The conspicuous presence of human growth hormone and ill-fitting suits worn by tech-billionaire CEOs in the front row of Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration last month speaks volumes about the deep ties between the disruptive ideology of the tech sector and far-right movements in recent decades—a partnership now formally entering the White House. The way disgraced New York City mayor Eric Adams was relegated to a back room after receiving a last-minute invite to the inauguration only adds to the displacement of traditional agents of governance to make room for the new “globalists.” Neoreactionary thought has been particularly influential, appealing to young provocateurs in art and tech turned on by its brand of futurist extremism and targeted anti-humanism spotted with various illiberal tendencies masquerading as pronatalism, market nationalism, and so on. In this issue, Yuk Hui notes that vice president J. D. Vance’s close association with Dark Enlightenment figures such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin has taken their abject provocations to a new extreme. Hui revisits his 2017 e-flux journal essay “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries” to analyze how this fitful thrashing of US empire clings to the spoils of globalization while also buckling under its consequences, deepening its unsustainable contradictions.
Sven Lütticken dives into the philosophical and reactionary foundations of what he calls “propaganda for potentiality.” Against the backdrop of “longtermism,” “effective altruism,” and their incumbent logics tied to property and rationalism, Lütticken asks how necessary deviations and divergences can be propagated to counter Silicon Valley’s techno-dystopian future—especially as today’s titans of “industry” dig their hands deeper into lawfare, in addition to their already central roles in warfare, surveillance, and governance. Also in this issue, Charles Tonderai Mudede observes how two supernovas that occurred during the Dutch Golden Age cemented scientific rationality’s role as practical knowledge for trade, establishing merchant rule through capital and superseding the influence of church and monarchy. Such celestial events were known before the age of capital, just as enchantment and dreaming surpass the luxury goods promising to re-enchant a world deprived of basic necessities.
As part of After Okwui—a series commissioned by contributing editor Serubiri Moses—curators Émilie Renard and Claire Staebler join Mathilde Walker-Billaud to reflect on their work on the 2012 Paris Triennale, which had the theme “Intense Proximity.” An ambitious and unwieldy project that Okwui Enwezor led as artistic director, the exhibition reexamined the ethnographic model of otherness in a city Enwezor described in terms of its “excess of cultural capital.” This issue also features an excerpt from Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (newly translated by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono), a landmark work that emerged out of the extra-parliamentary, autonomous, and internationalist feminist movements of the 1970s. Taken from the chapter “Housewives, Prostitutes, and Workers,” the excerpt illustrates the centrality of reproductive work for capitalist valorization in spite of the way that capital misrepresents—as personal service, domesticity, or prostitution—the labor power of this work.
Centralized AI services like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have become ubiquitous, enclosing our collective intelligence and selling it back to us through convenient interfaces. In “Taking AI into the Tunnels,” Mikael Brunila proposes that AI can be fragmented and decentralized through tools like open models, federated learning, and new forms of cryptography. A movement of “tunnel politics” that foregrounds collective opacity can undermine the panoptic aspirations of tech oligopolists. Kristin Ross and Andreas Petrossiants discuss another modality of contesting the accumulative world: the “commune form,” as seen in land-based struggles like the ZAD (zone à défendre) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France and the movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest in the US. As Ross says, perhaps it is the joy and pleasure of cultivating new forms of collective life and non-accumulative social values that scares capitalist states the most.
