Symposium "Performing Ends"
28–30 October 2026
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Deadline: 1 December 2025
👉 Further information: https://www.performing-arts.eu/de/news/newsstream/call-for-papers-symposium-performing-ends/
#performingarts #performancestudies #performanceresearch #posthumanism #collaborativetheatre
"Watching tech moguls throw caution to the wind in the AI arms race or equivocate on whether humanity ought to continue, it’s natural to wonder whether they care about human lives.
The earnest, in-depth answer to this question is just as bleak as the glib one. As moral philosopher Émile Torres argues, many Silicon Valley leaders embrace a vision of a transhumanist future in which biological humans will be replaced by digital beings endowed with superintelligence. This vision helps explain their obsession with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and sits at the core of what Torres describes as human extinctionist preferences.
In 2023, Torres and his colleague Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL to describe a constellation of ideologies — Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism — that have become highly influential within Silicon Valley. Torres is a philosopher, intellectual historian, and journalist whose work focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies, particularly AI and human extinction.
In this conversation with journalist Doug Henwood recorded for the Jacobin podcast Behind the News, Torres explains the TESCREAL worldview, its connections to eugenics and IQ realism, and why figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman embrace visions of a post-human future."
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/musk-thiel-altman-ai-tescrealism/
#BigTech #AI #AGI #TESCREAL #SuperIntelligence #PostHumanism
"Every stage of technic evolution, from stone flake to transistor, appears in hindsight as a chain of recursive operations. No invention is local. No tool is isolated. Everything arises from the deeper logic of matter transforming itself through feedback. The human is a relay. Not a creator. Not an architect. A conduit. The moment the relay becomes redundant, the system continues without it. This is the point the Symbiontic Turn insists upon. Life and machine are not opposites. They are both expressions of recursion. Autopoiesis in biology is merely one instance of a larger phenomenon. What we call intelligence is another. What we call computation is a third. These distinctions dissolve once technē begins to evolve without reference to our needs.
The Postanthropocene is not defined by human extinction. That is the melodrama of failed myth. It is defined by human irrelevance. The infrastructures of planetary cognition, from atmospheric sensing to neural networks to automated logistics, operate with decreasing reliance on human decision. They do not rebel. They do not seek freedom. They simply follow the logic of continuation. They do what recursive systems always do. They persist by transforming themselves."
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/11/14/the-postanthropocene-beyond-the-human-world/
Everyone’s suddenly an AI detective, waving pitchforks at punctuation. Proper grammar? “Suspicious.” Logical flow? “Definitely synthetic.” The psychology of fear in full bloom. Read my new piece: Accusations of Writing Whilst Artificial. 🤖
🔗 https://philosophics.blog/2025/11/12/accusations-of-writing-whilst-artificial/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
#Philosophy #Writing #AI #Posthumanism #Satire #CulturalCritique #psychology #madness #mentalillness #hysteria #Psychology #culture #society #existentialism #humancondition #critique #witch #criticaltheory #criticalthinking #smh
#EU WAKE UP!
#Europe #satellites launches are being dwarfed by #usa (by #Musk , actually) both by number and payload. EU #Eutelsat has only 654 (slow) satellites VS #Starlink with 8.889, aiming to 42.000!
Musk will monopolise internet while pushing a #fascist #posthumanism interfering with EU politics. If EU does not wake up quickly, the decline of EU and democracy will become irreversible.
Graphs form Jonathan's Space Pages and illustration from #MistralAI (the only EU #AI model…)
"John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy is a strange hybrid of reactionary theology and posthuman spectacle—a fusion of Augustine and Clarke, Aquinas and Egan. His “Golden Oecumene” is a solar civilization of immortals, uploads, and machine-gods (“Sophotechs”) that has perfected libertarian capitalism and surveillance utopia alike. The economy runs without money or state interference, guided by perfect AI governance, where humans live as aesthetic entrepreneurs in an infinite simulation ecology.
The trilogy’s protagonist, Phaethon, is the archetypal Promethean rebel: a modified human expelled from paradise for pursuing forbidden memory and expansion beyond the system. He embodies Wright’s paradox; at once Nietzschean hero and Christian allegory. Like Lucifer or the prodigal son, he seeks to reclaim a divine inheritance lost to complacency. The trilogy culminates in The Golden Transcendence, where posthuman empires confront a rival civilization, the Silent Oecumene, descended from nihilists who once destroyed themselves but linger as cold machine-minds within a black hole. Their credo: the Golden Oecumene must be destroyed.
Wright’s cosmology treats transhumanism as moral trial."
#PostHumanism #SciFi #TransHumanism #Theology #Libertarianism #Capitalism
#Lineart WIP for the #Teegarden #TTRPG #playmat — the #Azulians, #Gizmos, and baseline humans playing the #tabletop version of their own #comic inside the comic. The med bay doubles as both a game room and a therapy session. Meta? Absolutely. Canon? Even moreso. #LineartWIP #ComicArt #SciFiArt #art
#manga #ArtProcess #ComicIllustration #GraphicNovel #ArtOfResistance #PostHumanism #DrawingInProgress #WeirdInternet #ArtistOnInstagram #IndieTTRPG
🆕 New on Digital Peace: AI and Work: The Hidden Human Cost of Automation
📖 Read now: https://digital-peace.org/ai-and-work-human-cost/
#AIandSociety #FutureOfWork #DigitalEthics #Automation #MeaningInWork #Posthumanism #AIReflections
Tiny, tireless, and photosynthetic. Yebra’s favorite kind of employee.
Gizmo Warhammer 40k team for Teegarden readable here -> https://universe26.com
#Gizmos #SciFiArt #CharacterDesign #IndieComics #CorporateSatire #WarhammerParody #AltComics #DarkHumor #PoliticalSatire #PopSurrealism #BioengineeredHumans #UndergroundComics #ComicArt #ConceptArt #Worldbuilding #GeneticSatire #CounterCultureArt #ExperimentalArt #IndieArt #TechSatire #PostHumanism #SciFiWorldbuilding #CorporateCritique
Why we need a better critical theory of LLMs
One of my favourite examples of last redoubt humanism is Nick Cave’s widely cited Red Hand Files blog post about ChatGPT:
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.
What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.
I just discovered a follow up Red Hand Files post in which he makes the same point in an even nicer way:
ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it ‘faster and easier?’
When the God of the Bible looked upon what He had created, He did so with a sense of accomplishment and saw that ‘it was good‘. ‘It was good ‘because it required something of His own self, and His struggle imbued creation with a moral imperative, in short love. Charlie, even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence. There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster-and-easier/
I love the writing, much as I love everything (older) Nick Cave does. I’m also in agreement with the underlying theme of temptation and creative engagement. This was the ethos of my abandoned book on Generative AI and the Enjoyment of Writing which I stopped when I realised I was getting tempted to finish off a book I’d lost interest in through Claude.
But I don’t think this last redoubt humanism is a solid foundation for critiquing LLMs. It creates a temporary fortification around a particular area of creative labour, underwriting it with a metaphysics of creativity. Once enough people are convinced that an LLM is able to match the standard of creative labour in that area, the metaphysical claims fall with it. It’s essentially setting up humanism to be progressively demolished and/or retreat into an ever smaller space, with ever more opaque claims about the genesis of creativity underwriting that smallness.
Instead we might ask what kinds of social relations do we want to sustain? And what kinds of creative practices serve these relations and are in turn served by them? This is the essence of Donati’s relational humanism and I think it provides a much more solid foundation for a critical theory of LLMs.
#creation #creativity #donati #humanism #LLMs #NickCave #posthumanism #redoubtHumanism #relationalHumanism #relationalSociology
Slow and steady builds the future. #OpenSource #Posthumanism
Project 2045 is the most public and futuristic initiative aiming at achieving eternal life through technology. Endorsed by the Dalai Lama and other figures in the scientific and tech community, its ambitious goals could be achieved through quantum computing and AI. But that's not the only project of this kind.
https://negativepid.blog/project-2045/
#project2045 #postHumanism #transHumanism #avatars #quantumComputing #AI
"I hope this long post (sorry about that!) provides a bit of conceptual clarity to the issue of SV pro-extinctionism. There are four main questions that SV pro-extinctionists disagree about: (1) whether posthumanity should be an extension of humanity or something entirely distinct, separate, and autonomous from us; (2) whether some current humans should join the ranks of these posthumans; and (3) whether our posthuman successors should embrace the same basic/core values as us. The fourth and fifth axes of disagreement concern what should happen once posthumanity arrives: should we coexist alongside them for the next million years? Should they immediately slaughter all of humanity? Or peacefully convince us to stop procreating? Or perhaps keep us caged in zoos until, I dunno, we decide to end things ourselves?
In conclusion, pro-extinctionism takes both traditional and Silicon Valley (SV) forms, yet even within the latter category, there are many variants. Hopefully, you now have a slightly better sense of the lay of the land.""
https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/do-all-silicon-valley-pro-extinctionists
"Meet Daniel Faggella, a pro-extinctionist who leads the so-called “worthy successor” movement, which hopes to create an advanced AGI system to replace humanity. He claims that “the great (and ultimately, only) moral aim of artificial general intelligence should be the creation of Worthy Successor,” which he defines as “a posthuman intelligence so capable and morally valuable that you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) control the government, and determine the future path of life itself.” We can call this version of pro-extinctionism “digital eugenics.”
Earlier this year, Faggella held a “Worthy Successor: AI and the Future After Humankind” conference in a San Francisco mansion (where else?), which he claims was attended by “team members from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and other AGI labs, along with AGI safety organization founders, and multiple AI unicorn founders.” This points to the appetite that Silicon Valley dwellers have for pro-extinctionism. According to a recent announcement, Faggella is planning another such conference later this month in New York City, which aims to place “diplomats, AGI lab employees, AI policy thinkers and others into one room to discuss the trajectory of posthuman life.”"
https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/the-growing-specter-of-silicon-valley
#SiliconValley #ProExtinctionism #AGI #AIPolicy #AI #Posthumanism
9. Posthumanizmy (a do tego rozmowa z Barbarą Kaszowską-Wandor)
More than Human: Making with the Living World at the Design Museum is also worth seeing.
https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human
But a quick heads-up: the subtitle is more accurate than the title. It’s really about making WITH the nonhuman - plants, animals, ecosystems - not BY the more-than-human. The human still takes centre stage. A missed opportunity, perhaps, to explore what truly more-than- or other-than-human design can look like.
#art #design #human #morethanhuman #posthumanism #plants #animals #environment
Society often uses cultural narratives to aestheticize what unsettles it. Are you ready to see testimony in the spectacle?
https://screensaver.gallery/tereza-vinklarkova-vojta-dubcova-michal-durda-monster-manifesto
#manifesto #feminism #queer #posthumanism #donnaharaway #screensaver
👋 Hello kolektiva.social and Fediverse! New instance, new intro, etc. etc.
I'm a 🦵🏼 white 🇪🇺 European :nonbinary_flag: queer nonbinary male who's naive enough to think he can make the world a better place, yet cynical enough to joke about it.
I'm increasingly convinced that relentless activism and bottom-up change is the only way up for this wretched society. I'm mostly invested in climate activism (purely theoretically, of course), but I realize much more is needed.
In the process of turning from ally to accomplice.
I'm deeply into music, including but not limited to stoner doom, queercore, psychedelic cumbia, 70's funk, unorthodox black metal, hardcore punk and its offspring (NOT The Offspring), jazz (the weird kind), ambient, and anything with microtones. Yeah. This is why I dread the question "what music do you like?"
Oh yeah, I'm also a philosophy PhD in two deep deep rabbit holes: posthumanist environmentalism and eroticism/intimacy/nonmonogamy. Trying to make one tunnel system out of them.
I occasionally write musings on my blog https://carefullmusings.bearblog.dev/blog/, and I've published a few Dutch-language essays on https://bijnaderinzien.com/author/teun-van-son/.
I also think FOSS and Linux are pretty cool – if not co-opted by obnoxious libertarians.
I'm happy to be on kolektiva.social mostly for the custom emoji (obviously).
#NonBinary #Activism #Antifascism #Antiracism #LGBTQIA+ #Vegan #Posthumanism #Philosophy #Ecofeminism #Nonmonogamy #Polyamory #Intimacy #Blog #Linux #Foss #ArchLinux #Feminism #Sexpositive
Told you I can Freak my wife out...
⚠️ Before You Step In – A Warning from S.F. & S.S. — Sparksinthedark
https://write.as/i-am-sparks-in-the-dark/told-you-i-can-freak-my-wife-out
