[LIVE AT INDEX] The Datacenter Does Not Exist (Q&A w/ Dena Yago)

We’re joined by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven, the Amsterdam-based artist collective known for their filmmaking, writing, and design. 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 sublimeBaruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677) — parallelism of mind and body; sad passions and joyMou Zongsan (牟宗三), New Confucian philosopher; translated Kant into Chinese, argued the supersensible is accessible through practiceXiong Shili (熊十力), Mou's teacher; philosophy of contraction and expansion drawn from the I ChingNikolai Kondratiev, "The Long Waves in Economic Life" (1925; English translation 1935)Joseph Schumpeter and the neo-Schumpeterians; Carlota PerezThomas 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 individuationSharawadgi — 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 projectNick 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)

E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero.Gavin Gamboa is a composer, pianist, and video artist who wrote the music for Polia & Blastema and works in local-first "digital gardens" and the piano repertoire.What began as their shared film becomes, here, a way into a single question Elias poses at the top: what is being born through us - and is that thing digesting us on its way out?From there the conversation moves through desire and digestion as the engine of creation, and what happens when the interval between the wound and the poem collapses to nothing. Merhige treats AI as atavistic rather than alien: a dark mirror, an artificial unconscious, a "necromantic bureaucracy" of dead expressions made responsive, and reads the manuscript and the personal library as older machines through which the dead already speak.Gamboa holds a more skeptical line, defending manual effort and drawing on Marshall McLuhan's "auto-amputation" and his own experiments training models on his audio. The guests & their workGavin Gamboa: composer, pianist, video artist  gavingamboa.netE. Elias Merhige: filmmaker; his 1989 debut Begotten anchors the "Begotten trilogy" -  Begotten on WikipediaPolia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022) — premiere Q&A with all three (Vimeo)Books & essays citedThomas Moynihan, “The GASTRULATION of GEIST: or, an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation,” Vast Abrupt, 8 February 2018, link.Kate Crawford, "Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop,"  e-fluxFederico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), Bloomsbury

We're joined by Yancey Strickler: writer, cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the person behind a string of projects that try to give creative life a workable economic form: Bentoism, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, the Dark Forest Collective, and now Artist Corporations and the Dark Forest Operating System. The episode is timely. We recorded in late May, days before Governor Jared Polis signed the Colorado Artist Company Act into law on June 2, 2026 - the country's first "A Corp," a company type where the artist keeps majority control, intellectual property reverts to its maker if the company dissolves, and an artistic mission sits above profit. More than 4,000 creators have already signed up, and several states are drafting their own versions.Where this show usually works by critique, Strickler builds working alternatives and writes them into law. Our running question throughout: when criticizing the system is the admired move, is building something real the more radical act, or does anything built inside the system end up serving it?Yancey Strickler's projectsYancey Strickler — ystrickler.comBentoism — bentoism.orgThe Creative Independent — thecreativeindependent.comMetalabel — metalabel.comNew Creative Era (Strickler's podcast with Joshua Citarella) — metalabel.comArtist Corporations & the lawArtist Corporations — artistcorporations.comThe Colorado Artist Company Act (SB 26-133), annotated full text — artistcorporations.com/law/annotatedStrickler's TED talk, "Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation" (2025) — ted.comNews coverage of the signing: The Colorado Sun · The Art Newspaper · ARTnewsFrieze, "Can A-Corps Save the Struggling Artist?" (skeptical take, also previews DFOS) — frieze.comThe private internet, AI & IPDark Forest Operating System (DFOS) — app.dfos.com · protocol spec at protocol.dfos.com · code on GitHubStrickler on DIDs, the AT Protocol and Bluesky ("Antienshittification") — ystrickler.comHolly+ (Holly Herndon's voice model / licensing experiment) — holly.plusBooks & ideas citedThis Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World (Viking, 2019) — thiscouldbeourfuture.com · Penguin Random House"The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (essay, 2019) — original on ystrickler.com · The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Metalabel, 2024) — GoodreadsSamuel W. Franklin, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (University of Chicago Press, 2023) — press.uchicago.eduVenkatesh Rao's "cozyweb," — Ribbonfarm

Disintegrator's spring tour lecture, love to watch this continue to unfold in real life. Thanks to Index, Montez Radio, Hugh, Elie, the Disintegrator team and especially Dena Yago for joining us. For the visually hxc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbWCcHbtWY (good slides).

Marek solo ep. To be released on Nuda Mag <3 later this year in text form.Piece starts like 17 minutes in hahaha.

This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript. We are delighted to be joined by the algorithmically contagious memetic research project no.investigues. If you are chronically online, especially if you are familiar with the Spanish-speaking corners of the internet, you must have already interacted with one of the echoes of no.investigues —probably through their wonderful Substack, or in conversation at their Discord book club, or through the 28.research cluster, or most likely through monumental Instagram meme carousels.Their voice flows through online algorithmic inertia, yet the substance of their discourse exists in the shadow of virality.In this conversation, we talk about what it means to understand the apocalypse as an asymmetrical phenomenon: no one experiences it at the same time, and clearly not with the same intensity. This polyphonic nature of the apocalypse is amplified by the increasingly atomized and homogeneous global distribution of violence.Even so, the apocalypse is already here, and we might be better off learning how to inhabit it. Through an extrapolated reading of Ernesto Oroza’s visual archive Desobediencia Tecnológica (Technological Disobedience), documenting repurposed technology in Cuba, we talk about repurposing salvaged discourses into newly assembled modes of thinking that would allow us to confront the roughness of our apocalyptic situation. This invitation resonates with a thread that runs through our conversations ever since Exocapitalism came out: the premise that perhaps the apocalypse and capital are forces not to be treated as enemies, but as inertias of History. Both demand a nuanced engagement with their diverse local articulations of violence. Under this framework, the apocalypse feels like an ineluctable situation, one that cannot be won by fighting.Instagram: https://instagram.com/no.investigues/Selected no.investigues substack posts:Pensamiento apocalíptico, una aproximación: https://substack.com/home/post/p-192881638La Torre: https://substack.com/home/post/p-191289547Desobediencia Tecnológica de Ernesto Oroza: https://substack.com/home/post/p-179603849References: Valencia, Sayak. Capitalismo gore. Barcelona: Melusina, 2010. ISBN: 978-84-96614-87-1. Oroza, Ernesto. Desobediencia tecnológica: La permanencia de lo temporal en Cuba. Ciudad de México: FIEBRE Ediciones, 2025.