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Disintegrator

Disintegrator

By: Roberto Alonso Trillo Marek Poliks and Helena McFadzean
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 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.Copyright Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso
Episodes
  • The Teachings of Salesforce Child

    The Teachings of Salesforce Child
    Mar 2 2026
    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
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    44 mins
  • LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 2 (w/ Rosi Braidotti)

    LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 2 (w/ Rosi Braidotti)
    Feb 18 2026
    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; position papers on technological selection and extinction
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)

    LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)
    Feb 18 2026
    We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCL, 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
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    59 mins
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