Keynote, Lecture

The notion of a collective mind—or general intellect—has seduced thinkers from antiquity to the present. In recent decades, it has reemerged in debates around knowledge society and cognitive capitalism, framed as a vital site of political and artistic agency. Today, however, we face an unprecedented reality: a planetary infrastructure of data centers and AI models that both materialize and alienate this collective intelligence.

AI is designed to capture the very form of collective knowledge, yet its privatisation within a handful of corporate monopolies raises urgent questions: How might we imagine the dis-alienation and re-socialisation of knowledge in the wake of such enclosures? This alienation operates not only on the collective level but also at the scale of individual human experience. One of AI’s most pressing problems is its anthropomorphism—its hyperreal mimicry of human traits such as language—which can foster misplaced trust, as when teenagers turn to ChatGPT for psychotherapy.

How, then, can we intervene at every stage of this process of human alienation that is psychic, economic, and political at the same time? In his VLC Forum 2025 keynote lecture, philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli argues that a starting point may be to acknowledge that all knowledge is, in some sense, a form of alienation to begin with. David Bering-Porter, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, offers a response.