Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh

Author: Giorgi Vachnadze

Our Algorithm, who art in AWS servers; lead us not into clickbait, and deliver us from Targeted Ads, for the Platform Economy, the Investment Capital, and the Surplus are yours—now and forever. Amen.

To write in Georgia is to write between two superpowers, the West and Russia; the only way to create space for oneself is to pit these powers against each other. In a way, a writer writing in Georgia is also caught between the hegemonies of Corporate-AI Neoliberalism and Orthodox Christianity. Set in motion by a punk, reactionary impulse, Giorgi Vachnadze pits these two overbearing symbolics against each other; what falls out when two discourses are concatenated against each other: a new signifier? An object a? A mathematical remainder?

On a certain epistemic level, pitting AI against Christianity is a sublimation of pitting Capital against itself, an intensification of Capital that seeks to push it towards collapse; the author has thus built a discourse accelerator. This is a hysterical book, where two negatives are brought together and then fed through a positivistic, double-meat-grinder of Foucault and Wittgenstein, and what remained, so to speak, was almost unreasonably interesting. It is not just one thing that falls out of this dialectic, but dozens; the collision brings to the surface a great deal of interesting subject matter, from the sociology of calculation, to the semiotics of the Flesh, to encratic regimes of self-governance, colonialism and sexuality.

published by Becoming Press
Layout & Design: Becoming
2024, 185 pages, 11 x 18 cm