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
  • 35. The Pre-Individual (w/ Ramon Amaro)

    35. The Pre-Individual (w/ Ramon Amaro)
    Aug 19 2025
    We’re joined by Ramon Amaro, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven — an engineer, philosopher, writer, curator, and altogether critical-force-to-be-reckoned-with on the subject of computation as it intersects with concepts like culture, race, and being. We were drawn to his tour-de-force “The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being” (2023), which is an absolute banger, re-reading Gilbert Simondon’s technical object through the lens of blackness, race, and racialized technologies.

    This one is a wild ride, a really deep and incredibly thoughtful episode, and we make an effort to define some initial terms on the podcast — specifically the ‘pre-individuated milieu’ (the space where things or ideas live before they become crystalized into social or racialized relations) and the ‘technical object’ (a way that Simondon helps us think through the autonomies enjoyed by technology, that even though technological objects may be initially bound in some ways to their human partners, they are able to exert influences not just backwards on us, but influences that determine their own design evolution over time). Ramon starts the conversation with a distinction that is critical to the whole episode — that blackness is not a racial category, or moreover, that blackness is distinct from race. Race is something that happens after blackness, that impinges upon blackness as it moves from pre-individuated space and enters into the field of social relations we currently live within. This independence is critical, because it invites alternatives (and suggests, we think very rightly, that this field of social relations we currently live within, while historically situated in imperial or colonial violence, is arbitrary and exchangeable with any other possibility).

    A few works that are important to consider here:
    • W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk — total canon
    • Sylvia Wynter’s work is discussed throughout, specifically on the concept of “Man” (particularly Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument).
    • Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects and Two Lessons on Animal and Man — both places to look for autonomy in Simondon’s work
    • Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks — implied by discussions of phenomenology/perception under racialization.
    • Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons — no spoilers, but more on this later :)
    Thanks soooo much to Dr. Amaro for joining us!
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    1 hr and 15 mins
  • 34. Spirit (w/ Catherine Malabou)

    34. Spirit (w/ Catherine Malabou)
    Aug 8 2025
    We couldn't be more honored to have Catherine Malabou on the pod, a serious inspiration for all of us. This episode covers so much, moving from AI to education to anarchism to feminism, but all grounded within a focus on automony -- the autonomy of language from us, the autonomy of an anarchic subject or an anarchic collective, the autonomy of the clitoris from gender, the autonomy of the plastic being or form with respect to change.

    If you're unfamiliar with Malabou's work, this is actually a really great place to start. Her work includes all of the above topics, and it pushes further into language, neuroscience, and politics than most philosophers dare. We've been following her since the epic What Should We Do With Our Brains?, the legendary Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (whose fleshing out of Malabou's reading of the plastic inspired so many theorists, arists, and researchers across endless fields and disciplines), and our personal favorite, the recent Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy. We'd almost recommend working backwards from this episode (as an Anglophone, I'm thinking in terms of English translation), going into Stop Thief and Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought before taking on the works on Hegel, Derrida, and plasticity.

    We're so so inspired by the freshness of Catherine Malabou's perspective on AI -- as always, she dares to say and formalize things that many philosophers treat reflexively. We hope to have more conversations on the topic of AI and education soon, following from Malabou's hot takes. :)
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    46 mins
  • **EXOCAPITALISM** (w. Charles Mudede & Becoming Press)

    **EXOCAPITALISM** (w. Charles Mudede & Becoming Press)
    Jul 31 2025
    Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits!

    Charles Mudede is an author, critic, filmmaker, and thinker whose work is everywhere. Watch Zoo, it's absolutely nuts. We were honored to have him write the prologue to Exocapitalism. You will almost never get a chance to watch a master get to work like this in this interview, absolutely dancing through the entire legacy of Marx with incredible speed and approachability, lobbing grenades and jokes at every turn. He's so incisive and clear-eyed; it's just really refreshing -- and Claire knows exactly how to set him up!

    Buy the book -- buy the whole catalog. If you haven't bought the book already you're missing out on "the Das Kapital of the 21st century," "the most anticipated book of the year," "the book drop of the century" (your peers' words not mine :p).
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    49 mins
  • 33. After Us (w/ Émile P. Torres)

    33. After Us (w/ Émile P. Torres)
    Jun 30 2025
    We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book (buy it, wtf!) but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release.

    Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You'll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance between venture capital and Silicon Valley. We strongly recommend their podcast Dystopia Now! (w/ Kate Willett) and their newest book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

    The T in TESCREAL is 'transhumanism,' a frequent topic of the pod, which tends to mean an application of technology to human bodies and in such a way that allows humans to transcend human limitations (e.g. speed, efficiency, senses, mortality). From there, the rest of the ideologies follow from a relationship between the human and its 'rationalized' extensibility through technology: E (extropianism), S (singularitarianism), C (cosmism), R (rationalism), EA (effective altriusim), and L (longtermism). Here's a gentle and clean explainer of all of the above.

    In this episode, we talk extensively about some elements that aren't actively represented in TESCREAL but sit beneath it: accelerationism, extinction-neutrality, and left-adjacent positions with respect to both (e.g. l/acc, xenofeminism, ahumanism -- this episode might pair really nicely with our interview with Patricia MacCormack for this very reason).
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    50 mins
  • VESPERS Pt. 2 (w/ Millaze)

    VESPERS Pt. 2 (w/ Millaze)
    Jun 12 2025
    CW: eating disorders are discussed a few times in this episode.

    Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail.

    For this episode, we're joined by Millaze -- an iconic face and musical voice on Instagram. We talk about love, cringe, the open-endedness of her craft (we barely scratch the surface here), and performance.

    Favorite Millaze-core:
    • Ramen
    • Override
    • Driveways
    • Bedside Table
    • Viscera
    But I really recommend her Instagram in general (as well as the fountain of Youtube Shorts)
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    1 hr and 26 mins