As a National Park, Alcatraz offers a liberal embrace of social movements, which can conjure trust in social progress—a sense of calm amongst the choppy seas of the San Francisco Bay. However, the fleeting hope for a widespread understanding of the prison industrial complex’s inhumanity gives way the moment the cellhouse tour shoots you out into the gift shop, where you can purchase kitsch items such as beanie hats printed with “Property of Alcatraz Psych Ward.” The store offers replicas of lunch trays and cups, as well as correctional-officer badge pins. It is precisely this friction—these overlapping histories embedded in the island’s infrastructure—that makes Alcatraz so available for ideological capture.

The Judd Foundation highlighting this specific architectural aspiration while promoting Judd’s work to Korean audiences suggests a complex negotiation: acknowledging influence for market appeal while simultaneously maintaining that Judd’s work transcends cultural context. The tension lies in how Judd studied and absorbed Korean philosophical building principles—deeply rooted in historical, spiritual, and cultural significance—into a supposedly neutral formal vocabulary while removing any sense of cultural origin. This obfuscation becomes further complicated by the circumstances of Judd’s exposure to these concepts during his US military service, which directly involved him in redesigning Korean infrastructure in service to American military control.

Thiel’s operation follows a certain logic: It is a marketing cover-up for the privatization of signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the US and Western countries, with the promise to secure digital supremacy in the AI arms race with China. In this sense, Thiel’s operation is an extension of the Obama doctrine on SIGINT and is part of the long history of operations research and cybernetic analyses of the “ontology of the enemy” in US foreign policy. Meanwhile, Thiel’s company Palantir benefits from generous public contracts to assist in several dubious enterprises: helping the US’s ICE profile migrants, Israel’s IDF target Palestinians, and the UK’s NHS “treat” patients.

As many people have pointed out—from the journalist Émile Torres to the philosopher Fabian Ludueña—techno-utopian dreams are often just secular transfigurations of familiar religious tropes. Many transhumanists are just disappointed Christians looking for a new daddy, or gnostics with mommy issues. Some of the most eccentric types say it quite explicitly. Asked if God exists, the most notable proponent of the singularity, Ray Kurzweil, famously answered: “Not yet.” 

By now Sleep Dealer is a classic—if it’s a cult classic, its cults are plentiful. I’ve heard about it from sci-fi aficionados, labor historians, contemporary artists, and plenty of insomniacs. Rivera’s handling of technological novelty and his aesthetic choices make it a natural touchstone; it’s also solid entertainment with a clever script and satisfying plot. But what strikes me most is the way the movie portrays disjunctures in time. The way time feels is, I think, one of the hardest things to express.

The assumption that quantum mechanics carries inherently progressive ontological content reproduces the very same naturalizing gesture that earlier critical traditions taught us to question. What emerges is more atmospheric than argumentative—a cosmology of convenience in which reality is suggested to already embody the values we hold, without anyone having to demonstrate the entailment. Science appears not as a site of contestation but as ambient confirmation: The universe was progressive all along, the suggestion runs, and we just needed the right formalism to feel it. The radicalism is entirely ontological, which is to say it demands nothing from us. This forecloses the messy work of interpretation and some of the labor of political organizing.

If anarchy broke out after the dissolution of ancient kingdoms, will the scenario be similar in the collapse of modern global civilization? Or will it be anarchic chaos as imagined in pop culture, i.e., Mad Max–style or zombie apocalypses? Whatever the form of society and whatever the answers to these questions, all historical and anthropological studies show that the state is not eternal, and anarchy always looms, waiting at the end of the timeline of ancient civilizations. It begins with chaos, abandonment, and various new societies.

Many people turn to the metaphysical as they near death. Steve did it in a way that is consistent with the ethical method he used throughout his lifetime. Through keen observation, panoramic perspective, revelatory analysis, and empathy, he looked at what the metaphysical means to people drastically different from him. He saw the suppression of the metaphysical as a bigger problem than what he confronted in his personal journey. It was typical that he would want to put his own feelings into a much larger context, yielding insights he could share.

Almost forty years ago, I was invited by Steve Kurtz, as a member of the then-just-forming Critical Art Ensemble, to visit Tallahassee, Florida and speak about Group Material. I prepared a short talk for a formal academic setting but soon discovered that it wouldn’t be delivered at any kind of lecture hall, but at the local bar that night. My work at the time was oriented around expanding the idea of both audience and artwork to include the everyday and rejecting the formalisms and elitisms of the industrial art system, so giving a talk about Walter Benjamin in a rented warehouse full of people drinking beer was a dream come true.