The Books that Influence Hito Steyerl

For those interested in how digital technology contributes to the general clusterfuck most of us are experiencing these days, here is a list of texts I read last year. These recommendations form a solid base with which to face the current wave of authoritarian tech bullshit, including the idea that there is or was ever anything inherently democratic in it. The last months have unfortunately shown, to an astonishing degree, that the primary function of so-called AI is to replace society with radically dysfunctional proprietary systems. For anyone interested in how we got to this point and how to move on from it, a short reading list of essentials follows.

Baruch Gottlieb, Most-Human Condition (Delere Press, 2024)

Gottlieb riffs on the trope of post-humanism to explore what it means to be human today. The notion of humanity has come under fire in recent decades for being imperialist, racist, etc., as well as enabling the so-called Anthropocene in which humans started terraforming the planet, thus warming the climate and exterminating lifeforms. Gottlieb argues however that there is no convincing way for humans to exit the human condition either. Humans can’t just pretend to be minerals, quarks or bacteria in order to ‘decenter’ human violence. Cosplaying critters is no solution. Humans have specific ways to perceive, a specific relation to gravity, light, sound and the environment of this planet. Additionally, the idea of overcoming our humanity in some way echoes the current project of technofascist post-humanism to get rid of most people altogether. Humans are themselves in the process of being overtaken and partly made redundant by technical systems. According to corporate wishful thinking, humans are no match for robust self-propagating systems like capitalism or so-called AGI, and will soon be marginalized by these systems. Gottlieb’s book is a good guide for an age which is in the process of moving past the Anthropocene – as humans are voluntarily relinquishing control to more and more powerful technical systems.

Trevor Paglen, ‘Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media’, ‘Part 2: AI, Mind Control, and Magic’, ‘Part 3: Cognition and Chaos’ (e-flux, 2024)

Paglen, prescient as ever, opens the door to the realm of post-AI technology. In this three-part series about psyops and confusing mind games, he essentially argues that storytelling is the most evolved technology. Why? No one needs complicated tech to manipulate anyone else. In the end, it all boils down to telling stories people want to hear, and cloaking them in enough technological mumbo-jumbo for them to seem magic. The contemporary manifestation is to create an immersive environment for this with images that not only act as sensors but morph and twist to reflect what they think they know about us: ‘a media landscape where your refrigerator, vibrator, and toothbrush collude with insurance companies, advertisers, political campaigns, and big retailers, using computer vision, machine learning, and biometric feedback to influence your behavior and worldview? Every day, we are subject to subtle and not-so-subtle mind-control experiments.’

Svitlana Matviyenko, ‘Vertical Occupation’ (London Ukrainian Review, 2024)

In Matviyenko’s texts and lectures, I have learned that war has had an ecological dimension at least since the gas attacks of World War I. She writes: ‘The wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are all “ecologised” wars, as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk reminds us. Almost paradoxically in the age of precision weapons, such wars, like the Russian war on Ukraine, target broader environments on a micro- and macro-scale, which makes “collateral damage” – or everyone and everything that falls dead or damaged by war – not an exception, but the core rule of warfare. These late modern wars are always fought environmentally. Often, the material composition of such environments, from debris and pollution to air sirens and explosions, from masterminded psyops to random informational chaos, is employed to produce terror that suppresses the subject of war from within – just like it makes the living body hostage by the necessity of breathing poisoned air or drinking poisoned water.’ Climate thus becomes a medium in itself. If so, is there any form of immediacy within it?  

James Bridle, Ways of Being (Penguin, 2022)

While Gottlieb’s book is called Most-Human Condition, Bridle’s 2022 classic about the entanglement of images, materials and programmes starts with the chapter ‘More Than Human’. ‘The “more-than-human world,”’ Bridle writes, ‘acknowledges that the very real human world – the realm of our senses, breath, voice, cognition and culture – is but one facet of something vastly greater. All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else.’ A wonderful example of this is the story of biologist Martin Lindauer, who was severely wounded as member of a penal battalion in World War II, and was able to study biology as he was useless for the military. He became one of the first scientists to decode bee dances by tagging insects individually and literally running after them through the bombed ruins of Munich to see where they would fly and build new nests. 

Hito Steyerl's Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat will be released on May 20 by Verso Books

^{Main image: Hito Steyerl, 2019. Courtesy: Verso Books}