Disintegrator

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-fli

Gaby 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

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).

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/k3ffx3ze
YALE Sun 3/8: https://exocapitalismthedatacentr.rsvpify.com
MIT Mon 3/9: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf4Jh4UAS4ZehWgZWHhlEWyMZNBvzcML-vWdBHOkcxHaA9Bhw/viewform?usp=header

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 Braidotti
Patterns of Dissonance, Polity Press, 1991
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press, 1994
Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Polity Press, 2002
Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, 2006
The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (English trans. 1977, preface by Michel Foucault)
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980
Félix Guattari
The Three Ecologies, 1989 (English trans. 1991)
Michel Foucault
Preface to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus, 1977
Spinoza
Ethics
Theological-Political Treatise
Antonio Negri
The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, 1981
Genevieve Lloyd
Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics, University of Minnesota Press, 1994
Spinoza and the Ethics, Routledge, 1996
Antonio Damasio
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex, 1949
Frantz Fanon — mentioned in relation to decolonial thought and the anti-fascist generation Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man, 1964
Eros and Civilization, 1955
Rosa 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 Luxemburg

Altiero Spinelli
The Ventotene Manifesto, 1941 — founding document of the European federalist project
Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto," 1985
VNS Matrix
"A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century," 1991
Alain 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 networks

Julius Evola — philosopher of Italian fascism; cited alongside de Benoist as daily reference for Bannon

Peter Thiel — PhD dissertation on René Girard and the concept of sacrifice, Stanford / Yale; position papers on technological selection and extinction

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 Hayles
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999
Writing Machines, MIT Press, 2002
Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2017
Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Columbia University Press, 2021
Bacteria to AI: Cognition Across Scales (referenced as new/recent book)
Leif Weatherby
Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Jakob von Uexküll — concept of the Umwelt; the species-specific world-horizon generated through particular sensory and neurological capacities

Walter Freeman
How 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 experiments
Gregory 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 technosphere

Stuart Kauffman & Giuseppe Longo, for arguing that biological organisms cannot be mapped into phase space and always follow the adjacent possible

Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts — the McCulloch-Pitts neuron as a binary model with analog processes underlying the firing threshold

Bernd 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