Disintegrator

We’re joined by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven, the Amsterdam design and film studio. In some part we're here to talk about their new book, The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures (Verso, 2026), though also at the top of our minds is Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans, written this year with Nina Beguš, Gašper Beguš and Riccardo Petrini for Antikythera.

The Hard Question of Art opens by conceding that art does not change the world, at least in the way we were told it would. For Daniel, art does its actual work by being perceived, and any politics of art has to start from what that perception does.

Latent Spacecraft starts from a GAN trained on eight words of English that begins inventing new ones the way a child does, and lets you walk around inside its vector space. On a walk Daniel found a battered Finnegans Wake on a free sidewalk bookshelf, 30 or 40 words on page one that appear in no dictionary, and a GAN trained on Joyce babbles Joycean, which Whisper and GPT-4 collapse into different subtitles. Daniel brings in Anthropic’s J-space paper, where researchers found words Claude has in mind before it answers, as the case for treating a model’s interior as a place you can enter.

We're so delighted to have them on the pod!

Sorry this took so long we published a major whitepaper and went on tour ok???? But we've got a ton in the chamber we're back we're so back thanks for your patience.

We’re joined by Federico Campagna: philosopher and writer and magic man in his own right. Campagna is associate fellow at the Warburg Institute, for years the rights director at Verso, and author of Technic and Magic (2018), Prophetic Culture (2021) and Otherworlds (2025). He also co-created Agora with Andrea Bellini at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, a stipended semester of art and philosophy whose lectures are released free afterwards.

What can anyone say about Reality itself? Nearly the whole conversation is about worlding, the subject of the book Campagna is writing now for 2027. For Campagna a world gets built in exactly one place, the individual imagination, which cuts the continuum of Reality (capital R) into separate beings. He calls the faculty doing the cutting language, in a sense wide enough to include mathematics and dancing, which picks up right where our episode with Beatrice Fazi and co. on the cut left off.

The cut creates its objects for the first time: France exists because people decided to invent it, and once invented it can tell them who to kill. The trouble starts when you bring the shared metaphysics home and see a human in the mirror, which for Campagna is the moment you “stop being a creator and you become a creature.

The last twenty minutes are a real fight. Campagna reads AI as a tool made by the top of the capitalist class, which past a certain amount trades in power instead of money, to erase the last theoretical leverage of workers. Marek pushes back hard: AI came out of cybernetics and deep learning long before it met labor exploitation, Simondon gives technical objects a pull of their own, and Marc Andreessen matters more than Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Campagna holds his ground with grammar (“real fucking innovation”), the sonnet and the surname, all technologies on his account, and proposes that we stop calling AI technology until we call the alphabet one too. Banger.

We're incredibly honored to be joined by Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow, and Brian Solis, ServiceNow's Head of Global Innovation, digital anthropologist, and nine-time author. Together, Dave and Brian run ServiceNow Futures and have just published Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies (Wiley, 2026).

This is an awesome episode, where we have the luxury of talking to quite literal titans of industry about applied AI. We start with the concept of the 'workflow,' the graph-structure of business logic — designed, as Dave puts it, for the limitations of people and the scarcity of resources, and now confronting an abundance of intelligence. From there we work our way to the tantalizing concept at the core of their book, an 'infinite company,' a company that is technically enabled to such an extent that it can continously, progressively, reinvent itself.

Marek pushes the concept to its limits: can an infinite company generate synthetic demand? Can it get infinitely big? And when does it tip into a true dark enterprise, agents making executive decisions about what to build and why? For Brian and Dave, the answer leaves a path open for humans as leaders, workers, and collaborators, who function to destabilize the linear, incremental self-improvement of agentic systems and reroute business into new and unexpected places.

At the core of our conversation: Brian Solis & Dave Wright, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies(Wiley, 2026). See: infinitecompany.ai

We're joined by Anna Greenspan: philosopher, Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the Center for AI and Culture, and author of Shanghai Future and China and the Wireless Undertow. Longtime listeners will recognize her twice over — as co-editor of Machine Decision is Not Final and as the author of Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine.

The occasion is Greenspan's new research: a philosophy of the artificial built through the garden. If AI is now something "grown, not built," the garden raises the question of agency immediately — anyone who tries to make one learns that the thing the garden gardens is the gardener. Greenspan is surveying seven aesthetic garden traditions, and here we tour a few.

References:
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872), esp. "The Book of the Machines"
Anna Greenspan, Bogna Konior, Benjamin Bratton and Amy Ireland (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2024)
Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014)
Anna Greenspan, China and the Wireless Undertow: Media as Wave Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — the third critique, source of the beautiful and the sublime
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677) — parallelism of mind and body; sad passions and joy
Mou Zongsan (牟宗三), New Confucian philosopher; translated Kant into Chinese, argued the supersensible is accessible through practice
Xiong Shili (熊十力), Mou's teacher; philosophy of contraction and expansion drawn from the I Ching
Nikolai Kondratiev, "The Long Waves in Economic Life" (1925; English translation 1935)
Joseph Schumpeter and the neo-Schumpeterians; Carlota Perez
Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) and The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024)
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (1998)
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness; the ikebana essay ("The Japanese Art of Arranged Flowers")
Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015)
Gilbert Simondon — invoked by Marek on technological individuation
Sharawadgi — from William Temple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1685)
The ha-ha; Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening (1770)
David J. Chalmers, "What We Talk to When We Talk to Language Models" (2025)

We're joined by Paul Dylan-Ennis and Wassim Alsindi, two of crypto's sharpest in-house critics, who arrived at the same place from opposite directions.

Paul is a lecturer at University College Dublin, author of Absolute Essentials of Ethereum, an early speculative realist (co-founder of Speculations), and a member of the Silviculture Society, the informal cypherpunk body that keeps check on the Ethereum Foundation.

Wassim is a chemical physicist turned record-label operator turned MIT Media Lab researcher, founder of 0x Salon in Berlin, and a self-described "deradicalized Bitcoin maximalist." Hell yeah.

We start with Wassim's essay 'Open Swords,' which insists that open source has to die. The utopian horizon of the cypherpunks (Tim May's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, Eric Hughes' clarion call, Barlow's Declaration) has been repurposed into systems of closure, with Palantir, Anduril, Helsing, and the corporate AI monoliths built on the backs (and skulls) of open source development.

We go hard on the idea of the cypherbunk in general, into computational counter-politics, Nick Land's Crypto-Current, and Wassim's critical concept of necro-primitivism (Bitcoin as an indifference engine that cannot care about anything outside its thermoeconomic event horizon, now awaiting its quantum-computing civil war.)

References:
Wassim Alsindi, "Open Swords" (Akisoma)
Timothy C. May, "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" (1988)
Eric Hughes, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (1993)
John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (1996)
Wassim Alsindi, "The Necroprimitivist Manifesto" (2021) & the Indifference Engine project
Nick Land, Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy (Šum edition)
Anna Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine (2000)
Paul Dylan-Ennis, Absolute Essentials of Ethereum (Routledge, 2024)
Paul Dylan-Ennis, Continental Realism (Zero Books, 2011)
Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief (2010)