New York where both the stock market and mainstream media insist that the house isn’t on fire, it’s just the drapes. Meanwhile, on my home campus, even the Mediterranean climate and ever-present sunshine are insufficient to alleviate the existential dread of a 1.2 billion dollar fine demanded of us by the Trump administration. While we at UCLA hope for TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), we’ve seen private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Brown, and Cornell shell out over 300 million dollars so far to placate the grift. I queried Google’s AI engine about how high a stack of one billion, one-dollar bills would be. It’s 100 kilometers, high enough to pass through the atmosphere’s Kármán line, and enter outer space.

This has made me think about the nature of vast wealth in the 21^st century. It’s a commonplace that we’re in a New Gilded Age, but that doesn’t work as a metaphor anymore. Not when Trump hosts a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago complete with hired showgirls vamping it up in rotating, human-scaled champagne coupes while the government was literally shut down and food assistance to the poor was being curtailed. Not when he has literally slathered the Oval Office with gold-plated kitsch. Trump is demonstrating that 21^st century wealth is not “like” a gilded object, it “is” a gilded object. This in turn may explain something that perplexes me, an American with little exposure to royalty, but that may seem less head-scratching to Europeans with residual monarchies.

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by the idea of “fuck you money.” This meant that capitalism, or luck, or even theft could garner enough cash to tell anyone to go fuck themselves, that grit and moxie can triumph over bloodlines and connections. At the lower end of the economy, there was the outlaw country song, “Take This Job and Shove It,” a working-class classic about telling the boss to fuck off. The 1977 version by Johnny Paycheck has been on honky-tonk jukeboxes ever since, and stories abound of workers toting boom boxes and Bluetooth speakers to blast this anti-boss anthem through their workplaces as they quit. Further up the income ladder were Reagan era yuppies striving to be masters of the universe. The assumption was that if you were ferocious enough, and fully embraced greed, you’d become like Gordon Gekko, the slick haired plutocrat played by Michael Douglas in the Oliver Sone film, Wall Street (1987).

Hungry young associates dressed in padded shoulder suits and ties from Charivari not for the entry-level jobs they had, but for the power they wanted. The women striding to work in LA Gear sneakers with pumps in their attaches were right behind them, with their own champagne wishes and caviar dreams. The fantasy was to access the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, after a syndicated television show of that name hosted by an oleaginous Brit with the pitch-perfect name Robin Leach. The show ran from 1984-1994, in no small measure because Leach showcased the rewards of an all-consuming id, with his Gekko-adjacent subjects always giving—and never taking—orders. This sort of plutopornography was standard content for the Internet influencers of the aughts and teens and also focused on the freedom that wealth offers. Even if it’s just the freedom rent a studio that looks like an airplane interior—complete with artificial window lights—to host a fake-it-til-you-make-it photoshoot of a “private jet trip” to Vegas, complete with a posse. The entourage understands, even if they have to take a van to get to Sin City to shoot more content of their baller, high value lives.

Far above them is a ruling class literally richer than any in American, nay indeed, human history. Yet, we see that true autonomy for them is just as much a mirage as the influencers’ “private jets.” Here’s some numbers and actions regarding the three richest men in America as Donald Trump was installed in 2017 as the nation’s 45^th president (call it T45): Jeff Bezos was worth 67 billion dollars and bought the Washington Post newspaper to go after the president-elect, giving it a new, anti-authoritarian motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Mark Zuckerberg, worth 55 billion dollars, hired whole teams of fact checkers to combat fake news and suspended Trump’s posting privileges on Facebook and Instagram on January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot. Elon Musk, then worth 12 billion, publicly criticized the Republican National Committee for nominating Trump, reportedly called him a “fucking moron” in private, and resigned from two advisory committees over disagreements with the first term president.

In that first Trump term, I thought that each of these tech bros had enough billions to truly claim fuck you status. Yet fast forward eight years (T45 plus the interregnum) to 2025, and there’s a photo of the three of them sitting in a row yucking it up at Trump’s second inauguration as the nation’s 47^th president (T47). Bezos is now worth 239 billion (personal wealth up by 250%) and has fired/retired dozens of the Post’s columnists and journalists to shift its editorial focus to the “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Bezos’ company, Amazon, donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc. Zuckerberg at 211 billion (up 283%) eviscerated his social media fact checkers, reinstated Trump’s accounts, and his company, Meta, matched Amazon, also donating $1,000,000 to the inaugural. As for Musk at 433 billion (up 3425%—no that is not a typo), the South African-born, Canadian-educated tycoon supported the reelection campaign with a quarter billion of his own fortune and became the returned strongman’s most visible plutocratic enabler. Things have moved so fast and so ruthlessly in less than a year, that we need to be reminded that the richest man in the world savaged the world’s poorest children during his disastrous helming of the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was a department that wasn’t a department, named after a speculative cryptocurrency, that was in turn inspired by a Shibu Inu dog meme that peaked in the early teens. All of this would be comic if it were funny, it would be tragic if any of the people involved had an interiority worth considering, but in the end, it was simply heartbreaking because so many suffered and so much damage continues to be done.

 Bezos and Zuckerberg were joined in Washington by other non-MAGA billionaires almost too numerous to count, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple’s Tim Cook. Thus it was, during the T47 inauguration, Americans saw their wealthiest countrymen bend at the knee and kiss the ring of someone they had claimed to oppose and despise, and the one third of the electorate that is MAGA reveled at the spectacle of this subjugation. There’s a quote misattributed to the novelist John Steinbeck about why socialism never had much of a foothold in the U.S.: the poor in America see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. But what happened to that dream of fuck you money? Don’t these millions of embarrassed Americans lust for the chance to tell the boss to stuff it, move to the beach, and drink margaritas while raising their middle fingers to pencil-neck bureaucrats and penny-ante politicians? Apparently not anymore, as MAGA cheered the sight of obeisance and obedience.

Most people don’t give much consideration to the precarious relationship between money and power in autocracies. A few just-slightly-left-of-center media outlets like The Atlantic and The New Yorker pointed out the morphological similarities of Trump’s alliance with the tech bros to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his ever-shifting cadre of oligarchs. Putin’s vassals, however, have an unfortunate habit of falling out of windows to their deaths when they put up even the slightest resistance to the Kremlin’s rule. Yet new money men are always waiting in line to cozy up to Putin, no matter the risk to their freedoms or their lives. Even the biggest moths are drawn to the flame because they confuse its light with the stars they use to navigate at night. That confusion often leads them to ruin, as they self-immolate in the fire. Billionaires, it seems, are just as thoughtless as moths.

As anyone familiar with the story of German industrial giants during the run-up to WWII should realize, great wealth gravitates towards might, and enormous wealth is remarkably comfortable when it’s next to absolute power. The Nazi party was in economic trouble in the early 1930s, and it was saved in large measure by the intervention of industrial giants like I.G. Farben and Krupp. Both companies became active supporters of Hitler’s regime and the Third Reich’s armed forces. Not coincidentally, Farben and Krupp executives were among the few civilians brought up on war crimes charges during the Nuremberg Tribunals after the victory of the Allies.

I have no idea how well-versed Bezos and Zuckerberg are about the fate of these C-Suite Germans, but we know that Musk thinks about the Third Reich a lot, too much, in fact. When he purchased Twitter, Musk reinstated Trump’s and other insurrectionists’ banned accounts, and then opened the service, now rebranded X, to Nazis, of both the neo- and paleo- varieties. There are now so many of them on X, that when he trained Grok, his AI chatbot, on his own site’s content, Grok started to refer to itself as MechaHitler and spewed antisemitic posts. Musk disavowed all of this as glitches and “satire,” because apology and empathy are dead to him. But do Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the other accommodating billionaires ever look at the high windows in their office complexes and worry? Are they certain that there will be no tribunals in the future, even that discursive one we call the judgement of history? Is there any amount of money that would give them the cojones to tell Trump, a septua-moving-on-octogenarian, and his ghoulish henchmen to go fuck themselves? The ratio of greed to courage in these men is appalling.

Since we’ve been talking about gelding and gilding, I’ll close with a metallurgical juxtaposition. In New York, lines of people queued up at Sotheby’s for a glimpse of Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture, America (2016), before it sold at auction. In 2017, 100,000 people saw Cattelan’s functioning, 225 pound, 18 karat solid gold toilet when it was installed at the Guggenheim. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Cattelan, the Italian provocateur, chose to show his resplendent throne in New York on the hundredth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. After Duchamp turned a urinal upside-down, signed it, and declared the object a readymade, he claimed that the “only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.” This comment came to mind when Trump asked the Guggenheim for a loan of a Van Gogh painting to hang in his private rooms during his first term. After they declined this request, one of the curators offered him the solid gold toilet instead. There is no record of a response from the T45 White House, but perhaps we can see in this anecdote an explanation for the vindictive fury with which T47 has treated America’s cultural institutions, including the national treasures in the Smithsonian.

After all this notoriety, America is worth far more than the four million dollars it would sell for by weight. The same cannot be said for the humble penny. A week before Sotheby’s auctioned off the golden toilet, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia pressed the last copper penny, ending a tradition dating back to 1793, because it now costs almost four cents to manufacture each one cent coin (even after its composition moved to 97.5% zinc with a thin 2.5% copper plating decades ago). The end of the penny as currency augurs the end of the penny as a symbol of thrift and value. “Mind the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves” and “a penny saved is a penny earned” already seems like useless advice to young people who inhabit a speculative economy revolving around cryptocurrencies, sports betting, and meme stocks. Unfortunately, the last word belongs to Donald Trump who told the Chicago Tribune in 1989, before T45 and T47 were a gleam in his eye, “Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” Therein lies the problem in a gilded nutshell.