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)
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet investigates how intelligence – human and artificial – manifests itself under conditions of secrecy, hostility, and concealment. Departing from Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory, which frames the universe as a hostile terrain filed with predators where transparent communication is foolish and dangerous, the book portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with existential tension, nascent AI cults, and deceptive superintelligences. It maps a digital world in which deception is safety, silence is strategy, and new forms of intelligence emerge through obfuscation. Philosophically ruthless and speculative in method, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet doesn’t aim to reform the internet: it examines what can survive it. Against decades of writing that moralizes or diagnoses online life, this book suggests a colder thesis: that intelligence itself is mutating under pressure, learning to hide, mislead, and manipulate. 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 violence.The book draws unexpected links between internet studies and ufology, two fields haunted by the paradoxes of presence and concealment, detection and evasion, knowing and being known. Using this lens, it offers strategies for navigating online interactions with both humans and AIs.
When we break with the ideals of dialogue and open expression, what forms of intelligence and morality survive in their absence? Intelligence does not reward the loudest voice, but the most secretive presence. The future belongs to the quietest signal.
Buy book here. 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: AI in Light of Eastern European Intellectual History
This project develops a philosophy of technology informed by Eastern European intellectual history, specifically through the non-fiction writings of Polish intellectual and science-fiction author Stanisław Lem. Through his experiences of alienation, occupation, and forced displacement, Lem predicted civilizational trajectories that would eventually implicate the entire human species. He outlined a unique vision of technology that transcends inter-human relations, focusing instead on how technology alters the co-evolution of organic and inorganic existence. I propose examining contemporary technologies as existential pursuits through the lens of Lem's insights and Polish/Ukrainian modern history.
While debates about technology's future beyond the West gain increasing attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe remains understudied. Eastern European scholars, only recently freed from Soviet constraints on intellectual work, are now entering this discipline. This project aims to expand the canon of media theory and philosophy through engagement with Summa Technologiae, Lem's groundbreaking 1964 work that bridges philosophy and popular science. His futurological vision explores the relationship between technology and human cognitive capacities and evolutionary trajectories.
The project examines an array of futuristic technologies—those maintaining planetary and cosmic homeostasis, those altering the evolution of sex and cognition, and those disrupting our current moral and intellectual commitments. Through this examination, it articulates a vision of the future aligned with technology's inhuman and existential trajectories, while showing how Eastern European history prepares intellectuals to embrace alienation.
Read The Gnostic Machine: AI in Lem’s Summa Technologiae. Read Exonet. Read Unlearning Habitual Cosmologies.