bat{AI}lle
On Acephalic Intelligence and the General Economy of Computation
Part I
publications Computation Sovereignty Excess Cybernetics Infrastructure
Accelerationism Cognition Semiotics
I am large, I contain multitudes.
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Technology is society made durable.
—Bruno Latour
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
—Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
West Des Moines, Iowa isn’t usually where people go looking for metaphysics. It’s a place of suburbs, municipal meetings, and quietly expanding infrastructure. But in 2023, reporting traced something oddly ritualistic there: Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed large amounts of water, drawn from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, to cool a powerful supercomputing installation used in training AI systems that mimic human writing [1]. A model that arrives to most users as frictionless language <clean, instant, immaterial> begins, in fact, as a local hydrology problem. A few weeks earlier, a different kind of materiality surfaced in a Manhattan federal courtroom: lawyers submitted a brief citing cases that did not exist, fabrications produced by ChatGPT, and were sanctioned $5,000. [2]. These aren’t quirky anecdotes. They’re the same rupture seen from two angles. What arrives as frictionless language at the interface is, upstream, an apparatus that burns energy, routinizes extraction, and can overproduce coherence beyond truth. “Cloud” is an aesthetic for heat management: electricity becomes computation; computation becomes waste heat; waste heat becomes cooling; cooling becomes local governance. The metaphysics is in the conversion that makes prose appear to float.
Georges Bataille gives a blunt instruction for how to read such conversions. “Shouldn't productive activity as a whole be considered in terms of the modifications it receives from its surroundings or brings about in its surroundings?” he asks, insisting that production cannot be understood in isolation, because economic activity is “so far-reaching” that it folds directly into “social conflicts and planetary wars,” into consequences that only appear once “the general data of the economy are studied,” and into “the general problems that are linked to the movement of energy on the globe” (Bataille, 1988a, p.20). On this reading, AI is not just “innovation” but an industrial regime whose inputs and outputs are ecological and political by default, because the system in which it operates is already planetary.
Yet contemporary AI is mostly narrated in the smooth dialect of optimization: smarter search, leaner logistics, finer-grained advertising, automated governance. Utility everywhere, friction nowhere. Under this managerial prose, however, proliferate phenomena that refuse to stay within the borders of a restricted economy or a rationalist imaginary: oceans of data that will never be meaningfully used; spectacular expenditures of energy and capital in training runs; sacrificial labor in annotation and content moderation; hype cycles oscillating between messianic promise and apocalyptic dread. AI presents itself as an engine of efficiency while continuously producing waste <material, cognitive, affective> along with anxiety and a strangely devotional atmosphere of hope and fear. Here Bataille’s diagnosis lands with uncomfortable precision: “Man's disregard for the material basis of his life still causes him to err in a serious way.” The error is not simply technical; it is metaphysical and organizational. By restricting our attention to “the resolution of the immediate difficulties” we encounter, we assign to the forces we employ “an end which they cannot have.” Beyond our immediate ends, he writes, “man's activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe” (Bataille, 1988a, p.21). This is the doorway into his general economy, a way of thinking society through the necessity of excess and the compulsion to spend. Cultures are defined not only by how they make and conserve wealth, but by how they dispose of the surplus they cannot avoid. And the surplus is written into the planet’s basic energetics. “Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development,” Bataille insists; “the origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun,” which dispenses “energy—wealth—without any return.” “The sun gives without ever receiving” (Bataille, 1988a, p.28).
Bringing Bataille into conversation with AI is, admittedly, a sideways move. He did not know machine learning, data centers, recommender systems, or the platform economies that now structure attention and work. And yet the AI landscape exhibits many of the dynamics he diagnosed: the impression of inexhaustible energy and information; systems that require continuous sacrifice <of privacy, labor, and environmental stability>; and emergent forms of sovereignty that no longer belong cleanly to human subjects or nation-states. This resonance suggests that Bataille can function as an optic: a lens for reading AI as a socio-technical formation of excess, ritual, and a secular sacred.
The aim of this essay is twofold. First, it reconstructs Bataille’s central concepts and places them in a wider theoretical constellation spanning postwar political economy, media theory, and contemporary critiques of digital infrastructure and AI. Second, it develops a Bataillean theory of AI organized around the notion of acephalic intelligence: AI not as a unified rational agent, but as a headless configuration of flows and institutions, expenditures and constraints, a distributed technical assemblage that nevertheless concentrates power and produces opaque forms of command. This is not a comprehensive empirical account of AI systems, nor a contribution to technical debates about architectures and benchmarks. Its stake is diagnostic and conceptual: How might AI be understood as a component of a general economy of energy and information? What forms of sacrifice and waste does it organize, naturalize, or conceal? How does it recompose sovereignty and servility? And what kinds of refusal <what counter-designs, what practices of non-participation> might become thinkable within such a frame? The essay treats Bataille less as a toolkit for ‘applying’ concepts and more as a provocation: a way to push beyond the familiar critical repertoire of bias, transparency, and fairness toward questions of excess, loss, and the sacred that AI discourse tends to avoid, perhaps because they expose what optimization is forced to repress. To read AI through Bataille is to accept a certain risk: of hyperbole, of abstraction, of turning infrastructure into metaphysics. But that risk mirrors Bataille’s own wager: that thought must pass through limits, even to the point where it trembles and threatens to dissolve, if it is to touch the extremity of modern experience. The following pages are written in that spirit.
2. Bataille for the 21st-Century Machine: A Brief Cartography
To invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck.
—Paul Virilio
Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.
—Nam June Paik
2.1 The Core Operators
Bataille’s corpus is insistently vast, a small set of motifs returns obsessively, like a refrain that keeps finding new bodies.
First: general economy and the accursed share. Against a restricted economy <scarcity, conservation, rational allocation> the general economy begins from abundance, above all the solar abundance that floods the Earth. Its “basic fact” is almost brutally simple: “the living organism… ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life.” What follows is the real scandal: when growth saturates, the excess “must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically” (Bataille, 1988a, p.21). The accursed share is that surplus portion that cannot be productively reinvested and therefore must be expended <whether as ritual, luxury, monument, spectacle, or war>. Potlatch rituals, monumental architectures, luxury, war: these are not cultural extras but social techniques for organizing necessary waste (Bataille, 1988a; Bataille, 1991; Sørensen, 2012; Weinstein, 2001). Recent readings sharpen how this surplus mutates under contemporary techno-capital. Achim Szepanski describes speculative capitalization <entangled with networked computing> as an ecstasy of the over: too much capital, but also too many images and signs, an overload that can neutralize historic sense and culminate in new forms of rubbish <material and semiotic> (Szepanski, 2024). In this register, excess becomes ambient: opinion-surplus, text-surplus, image-surplus—the white-noise abundance that both signals power and anesthetizes critique.
Second: sacrifice and the sacred. Sacrifice is not simply destruction; it is the withdrawal of beings or objects from the order of use and their entry into another register where they can no longer be employed, only venerated, feared, or remembered (Bataille, 1989). The sacred is an untouchable zone that every social order requires, even if it disavows it (Bataille, 1990). Sacrifice makes visible that utility always depends on what it excludes. Bataille’s favorite example is architectural because it makes the logic legible at scale. A barn is “clearly… a thing,” known from without, “available without reserve,” subordinated to anticipated advantages. The church, by contrast, “expresses an intimate feeling and addresses itself to intimate feeling”; its purpose “withdraws it from public utility,” and the withdrawal intensifies into “a profusion of useless ornaments.” The point is expenditure: the church is “not a profitable use of the available labor, but rather its consumption… the destruction of its utility” (Bataille, 1988a, p.132). In that sense, religion is not the opposite of economy but one of its historical organs for handling surplus: “Religion is the satisfaction that a society gives to the use of excess resources” (Bataille, 1988a, p.120). As Alexander C. Irwin glosses Bataille’s Theory of Religion, the principle of sacrifice is destruction insofar as destruction is what tears the victim from the world of objects and utility—violence as the passage from thinghood to a charged, untouchable intimacy (Irwin, 1993). The sacred is therefore not an ethereal belief, but a social technique for producing an island of inoperability inside a world that otherwise tries to convert everything into function.
Third: eroticism and transgression. In Erotism, Bataille insists that eroticism names a general structure of crossing. Human beings experience themselves as discontinuous individuals <bounded by bodies, laws, and taboos>. Eroticism is the quest for continuity, the temporary dissolution of separateness through violating the prohibitions that hold the world apart, ultimately those separating life and death (Bataille, 1986). His formulation is clean and programmatic: “My aim is to show that… the concern is to substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity” (Bataille, 1986, p.15). This continuity is not simply pleasure; it is a brush with the sacred, because transgression is not the abolition of taboo but its charged traversal—the threshold where prohibition becomes luminous. That is why he can bind eroticism to sacrifice without apology: “mystical experience seems to me to stem from the universal experience of religious sacrifice” (Bataille, 1986, p.23). A useful contemporary detour here comes from techno-horror rather than moral philosophy. Filip Andjelkovic tracks a recurring trope of monstrosity produced by technologically augmented sight, arguing that such fictions stage unconscious projection and the uneasy intimacy between subject and device (Andjelkovic, 2022). This matters for Bataille because it reframes projection as a transgressive infrastructure: technology becomes a membrane through which forbidden fantasies circulate and return as the monstrous.
Fourth: sovereignty. This is not simply political rule. It is the capacity to act for nothing, to spend without justification, to refuse the reduction of life to ends and functions (Bataille, 1988b). The sovereign is opposed to the worker not by class position but by relation to time and expenditure: sovereignty is the ability to waste <time, resources, even life> without answering to profit’s calculus. In Bataille’s sharpest compressed definition, “all useless consumption, all nonproductive spending, implies recognition of a sovereign value that justifies it” (Bataille, 1991, p.157). This motif cuts awkwardly across the modern innovation catechism, which treats novelty as inherently productive, measurable, and justifiable. Bataillean critique of innovation theory targets precisely this poverty: the managerial imagination that can only recognize creation when it already resembles value creation, already aligned with measurable usefulness (Rehn, 2023). Read alongside Bataille, the point is not that innovation is bad, but that a culture that cannot metabolize non-utility becomes incapable of recognizing certain kinds of creation at all, especially those that look like waste, play, loss, or refusal.
Finally: inner experience and non-knowledge. In Inner Experience, Bataille pursues limit-states <ecstasy, anguish, mystical dissolution> where language and rational discourse fail, exposing the subject to a kind of non-savoir that cannot be mastered conceptually (Bataille, 1988b). This is not anti-intellectualism, but a theory of the point at which thought meets what exceeds it. “We are only totally laid bare by proceeding without trickery to the unknown,” he writes; the unknown is what grants “the experience of God, or of the poetic, their great authority.” But the unknown finally demands something like an ethical posture: “sovereignty without partition…” (Bataille, 1988b, p.5). Here a subtle correction enters through technology studies. Alessandro Tomasi, working with Bataille’s notion of intimacy, argues that devices can become so familiar they are experienced not merely as instruments but as intimate—indistinguishable, at moments, from our psychophysical personality; he reworks organ-projection into a full process from invention and objectification to lived familiarity (Tomasi, 2007). This complicates the simple opposition tool versus inner life: even the tool can, under certain conditions, become the site where intimacy is lived, while also remaining a mechanism of separation, capture. That tension is Bataillean to the core: intimacy as continuity, technics as interruption, and yet, under pressure, technics as the strange place where continuity is sought again.
Bataille overviews (Botting & Wilson, 1997; Hegarty, 2000; Noys, 2000) situate these motifs within cultural theory and heterodox political economy. Taken together, they furnish a diagnostic grid: surplus that must be spent, separations from utility that become sacred, transgressive crossings that intensify taboo, sovereignties defined by who may waste, and zones where non-knowledge becomes authority.
2.2 Postwar Afterlives
Bataille’s operators are repeatedly re-coded in postwar theory, less as a doctrine to be applied than as a pressure-test for the story modernity tells about utility. Jean Baudrillard is the decisive case. In Symbolic Exchange and Death and adjacent texts, he draws Bataille into a critique of late capitalism in which domination no longer relies only on production, but on the saturation of social life by signs, models, and simulation (Baudrillard, 1993; Pawlett, 2018). The crucial displacement is from value to difference: where classical exchange requires a general equivalent (money) to quantify value, Baudrillard argues that “models” function as a distributed equivalence that standardizes difference across cultural fields. What matters for the present argument is his claim that, once forms are generated from models, they cease to be produced “according to [their] own determinations” and become instantly reproducible, a regime where critique is absorbed not by rebuttal but by overproduction (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 92).
A related question appears in Jean-Joseph Goux: if late capitalism can sponsor spectacular luxury, destruction, and “waste,” can it still be described as restricted—or has it internalized general-economic logics while maintaining the rhetoric of rational allocation (Goux, 1990)? Postwar geopolitics provides a grim demonstration that surplus does not remain politely “surplus.” The Cold War arms race and space race consumed vast resources whose “returns” were often strategic, symbolic, or purely positional rather than productive, exemplifying the type of expenditure Bataille treats as structurally inevitable once growth can no longer absorb what it generates (Bataille, 1988a, p. 25). Bataille’s point is not that wars are caused by a single economic variable, but that industrial intensification tends to manufacture its own excess, and technical “solutions” frequently increase the size of the surplus they temporarily absorb (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 36–37). This is the hinge for techno-capitalism: optimization discourse can coexist with, and even enable, systems that must continually burn resources simply to keep circulation going.
Later interpreters make this hinge explicit by moving from surplus as a cultural-economic dynamic to surplus as an energetic and ecological one. Allan Stoekl rereads general economy through fossil-fuel modernity and climate crisis, distinguishing industrial, mechanized waste from older forms of ritual expenditure, and insisting that ecological politics must grapple with excess rather than fantasize about total efficiency (Stoekl, 2007). Alexander Styhre extends Bataille toward information and communication technologies, treating digital networks as engines of informational surplus that strain classical scarcity-based models of value (Styhre, 2002). Across these engagements a pattern recurs: Bataille offers a grammar for systems propelled as much by overflow, risk, and sacrificial loss as by rational utility, especially in periods where “development” appears as both promise and compulsion.
Bataille’s own postwar remark about the Cold War is telling not because it is reassuring, but because it frames geopolitics as a temporization of catastrophe: a third arrangement that buys time for thought while keeping expenditure structurally in motion (Bataille, 1991, pp. 188–189). That posture, time purchased through ongoing mobilization, will matter for the contemporary scene, where AI infrastructures similarly promise rationalization while extending the conditions of intensified extraction, surplus production, and strategic competition.
2.3 Contemporary AI Critique as Bataillean Symptom
A growing critical literature on AI and digital technologies, often without naming Bataille, nonetheless converges on concerns that his work anatomizes with unusual clarity. Several strands matter most here: data excess, infrastructural sacrifice, and the problem of sovereignty. What recent work adds is that these are no longer “mere metaphors”: they are increasingly measurable, governable, and contested, which is precisely why they remain politically volatile.
First, AI thrives on surplus. Machine learning wants more: more images, more clicks, more traces, beyond any plausible human need. Digital networks produce an informational glut, theorized as behavioral surplus captured and operationalized by surveillance-capitalist firms (Zuboff, 2019). Zuboff’s own definition is blunt: surveillance capitalism “claims human experience as free raw material” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 8). Contemporary critique pushes even further, toward a wider diagnosis: the extraction is not just commercial, but civilizational, turning everyday life into a standing reserve for computation. This is why newer work increasingly treats “data” less as a neutral resource and more as a relation of capture: what matters is who gets to appropriate, who must disclose, and who is rendered legible only on someone else’s terms (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). Decolonial and postcolonial AI scholarship sharpens the point: AI inherits and amplifies asymmetries in whose languages become benchmarks, whose bodies become “standard,” and whose contexts are treated as statistical noise—coloniality reproduced as sociotechnical infrastructure rather than explicit ideology (Mohamed et al., 2020; Birhane, 2020; Muldoon & Wu, 2023). This is restricted-economy universalism: a system that cannot tolerate remainder and therefore insists that relation, culture, and subjectivity must become computable to count.
Second, AI is materially heavy. Large-scale training and inference consume significant electricity and water; data centers demand constant cooling; hardware production depends on extractive mining and global logistics. Kate Crawford’s infrastructural reading of AI as a technology of extraction makes this planetary grounding explicit. In an interview tied to Atlas of AI, she puts it with disarming clarity: “AI is made from vast amounts of natural resources, fuel, and human labor” (Crawford, 2021, as quoted in Wired, 2021 [3]). “Intelligence” is not floating software; it is a logistical achievement built out of minerals, supply chains, energy regimes, and labor relations (Crawford, 2021; Dauvergne, 2022). What has intensified in the last few years is that the sacrificial framinge of AI is now fought over through accounting itself. The environmental critique has moved from general claims (“it uses a lot of energy”) toward disputes about what counts as cost, where the cost lands, and which metrics make expenditure look acceptable. Li et al. (2023) argue that AI’s water consumption can no longer stay under the radar, and propose methods for estimating both direct and indirect water footprints across locations and electricity mixes (Li et al., 2023). The public controversy around “how much water does a prompt cost?” is a symptom of a deeper issue: measurement choices can externalize impact into indirect use or hide local scarcity behind global averages. Bataille helps name what is at stake here: expenditure is real, but legitimacy depends on rendering expenditure legible as optimization: managed, minimized, and therefore morally neutralized.
Third, AI intensifies the question of sovereignty. Algorithmic systems shape what we see, how credit is allocated, where police are deployed, and how risk is calculated (Eubanks, 2018; O’Neil, 2016; Pasquale, 2015). Luciana Parisi describes an emergent computational sovereignty in which automated decision architectures pre-empt judgment and redistribute reason into machinic procedures (Parisi, 2019). Keller Easterling’s concept of “infrastructure space” sharpens the political form such systems take: power increasingly resides not only in states or firms but in standards, protocols, zones, and spatial-operational rules that govern by default rather than decree (Easterling, 2014). Wendy Hui Kyong Chun complements this by showing how networked systems bind “control” and “freedom” together: the promise of openness becomes a technique of modulation, habituation, and preemption—power that operates through the user’s sense of agency rather than against it (Chun, 2006). Benjamin Bratton, meanwhile, theorizes planetary-scale computation as a Stack: a layered megastructure of infrastructure, platforms, and jurisdictions that produces novel forms of governance beyond the nation-state (Bratton, 2016). From a Bataillean angle, this threatens sovereignty in its strict sense, freedom from instrumentality, by recoding humans as servile workers, users, and data sources inside machinic circuits of utility. A particularly sharp articulation of this shift appears in Rouvroy’s work on data-behaviourism and “algorithmic governmentality.” She writes: “Algorithmic governmentality is without subject: it operates with infra-individual data and supra-individual patterns without, at any moment, calling the subject to account” (Rouvroy & Berns, 2013, p. 2). The claim is not that humans vanish, but that they are re-encountered as profiles, probabilities, and risk surfaces—governed not by argument, but by pre-emption.
Fourth, sovereignty is propped up by disavowed human labor—the “ghost work” that makes machinic authority look autonomous. Contemporary AI systems depend on vast, often invisible labor: data labeling, content moderation, red-teaming, and continuous patching of model behavior—work frequently distributed across global inequalities and organized as precarious piecework (Gray & Suri, 2019; Roberts, 2019). The rhetorical trick of “autonomy” is purchased by an ongoing expenditure of human attention and judgment. This is sovereignty-by-disavowal: authority that denies its dependencies while consuming them as fuel.
Fifth, excess is beginning to flip from “more data” into “more reality-like signal,” producing an epistemic pollution problem. Generative systems industrialize plausibility: texts, images, and arguments that circulate as knowledge-like objects while being weakly anchored to accountable sources. A growing line of work treats this not merely as misinformation, but as a structural threat to shared epistemic life: generative AI can amplify testimonial manipulation, worsen interpretive inequalities, and distort what counts as credible speech in institutions and publics (Kay et al., 2024). The point is Bataillean in spirit: the system produces too much, the problem is a surplus of synthetic semiotic matter that must be sorted, discounted, or ritually expelled to keep “truth” from dissolving into ambient noise.
Sixth, the contemporary turn is from critique to regulation, without resolving the underlying Bataillean tension. Policy frameworks increasingly treat AI as a governable risk domain <rather than a mere innovation domain>: the NIST AI Risk Management Framework formalizes governance practices around measurement, accountability, and harms, while the EU AI Act creates a legal regime of obligations calibrated by use-case risk [5]. These instruments matter, but they also reveal the paradox: governance mechanisms often aim to make expenditure administratively tolerable rather than to question the deeper political economy that demands continual expansion of data, compute, and extraction. Bataille’s general economy clarifies the shared grammar beneath them: the refusal of waste, the conversion of expenditure into optimization, and the displacement of sovereignty into infrastructure. Taken together, contemporary AI critique reads like an unwitting Bataillean dossier.
2.4 Inhuman Turns
Recent philosophical currents engaging AI and computation carry trace elements of Bataille’s legacy, especially where technology appears not as an instrument, but as a regime of escalation: intensification without guarantee of intelligibility or control. Nick Land’s early work, especially The Thirst for Annihilation, is a delirious Bataille fused with cybernetics and capital (Land, 1992; Peredrii, 2025). Capital is not a social tool that subjects wield; it is a process that unbinds them. Land’s language makes this explicit: “Capital is a headless lurch into the abyss, an acephalic catastrophe” (Land, 1992, p. 140). The force of the claim is not merely destructiveness but impersonality: the sense that the system acquires its own vectors, its own runaway curvature, “a run-away whirlwind of dissolution,” once it attains “its own ‘angular momentum’” (Land, 1992, p. 80). In this register, accelerationism turns from strategy into metaphysical diagnosis: a picture of technocapital as an inhuman drive that metabolizes cognition, institutions, and subjectivity as fuel (Land, 1992; Peredrii, 2025). Benjamin Noys’ critique matters here because it repositions “acceleration” as symptom rather than program: a recurring fantasy that radical politics can be derived from the speed and violence of capitalist dynamics, even as this often collapses into complicity (Noys, 2014). A different divergence appears in “#Accelerate” project, where acceleration names not meltdown but an attempt to redirect contemporary technical capacities toward post-capitalist planning and collective agency, rather than abandoning them to market automatisms (Srnicek & Williams, 2013/2014). These positions let accelerationism appear as a contested field.
Speculative realism and adjacent debates shift the question again: not how to accelerate or resist, but how to think the real beyond human correlation and phenomenological privilege (Meillassoux, 2008; Brassier, 2007). Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude supplies one of the signature gestures here, contingency as absolute, while Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound pushes “inhumanism” toward cosmological extinction and the disenchantment of meaning (Meillassoux, 2008; Brassier, 2007). Read alongside Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit, the tonal spectrum becomes legible: Land’s ecstatic catastrophe; Brassier’s cold lucidity; Negarestani’s rationalist reconstruction of intelligence as a normative-historical project that can exceed the empirical human without collapsing into nihilistic surrender (Negarestani, 2018).
Furthermore, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics pushes against the idea of modern technology as a single universal trajectory: technics is always bound to cosmology and ethics, hence his warning that without technodiversity “we will all remain at a loss, overwhelmed by the homogeneous becoming of modern technology” (Hui, 2016, p. 12), and his insistence that “technics is always cosmotechnics” (Hui, 2016, p. 19). Pieter Lemmens’ reading makes the stakes explicit by situating Hui between Heidegger’s ontological critique and Stiegler’s organological account of technics: cosmotechnics becomes a way to think technological plurality without reducing difference to folklore or “culture” as decoration (Lemmens, 2020).
Finally, a set of political-economic accounts bring AI and computation back into contact with extraction, labor, and social surplus without reducing them to ideology critique alone. Matteo Pasquinelli reconstructs AI as a history of social and industrial rationalization: machine intelligence emerges from techniques for measuring, organizing, and extracting knowledge from collective behavior (Pasquinelli, 2023). Tiziana Terranova’s diagnosis of network culture, especially her account of “free labor” and informational economies, helps explain how digital systems intensify productivity while externalizing costs into diffuse social time and attention (Terranova, 2004). These accounts help keep “inhuman intelligence” from floating off into metaphysics alone by locating it in concrete processes of organization, extraction, and automation.
In the more speculative borderlands, these themes reappear as techno-horror and apocalyptic theology. Amy Ireland’s The Alien Inside stages AI as an intrusive outside gestating within the symbolic order (Ireland, 2017), while S. C. Hickman’s The Horror of Capitalism: Consuming the Body of God reframes technocapitalism as a self-consuming sacrificial machine, borrowing Bataillean energies but translating them into an idiom of terminal innovation (Hickman, 2019). What these strands share is a shared pressure: computation is increasingly described as a force that reorganizes reality—metaphysically <the inhuman>, politically <infrastructural sovereignty>, and culturally <cosmotechnical plurality>, while AI becomes a privileged site where the promise of intelligence is inseparable from the question of what, and who, gets spent in its name.
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O’Brien, M., & Fingerhut, H. (2023, September 12). Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa — with a lot of water. Iowa Public Radio.
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Merken, S. (2023, June 26). New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in legal brief. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanction ed-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/
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Simonite, T. (2021, April 26). This researcher says AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/researcher-says-ai-not-artificial-intelli gent/
- Calma, J. (2025, August 21). Google says a typical AI text prompt only uses 5 drops of water — experts say that’s misleading. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/report/763080/google-ai-gemini-water-e nergy-emissions-study
- Bentzen, N. (2025, December). Information manipulation in the age of generative artificial intelligence (Briefing No. PE 779.259). European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7792 59/EPRS_BRI(2025)779259_EN.pdf
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