At AMRO 2024 you talked about »techronologies« understood as the temporalities within AI and prediction algorithms, and now you are observing what you call »politics of isolation«. Shall we start with your definition of tech temporalities, what your interest in them is, and how that serves your research?
In my research on temporalities, I look at predictive technologies and the underlying concepts of time that are embedded within these, ranging from a technical perspective to the ideological frameworks in which these technologies are developed. A concrete example I explore in my video »Road to Futures Past« is predictive policing. This comprises technologies that use data to train models which, for instance, predict where future crime is likely to occur based on past crime locations.
But the term »prediction« that I use is broader, encompassing not just data-driven forecasts but also the narrative shaping of the future. This includes the promises big tech companies make about the future and how these corporations appropriate the future through expanding their power. These two aspects are deeply intertwined: the ideologies that focus heavily on the future (like »Longtermism«) also form the philosophical backdrop on which these technologies are developed. It’s this intersection that I am looking at in my work around »techronologies«.
Where does the »politics of isolation« come from? What is it connected to?
»Politics of Isolation« is a working title that I use for specific Big Tech visions of the future, ranging from privatized cities, to space colonization and doomsday bunkers. These ventures build on the idea of isolation as departure from a shared common ground: for example space colonization as detachment from Earth, or private cities to escape tech regulation and taxes. Essentially politics of isolation means abstracting yourself from the rest of the world by what Peter Thiel describes as going »one meta level above«, which starts as a business strategy to find a market niche for a company where there is no competition yet. Going one meta level above means that you try to isolate yourself. The lobbying for creating new »private« special economic zones takes this business strategy even further, by creating zones with regulation a la carte, isolating corporations from things that we agreed on as a society, like which tax or work regulations we want to have. In this worldview, freedom is imagined as an escape from responsibility and the society at large.
Wealthy people have always been somewhat antisocial – but is this a new phenomenon or does it build on something already existing?
Historically this idea of special economic zones has been around for some time. In his book »Crack-Up Capitalism«, Quinn Slobodian traces these zones historically from Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, Dubai, Singapore and many more, to more recent projects like the charter city Próspera in Honduras. Próspera is a subnational territory that has its own fiscal, legal and regulatory system, autonomous in most cases from the national government. It is financially backed by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital fund investing in private cities, with prominent figures from Silicon Valley, such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, behind it.
But what maybe adds a new dimension to this libertarian private cities movement at the moment, is the current Trump administration, which is increasingly forming an alliance with big tech, and its libertarian actors. In his campaign trail in 2023 Trump promised to build 10 freedom cities within the US to accelerate innovation. Libertarian networks are now actively lobbying to bring this vision to life, with the Freedom Cities Coalition having met with the Trump administration to discuss the matter.
But how do they work? What are the consequences of the isolation of some for the other people?
At its core is a liberal concept of freedom – rooted in property rights, hyper-mobility and the denial of the interconnectedness of ecological and social systems. Yet, these zones are fundamentally reliant on global systems of labor and resource extraction. That’s why I speak of »politics of supposed isolation«. What appears as isolation is, in fact, an exploitative relationship: from special economic zones, which have facilitated access to cheap, unregulated, and often migrant labor, to today’s proposals like Dryden Brown’s »Acceleration Zones«, which promote »Elon-compatible labor law«.
Is there European examples of this ideology and how this is rooted technologically or ideologically here?
There are German actors that have global ties to these libertarian networks. One example is the TUM International GmbH, a subsidiary of the Technical University of Munich, which was involved in the development of Próspera until 2020. The CEO of TUM International GmbH at that time, Daniel Gottschald, is now the CEO of the TUM Campus Heilbronn GmbH, an educational campus in Heilbronn built by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, bound to the Schwarz Gruppe, that owns Lidl and Kaufland. So we see these libertarian networks in Germany, and with Dieter Schwarz we also see parallels in this practice of billionaires heavily financing AI development and education.
What is specifically different in this German context from the US one? And what do they share?
So in terms of what they share – I think it’s grounded within a similar philanthropic ideology, operating along the ideas of effective altruism, where it is morally superior to pursue a career that earns a lot of money, like finance, in order to be able to give away a lot of money, including for example foundations financing certain endeavors. This obviously poses a lot of problems, because the money is distributed without any democratic legitimation, with billionaires deciding what to finance, while developing influence on politics and education. For example, in addition to the TUM Campus Heilbronn, where study programs focus primarily on AI, management, and business, the Dieter Schwarz Foundation is also funding a startup park in Heilbronn and 20 professorships in AI at ETH Zurich, with the condition that they also teach at the Campus in Heilbronn.
I think what sets the German context apart from the US, especially considering the geopolitical backdrop, is their effort to narrate a distinct approach to AI, with Germany focusing for instance on »medium-sized companies« and »industry-specific AI«. We see this with the discourse around »digital sovereignty«, where there are these re-nationalization attempts to build a European or German identity around AI. Going back to Dieter Schwarz as an example, part of the Schwarz Gruppe is Schwarz Digits, a company providing German cloud infrastructure, cyber security, AI and more – whose projects are marketed as instances of digital sovereignty. However at its core, this is still a large corporation, one that has faced labor law allegations, with a German billionaire behind. While digital sovereignty seems to focus on creating technologies of German origin, the real question should be more about the values behind these technologies. Because in the end we need to ask ourselves, do we want to have a European Amazon, that is just doing the same thing?
How does all this research connect back to your artistic practice?
In my academic research, I focus on analyzing discourse: how do we talk about certain phenomena, what is (or isn’t) said, why are specific terms hyped, and what is their function. I collect a variety of materials, such as newspaper articles, political strategy documents, advertisements, and more, trying to make sense of what is happening at the moment. Similarly my artistic practice, which revolves around video and installation, also looks at how certain topics are discussed, presented and narrated, also on a visual level. I work with found footage, and combining it with new content, to deconstruct and reconstruct narratives. This approach allows me to shift focus onto the underlying ideologies, or the narratives you find in the cracks in between.
Are there ways that the artistic production feeds back into your academic research?
My academic research does not precede my artistic practice – they are rather a simultaneous process. I work within specific subject areas, and of course certain institutions want you to have different production outcomes – such as an artistic work, an academic paper, a talk, etc. Also sometimes particular questions ask for a specific methodology or approach. But, yes, there are also instances, when my artistic production processes feed back into my theoretical work. For example, when I was working on the subject area of temporalities and technologies, I created a video installation projected on a non-Newtonian fluid, which is a substance that solidifies when pressure is applied or when you move through it quickly. I used this as a metaphor to critique the supposedly constant acceleration through technology. For an exhibition, I had to redo the fluid mixture every few days, which was really frustrating as it took about 45 minutes each time. This embodied experience made me reflect on how critique often operates in the inverse to what is critiqued, such as reacting to acceleration with slowness. Yet, this thinking stays within a binary framework, which cannot address the complexity of issues we face. In the case of temporalities and technologies, this might mean not just demanding to slow everything down, but to consider how time is unequally distributed – who has to wait, who benefits from accelerated processes and who gains or looses time due to the introduction of certain technologies. So in that case my artistic practice fed back into my theoretical work, also beyond this subject area, reminding me to identify binary thinking and to reconsider how I express critique and point at possible solutions.
Anna Kraher is an artist and researcher that explores the societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Tech, with a particular focus on the interplay between AI ideologies, predictive analytics, and temporalities. Anna is a research assistant in the Ethics and Critical Theories of Artificial Intelligence research group and part of the Data Ethics Outreach Lab at Osnabrück University. She studied Design & Computation, Computer Science and Gender Studies in Berlin.
- The AMRO Research Lab is found at research.radical-openness.org/2025