Book Reviews
12 Items
All Items
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A Permanent Condition of First Contact: Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
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.
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Culture, Computationally On Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism
This is a review of Leif Weatherby's 2025 book Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.
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The Dis-automating Automaton: Intelligence Between Automaticity and Disruption
Book review of David W. Bates’s An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking With Machines From Descartes to The Digital Age
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Feenberg's Marcuse: Design, Ontology, and the Critique of Technology
A book review of Andrew Feenberg's The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse's Philosophy of Praxis that emphasizes how Feenberg develops a critical philosophy of technology from Marcuse's work.
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Book Review: The Digital and its Discontents by Aden Evens
Book review of Aden Evens’s The Digital and its Discontents.
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Review of Organism Oriented Ontology
Audrone Žukauskaitė’s book is a concise analysis of the place and role of the organism, or perhaps organic thinking, within the tradition of continental philosophy. In particular, it is interested in how the legacy of post-war French thought intersects with how we think biological systems today and suggests that this thinking should be renewed in order to address some of the more massive political deadlocks of the present namely the status of biopolitics and what to do with the concept of the anthropocene.
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Polycephalous Slime: Chemistry and Intelligence in Parallel Minds
Review for:
Laura Tripaldi, Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2022. 192 pp. $18.95 (Paperback ISBN: 9781913029937)
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Book Review: The Phenomenology of Virtual Technology
Book review of The Phenomenology of Virtual Technology: Perception and Imagination in a Digital Age by Daniel O'Shiel -
Book Review: Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens. Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting
In this text I offer a review of the book ‘Toward an Anthropology of Screens’ by Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua. After briefly introducing the operation proposed by the authors, I consider the salient points of the work. Finally, I propose an assessment of the relevance of the book in contemporary philosophical debate.
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Book review: Cybernetics and the Origin of Information by Raymond Ruyer
Ruyer and his elements towards a metaphysics of information’s origination Critical notice on Raymond Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information
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Book Review: Returning to Judgment: Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory by Ben Turner
Book review of Ben Turner’s Returning to Judgment: Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory.
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Philosophies d’après-nature
- Bitbol, Michel. Maintenant la finitude : peut-on penser l’absolu ? Paris, Bibliothèque des savoirs. Flammarion, 2019, 520 pages.
- Moynihan, Thomas T. Spinal Catastrophism : A Secret History, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2019, 352 pages.
- Woodard, Ben. Schelling’s Naturalism : Space, Motion and the Volition of Thought, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 256 pages.
