MEDIUM HOT

A techno-environmentalist warning shot for the digital landscape’s impending doom.

In 11 searing essays, filmmaker and new media scholar Steyerl (Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, 2017, etc.) discusses cutting-edge advancements in AI and art and outlines the ripple of damage caused by competing tech companies. “The more one tries to preempt the future,” she writes, “the more the present gets out of hand.” Many generative AI programs use images scrubbed from the internet, regardless of copyright protections. A 2023 Hollywood strike protested against the use of AI likenesses in film. “The recent history of these apps,” Steyerl explains, “can be written succinctly through the different protests against them.” She positions seemingly harmless image-generation programs on the same spectrum as “warfare, marketing and surveillance” by detailing the harmful impact this boom has on marginalized communities around the world. One essay discusses how compromised immigrant populations are exploited as “a new, invisible global underclass of data proletariats.” In Kosovo, the region’s electricity is sapped by the crypto mining frenzy. In Kenya and Sudan, the cryptocurrency Worldcoin collects biometric data from underinformed volunteers via retinal scans. These unnerving texts are steeped in technical jargon that will challenge many readers but reward those who endure by offering a blistering new perspective. Steyerl uses thermodynamic terminology to explain image generation: “a detailed, intelligible image is seen as being ‘cool’, then is diffused into ‘hotter’, less organized articulations, and ultimately into random noise. Image generation proceeds by reversing this process of entropy and recovering, or ‘restoring’, an image from noise.” Later, this lingo leads to another dark observation: “workers in digital industries take on the role of noise particles, being burnt out, dispersed and moving about randomly, making them vulnerable to exploitation.” By highlighting a system of global damage incurred at the expense of new technology, Steyerl paints a rotten digital landscape on the brink of something terrible.

A startling vision of the present rendered from the chaotic noise of recent technological advancements.