Anna Kraher: We’re All in This Together (Big Tech and the Politics of Isolation)

This talk explores how Big Tech’s vision of the future – from privatized cities and space colonization to doomsday bunkers – reflects a growing ‘Politics of Isolation’. These projects signal the tech elite’s departure from a shared common ground: corporate-run territories as retreat from legal and regulatory frameworks, bunkers as escape from ecological limits, and space colonization as detachment from Earth itself. In this worldview, freedom is imagined as an escape from responsibility and the collective. Yet, these isolationist strategies rely on global systems of labor and environmental extraction. What appears as isolation is, in fact, an exploitative relationship. For tech elites, this suggests an escape route from a world in crisis, while the majority are left to confront a collapsing planet. In contrast, the ‘freedom to stay’ requires the preservation of a collectively habitable world, where we have the right to remain present.

Anna Kraher is a researcher and artist who explores the societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Tech. Her research interests lie particularly in the interplay between AI ideologies, predictive analytics, and temporalities. She is a research assistant in the Ethics and Critical Theories of Artificial Intelligence research group and the Data Ethics Outreach Lab at Osnabrück University. She studied Design & Computation, Computer Science, and Gender Studies in Berlin and has been affiliated with the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University as well as the non-profit organization AlgorithmWatch.

✹ Saturday 27 September, 13:30 @ Cultural Incubator, Koroška cesta 18