News from the Collective

In 2025, ARTez Press published Auto-Correct: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Car by Maya Indira Ganesh. I talked with Maya about the book — why and how technologies fail, the meaning of ethics within and outside technologies, and the ambivalence that comes with irony (as well as critique). The interview was recorded on April 15^th in Zoom, automatically transcribed, and lightly edited for clarity.

In my PhD project, I keep thinking about how one can relate to the fact that algorithmic technologies err and fail all the time. All things fall apart and break down—that much is a truism. Yet, how we choose to make sense of it individually and collectively is a different matter. What initially drew my attention to Maya’s book is how she describes failures of self-driving cars as happening at different scales and moments in time. The idea of error-free technology is thus a dream, and yet not all failures are alike.

Dmitry Muravyov: Yeah, so to start us off, you mentioned how long this project has been going. For those doing PhDs and turning them into further projects or books, I’m curious: What question or intellectual concern has driven you throughout this process? Was there a thought you kept returning to—like, I need to put this out into the world because it’s important?

Maya Indira Ganesh: There are two dimensions to that. First, in Germany, you have to publish to complete your PhD; it’s not considered ‘done’ until you do. I used that requirement as a chance to turn my thesis into a printed book. Second, since finishing my PhD at Leuphana University, I’ve mostly been teaching. Almost exactly four years ago as I was handing in my thesis, I was also interviewing for a job at this university. I was hired to co-design and co-lead a new master’s program in AI, Ethics, and Society.

Teaching AI ethics made me aware of what I put on reading lists—how to bring critical humanities and social science perspectives into conversations about technology, values, and AI. I noticed gaps in the literature. Not that I’m claiming to fill those gaps with my book, but there’s a standard set of citations on the social shaping of technology, epistemic infrastructures, and AI’s emergence. Teaching working professionals—people building tech or making high-level decisions—pushed me to ask: “How do I make theory accessible without diluting it?” They wanted depth but weren’t academics. So, I thought, “What can they read that’s not tech journalism or long-form criticism?” That became a motivation.

The other thing I’ve wrestled with is the temporality of academic research versus the speed of AI innovation. It’s about the politics of AI time. A big question asked of AI in general and driverless cars in particular is this question: ‘When will it arrive?’ You don’t ask that about most technologies because, say, a car is tangible—you see it, you know it’s here. But so much AI operates invisibly in the background. Its rhetoric is all about it always being almost here, ‘just around the corner’.

As an academic, though, timing doesn’t matter—unless you’re under the delusion your work will “change everything,” which, let’s be honest, few believe. But also, no one had written about driverless cars this way. Most books are policy or innovation-focused. I thought, “Why not a critical cultural study of this artifact?”

Dmitry Muravyov: It really makes me think, especially when people talk about regulation, there are so many times metaphors like “we’re lagging behind.”

I’m really interested in how technologies fail, and obviously that’s a huge theme in your book—it’s right there in the title. I’ve been trying to make sense of one of your chapters in a particular way, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. You talk a lot about how driverless cars are kind of set up to fail in certain ways, and how all these accident reports are always partial, always uncertain.

But reading Chapter 2, I noticed you sort of map out why these crashes happen, and I think I’ve got three main patterns. First, there’s the human-machine handover failure—like when the human just zones out for a second and can’t take over when they need to. Then there are the computer vision gaps, where the car’s system just doesn’t ‘get’ what it’s seeing— objects just don’t register properly. And third, there’s this mismatch between the car and its environment, where the infrastructure isn’t right for what the car needs to work.

But then you also show how the tech industry tries to deal with these failures, right? For the handover problem, they push this whole ‘teamwork’ idea in their PR — making the car seem more human, more relatable. For the vision gaps, there’s all this invisible data work going on behind the scenes to patch things up. And for the infrastructure issue, they’re literally reshaping cities to fit the cars—testing them in the real world, not just labs.

So, my question is: Would you say these are basically strategies to compensate for the cars’ weaknesses? And do you think it’s mostly the tech industry driving these fixes?

Maya Indira Ganesh: Wow, yeah—that’s such a good summary, and you’ve definitely read the book! [laughs] You’re completely right; this is exactly it.

And yeah, these rhetorical moves are chiefly coming from the tech industry, because they’re the ones who really see these problems up close. But the way they handle it is interesting—it’s like they’re working on two levels:

Making it seem human. At one level, they’re saying, “Look, it’s just like a person!” Whether it’s comparing driving to human cognition, or even calling the software the “driver” for the car’s “hardware”—like the CEO from Waymo does. If you make it feel human, suddenly people are more forgiving, right?

Andrew Ng from Baidu, who says, “Hey, this tech is still learning, be considerate—cut it some slack”! Which, okay—but why should I feel concerned for a car? This works because cars feel familiar, cars are anthropomorphized anyway, and are distinctly gendered at that. Cars, like boats, are given monikers, are usually ‘she’.  We tend not to do this with an invisible credit-scoring algorithm.

The other move is the strategy of blaming actual humans. This isn’t new. Back when cars were first invented, jaywalking laws were invented to shift responsibility onto pedestrians for running out onto the street and disrupting the space for experimental automobility in city spaces, and new drivers. This was in the early days of automobility in the US before traffic lights existed, and people were unaware of how this new technology worked, and were more familiar with horse-drawn carriages. Rather than regulate cars and drivers, what happened was to blame the human for not crossing the road correctly. That’s why the car hit you.” There is a similar playbook now: “praise the machine, punish the human” as Tim Hwang and Madeline Elish put it—it’s this endless cycle of Oh, the tech’s fine—you’re the problem.

Dmitry Muravyov: This whole process really seems to be about adaptation, right? We humans are fallible beings, but in this context of coexisting with technology, it feels like our failures are the ones that need adjusting—we have to change to fit driverless cars, for instance.

But I’m curious, could we distinguish between more and less desirable types of failure? If we accept that neither tech nor humans can be perfect—that we’re all prone to fail in some way—does that open up new ways to think about these systems differently?

Maya Indira Ganesh: Good question. Actually, I touch on this in the book’s epilogue about the “real vs. fantasy” worlds of technology. When you focus on the real world, you have to confront failure—that breakdown is crucial for understanding how systems interact with human society. That’s why these technologies have to leave their controlled “toy worlds” and enter our messy reality, where they inevitably fail. That failure gives us valuable data about how the system actually works.

But here’s the tension: By dwelling in the fantasy of what the technology could be—that idealized future where everything works perfectly—we avoid grappling with its real-world flaws. The driverless car is interesting because it’s too tangible for pure futurism—you can’t pretend its failures are just “speculative risks” like you might with AI doom scenarios. Yet even with AVs, there’s still this tendency to say “Oh, the real version is coming later” to deflect from today’s problems.

So, in short: If we obsess over the technology’s potential, we don’t have to account for how it’s actually failing in material, accountable ways right now.

Dmitry Muravyov: It makes me curious—is it possible to envision technologies that recognize their intrinsic fallibility and try to account for it? Maybe in certain ways, rather than others, as your discussion of existential risk shows.

Following up on that, you discuss ethics in the book so well. You interrogate the assumptions and limitations of machine ethics, showing how it localizes ethics within computational architecture, making it a design problem to solve. I love how you describe it: “the statistical becomes the technological medium of ethics”—and you contrast this with “human phenomenological, embodied, spiritual, or shared technologies for making sense of the world.” Could you talk more about this opposition?

Maya Indira Ganesh: I think machine ethics is really interesting because it’s such a niche field that people don’t talk about enough. But it actually does a great job of showing what people are trying to do when they try to embed values into machines—to make decisions that align with certain ethics. But the thing is, this approach works at small scales, not for complex systems like driverless cars in cities.

Of course, we want that in some cases—like removing violent extremism or child pornography online. That’s clear-cut. But then you get into nuances: What if it’s a GIF mimicking beheading, but with no real-world groups or ideologies attached? Suddenly it’s not so simple.

The problem is, machine ethics—and a lot of tech ethics—assumes technology can be totalizing, seamless. We don’t want to deal with breaks or failures, or messy systems talking to each other. Right now, every wave of digitization just gets called “AI.” For 15 years, we’ve had digitized systems working (or not working) in different ways—now AI is being patched on top, often in janky ways.

Take public sector AI in the UK—there are a number of projects trying to apply LLMs to correct doctors’ note-taking, to make casework more efficient. But this is just responding to earlier failures of digitization! We have PDFs that were supposed to make documents portable, but now we’re stuck with stacks of uneditable forms. Every “solution” creates new problems.

So maybe we shouldn’t even call it “ethics” anymore. What we really need is to ask: What values are driving our societies? Efficiency? Profit? Innovation? These are ideological choices that get normalized. The point of my book is that ethics can’t just live inside machines—we need to ask how we want to organize our cities and societies, with all their messiness. Maybe LLMs could help facilitate those conversations, rather than pretending to be the solution. But we’re still figuring that out.

Dmitry Muravyov: When I first thought about this question, I was thinking about how you position ethics in two ways. On the one hand, as something technological and localized within computational architecture (the machine ethics project), and, on the other hand, as something more embodied and societal.

You seem to criticize machine ethics for not being “ethics” in that fuller sense. But now I’m wondering—are you actually saying that machine ethics can serve a purpose, we just shouldn’t call it “ethics” to avoid confusion? Would that be accurate?

Maya Indira Ganesh: Yes, exactly. The framing of “ethics” hasn’t helped us reckon with what kind of society we want to build. It either gets reduced to designing machines that mimic human decision-making (as if machines could create the social through their choices) or becomes corporate self-regulation theater, which we’ve seen fail as companies discard ethics when inconvenient.

Now, I’ll admit: Terms like “ethics” do have power. When you call something unethical, it activates people—no one wants that label. But we’ve overused these concepts until they’re hollow.

But here’s the key point: People are remaking society through technology—just not with “ethics” as we’ve framed it. Look at the U.S., where companies can now ignore AI safety under Trump. This isn’t about not caring—it’s about competing visions of society.

The Elon Musks and Chris Rufos have very clear ideologies about the world they want. And that’s what we need to confront: Not “ethics” as a technical problem, but the values and power struggles shaping our technological future.

So yes—we need value discussions, just not under the exhausted banner of “ethics.”

Dmitry Muravyov: There’s this interesting contrast in your reply between the ethical and the social that I want to explore further. Let me bring in my own experience too—I also teach technology ethics courses to engineers and computer scientists. I’ll play devil’s advocate a bit here, because while your book offers strong (and often justified) criticism of engineering ethics, I want to push back slightly.

That emphasis on individual responsibility you critique—it’s a weak point. Students tell me (or, more often, I imagine that this is something they can tell): “These ideas are nice, but eventually I’ll need a job, a paycheck, and I’ll have defined responsibilities within an organization.” Many so-called “ethical” issues in tech may be better addressed through labor organizing and unions rather than ethics courses.

But to defend ethics—even when we acknowledge how socially determined our positions are, there’s still an ethical weight to our decisions and relationships that doesn’t disappear. How do you see this tension between the social and ethical? Do you view ethics as having any autonomous space?

Maya Indira Ganesh: That’s a really good question, and it connects directly to what I was saying earlier. In teaching AI ethics to engineers, policy makers, even defense department staff, the core problem is treating ethics as something separable from the social, something we can formalize into machines. That’s why machine ethics fascinates me—it embodies this flawed approach.

Everything meaningful requires context. It resists automation. To your student’s dilemma—yes, we’re socially constrained, but there’s no substitute for personal reckoning. There are forms of social inquiry and ethical engagement that can’t—and shouldn’t—be automated.

This connects powerfully to Nick Seaver’s work about music recommendation algorithms. He studies these engineers who pride themselves on crafting “caring,” bespoke algorithms—until their startups scale. Suddenly, their intimate knowledge of musical nuance gets replaced by crude metrics and automated systems. What fascinates me is how they cope: Seaver finds that they perform this psychological reframing where the “ethical” part of their work migrates to some other more manageable domain so they can stomach the compromises required by scale.

Dmitry Muravyov: I think it’s indeed an interesting way to think that if ethics has to be somewhere, but at the same time, it can be in many places. So, we can think indeed: what is the place for ethics in this particular time and space?

The last thing I wanted to discuss was the irony you explore. The way I made sense of it was seeing the “irony of autonomy” as a type of technological critique. Often, the traditional critical move is one of suspicion—unmasking what’s actually going on behind the hood. In technology studies and humanities, we’ve seen rethinking of critique—reparative critique, diffractive critique, post-critique.

But irony seems different. When I first read your piece introducing irony in the book, I caught myself smiling—it sparked something in me. How do you see this use of irony in relation to the history of technological critique? Especially given your earlier piece with Emanuel Moss about refusal and resistance as modes of critique.

Maya Indira Ganesh: The “irony of autonomy” (playing on Lisanne’s Bainbrdige’s work (1983) about the irony of automation) was my way of historicizing these debates, showing how we’re replaying similar responses to automation today. We perform this charade of pretending machines act autonomously while knowing how deeply entangled we are with them.

Over time, I’ve struggled with that irony, albeit not in a bad way. It connects to a melancholia in my other writing about our embodied digital lives, especially around gender and technology. There’s a strong cyberfeminist influence here—this Haraway-esque recognition of how technologies shape gendered existence.

I don’t think we’re meant to resolve this tension. Like Haraway and cyberfeminists suggest, we need to sit with that discomfort. Disabled communities understand this deeply—when you rely on technologies for basic existence, you develop a nuanced relationship with them. There’s no clean ethical position.

A disabled colleague once challenged me when I asked if she wanted better functioning tech: “Actually, no—if it works too smoothly, people assume it always will. The breakdowns create necessary moments to see who’s being left out.” In our resistance and refusal piece with Emmanuel Moss, we were pushing back against overly literal critique. Resistance gets co-opted so easily—tech companies now use activists’ language! Refusal offers complexity, but isn’t a blueprint. You can’t exist outside these systems.

Irony is an opportunity for ambivalence, it is a politics of not turning away, while refusing to ever be fully reconciled with the digital.

Dmitry Muravyov: Sometimes I think when certain critical moves—like undermining or unmasking—are presented to audiences without humanities backgrounds, like computer science students… You can get this response where it feels like you’re taking the joy out of their work.

What I appreciate about irony as an alternative is that it lets people chuckle or smile first. Maybe through that smile, they can think: “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t automate everything.” That moment of laughter might plant the seed for a more ambivalent attitude.

Maya Indira Ganesh: Actually, I think critique has become largely about exposing corporate capture—it’s tied up with legal/regulatory battles now. I get this from friends and colleagues sometimes, “You’re not being hard enough on this.” But why can’t computing be fun? It is fun for many people. It creates beautiful things too.

That’s why I want that ambivalent space—to sit with both the problems and possibilities. If we open up how we think about our relationships with technology and each other… maybe we can make something different.

Dmitry Muravyov: There can still be joy at the end!

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Biographies

Maya Indira Ganesh is Associate Director (Research Culture & Partnerships), co-director of the Narratives and Justice Program, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI). She draws on varied theoretical and methodological genres, including feminist scholarship, participatory methods, Media and Cultural studies, and Science and Technology Studies to examine how AI is being deployed in public, and how AI’s marginalised and expert publics shape the technology.

Dmitry Muravyov is a PhD Candidate at TU Delft, working in the AI DeMoS Lab. Drawing on philosophy of technology, STS, and media studies, he currently focuses on the political and ethical issues of algorithmic fallibility, a collectively shared condition of living with technology’s breakdowns, failures, and errors.

 

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 28 Band People with Franz Nicolay This episode is a recording of a seminar held at the University of Essex with Franz Nicolay on his book Band People. In it Franz Nicolay explores the working and creative lives of musicians. In it, he argues that to talk about the role of […]

Reworking the Situationist heritage and applying it to our time, many of the approaches presented here extend beyond the city and physical environments into the virtual dimensions of digital socialities, identifying new forces of power and potential sources of emancipation.

At a time when it has become fashionable to celebrate the looming apocalypse as post- or transhuman payback, we urgently need to reinvigorate our desire for the future. Approaching cultural production in psychogeographic terms might help identify what blockages are at play in constraining contemporary art and culture to addressing what feels like only a handful of topics, in a handful of ways.

Contributors include: Experimental Jetset, Max Haiven, Liam Young, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Dan McQuillan, Image Acts, Total Refusal, and Tristam Adams. Edited and published by our friends at CARADT, Sebastian Olma and Jess Henderson.

Click here to access the latest issue of Making & Breaking: Psychogeographies of the Present

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 27 Free Jazz, Revolution and the Politics of Peter Brötzmann For this episode we have a discussion of the book Peter Brötzmann: Free-Jazz, Revolution and the Politics of Improvisation with its author Daniel Spicer and long time comrade and fellow radical theorist / free jazz musician Richard Gilman-Opalsky. In it we […]

Welcome to our April Newsletter!  

We hope this newsletter finds you well and that your April has been rejuvenating. We write with publication announcements, new posts on academic freedom, and announcements about a book prize and a new series partnership.

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Here's what happened this month:

We published five new books

Humans, Dogs and Other Beings: Myths, Stories, and History in the Land of Genghis Khan by Baasanjav Terbish

Active Speech: Critical Perspectives on Teresa Deevy by Úna Kealy and Kate McCarthy (eds.)

Tragedy and the Witness: Shakespeare and Beyond by Fred Parker

Women Writers in the Romantic Age by John Claiborne Isbell

Coral Conservation: Global Evidence for the Effects of Actions by Ann Thornton, William H. Morgan, Eleanor K. Bladon, Rebecca K. Smith, and William J. Sutherland

All of our titles are free to read and download. Explore our complete catalogue.

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We shared two blog posts on academic freedom, censorship & open access

We have just published two posts—one written by our team, and one by our author Ash Lierman—reflecting on the increasing threats to academic freedom that we are seeing in the United States and elsewhere, and the role of open access in fighting back against these trends. We have released the posts today to coincide with the #DefendResearch day of action on the 100th day of the Trump presidency. Find out more about the Declaration To #DefendResearch Against U.S. Government Censorship, which OBP has signed.

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We announced a new series partnership with the Philological Society

We are delighted that we have begun a partnership with the Philological Society, the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages, to publish their book series: Publications of the Philological Society. We have listed the first two books we will publish as part of the series: A Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta and Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician: Insights into the Genesis of Colonial American-English Phonology by Gary D. German. We look forward to sharing these and many more titles in the series via our Diamond open access model, with no barriers for readers or authors.

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We received news of a prize-winning chapter in Prismatic Jane Eyre

We are thrilled to learn that “The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran” by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, a chapter published as part of Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages by Reynolds et al., has won The Nineteenth Century Studies Association Article Prize. Huge congratulations to Kayvan and Rebecca!

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NEW BOOK DISCOUNT: Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies) at OBP! The discount will be applied automatically at checkout.

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That's all for this month!

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By the OBP team

The recent wave of government censorship in America under the Trump administration has sent a chilling message to US scholars, librarians, universities and publishers alike: the freedom and stability we often take for granted in order to undertake and publish research is not guaranteed. As publishers committed to open access (OA), the suppression, distortion, and erasure of research is antithetical to our core mission: to share rigorous academic work freely. This is why we have signed the Declaration to Defend Research Against U.S. Government Censorship, and we urge others to do the same.

The assault on academic freedom is not a hypothetical risk; it is happening now. Government agencies have restricted the terminology that can be used in government-funded research, frozen funding for politically ‘sensitive’ topics, and removed publicly available data from official sources. Researchers have been targeted for pursuing knowledge that challenges political narratives, while universities have been threatened with the removal of funding in order to coerce their obedience to the administration’s will. In response to these actions by the American government, we have even seen attempts by scholarly societies to censor published research without informing the author. These acts do not merely impact the individuals and institutions directly involved; they strike at the very heart of scholarly integrity and global knowledge production.

We believe that OA publishing is crucial because it is an act of resistance against censorship and control. When knowledge is published OA, it can be accessed and shared in many places with no restriction – making it much more difficult to smother once published. When knowledge is openly available, it cannot be erased.

At OBP, we do not limit research to a single proprietary platform. We distribute widely and openly, ensuring that scholarship is available across multiple external repositories, platforms, and archives, freely available to download and share. This decentralization means that if one source is lost or modified, the research remains available elsewhere, safeguarding it for future generations. It ensures that authors' hard work will not disappear due to political pressure or institutional instability. By publishing OA, authors have confidence that their contributions to knowledge will persist, no matter the challenges ahead.

Arguments for the benefits of OA often focus on the reader: the reader’s access is not inhibited by a paywall or a price for a physical copy that is too expensive to afford. But OA can also liberate and protect the author, ensuring global reach for their work, and safeguarding it from erasure under political or institutional pressure. However, for the freedom to publish and preserve one’s research to be meaningful, it must not be dependent on the author’s ability to pay a fee.  This is why we use a Diamond OA model that does not charge authors, and support other publishers in developing the same via our work on Copim’s infrastructures.

OA is often perceived as a risk: can a publisher risk shifting to an OA model; can libraries have confidence that their OA investments are worthwhile or that an OA initiative is ‘sustainable’; can authors take the risk of publishing with a less well-known Diamond OA press? But in a world where old certainties are crumbling – where censorship, platform instability and political interference pose real threats – OA offers something traditional publishing cannot: resilience. Once knowledge is openly available, it cannot easily be silenced. In this light, OA is not a gamble: it is a safeguard.

Open Book Publishers stands unequivocally against threats to academic freedom. We will continue to support researchers in sharing their work freely, without fear of suppression. We urge our colleagues to recognize the urgency of this moment and join us in this commitment.

What do our authors say? We share here a post from Ash Lierman, author of The Struggle You Can’t See: Experiences of Neurodivergent and Invisibly Disabled Students in Higher Education, who writes from their perspective as a US-based researcher, author and librarian, and as a disabled and transgender person. Read Ash’s post.

Sign the Declaration to Defend Research Against U.S. Government Censorship here. Use the hashtag #DefendResearch to spread the word.

12th of March

I finished watching the film No Other Land and it’s raining outside. It is a documentary on the destruction of the occupied West Bank villages of Masafer Yatta. The documentary—a collaboration between Palestinian Basel Andra and Israeli Yuval Abraham—was conspicuously awarded an Oscar earlier this year. It depicts the undying strength and perseverance of the resistance movement in the face of Israeli military units and settlers who casually murder civilians, demolish educational and domestic infrastructure, and pour cement into wells. It’s raining outside and I feel tired and suddenly so sad.  I spent months avoiding feeling the weight of the world and my news feed.  I chose to enjoy my privilege and laugh, drink, and dance in the collapsing world.  I align my avoidance with the distraction from grief, the heavy claustrophobic feelings of sorrow and helplessness. It is much easier to look away or trace the blurry contours of destruction and death. To look directly would mean to deeply consider the millions of individuals casually murdered, amputated, raped, missing, or living under unjust and violent regimes and slip into the valley I have been avoiding. Empathy fatigues.

The objectives of the film are to fracture empathy fatigue by depicting the complexities and rewards of multi-ethnic allyships and resistance. Although residents of Masafer Yatta have stated the film is important to platform and personalize the war, No Other Land has been criticized by the pro-Palestinian movement Boycott Divest Sanction as a film that promotes normalization of the occupation, represents an Israeli voice, and optically formalizes the apartheid state. The directors are accused of accepting an award by the blatantly hypocritical and bullying empire of America, which finances the genocide and mutilates people and lands to access the valuables hidden in the folds of landscapes so violently fought over. However, by publicly denouncing the film due to the inherent need to radicalize the narrative of resistance, BDS disregards a locally produced chronicle and attempts to monopolize the sculpting of dissident imagery.

 

 

18th of January

I go to a literary evening with Nicholas Schultz presenting his new book Land Sickness to examine the emotional and political fatigue he defines through “the new ecological class.” Land Sickness is an auto-fiction travelogue describing the planetary interconnection and agony through a series of personal climate-related decisions of mobility and consumption facing those privileged with a choice; flight or bus? Veggies wrapped in plastic? Vegan or dairy? “It seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them. ” The author describes the relatable anxiety of helplessness. In the discussion following the book presentation, he spoke of the forlorn aesthetics of the Green Party and the climate protests, criticizing the lack of visually informed and emotively charged resistance collectivities and their weak use of symbols. He addresses the ongoing discourse regarding leftist movements’ apparent incapability of injecting hope and action to fracture the fatigue of helplessness through evocative aesthetic narrative. I ask what he thinks of direct action as a form of resistance, and the sweet Danish sociologist predictably and proudly refers to his undying belief in democracy and political methods. How Scandinavian of him.  Schultz states this very seriously, as if a reality existed in which current infrastructures could solve the well-documented and studied wars, ongoing genocide, mundane inequalities, extractivist mechanisms, and the climate collapse knowingly driven by just a few massive corporations interlacing moral and economic dependency and decay. The democracy he believes in is what we are witnessing—a subjugation to a grid of suffering imposed through an undying belief in diplomacy and the phantasma of politics.

I feel fatigue in my bones and a fog in my brain. I feel saliva thicken in my mouth. I feel disgusting, as if a mirror has been placed in front of my face and I am a brat that does nothing, nothing at all. I want to rip out my eyes and peel off my idiotic white skin. Later on my friends and I refer to the lack of visual and ideological narratives to represent the left in inspiring, productive, and revolutionary ways. Luigi Mangionni, a young man who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of the biggest insurance company in the US, with a 3D printed gun in December 2024, is mentioned as the only recent example of inspirational and sexy leftist resistance. One of the only images of resistance that trended in a generative way and gave disillusioned leftist communities the feeling of possible change and action that transcends veganism and infographics; “Don’t forget Congo!”, is an image showing a zoomed-in photo of Luigi’s six-pack and the text UTOPIAN LANDSCAPES. This meme functions as an image of resistance and hope because it is reflective of the memetic hive mind and connotative forms of communication: those rooted in emotion, belief, and experiential associations. Unlike denotative systems—which rely on literal meaning, objective framing, and the strict logic of alphabetic code—connotative communication spreads through affect, intuition, and shared cultural subtext. It doesn’t explain; it evokes. Similarly, long-form student protests in Serbia against their authoritarian, autocratic, and corrupt president, Vučić, are effective as triggers of hope, because of their use of symbols, DIY flags, collectivity, horizontality, and youth as connotative forms of expression and mass action. Unlike a different set of protests in Serbia and the Balkans protesting the construction of a lithium mine, which proved to be less viral due to their smaller size, shorter longevity, and lack of visceral honesty and associative strength. Objecting to lithium mines in our European backyard of western Serbia, thus preferring extractivist infrastructure to be located in the jungles of the Congo in Africa, doesn’t resonate because interlinking moralism and political solutionism is a flaccid agenda of resistance . The Serbian students protesting their government on a delusional and systemic rather than representative level is simply a more potent and resonant cause, avoiding the hypocrisy that has consumed the web that held the radical left.

 

25th of February

I go to a conference called Tactics&Practice#16: Are You a Software Update? organized by the Ljubljana-based institute Aksioma to find out more about optical collectivity, evocative imagery, and AI-generated imaginariums of dystopian landscapes. Lesia Kulchynska, a visual studies researcher and independent curator who aligns online political recruitment strategies to classical advertisement models, posited in her lecture that image production and the production of violence coincide. She speaks of Ukrainian car arsonists drafted online, where regular individuals are hired as contractors to make a video or image of a burning car. The contractors are encouraged to set a car on fire and film it—even if a vehicle had already been torched, the gig-workers are told to reignite the scorched metal shells and set them ablaze again. “The job is to produce an image of violence and create media content, not the act of violence itself.” The media content functions as an advertisement image, aiming to evoke your desire to be part of a fictional, already existing collectivity, striving to outline the future as a fact and shape what is to come. “Pain is a marketing goldmine,” and political recruitors as advertisers don’t need to explain the benefits of an action, but rather “locate the source of the pain.”

The Tactics&Practice conference concluded with Donatella Della Ratta, a media theorist specialized in Arabic-language media, whose striking performance addressed the AI-assisted conjurations of future realities. Similarly to potent advertisement mechanisms, the future can be rendered and thus rework the present through the synthetic realism of AI-generated urbanities. Curiously, the conference took place one day before the official Donald Trump Instagram account posted a bizarre, AI-generated video of Palestine as a utopia of “consumption and technology.” The short-form video showed Gaza specifically as a renovated Riviera of hotels and shopping centers centered around a huge golden statue of Trump, while Donald in the flesh and Netanyahu are rendered by the pool drinking cocktails as money rains from the sky. Donatella could not have possibly known that only a few hours after her lecture concluded this viral reel would be published, clearly demonstrating the reality of her words. Using AI-generated vivid imagery functions as “a vision so seamless, it no longer feels like a possibility but an inevitability.” She tells us that by looking at and consuming the images of these mutated landscapes and societies, we assimilate them in silence through our eyes and the optical unconscious—“a future that has not yet arrived but has already been seen.”

 

28th of February 

I go to the opening of a Jan Krmelj new theatre production, O.I.L., to see an alternative present that has not yet fully arrived in the form of a three-hour-long theatre play. Through a disembodied narrator, a journalist, and five members of an activist collective describing their backgrounds, past direct actions, and a geopolitical podcast series that was interrupted by an abrupt flood, the play constructs a parallel reality that seems so real, the viewers’ optical unconscious fully accepts it. The method of reality construction the director uses is devised theatre or collective creation, where the actors build on personal, real, and emotive life experiences throughout rehearsals to develop storylines and characters. The narrative is anchored around a mix of fictional and real events and is closely knit with the multiple media used. Actors film each other and a miniature replica of the stage throughout the performance, exchanging the camera that streams the zoomed-in perspective onto a projection behind them. Framed up close, a small tank of water and spilled ink become a slowly spreading oil spill, and miniature cars sprinkled with baki ng soda become a snowy parking lot in a Russian city built around an oil refinery. The radical collective walks the line between activism, vandalism, and art; Spotify is hacked to play a single audio, government parties’ sites are manipulated, algorithms are adjusted and steered, a fake political party is constructed online that grows a public backing, and the United Nations Climate Change internal conference is infiltrated and compromised. The mode of communication in O.I.L. is connotative on multiple levels, using parallel visual and sonic methods to construct an evocative and alternate state, where the conditions of reality can be adjusted. Although Krmelj’s work is generative in cultivating the possibility of cyber direct actions as scaffolding for the fictional left, the seemingly inevitable dystopic narrative is still the informing anchor of his current work.

 

24th of April

While listening to the discussion around the book Land Sickness, watching the lectures of Tactics&Practice and to a lesser degree during the film No Other Land and the theatre play O.I.L. I couldn’t help but wonder why contemporary cultural producers rely exclusively on carefully layered critique of the system and opposition. What would happen if the narrative was flipped from criticizing dystopian realities to optically and conceptually building appealing utopian possibilities? Although all the cultural events I attended so far in 2025 attempt to construct and address a still-forming fictional leftist collectivity, they don’t go far enough. While these authors integrate familiar hooks and symbols, their communication often falls short—audiences are fatigued by dark analytical critiques, sweeping moralism, and the constant invocation of political solutions. We—the weepy bourgeois as well as the disenfranchised—are already (intimately) familiar with viral genocide, humanitarian and environmental catastrophes, and the extraction mechanisms pillaging our landscapes. We are also familiar with the ineffectiveness of existing political parties—whether through complicity or paralysis. Alternative methods of imagined leftist resistance movements must transcend critique as a means to an end by co-opting the reality-sculpting techniques of the radical right: persuasive visuals of collectivity, strategic virality, digital recruitment models, and AI-generated speculative futures. Such systems of communication have proven to be extremely efficient in the post-internet era of primarily image-based communication and utilize virality, propagative efficiency, mass appeal, and pain relocation. We—members of the fictional left—know it’s time to change the rules and inverse the narrative to grow alternative imaginariums of realities we want to live. This can be done by working towards pushing the memetic infrastructure that already exists past its aesthetic overload to a productive level of community simulation. Communities that will blossom in realities that will be seen, imagined, felt, and ingrained into our optical unconscious as powerfully as today’s dystopias. The seeds are already planted across the globe. All we need to do is to help them grow.

 

This text was originally published in Slovenian on Disenz.net