M-I-M’: Living Information and AGI (Artificial Genocidal Intelligence)

Researcher: Jonathan Beller

The industrialization of visuality and the transformative expansion of the category of labor as attention in and through cinema reveal the technical reconfiguration of value extraction and the role of computation in relation to political economy and the bios, as mediated by screens and ultimately by all possible interfaces. What is called AI indicates a shift in the dominant mode of production, and in the media and metaphysics that pertain therein. The dialectical development of racial capital proceeds through computation and its many interfaces, reshaping understandings of labor, politics, economics, money, time, rationality, being, and mind. The distributed and relational character of objects and entities comes to the fore, even as monetary accumulation and AGI (Artificial Genocidal Intelligence) informatically orchestrate ever more aspects of daily life, global policing, and planetary fate. The current rise of fascist oligarchy and the promulgation of genocides are symptomatic of these transformations, as is the emergence of global discontent.

About the Researcher:

Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and co-founder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Recently, he held the titles of Visiting Professor at REMESO / Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity, and Society, Linköping University, Sweden, and Visiting Researcher at the University of the Arts, Helsinki Research Institute, Finland.
His books include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Dartmouth UP, 2006), Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2006), The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (Pluto Press, 2017), and The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021). He is currently working on two book projects: Economic Media and Collateral Genocide.
Beller serves as co-editor of the international political journal Social Text.