Platform Capitalism

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumors against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court – it was like fighting shadows. The moment was Socrates, the harbinger of logos and true knowledge, was eventually defeated by rumors and mendacious slander.

Where does the strange power of rumors come from? Everyone knows that rumors are unfounded and based on thin air, but still they pass them rumors spread, and what appeared as a small breeze can grow into a mighty whirlwind and produce serious effects, ruin people’s lives and change the course of events. This book scrutinizes the mysterious power of rumors and seeks to analyse it philosophically, examining along the way some key moments of our cultural history concerning rumors, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Gogol and Kafka.  It also underlines the fact that, although rumors are as old as humankind, the advent of the internet and social media has raised the spreading of rumors to an entirely new level, to the point where we could speak of the rumorization of the social.  The more communication there is, the more the social fabric threatens to fall apart – and the more urgent it becomes to find strategies to counteract this.

Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers.

Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.

In many places around the world, the freedom to simply care for one another is under attack by the powerful, and acts of solidarity are being made illegal. In a moment of struggle defined by the rollback of social welfare programs, the criminalisation of migration, and the right-wing clampdown on bodily autonomy, radical networks of care are fighting back.

From volunteer rescue boats in the Mediterranean to underground labs for preparing gender-affirming hormones, from the sharing of copyrighted health knowledge to the provision of abortion and contraception, people are reclaiming the means to care for one another in defiance of a system that devalues and exploits the labour of care.

Against atomised despair, Pirate Care shows that fighting back isn't only about legal and legislative changes but also about organizing, direct action, and disobedient care.

This is a limited edition book. The author trained an LLM on the texts of a deceased theorist, and then proceeded to interact with the LLM and produce simulations of what the theorist may have said in regards to various pertinent topics. The book is primarily a free online resource, but a few copies are being printed to commemorate the work. It has a foreword and afterword by the Editors. 

At the core of this project is a translation of “Marxist Islam or Islamic Marxism,” a groundbreaking text written by Bizhan Jazani during his imprisonment in the 1970s under the Shah’s oppressive regime. Translated by Parham Ghalamdar, this work is accompanied by an introduction contextualizing Jazani’s radical vision. Ghalamdar also contributes a series of ASCII-style illustrations and diagrams—AI-assisted reinterpretations of Jazani’s original paintings and photographs—that bridge the past and present, offering a new perspective on his revolutionary artistry. 

Siahkal names a place in the forests of Gilan and a threshold in revolutionary time. In 1971 a guerrilla action near Siahkal shook the order of the Shah. The action failed militarily yet seeded a myth for the People’s Fedai Guerrillas. Bizhan Jazani, a founding thinker, wrote and painted in prison and was executed in 1975. His work teaches that strategy rather than sentiment endures. // This book treats Siahkal as a Deep Object, a persistent attractor that gathers memory, images, and tactics. An AI model trained on Jazani’s writings and paintings translates his essay on Islamic Marxism and proposes annotations. The machine functions as a probe that widens attention while remaining accountable to the source. Parham Ghalamdar trained the AI, wrote the introduction, and composed ASCII diagrams and diagrammatic readings from Jazani’s artworks. Parsa Esmaeilzadeh contributes an essay that reads Jazani through Karatani and left accelerationism. // It is a call to reimagine and export revolution as a Deep Object that asks for Deep Time to unfold. This clandestine edition invites the reader to study, test, and build strategy that can outlast the news cycle and meet the future head on. 

Parham Ghalamdar is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in the UK. Ghalamdar’s work traces forgotten mythologies, buried philosophies, and visual ruins, reconfiguring them into speculative worlds where memory, fiction, and futurism collapse into one another. Drawing on cybernetic theory and generative AI, he explores how systems of feedback, simulation, and machine vision mediate our understanding of history and possibility. Through painting, film, and writing, he builds narratives that feel both ancient and yet-to-come, haunted by lost histories and animated by possible futures.

Moving beyond the usual genres of form in graphic design’s canonical history, ‘Designing History’ proposes a model centred on bureaucratic instruments of identity, ownership, value, and permission: money, passports, certificates, property deeds, etc. It considers the implications of a design history of the document, where the designer shifts from being a practitioner of conventional design histories to become subject and agency of bureaucratic authority. The book is a revised edition of ‘Immutable: Designing History’ (2022) and includes an extended essay that contextualizes the project as a remapping of graphic design’s historical, pedagogical, and practical assumptions.

The current crisis of museums and the future of Institutional Critique.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Since joining the Stedelijk Museum in April 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlie Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. She has written numerous catalogue essays and is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

A text on speaking, listening and being understood made in conversation with iOS speech-to-text software.