Disintegrator

Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits [https://shop.becoming.press/products/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-2025-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trillo]! Charles Mudede is an author, critic, filmmaker, and thinker whose work is everywhere. Watch Zoo [https://www.artforum.com/columns/zoo-180112/], it's absolutely nuts. We were honored to have him write the prologue to Exocapitalism. You will almost never get a chance to watch a master get to work like this in this interview, absolutely dancing through the entire legacy of Marx with incredible speed and approachability, lobbing grenades and jokes at every turn. He's so incisive and clear-eyed; it's just really refreshing -- and Claire knows exactly how to set him up! Buy the book [https://shop.becoming.press/products/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-2025-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trillo] -- buy the whole catalog. If you haven't bought the book already you're missing out on "the Das Kapital of the 21st century," "the most anticipated book of the year," "the book drop of the century" (your peers' words not mine :p).

We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book (buy it, wtf!) [https://becoming.press/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-(2025)-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trillo] but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release. Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You'll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance between venture capital and Silicon Valley. We strongly recommend their podcast Dystopia Now! [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6P6ekhshLnQAaA7JffTN4-Xkl5NPJAwa] (w/ Kate Willett) and their newest book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. The T in TESCREAL is 'transhumanism,' a frequent topic of the pod, which tends to mean an application of technology to human bodies and in such a way that allows humans to transcend human limitations (e.g. speed, efficiency, senses, mortality). From there, the rest of the ideologies follow from a relationship between the human and its 'rationalized' extensibility through technology: E (extropianism), S (singularitarianism), C (cosmism), R (rationalism), EA (effective altriusim), and L (longtermism). Here's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txok0XY2ePU] a gentle and clean explainer of all of the above.  In this episode, we talk extensively about some elements that aren't actively represented in TESCREAL but sit beneath it: accelerationism, extinction-neutrality, and left-adjacent positions with respect to both (e.g. l/acc, xenofeminism, ahumanism -- this episode might pair really nicely with our interview with Patricia MacCormack for this very reason).

CW: eating disorders are discussed a few times in this episode. Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail. For this episode, we're joined by Millaze -- an iconic face and musical voice on Instagram. We talk about love, cringe, the open-endedness of her craft (we barely scratch the surface here), and performance. Favorite Millaze-core: * Ramen [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-YzT8RY280] * Override [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXZhBm9rQ] * Driveways [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYt1C5kzE] * Bedside Table [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiNw5be3Ico] * Viscera [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JARQ1G8VPLE] But I really recommend her Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/iammillaze/] in general (as well as the fountain of Youtube Shorts)

Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail. For this episode, we're joined by RayonBase. If you've opened TikTok or Instagram over the past few years, you recognize RayonBase's face, voice, instrumental composition, and video editing style. This is an open-ended conversation about character, craft, love, innocence, and the future. <3  Favorite RayonBase-core: * The Swagger Song (Badder Than You) [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/itBxE8Xst8I] * EVER CLOSER PT. 2 [https://www.tiktok.com/@rayonbase/video/7331755637581385002] * Shelter [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T8S7cBRq-aM] * Can Eye Kiss You? [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KGOvDOb99IE] * Innocence Found [https://www.instagram.com/p/C_t6_vuu3PV/] ^ The above are videos / shorts primarily used as teasers for full songs, all of which is available on any streaming platform.

Artist and curator Dana Dawud joins Disintegrator to talk about Open Secret, her touring platform for internet cinema, and her evolving film series Monad. We discuss the blur as a visual device and trend, the impossibility of representing Palestine, being trained by AI and building myth in the age of the feed. The audio is laced with reflections by collaborators orbiting Open Secret: redactedcut @redactedcut, Palais Sinclaire @palais.sinclaire, Mischa Dols @mischaapje, 0nty @the.ontological.turnt, Angel Kether @user_goes_to_kether. References mentioned: * Gore Layer by Alex Quicho in Spike (July 2024): https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho [https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho], * The novel Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus: https://www.semiotexte.com/aliens-anorexia-new-edition [https://www.semiotexte.com/aliens-anorexia-new-edition], * Further reading on CoreCore by 0nty (July 2023): https://becoming.press/corecore-the-return-of-speculative-irony-by-0nty [https://becoming.press/corecore-the-return-of-speculative-irony-by-0nty], * We spoke about Serge Daney’s observation that “there is no image of Palestine” (or, more precisely, that there is “no complex image of Palestinian reality”) which arises from his deep engagement with the politics and ethics of representation, particularly in the context of Jean-Luc Godard’s film ‘Ici et ailleurs’ (Here and Elsewhere). Read more in Serge Daney’s seminal ‘Before and After the Image’ (1999): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389528 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389528]., * Watch ‘The Sight is a Wound’ (2025), a visual essay by Parham Ghalamdar: https://www.ghalamdar.com/tsiaw [https://www.ghalamdar.com/tsiaw], * ‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’ (1988). In this work, Deleuze interprets monads not as isolated points but as folds of space, movement, and time, each containing the world within itself as a unique point of view., * Jaques Rivette’s almost-13hr-long-film: ‘Out 1’ (1971), * Sven Loven at No Gallery: https://www.nononogallery.com/exhibitions/sven-loven-humiliation-ritual/#press-release [https://www.nononogallery.com/exhibitions/sven-loven-humiliation-ritual/#press-release], Links to explore Dana’s work: * Monad+ : https://hybrida.space/monad [https://hybrida.space/monad], * PalCoreCore: https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/dana-dawud-palcorecore [https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/dana-dawud-palcorecore], * Pleasure Helmet Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/pleasure-helmet-977951874 [https://soundcloud.com/pleasure-helmet-977951874], * https://www.instagram.com/dansdansrev/ [https://www.instagram.com/dansdansrev/], * https://www.instagram.com/_opensecrett_/ [https://www.instagram.com/_opensecrett_/]