KRES 3.0
Collapse

‍The post-internet utopia never arrived. Instead, we got a destabilizing world, full of uncertainty, surveillance, violence and powerlessness. Trust in institutions has collapsed, and the systems that once claimed to safeguard stability now accelerate our descent into chaos.

Kres 3.0 examines this collapse through different lenses. Under technofeudalism owners of big tech companies act as modern feudal lords, while users till their data as serfs. This concentration of power fuels violent algorithms, designed to extract attention, normalize and push content that causes harm, and desensitize violence and misogyny. And this relentless pursuit of engagement generates slop aesthetics that flood our screens with meaningless AI-generated, brainrot content.

‍How do we exist in times of collapse?

‍Impending collapse could allow new tactics to emerge – interventionist practices that hack, disrupt, and repurpose these systems, alongside ideas of degrowth, deceleration, and new forms of collectivism that reject extraction in favor of solidarity. Collapse is therefore understood as a contradictory state: as a space where the decay and exhaustion of systems intertwine with the beginnings of new aesthetics, ways of thinking, and future imaginaries. In the spirit of bonfire we ask not only what burns, but what grows from the ash.

‍Keywords: disinformation, surveillance, artificial intelligence, synthetic media, slop aesthetics and sloptimism, brainrot, violent algorithms, technofeudalism, surveillance capitalism, attention economy, algorithmic governance, extractivism, powerlessness, decelerationism, societal reset, data sovereignty, resilence, agency, decomputing & degrowth, tactical media

‍Reading & listening list
- McKenzie Wark: Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
- Karen Hao: Empire of AI. Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- Lizzie O'Shea. Future Histories. What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology
- Paris Marx: Hyperscale. The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires
- Olga Goriunova: Ideal Subjects
- Legacy Russell: Glitch Feminism
- Yanis Varoufakis: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
- Brian Merchant: Blood in the Machine. The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
- Dan McQuillan: Resisting AI. An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
- Decomputing: Paris Marx & Dan McQuillian (podcast) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNC49i8-JdY
- Babak Ahteshamipour: Castle Postcards Frozen in Cursed Captcha Scrolls
https://networkcultures.org/blog/2026/01/21/castle-postcards-frozen-in-cursed-captcha-scrolls/