How should we criticize AI, and how shouldn’t we? This episode features a roundtable discussion organized by the Centre for Social Critique at HU Berlin on February 16th, 2026, featuring Matteo Pasquinelli, Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Roland Meyer, and Rainer Mühlhoff, moderated by Jacob Blumenfeld. Throughout the conversation, the discussants criticize AI as an ideology, a mode of power, and a social relation. Rather than treating AI as either some super intelligence or inherent doom, they focus on the dominant political and economic forces that contemporary AI both expresses and intensifies.
The conversation explores how contemporary AI systems inherit older cybernetic ambitions of control, prediction, and optimization, while serving as ideological cover for new forms of domination. The participants examine AI’s role in reshaping the division of labor, from the automation and decomposition of skilled work to new forms of surveillance. They also ask whether the logics of scale embedded in AI are contributing to new authoritarian and even fascist tendencies adequate to the digital age. At stake throughout is not only what AI does, but what social order it helps reproduce, and what it would mean to resist the imperative of AI altogether.
Before the roundtable begins, Jacob Blumenfeld and Robin Celikates reflect on the key themes of the discussion.
Sound editor: Jürg Meister.
Show notes:
Matteo Pasquinelli
https://www.versobooks.com/products/735-the-eye-of-the-master
https://www.matteopasquinelli.com/
Anna-Verena Nosthoff
https://www.criticaldatalab.org/anna-verena-nosthoff
https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/anna-verena-nosthoff-kybernetik-und-kritik-t-9783518300794
Roland Meyer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUK5Ibp0Th0
https://digitalculturesandarts.ch/
Rainer Mühlhoff
https://www.reclam.de/produktdetail/kuenstliche-intelligenz-und-der-neue-faschismus-9783150146668
https://rainermuehlhoff.de/