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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.Copyright Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso
Episodes
  • 38. Natural Language (w/ Leif Weatherby)

    38. Natural Language (w/ Leif Weatherby)
    Sep 24 2025
    We’re joined by Leif Weatherby, associate professor at NYU, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and author of the new Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, to think with us about AI, structure, and what happens when computation meets language on their own shared turf. Language Machines is easily the best book about AI written this year and is just a killer antidote to so much dreary doomer consensus, it really feels like one of the first truly constructive pieces of writing we’ve seen out of academia on this subject.

    This episode follows really well after two others — our talk with Catherine Malabou earlier this summer and the episode with M. Beatrice Fazi about a year ago (both faves). It feels like theory is opening back up again into simultaneously speculative and structural returns, powered in no small part by the challenges posed to conventional theories of language (from Derrida to Chomsky) by Large Language Models. This episode absolutely rips, literally required listening.

    Structuralism is so back (and we’re here for it).

    Some important references among many from the episode:
    • Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics.”
    • N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious .
    • Beatrice Fazi, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics.
    • Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994).
    • e.g. Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts & Jeffrey Watumull, “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” NYT (link)
    • Anthropic, “Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet” (featuring the Golden Gate Bridge example - link)
    • LAION-5B dataset paper and post-hoc analyses noting strong Shopify/e-commerce presence in training scrapes.
    • Weatherby in the NYT
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • 37. Center (w/ Mohammad Salemy)

    37. Center (w/ Mohammad Salemy)
    Sep 17 2025
    We're joined by Mohammad Salemy, organizer and facilitator of the New Centre for Research and Practice, fierce critic, social media (@inhumansofberlin) hyperstitionist, artist, personality, and force.

    This episode provides a lot of background into how the New Centre came to be. If you're unfamiliar with TNC, it's one of the main places where theory happens today. Check out their website here, and some of their legendary moments on Youtube:


    • Colin Drumm's Capital & Power - a huge influence on our book, and an excellent discussion of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan (heavily discussed on the pod today).
    • Friend of the pod Richard Hames' excellent Critical Collapsology series.
    • Laura Tripladi's series on Material Interfaces.
    • Reza Negarestani's Draw of the Desert - one of the most incredible and contentious pieces of modern political philosophy around.

    While we spend time on the New Centre, we also spend time on Mo and his legendary backround, culminating in a discussion of his (iconic? infamous? lovable? hostile?) social media presence, its relationship to his political philosophy, the 'developmental problem' of post-colonial geopolitics, and on the necessity of breaking up the rust that accumulates around frozen gears.

    We also discuss his recent piece on &&&, Category Theory & Differential Identity, a project close to our heart in terms of understanding how identity is perhaps less constructed than it is mobilized, driven, and how it comes into contact with structures anterior to the strictly human.

    Many, many thanks to Mo for joining us!
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    57 mins
  • 36. Violence (w/ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney)

    36. Violence (w/ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney)
    Sep 3 2025
    We’re joined by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney — co-conspirators of The Undercommons — to think with us about AI, study, and brutality, and the long histories that place these concepts into relation.

    In a lot of ways neither Moten nor Harney require an introduction, they are the sources of major touchstone references made throughout this podcast — from last week’s guest Ramon Amaro to one of our first guests, Luciana Parisi, and plenty of places in between.

    The episode starts with a conversation about AI, but it quickly becomes a conversation about change, the question of the necessity of change or even organization, and imposition (that is, the brutal, external application of force against situations that already contain within themselves the lived possibility of alternative futures).

    Some important references among many from the episode:
    • Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
    • Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).
    • Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” (2003).
    • Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke UP, 2016).
    • Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022).
    • Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; later eds. 2000/2020).
    • Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music (1968).
    • Hua Hsu, “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” The New Yorker (June 30, 2025).
    • • Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945).
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    54 mins
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