Currently in development ₊˚⊹ᰔ
Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025)
This edited collection spans philosophy, social science, history, science-fiction and art criticism at the cross-roads of two questions: What is a decision? What is a machine? And can the rich material and intellectual history of China’s engagement with these questions provide insight into trajectories of artificial intelligence unveiling itself across the planet? Visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition. Tracking the history of Chinese AI from the pre-Cultural Revolution to the post-Deng Xiaoping eras right up to contemporary debates surrounding facial recognition, the writers in this collection draw on a mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer singular views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics and policymaking, the development of computational models in early Chinese cybernetics and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism.
Book forthcoming from Urbanomic in 2025.
Excerpts featured in a Zheng Mahler solo show here.
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press/Theory Redux, 2025)
Neither a political critique nor a blueprint for social change, this book presents a radical thought experiment about the internet and artificial intelligence as technologies with philosophical significance, whose workings reveal brutal truths about the limits of free will and human agency. Departing from Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin’s “dark forest theory,” it portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with conflict, nascent AI cults, and deceptive superintelligences. Humans are both predator and prey in this digital ecosystem of information exchange, whose purpose reverberates on a cosmic scale, weaving us into inescapable patterns of entropy and violence. On the surface, the internet is a positive tool for self-expression and wide-ranging social debates, but this neutral image obscures a darker mechanism. As a system that demands constant participation and communication, the internet extracts conflict from both human and artificial agents. It is a conflict-sustaining machine, where language and conversation are the fuel. How might we orient ourselves philosophically towards the internet, when all the pretense has been removed? Departing from a different history and ideal of communication, where espionage, secrecy, doublespeak and silence are the markers of intelligence, this book describes our current predicament and delineates emerging strategies for engaging with both humans and AIs online.
Book forthcoming from Theory Redux. Read The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (original essay). Watch The Dark Forest Theory of Intelligence (early talk).
Angels in Latent Spaces: Notes on AI Erotics
Drawing on my own education at Marcelina Darowska’s Catholic school for girls established in 1857, this multimedia research project engages female Christian erotic mysticism, from the Middle Ages until modernity, as an early philosophy of the internet. A cyber/feminist archeology around the questions of inhuman causality and automation, cross-reading theology and cyberculture theory, this project celebrates the ‘unnatural,’ revealing mystics to be prophetesses of the internet to come. Through this lens, contemporary examples like chatbot partner apps, virtual reality sex, and xenowombs, become spaces of human-machine malleability and intimacy.
Read Determination from the Outside: Stigmata, Teledildonics and Remote Cybersex. Read Angelsexual: Chatbot Celibacy & Other Erotic Suspensions. Watch Angels in Latent Spaces. Watch The Female Robot. Watch Shamanism, Oracles, and AI.
Existential Technologies
This project develops a philosophy of technology informed by the intellectual history of eastern Europe, specifically in dialogue with the non-fiction writings of Polish intellectual and science-fiction author Stanisław Lem. Through a life of alienation, occupation and forced displacement, it argues, Lem was able to predict civilizational trajectories that would in time implicate the whole of human species, while outlining a singular vision of technology that is not reducible to inter-human relations, but rather alters the co-evolution of organic and inorganic existence. I propose a philosophy of contemporary technologies as existential pursuits in dialogue with his insights and the history of Poland as such. As debates around the future of technology beyond the West draw increased attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe remains a neglected territory. Eastern European scholars, having emerged from Soviet constraints on intellectuals, have only recently entered this discipline. This project, looking to expand the canon of media theory and philosophy, is in dialogue with Summa Technologiae, a unique work at the intersection of philosophy and popular science published in 1964. Lem's futurology, focusing on the relationship between technology and human cognitive capacities and evolutionary trajectories. Focusing on vast arrays of futuristic technologies—ones that maintain planetary and cosmic homeostasis, ones that alter the evolution of sex and cognition, ones that disrupt our present moral and intellectual commitments—this project articulate a vision of the future aligned with inhuman and existential trajectories of technology, while examining how Eastern European history primes intellectuals for embracing alienation.
Read The Gnostic Machine: AI in Lem’s Summa Technologiae. Read Exonet. Read Unlearning Habitual Cosmologies.