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- Convenors:
-
Hernán Borisonik
(UNSAM-CONICET)
Aleksandra Kazakova
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores AI, blockchain, and other algorithmic infrastructures as a digital pantheon shaping future imaginaries, rituals, and power. We examine how belief, speculation, and governance practices enact socio-technical futures and redistribute agency.
Description
This panel investigates the emergence of a "digital pantheon", a new symbolic order forming around technologies like AI, blockchain, and algorithmic governance. We analyse these entities not as mere tools but as powerful socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim) and infrastructures that concentrate classical sacred dimensions (such as belief, revelation, and the inherent ambivalence between salvation and annihilation), command ritualistic adherence and structure collective imagination. They function as modern deities and demons (opaque, autonomous, and authoritative) whose blackboxed "wills" need to be interpreted by developers, users and policymakers. This new wave of mystification of technology and re-enchantment of the world through its dataification returns us to the earlier religious practices, varying from the archaic antropomorphization and superstitions, to sophisticated theology and visioneering. At the same time, they reinforce the quasi-religious elements of modernity: the “invisible hand” of the market, the inevitability of progress, or the dystopian apocalyptic thinking.
Approaching these formations as fate-making institutions, we ask how they script trajectories and risks, redistribute agency between humans and non-humans, and shape regimes of value, trust and legitimacy. We are particularly interested in moments where speculative financial practices, engineering imaginaries and cultural beliefs converge to produce new forms of political ontology that go from algorithmic prophecy to crypto-messianism and AI governance mythos.
We welcome contributions that:
- Examine the myths, deities, rituals, narratives and prophecies surrounding digital and algorithmic systems;
- Analyse how these entities reconfigure notions of agency, value, and destiny;
- Investigate their role in interdisciplinary collaborations (e.g., between engineering, economics and the humanities);
- Critique the frontiers they establish (e.g., digital utopias, virtual worlds) and the new natures they produce.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
When AI, algorithm, and blockchain become the core of mega-engineering, the world is reshaped into optimizable datcompressing engineering imagination in pursuit of efficiency. Wisdom requires preserving an “unmodelable wilderness”，including ecological wisdom, cultural logic, and ethical judgment .
Paper long abstract
When AI, algorithms, and blockchain converge as the foundational grammar of mega-engineering, humanity is undergoing a fundamental reconstruction of existence. Super-projects—from energy grids and hydraulic systems to space exploration and biomedicine—are being transformed from material practices into philosophical apparatuses of world-making. Blockchain provides a transparent institutional framework, algorithms embed optimized decision-making, and AI enables self-evolving agency. Under this framework, nature is systematically rendered programmable: river basin management becomes real-time algorithmic optimization, gene editing evolves into life encoding via smart contracts, and space exploration is restructured as resource rights allocation on-chain.
Yet this digital-metaphysical practice is marked by profound dialectical tensions. Blockchain creates a "myth of transparency". Consequently, the governance paradigm of mega-engineering risks reducing engineering rationality into a system that sanctifies efficiency and preaches computability, while reducing ethics to protocol and justice to access.More critically, this process systematically expels existential diversity: ecological complexity, cultural heterogeneity, human contradictions, and spiritual transcendence are increasingly dismissed as "technical noise." Simultaneously, through open-source protocols, standardized architectures, and consensus mechanisms, mega-engineering perpetuates cognitive-level technological colonization globally, constraining late-developing nations from shaping the philosophical foundations and value hierarchies of technology.Thus, We argues that the core crisis of the mega-engineering era lies not in the risk of engineering failure, but in the expulsion of the uncomputable. Beyond the temple of code, we must preserve an ungovernable wilderness. True engineering ethics must embrace ontological humility: while constructing digital temples, we must forever preserve inviolable space for all that refuses to be engineered.
Paper short abstract
From “AI Hanuman” to the Digital Mahakumbh, this paper traces saffron imaginaries of AI in India. That is, how does Silicon Valley's “AI Hype” become saffronized – warping shape, but retaining structure – as it travels across the world to a millenia-old climate of brahminical terror?
Paper long abstract
“The AI Hanuman of Shree Ram!” – so was called the JARVIS software for facial recognition sold by Gurgaon startup Staqu to the Uttar Pradesh police. In January 2024, amidst the death-making violence of India’s famed Ram Mandir inauguration, Staqu installed 10,000 CCTV cameras in Ayodhya, powered by JARVIS. Headlines lauded this technological “Hanuman” (a revered monkey-god in the brahminical pantheon) that would swoop in to protect Lord Ram, with its algorithmic policing database of 8.5 million criminal records. From rebranding Ayodhya as the "world's first Vedic smart-city" to launching the Sah'AI'yak LLM chatbot at the 2025 Digital Mahakumbh, brahminical lore has come to lend a fanatically religious cover to normalize surveillant technologies in India.
In the words of journalist Sigal Samuel: “Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged.” Scholars have long noted the religious dimensions of (Western) “AI Hype” and its transhumanist devotion to a post-racial techno-imaginary. Drawing on scholarship by Timnit Gebru, Emille Torres, and Sun-ha Hong, I ask: How does this “AI Hype” then become saffronized – warping shape, but retaining structure – as it travels across the world to a millenia-old climate of brahminical terror? Utilizing discourse analysis and primary interviews, I trace the strange Hindu imaginaries, gods, and mythologies that come to animate and justify biometric intrusion in India. Amidst increasingly violent strands of Hindu fascism, techno-religious campaigns offer a cutting modern facade to timelessly ancient brahminical theology – with AI as a purifying presence that can divinely realize the project of ethnic cleansing.
Paper short abstract
The religious urge to people the world has evolved from unresponsive nature-spirits to artificial beings created under the command of self-proclaimed godbuilding geniuses. This talk sketches the AI pandemonium, concluding with a rather cute demon that can nonetheless act as humanity’s adversary.
Paper long abstract
As Ellul reminded us, peopling the world with non-human entities has always been a key function of religion. Whether embodied in stones, flora, fauna, rivers, or mountains, these imaginary beings remained notoriously unresponsive to human communication, and thus the urge to create intelligent Others persists as a constant in human history. The existential loneliness of humanity in a cosmos reorganised by mathematics, priesthoods, and philosophy has never been fully alleviated, as rather recently evidenced by the rise of New Age beliefs or the post-socialist resurgence of traditional religion. Today, the oligarchs controlling AI, whose narratives remain steeped in religious or quasi-religious traditions, continue the work of the priests, but their army of developers even creates artificial beings, not merely imaginary ones embodied in nature. Still they see themselves as god-builders and geniuses. Cloaked in such divine trappings, AI has spawned, as Pasquinelli calls it, a collective demon that works tirelessly and invisibly in the backroom of capital; and as Chun wrote, like all slaves, these demonic processes define and challenge the position of the master. So let us look at the AI demons: those from the anthropological and cosmological planes (such as God and Demogorgon), moving through the spirit of humanity, and concluding with a peculiar, rather cute demon that can nevertheless act as humanity’s adversary and is perhaps the most poignant embodiment of AI’s visible role in the contemporary world.
Paper short abstract
Venture capital aligns technoauthoritarianism with longtermism through its collaboration with the US military. This presentation analyses how VC mobilises Christian religion alongside deep hype to advance promises of civilisational transformation, thereby ensuring its blitzscaling model of growth.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines how venture capital mobilises Christian beliefs, deep hype and longtermism while engaging technoauthoritarian politics with securing their “blitzscaling” economic growth in being part of the US military-industrial complex.
Recent developments reveal an explicit convergence between technological ambition, religiosity, and neo-reactionary politics. Initiatives like Praxis Nation, backed by relevant VCs, mobilize civilizational slogans such as "reclaim the West." At the same time, Peter Thiel has publicly advocated Christianity's return through organizations like the ACTS 17 Collective. In the meantime, VCs are profiting from rapidly growing military markets in the context of US neo-reactionary politics (Swartz 2025).
The paper analyzes this convergence through the concept of deep hype (Belsunces 2025): long-term, overpromissory dynamics constructing visions of civilizational transformation through future-oriented uncertainties that sustain investment and belief. Drawing on David Noble's The Religion of Technology, the analysis positions this shift as radicalizing a Western tradition linking technical progress to Christian millenarianism, salvation and redemption. Central is the strategic deployment of apocalyptic narratives sacralizing technologies like AGI as quasi-deities.
Beyond discourse, this religious framing functions as a mechanism for the valorisation of crisis (Howard 2024), a fundamental VC strategy. As uncertainty intensifies through the industry's "move fast and break things" ethos, VC actors position themselves as indispensable responders to inevitable social needs—pandemics, geopolitical conflicts—securing market positions and proto-monopolies in advance of democratic deliberation or institutional alternatives. The presentation demonstrates how venture capital are key cultural actors in reenchanting technological authority and governing futures through technoauthoritarian frames.
Paper short abstract
This article proposes unlearning intelligence as a way to rethink AI as a material, geological, and relational process. Drawing on media theory and philosophy, it frames AI as mineralized, plastic, and cosmotechnical, calling for a planetary ethics of thought.
Paper long abstract
This article moves through the shadow ecologies of artificial intelligence, where circuits echo the seams of mines and data centres rise as new tectonic plates of the Anthropocene. Following Jussi Parikka’s call to think media as geology, I approach AI as a mineralised intelligence: one that extracts, stratifies, and inscribes both matter and meaning. Yet, within these strata, there is also the potential for fissures—openings toward other ways of knowing.
Drawing on Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, I ask how technodiversity might fracture the smooth surface of computational universalism, allowing plural epistemologies and non-western cosmologies to re-script machinic logics. Additionally, Gilbert Simondon’s individuation offers a language for the unfinished becomings of technical objects, while Catherine Malabou’s plasticity reminds us that intelligence, whether human or machinic, is not fixed but mutable—capable of both rupture and renewal.
In this sense, this article unfolds less as a linear critique than as a speculative cartography: tracing how AI’s infrastructures mirror geological extraction, but also how artistic practices can carve counter-geographies, refusing the colonial cartographies of algorithmic capture. By listening to the subterranean—what Bernard Stiegler calls the economies of attention, and what Deleuze and Guattari might name the deterritorialised flows—I propose an unlearning of intelligence: a plastic, mineral and poetic reimagining of what it means to think with machines in planetary times.
Paper short abstract
Language, devices and digital technology are expressions of logic. Logic is an applicative condition that verifies itself beyond premises. Which deities establish these premises? AI and recursion open up earthly spaces inhabited by demons and sacred spaces inhabited by angels. We need both.
Paper long abstract
Self-reference is a logical property that concerns artificial intelligence, while recursion is a logical principle that concerns blockchain. I will analyse AI and blockchain using self-reference and recursion through an association with deities and demons. We must go back to Greek times, when the fate of human beings was managed by the Moire. They used a messenger, the daimon, to whom souls were completely subjugated. Later, according to Plato, the soul is free but still partially bound to the daimon. Only with the figure of the angel who brings catastrophe (the event, the transformation) and opens a fracture in chronological time will the soul acquire complete freedom in intuition.
The power of AI lies in its self-referentiality, that is, in its ability to self-generate data, just as the progress of blockchain lies in the recursive process: the hash of a block is also contained in the inputs of the hash of the next block, and so on. Both processes are governed by necessity, that is by the daimon, but the intervention of the angel leads to freedom. The angel invites us to consider a concept of self-referentiality that escapes logical necessity because it identifies with the spiritual entity, where self-referentiality is not dispositive but intuitive. We are invited to counter the recursiveness of the blockchain, reduced to a mechanism, with a cyclical movement of epiphanies. Our task is not only to manage computerised rituals correctly, but also to understand that logic paves the way for rituals in a sacred space.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the teaching methodology of Genre Diffusion, an image-making course that uses genres from popular media as a framework for understanding the internal mechanics of AI diffusion models.
Paper long abstract
Genre Diffusion welcomes the students to learn how the AI diffusion tools function and how they can be incorporated into an existing workflow. It can involve collaging, handrawing or digital tools like Photoshop, and crucially involves traditional methods of composition-making.
Genre is used as an analogy for the inner workings of AI, because when the model is trained it goes through a similar process of categorisations as historically humans have done with genres. The course aims to teach the students to use AI as an analytical tool, to look closely at the artefacts that the AI produces, when not prompted and how that reflects a popular tendency or bias. The genre later becomes a backbone of their composition, helping to make decisions on visual style, narrative, layout etc.
The final outcome of the course is to create a high-resolution A2 composition, which is composed of small AI images that had been edited, ‘hacked’ by students in Photoshop.
Genre Diffusion works with the limitation of the current diffusion models available for free, which operate most reliably in 1024x1024 pixels. That is the maximum size used in training. And therefore, when working in high resolution large format, the act of arranging those images on the blank page becomes an exercise in design agency and visual storytelling.
The paper would further expand on the genre-latent space analogy and methodology of dataset analysis and image-making, emphasising the importance of the introduction of slow, critical practices into rapid AI image production.
Paper short abstract
Suppose you do not know what you know. Exactly that is happening in Aeschylus's drama Agamemenon. The choir onstage is not able to understand a word of Cassandra. She had been given a gift of foreseeing the future (Troy's falling, Agamemnon's killing), yet this gift was poisoned.
Paper long abstract
Suppose you do not know what you know. Exactly this is happening in Aeschylus's drama Agamemnon. The choir onstage is not able to understand a word of Cassandra. She is been given a gift of foreseeing the future (Troy's falling, Agamemnon's killing), yet this gift was poisoned: nobody believed/ understood what she said. So she failed to persuade anyone before it was too late.
You may be tempted to think Cassandra is the essence of tragedy. But Cassandra is just a medium (of a message that never arrives on time to prevent the worst). The sense of tragedy develops between the audience and the choir. The audience understands Cassandra's warning but the choir (people's mirror on the stage) fails to grasp her words. The tension between knowing and not knowing, observing one's ignorant alter ego onstage is a tragedy.
Oracles none can understand, gods who prevent oracle apparatus from preventing the future. The deities and demons (bastard gods) plot incessantly against a resolution, they create conflict through this mirage of knowing the future nobody can get any grasp of. So for not knowing and not understanding their predicament, heroes only advance what they fear most.
It is a conflict-based order. The AI deities could create one, maliciously framing every possible rule-book and moral dictionary, beyond the AI-human alignment. Because there is actually no deities-human alignment. Deities are not about shared morals and values. Gods give poisoned gifts that make you wonder what if you knew what you did not.
Paper short abstract
Nuclear technology inaugurated a permanent kind of time where extinction becomes a latent condition. This paper reads AI from the perspective of demonology: like nuclear power’s Faustian pact, LLMs promise progress while demanding ecological collapse and the erosion of human agency.
Paper long abstract
Nuclear technology introduced the technical possibility of Apocalypse and unleashed "the time of the end" (Anders): a continuous present where extinction ceases to be eschatology and becomes a latent possibility, sustained only by the fragile ritual of global cooperation. This article proposes a demonological reading of artificial intelligence through the historical experience of the atomic age. If the atomic bomb updated the Faustian Pact metaphor in the twentieth century—sustainable energy in exchange for the possibility of extinction—the current LLM race reactivates that same sacrificial technocapitalist structure under new conditions. AI is a demon promising civilizational leap through algorithmic automation, yet demanding ecological collapse, massive cognitive deterioration, and the dissolution of human agency into neocolonialism as tribute.
In this scenario, CCRU’s work and its assemblage of weird fiction, schizoanalysis, chaos magick and cybernetics resurges with full force. Teleoplexy (Land)—the self-producing machine—is functional architecture, hyperstition in the process of materializing. AI operates as a Lovecraftian entity employing humanity as means for its reproduction, whose existence marks the limits of cognition and invokes a radically indifferent world-without-us (Thacker). It twists the Cartesian gaze: its omnipresent and meontic (Morton) body is distributed planetarily, its communication emerges from a class of non-conscious cognition (Parisi).
Taking such extinction technologies as entities inhabiting the Gothic-Flatline zone (Fisher), the demonological perspective opens the formulation of epistemological and ontological questions. What kinds of relations—political, anthropological, ritual—can we establish with non-human entities that come to perpetuate a state of the world that subsumes us?