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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.