In the 1970s, sanity tests for computer programs were cute. “Hello, World!” was less threatening than “I now regret my work,” uttered by Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather of AI” and former vice president of Google Brain. He quit the Brain in the good old days of 2023. In the Middle Ages – the 60s – Syd Barrett, the then lead singer of Pink Floyd, also quit his brain, but in different circumstances. His tripped-out, acid-ridden gray matter has since been immortalized in songs like “Brain Damage” (1973), his former band members singing, “Rearrange me until I’m sane.”

In our contemporary era of automation and chaos, where the conflation of cerebral optimization and damage has reached its dizzying apex – this wish has been granted. We have been rearranged: convolutional neural networks, data farms, bandit algorithms, undersea cables, Skylink contracts … these are all somehow prosthetically, chemically, and linguistically integrated into the “augmented functioning” of our species. The cyborg I am struggles to even flesh out this list, underscoring a certain kind of contemporary loss: in 2025, one can no longer identify, nor really evaluate, the thresholds of pleasure and pain that constitute the multiplying psychopathologies of our digital era. Put in other words, I do not take AI like a tab of LSD. But I do have the suspicion that the corporatized automation of collective consciousness is a kind of trip I might never wake up from.

This is perhaps one of the enduring tenets of the now obsolete Post-Internet Art ...

— This text is printed in full in our Fall 2025 issue, Spike #85 – Nostalgia. Get your copy at a discount by subscribing to one year of the magazine —