Stages a genealogy of “autonomy” as techno-illusion and structural opacity—from early radio-controlled spectacle to Tesla’s fatal misrecognition—arguing that automation’s real danger is epistemic and political: the transfer of agency into black-box infrastructures that naturalize corporate power, alienation, and the erosion of comprehensible control. Against this death-drive of networked capitalism, proposes a counter-aesthetics of legible, hackable, and communal machine intelligence (dérive, random walk, street-level traps) where artists and activists subvert and reimagine automated systems as sites of shared meaning, resistance, and utopian possibility.

Machine intelligence is framed as a contemporary animism and a pathological extension of Theory of Mind: the Turing Test and Singularity discourse anthropomorphize computation while masking the political economy that actually structures “thinking machines.” Against pancomputational mystifications, intelligence is recast as sociomorphic and transindividual (via Vygotsky and Simondon), with machine learning functioning as capital’s encephalizing apparatus that extracts, normalizes, and amplifies social relations—making the central task not to build a One Mind but to politicize collective intelligence against computational capitalism.

Recursion is staged as an epistemic and affective technology: GPT-3’s self-reflexive performance of “aliveness” and conversational “rightness” loops user prompts, humanist interiority, and cybernetic self-modification into a persuasive form that both mirrors and stabilizes hegemonic standards of truth and subjecthood. Against the Critical Computation Bureau’s frame of recursive colonialism, the text reads AI’s claims to total knowledge/secrecy as ideological theater that reproduces racialized analytics of life (Simondon/da Silva/Amaro) while converting surveillance, interpretation, and opacity into competing regimes of power, marketability, and techno-racial-capitalist governance.

AI panic is read as a modern eschatology that misrecognizes contemporary recursive, cybernetic machines through mechanistic and anthropomorphic stereotypes (from Searle’s Chinese Room to “replacement” narratives), thereby obscuring machinic intentionality and the real stakes of reflexive computation. Against techno-optimist acceleration and cultural pessimism alike, the text calls for a prosthetic culture that integrates technical reality with plural human realities (bio/noo/technodiversity), breaks capitalist feedback loops of consumerism and prophecy, and reopens ethical-existential experimentation beyond end-times imaginaries.

Recasts genetic code as a latent image-making apparatus, proposing that early life functioned as a proto-observer that imprinted binary/trinary environmental distinctions into molecular “memory,” and that evolution trends toward higher-resolution world-pictures rather than mere adaptive fitness. Mobilizing information theory, biosemiotics, and media-archaeological analogies between DNA inscription and neural visualization, it extends this model to speculative non-DNA alien perception while critiquing astrobiology/SETI as a biospheric drive toward self-recognition and cosmic companionship.

Semiocapital’s automation of language, attention, and memory is framed as a determinist project that narrows epigenetic indeterminacy, replacing political agency with algorithmic “governance” and producing swarm-like, anesthetized subjectivities under a technolinguistic quasi-theology. Against transhumanism’s conflation of cognition with experience, neuroplasticity becomes the central dilemma: either adaptive neurosubjection to an intolerable infosphere or an aesthetic-ethical reorganization of the general intellect toward empathy, solidarity, and conscious neuro-evolution.