Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology

The most extensive recent work on mechanism, organicism and organology is in Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency (2019). Of interest to me is the concept of a general organology, first introduced by Georges Canguilhem to reverse the relationship between mechanism and organism by inscribing the mechanical within the organic without sacrificing a theory of technicity. More recently, the notion of an organology has been taken up by Bernard Stiegler, particularly as it relates to the exteriorisation of memory into digital artefacts. Both Canguilhem and Stiegler are discussed by Hui, and though he mentions the work of Gilles Deleuze, this is never developed in relation to organology. In this paper I ask: “Do Deleuze and Guattari have an organology?” My aim is not to critique Hui, but to supplement his work by arguing that Deleuze and Guattari do indeed have an organology, and that it is one adequate to contemporary life.

This article explores the symbolic entanglements between Jewish mystical traditions and the contemporary rise of generative artificial intelligence. Taking the Golem - a mythical anthropoid animated through sacred language - as a guiding figure, I examine how current developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) revive long-standing theological concerns about animacy, speech, and the limits of human control. The Golem offers a hermeneutic tool for understanding LLMs as language-animated entities whose operations are mytho-technical as much as they are computational. Crucially, LLMs have crossed what Jewish mysticism held as the ultimate threshold: the capacity for speech that distinguished divine creation from human artifice. Drawing on Kabbalistic cosmology, I argue that the AI alignment problem cannot be reduced to engineering challenges but requires what I term "magical alignment" - a ritual architecture that recognises AI development as participation in cosmotechnical processes demanding ethical preparation, relational responsibility, and planetary awareness.

This paper examines how generative artificial intelligence reshapes creativity and meaning-making, proposing a shift from individual authorship toward collective, hybrid, and ritual forms of creation. Drawing on performative, process, communicative, and feminist-posthumanist perspectives, it argues that AI-driven creativity constitutes an “AI ritual”: a socio-technical process and performance where meaning emerges through interaction among humans, algorithms, and data. Rather than viewing creativity as a singular act rooted in human origin or agency, the paper conceptualizes it as a communicative performance involving a range of heterogeneous actors—code, datasets, users, and audiences. Echoing Barthes’ proclamation of the “death of the author,” it proclaims the “death of the creator,” reframing creativity as a dynamic, ritualized, and dialogical-collaborative process. Meaning is understood not predominenatly by its origin but by its circulation and transformation within a communicative collective. After reimagining creativity in the AI age as a shared, posthumanistic, and performative process of co-production, (re-)performance, and co-becoming that is more like love than control, the paper then explores some implications for aesthetics, AI research, and politics of art.

This paper conceptualizes a notion of memory based on the philosophy of archaeology, with particular emphasis on early Baltic computational mnemonic technic. Early Baltic mnemonic technic manifested as a form of memorization through gesticulations with small clay figurines, enabling the recording and retaining of larger quantities of things being counted. This interactive and material nature of memorization challenges such isolationistic ontologies as hylomorphism, suggesting that memory should not be understood as a distinct passive faculty operating solely via inner mental representations. Contrasting this definition, a relational ontology–emphasizing interactions, entanglements, and engagements–can be extended to memory. Therefore, depending on various networks of relationships, memory emerges in new and ever-changing forms of practical operations. Following this perspective, computational mnemonic technic highlight technical and organizational aspects of relational memory. These aspects are interpreted in light of Leroi-Gourhan’s theory (Gesture and Speech 1993 [1964-65]), proposing that, insofar as memory is modulated by technical determinations, it also enables the organization of anticipations for future actions.

Silicon Valley CEOs have postponed their trip to Mars to seize power on Earth instead. Let’s take this opportunity—even if it’s a sombre one—to philosophically affirm our planetary condition: however situated we may be (in terms of race, class, and gender), we are cosmologically un-situatable, i.e. exceeding any terrestrial situation. Escaping all terrestrial power, this cosmological freedom can be a last resort when democracy, attacked by authoritarian technologies and neo-dictatorships, is fading away.

This article explores Yuk Hui's cosmotechnical thinking, focusing on how technological development is influenced by culture, and the possibility of technodiversity. Yuk Hui introduces the concept of cosmotechnics, which links technology to specific cultural cosmologies, and argues for the necessity of technodiversity to counter the homogenizing effects of modern technology.  However, it remains a question how technodiversity is to be realized exactly. This article claims this follows from Hui’s classical interpretation of the relation between tradition and modernity and his noöcentric approach to cultural traditions. By criticizing this position, this article aims to bring Hui’s thinking into contact with other ways of thinking, which can lead to a fruitful conversation and open a possible pathway to technodiversity.

This paper explores the hypothesis that capitalism might be understood as a computational phenomenon, akin to a program running on a Universal Turing Machine (UTM). Grounded in the principles of digital physics, Marxist theory, and techno-criticism, it proposes that if the universe is fundamentally computable, then socio-economic systems like capitalism could also be seen as outputs of this universal computational process, thus questioning whether capitalism emerges as a neutral outcome or as an inevitable consequence of its design. Drawing from philosophical and political critiques, the paper interrogates the implications of this hypothesis for human agency, resistance, and the construction of alternative social frameworks. The film Cube is used as a fictional case study to illustrate the dynamics of interacting with a capitalist super-machine. Furthermore, the paper reflects on quantum computing's impact on the UTM hypothesis.

This is a review of Leif Weatherby's 2025 book Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.

Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025) departs from the “socially engaged journalism” that dominates internet scholarship to recover an older link between computation and ufology, recasting the internet as a site of first contact. Drawing on Liu Cixin’s game-theoretic answer to the Fermi Paradox, Konior underscores AI systems’ continuous ingestion of online communication as training data, arguing that it collapses the distinction between speaking about and speaking to algorithms. Intelligence, in her account, inheres in strategic concealment, yielding an “inverse Turing Test” in which genuine cognition would remain undetectable. From this follows a Wallfacer strategy: the tactical deployment of silence, deception, and abstraction within an architecture engineered to collapse deliberation into reaction. Yet this prescription sits in tension with her characterization of online communication as compulsive and pre-reflexive, raising the question of whether strategic opacity is available to organisms constitutively driven toward disclosure. This review proposes that the discordance can be negotiated by reframing the communicative impulse as autonomic rather than automatic. Read in this light, Konior’s text may itself function as an adversarial payload, encoding structural indeterminacy into the datasets it ostensibly theorizes. For audiences who have grown weary of emancipatory manifestos and the defeatist critiques that shadow them, Konior provides a realism sturdy enough to inhabit the forest without surrendering to it.

Book review of David W. Bates’s An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking With Machines From Descartes to The Digital Age