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Disintegrator: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean
What does it mean to be human in an age where experience and behavior are mediated and regulated by algorithms? The Disintegrator Podcast is a limited series exploring how Artificial Intelligence affects who we are and how we express ourselves. Join Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean as they speak to the artists, philosophers, scientists, and social theorists at the forefront of human-AI relations. Disintegrator is produced by Rubén Bañuelos.
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- 1 weeks ago1h 14m
[LIVE AT INDEX] The Datacenter Does Not Exist (Q&A w/ Dena Yago)
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).
- Apr 28, 202641 min
[NECROLECTURE] The Excarnated Angel: On AI and the Impossibility of Touch
Marek solo ep. To be released on Nuda Mag <3 later this year in text form.Piece starts like 17 minutes in hahaha.
- Apr 23, 20261h 13m
45. El Apocalipsis Ya Está Aquí (w/ no.investigues)
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.
- Apr 8, 202659 min
44. The Grid (w/ Molly Taft)
Molly Taft, Senior Writer at Wired, joins us to talk datacenters, AI, US power infrastructure, and big energy. You've almost definitely read her work, especially if you live in the US. This episode absolutely ROCKS and is maybe the most grounded and realistic assessment of the role that all of those above forces play together in our social and political moment. A couple really relevant pieces, including some very very recent pieces.https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-will-be-powered-by-a-massive-gas-plant/https://www.wired.com/story/senators-demand-to-know-how-much-energy-data-centers-use/https://www.wired.com/story/new-bernie-sanders-ai-safety-bill-would-halt-data-center-construction/https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use-statistics/ https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-gas-boom/https://www.wired.com/story/trump-energy-industry-ai-fossil-fuels-pittsburgh-summit/https://www.wired.com/story/ai-carbon-emissions-energy-unknown-mystery-research/Seriously, like, this is the only person I've found to be consistently trustworthy with respect to the intersection of energy reporting and tech. Follow her on X: https://x.com/mollytaft. She also reccomends a few other pieces that we touch on a little bit: Tina Nguyen's recent piece on the Pro-Human Declaration (right-wing populism X AI backlash) https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/888841/pro-human-ai-declaration-fliGaby del Valle on the forefront of environmentalism and the right: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/state-of-nature-gaby-del-valle-acc-conservative-environmentalism/Anti-renewable energy protests and anti-data center movements: https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/data-centers-renewables-opposition
- Mar 11, 202655 min
43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)
We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles. Tripaldi's work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy computation: that intelligence is substrate-indifferent, that it can scale and migrate independent of what carries it. She argues the opposite, that you cannot separate intelligence from the materials through which it is conveyed.This becomes experimentally clear in her recent essay Substrates Unbound (Antikythera, 2025), where she tracks biocomputing systems like DishBrain — living neuronal cultures interfaced with silicon chips that don't execute pre-given code but reorganize, learn, and adapt. Mouse neurons and human neurons perform differently under the same training conditions. This reframes a central question of the moment: not 'can we scale intelligence,' but which matter are we asking to think, under what energy regime, and at what cost?References:Tripaldi, Laura. Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022).Tripaldi, Laura. "Substrates Unbound" (Antikythera, 2025).Tripaldi, Laura. Soft Futures (newsletter, Substack).Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum, 2004) — source of the concept of hyper nature.Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China (Urbanomic, 2016) — source of the concept of cosmotechnics.Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke, 2007) — onto-epistemology and intra-action.Irigaray, Luce — referenced as an influence on Tripaldi's feminist materialism.Pasquinelli, Matteo. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023) — discussed in relation to technology as captured labor; Tripaldi pushes back via the history of automata.Laschi, Cecilia. Soft Robotics Lab, National University of Singapore — pioneer of octopus-inspired soft robotics.Hookway, Branden. Interface (MIT Press, 2014).
- Mar 2, 202644 min
The Teachings of Salesforce Child
Salesforce Child is our favorite artist.More here and on her instagram @salesforcechild.We're on TOUR see us:NY Sat 3/7: https://luma.com/k3ffx3zeYALE Sun 3/8: https://exocapitalismthedatacentr.rsvpify.comMIT Mon 3/9: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf4Jh4UAS4ZehWgZWHhlEWyMZNBvzcML-vWdBHOkcxHaA9Bhw/viewform?usp=header
- Feb 18, 20261h 9m
LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 2 (w/ Rosi Braidotti)
We're joined by Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities, for a wide-ranging conversation on posthumanism as both a philosophical project and a political orientation.Braidotti's work has constructed one of the most sustained and consequential accounts of what comes after the collapse of Eurocentric 'humanism.' The conversation traces the long arc from her early intervention on nomadic subjectivity, a materialist corrective to postmodernism's drift into linguistic relativism, through the ethical and ontological turn that her posthumanist project represents. Where poststructuralism gave us the critique of the subject as origin, nomadism gave us a subject that is grounded, embodied, multiple, and in motion.Central to the episode is the missing link in the American reception of French theory: the radical materialist tradition of Deleuze and Guattari, which diagnosed capitalism's schizophrenic logic (its ability to deterritorialize and adapt faster than any opposition) long before it became common sense. Braidotti traces the suppression of that critique through the French Communist Party's blacklists, the invention of "French theory" as an exportable product stripped of its political economy, and the consequences for a left that lost the ability to think technogenesis, cognitive capitalism, or the mutation of subjectivity under media saturation.The conversation then turns to fascism as concept rather than historical event: the philosophical move that Deleuze and Guattari made and that Foucault named in his preface to Anti-Oedipus. This allows Braidotti to connect micro-fascism (the cult of negativity, the eroticization of power-as-humiliation, the viral spread of impotence) to the coherent neo-fascist philosophical tradition running from Alain de Benoit through the Heritage Foundation and Budapest to Peter Thiel's Yale dissertation on sacrifice. While the left blocked its own analytical capacities, the right was doing serious philosophical work.Against all of this, Bradiotti proposes affirmative ethics: a Spinozist praxis of activating what a body can do. The episode ends thinking through scale, how affirmative ethics operates from the city to the planetary, and the urgency of the European federalist project as the only existing institutional attempt to participate in decisions about what we could possibly become.Some references:Rosi BraidottiPatterns of Dissonance, Polity Press, 1991Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press, 1994Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Polity Press, 2002Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, 2006The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013Gilles Deleuze & Félix GuattariAnti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (English trans. 1977, preface by Michel Foucault)A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980Félix GuattariThe Three Ecologies, 1989 (English trans. 1991)Michel FoucaultPreface to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus, 1977SpinozaEthicsTheological-Political TreatiseAntonio NegriThe Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, 1981Genevieve LloydPart of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics, University of Minnesota Press, 1994Spinoza and the Ethics, Routledge, 1996Antonio DamasioDescartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003Simone de BeauvoirThe Second Sex, 1949Frantz Fanon — mentioned in relation to decolonial thought and the anti-fascist generation Herbert MarcuseOne-Dimensional Man, 1964Eros and Civilization, 1955Rosa Luxemburg — cited as an ecological thinker; the dialogue with Lenin in Zurich narrated by Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin — on Spinoza and radical enlightenment; on Rosa LuxemburgAltiero SpinelliThe Ventotene Manifesto, 1941 — founding document of the European federalist projectDonna Haraway"A Cyborg Manifesto," 1985VNS Matrix"A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century," 1991Alain de Benoist — neo-fascist philosopher, intellectual architect of the European New Right; cited as formative influence on Steve Bannon and the Heritage Foundation / Budapest / Rome foundation networksJulius Evola — philosopher of Italian fascism; cited alongside de Benoist as daily reference for BannonPeter Thiel — PhD dissertation on René Girard and the concept of sacrifice, Stanford / Yale; posi
- Feb 18, 202658 min
LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)
We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense. Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive framework that extends from bacteria to AI. The opening provocation is one she has been developing since large language models appeared as a genuinely literary phenomenon, the claim that LLMs do not speak natural language but produce a computational simulation of it.The umwelt of an LLM (its 'operative world-horizon,' in Uexküll's sense) overlaps with the human umwelt enough for communication to occur, but the divergences are large and consequential. This leads to the question of cognition itself. Against definitions that make consciousness the threshold of cognitive status, Hayles proposes the SIEPAL framework: Sensing, Interpreting, Responding, Anticipating, Learning, under which bacteria, algorithms, and ecosystems all qualify as cognitive. The non-conscious, on this account, isn't pre-cognitive but is in many ways more cognitively capable: faster, closer to environmental noise, less committed to the narratives of coherence that consciousness requires.The final section breaks genuinely new ground with Hayles's turn to analog computation: the argument that digital computation is a historical blip, that biological life has always operated on analog principles, and that the future of computation (neuromorphic chips, organoid computers, hybrid analog-digital architectures) represents not a departure from but a return to what life has always done. She proposes the analog humanities as a corrective to digital humanities, and the computational humanities as the synthesis that might finally close the gap between biological and technological cognition. This one is very much worth enjoying in dialogue with our previous epsiode on the digital.Some references:N. Katherine HaylesHow We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999Writing Machines, MIT Press, 2002Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2017Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Columbia University Press, 2021Bacteria to AI: Cognition Across Scales (referenced as new/recent book)Leif WeatherbyLanguage Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2025Jakob von Uexküll — concept of the Umwelt; the species-specific world-horizon generated through particular sensory and neurological capacitiesWalter FreemanHow Brains Make Up Their Minds, Columbia University Press, 1999 — on EEG waves as the mediating mechanism between individual neurons and global hemispheric activation; the rabbit olfactory system experimentsGregory Bateson — on systems that lose the ability to receive feedback collapsing; referenced without specific title (e.g. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972)Peter Haff — the technosphereStuart Kauffman & Giuseppe Longo, for arguing that biological organisms cannot be mapped into phase space and always follow the adjacent possibleWarren McCulloch & Walter Pitts — the McCulloch-Pitts neuron as a binary model with analog processes underlying the firing thresholdBernd Ulmann — here referenced as an expert on analog computing who argues that continuity vs. discreteness is a secondary rather than primary distinction between analog and digital
About Disintegrator
What does it mean to be human in an age where experience and behavior are mediated and regulated by algorithms? The Disintegrator Podcast is a limited series exploring how Artificial Intelligence affects who we are and how we express ourselves. Join Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean as they speak to the artists, philosophers, scientists, and social theorists at the forefront of human-AI relations. Disintegrator is produced by Rubén Bañuelos.
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