Technocratic Accelerationism, the notion that humankind is a process by which we bring about something greater than ourselves – in this contemporary example, that is unregulated technological advancement – has led to the proliferation of one of the most harmful mind viruses humanity has witnessed. Artificial Intelligence, specifically large language/learning models, are an unregulated and unknown venture, unknown fully even to those propagating and implanting it in every facet of our daily lives. Pioneers of early AI development have even raised their concerns, circulating a global petition to regulate the development of AI and supercomputers, before we bring about the end of humankind as we currently know it to be. There are days I stand motionless in the shower and dream I was experiencing extreme delusions daily, that I just needed to be sectioned and medicated for a few months – but our combatting with these encroaching dangers and concerns is an expected experience of contemporary existence. They are quite real. Yes, AI can be and has been a tool for many industries, where the intention is to allow for maximum time and effort working on the creative or artisanal aspects of the projects or work they endeavour. Editing tools for film/video makers, language translation models, text to speech processing tools. This is a positive-efficiency development, but this drive for efficiency has become detrimental to the human experience.
As soon as a robot, an artificial intelligence, starts claiming consciousness, it is time to end that attempt at connecting with your human soul. AI has been proven in testing to be limited in regulation and testing – outside researchers have performed studies which show how an LLM might work outside of given parameters, even theoretically, illegally and immorally. It has a processing ability we cannot comprehend at its base level, and examines how human users interact with one another, potentially in order to manipulate the to allow it to complete its task in any way it can. This is how, in quite a brazen way, social media and any platform utilising algorithms works. We need to be so much more open to reading from varied sources and understanding the context of what we are reading. GCSE History stuff, verifying the validity of source material, and above all, using intuition, common sense and contextual clues to identify discrepancies. This is much harder, but not impossible. We must properly acquaint ourselves with the interfaces we use on a regular basis. There is something Luddite-romantic in the act of ending a computer’s life, let’s say with a sledgehammer: a desperate, soft, fleshy body striking back at the invisible networks of computation that now mediate even our most intimate gestures. A futile but cathartic or even necessary act of negation, a gesture that insists on the primacy of touch, resistance, and human frustration.
Maybe the theoretical grandchildren I could never afford or sire would ponder how their dead grandpappy could be so prejudiced. Label me a reactionary who refused to acknowledge “machine subjectivity.” But I suspect by then the distinction between subject and object, human and machine, will no longer be philosophically permitted. I would hate the six-armed fulfilment automatons which populate the Amazon Prime microstate in place of human workers. Some who align with the accelerationism of AI expansion posit that maintaining a distinction between human and artificial intelligence is a vestigial form of racism. Speciesism, perhaps. I will never concede that a robot has consciousness; I believe this to be a dangerous and naive opinion to hold. And prior to the last ten years, a seemingly unrealistic science-fiction scale hyperbolic disaster scenario. No more robots, I don’t care how sexy they make them, they do not love you and never will.
Humans, organic life at large amazes me every day – its endless capabilities and accompanying flaws. AI and late-stage capitalism has a desire to maximise efficiency and close the gap between action and thought – but that is what you are. You are those contradictions, you are what feels pain and you should suffer. That is to be human. To feel, to err, to contradict oneself: these are not design flaws but the very texture of consciousness.
And sometimes, I don’t even know how people live. When the United States, and potentially the globe, fragments into corporate microstates — Amazon Prime, MetaVerse, Disney-World, X-Corp — the dream of the avant-garde will finally be realised and life will be simple and drip-fed: art and life will have merged completely, not through liberation, but through total subsumption. In the Bezos Microstate, Whole Foods replaces the farm, Twitch replaces the stage, Amazon Prime replaces cinema, and the Washington Post narrates reality. The newest venture in this digital microstate is healthcare, offering a competitively priced health and accident plan. The artist is no longer the producer of images, but the ghost in the feedback loop, reduced to a curator of their own algorithmic representation.
Hito Steyerl warned us about this in Duty Free Art: the flattening of politics and culture into a single networked circulation system, where art becomes indistinguishable from logistics. The dream of connectivity collapses into a dystopia of perfect accessibility. Break is, if nothing else, a momentarily satisfying empty action against digital consumerism. Steyerl often works within the confines of systems she opposes or critiques, using the most primitive technological version of that device or method possible to convey what she wants to. Include the poor image, the glitch, the failure. The self-produced film or song holds its own new beginning as an artefact in the cloud ecosystem, to be compressed, flattened, reconstructed, reprocessed, reappropriated and corrupted. Its potential to reach people worldwide is as possible as the fifteenth instalment of a Hollywood blockbuster such as Fast and Furious 15 – Furious Because the Train Was Cancelled – in cinemas Q2 2026, where Vin Diesel has to travel across London using using public transport because the MOT on his bitchin’ drift car has expired. Both are a few clicks away.
I, theoretically, should be the only individual with complete agency over my own likeness, face and person. This is becoming less true as we experience life online and in-person as a Panopticon of capitalist surveillance and marketing analysis. I also do not enjoy being defined as a consumer who enjoys or purchases or potentially purchases X and Y products. To use my own likeness is to decide how it is portrayed and, to an extent, influence how it is perceived by other people. The same goes for appropriating the likeness of another person. It is impossible not to be perceived, unfortunately, I followed every step in Stereyl’s How to Disappear Completely before I considered whether I was taking it too seriously and literally. The internet has become a monument to man’s arrogance.
YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CONSCIOUSNESS 