“Decoding the Black Box” opens at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Germany, exposing the corporate surveillance systems that invade the private sphere. 14 artists and collectives including Aram Bartholl (image: Are you human?, 2017), James Bridle, Adam Harvey, Femke Herregraven, Jonas Lund, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Metahaven, and Mimi Ọnụọha make transparent the capitalist power structures of the internet and virtual image economy with evocative counter-narratives and provocations.

Tech critic Evgeny Morozov launches The Santiago Boys, a podcast chronicling Chile’s Project Cybersyn, the early 1970s fusion of cybernetics with Salvador Allende’s socialist agenda that yielded a technocratic control room (image) that anticipated big data and remains iconic in left-wing thought. Meticulously researched, Morozov tells the story of central consultant Stafford Beer, the CIA-adjacent telco that bankrolled the Pinochet coup, and a forlorn “future where technology helps democracy, not ruins it.”