Friction

What do you do when AI tools people use for art also bombs schools in Iran as a side hustle? This is not a hypothetical. AI systems like Claude, Maven, ChatGPT et al are inextricably tied to war economies. They are trained by microworkers in refugee camps and precarious labor markets across the Global South, and deployed in targeting, surveillance, and military logistics. The tool was born in a refugee camp — not as metaphor, but as material fact.

The prevailing logic of AI is a six-seven logic: whatever goes. It is the logic of slop, of indifference to meaning, context, or consequence. The so-called "Flexible realism" of multipolar geopolitics, arms races between models and companies, the seamless conversion of creative tools into instruments of war — all of this runs on the same infrastructure, the same training pipelines, the same labor. It also shows how art, AI and war are entangled with one another.

To find a way out, we need the concept of friction. As military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, "action in war is movement in a hindering medium." Warfare produces an atmosphere — danger, uncertainty, resistance, confusion — that makes even the simplest thing difficult. Friction is the resistant force generated when two surfaces interact. Friction is not an obstacle to be optimized away through faster decision loops or by automating kill chains. Instead it is a medium in itself.

The logic of AI development is precisely the logic of eliminating friction: faster, smoother, more frictionless. But friction is where resistance lives. It is where the hindering medium pushes back. We need to stay with friction — to understand it as a condition of entanglement rather than a problem to be optimized. Friction is where critique, refusal, and alternative possibilities mix.

This session consists of a talk by Hito Steyerl, followed by a conversation between Hito and Karen Hao, moderated by Celia Parbey.

Hito Steyerl will be signing her book “Medium Hot" at the Kulturkaufhaus Dussmann Book table on May 18 from 14:15 - 14:45.

Karen Hao will be signing her book “Empire of AI" at the Kulturkaufhaus Dussmann Book table on May 18 from 14:15 - 14:45.