A severe, lucid argument about AI, touch, and the limits of scale.
This episode makes a severe, lucid case about AI, touch, and scale, and it keeps circling the gap between what AI can simulate and what it can actually change.

Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean
68 episodes listed below
Theory for the age of computation.
Disintegrator treats AI as a philosophical, cultural, and infrastructural problem rather than a gadget story. Its conversations move from data centers and digital theory to post-humanism, memes, embodiment, and the strange politics of scale.
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Disintegrator is a podcast of theory under pressure. Its central concern is AI, but the show rarely treats artificial intelligence as a self-contained technical object. Instead, it follows computation outward into bodies, materials, platforms, energy systems, financial incentives, art worlds, and online mythologies. Episodes often begin from a precise question. What does it mean for AI to seem alive to a user? What is digital theory if the digital is not reduced to platforms or culture? How should data centers be discussed when environmental concern, local fear, and industry self-justification all distort the picture? The show gives those questions room. It prefers accumulation to simplification, and its best exchanges sharpen concepts by testing them against infrastructure, politics, and lived conditions. A conversation with Laura Tripaldi moves through material intelligence, spiders, alchemy, interface, and the capacity of matter to transform itself. Episodes with N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti place cognition, embodiment, post-humanism, and ethics into a wider history of theory. The discussion with no.investigues brings Spanish-language internet culture and Mexican memetic experience into contact with global-north theory without treating either side as decorative. The data-center episode with Molly Taft is more concrete, but it keeps the same ethic: name the material stakes, resist bad narratives, and ask who benefits from confusion. Disintegrator can be severe. It can also be funny in a dry, unsentimental way. Its editorial center is not optimism or doom, but literacy: a demand to know what systems are made of before assigning them meaning. The show suits listeners who can handle abstraction when it is anchored to actual technological and political conditions. It rewards patience. It also rewards skepticism toward both tech boosterism and shallow anti-tech posture.
Made for: For listeners who want AI criticism with philosophy, media theory, political economy, and material detail in the same frame. Best suited to people comfortable with dense arguments, long conversations, and minimal handholding.
What sets it apart: Disintegrator stands apart by treating AI as infrastructure, ontology, culture, and political economy at once. It is less interested in quick takes than in building concepts sturdy enough to describe computation at scale.
What does it mean to be human in an age where experience and behavior are mediated and regulated by algorithms? The Disintegrator Podcast is a limited series exploring how Artificial Intelligence affects who we are and how we express ourselves. Join Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean as they speak to the artists, philosophers, scientists, and social theorists at the forefront of human-AI relations. Disintegrator is produced by Rubén Bañuelos.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Disintegrator connects AI theory to bodies, infrastructure, political power, and culture without flattening the questions into familiar technology commentary.
Disintegrator treats AI as a philosophical and material problem, moving between guest conversations and solo lectures that test what computation means for bodies, culture, and collective life.
A hypothetical spider enters the philosophy of AI; your neat definition of intelligence may not survive.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A severe, lucid argument about AI, touch, and the limits of scale.
This episode makes a severe, lucid case about AI, touch, and scale, and it keeps circling the gap between what AI can simulate and what it can actually change.
A dense Spanish conversation where theory, irony, and ordinary life keep pulling against each other.
Disintegrator’s conversation with No Investigues moves through memetics, Instagram, web 2.0, and daily life without pretending those things sit in separate boxes.
A sharp data-center conversation about AI, water fears, and the politics that gather around both.
The episode looks at data centers, AI, and the stories that gather around both, with the host and Molly Taft, senior writer for Wired, moving through water fears, misinformation, and the politics that follow a project once it reaches a neighborhood or state-level fight.
A theory-heavy conversation about matter, interfaces, and how intelligence takes shape.
Laura Tripaldi's visit to Disintegrator makes a focused case for intelligence as something inseparable from the matter that carries it. The discussion moves from Parallel Minds and Discovering the Intelligence of Materials to Donna Haraway's cyborg, then through spiders,…
A focused argument for treating digital theory as a question about what the digital is, not just how it appears.
The episode frames digital theory as a question of definition rather than a label for a department, a scene, or a citation cluster. Centered on Digital Theory, the recent MESO and University of Minnesota Press book, it brings Beatriz Sefaci, Alexander Galloway, Matthew…



Bay Area news with human stakes.

Calmer growth for service business operators.

Media, entertainment, and tech in motion.
Cisco tech, translated through workplace conversation.
It starts by circling back to solo form.
Roberto and the host speak with No Investigues, an anonymous online memetic research cluster whose name translates roughly to "do not research." The conversation is entirely in Spanish, with a translated transcript available in the description.
The host opens by framing the conversation around data centers, AI, and the financial forces gathering around both.
Laura Tripaldi joins Disintegrator.
This episode contrasts a pretentious academic art talk with the insightful and meme-driven approach of Salesforce Child, who effectively conveys the ideas from the book Exo-Capitalism about AI and modern culture.
This episode explores post-humanism as a philosophical project with guest Rosi Braidotti, examining how biotechnology, ecology, and technology reshape human subjectivity and ethics beyond anthropocentric models.
This episode features an interview with N.
The episode asks what digital theory means when the digital itself becomes the problem.
This episode explores Open Secret, an experimental screening series and artist network founded by Dana Dawud, focusing on internet cinema, its logics, and its role in contemporary media and attention scarcity.
This episode features philosopher M.
Patricia MacCormack discusses her A-Human Manifesto, advocating for human extinction as a radical ethical response to the Anthropocene to promote the flourishing of all life through compassion beyond human-centered frameworks.
This episode explores how big tech systems are actually messy, arbitrary, and contingent rather than the sanitized, strategic entities people imagine, using Alex Reisner's work to examine these unexpected realities.
This episode features an interview with composer Jennifer Walshe, discussing her innovative works at the intersection of contemporary music, technology, and AI, including pieces like 'Ghost of the Hidden Lair' and '13 Ways of Looking at Art and Music'.