The Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) is a conspiratorial, practice-led research framework focused on the intersection of culture, politics, and technology.

LOCATION: Athens-EU-WWW

Last Notes

##
A Call for Solidarity from the Universities in Rojava/Northern and Eastern Syria*The following statement was issued by the Universities in Rojava/Northern and Eastern Syria (University of Rojava, Kobani University, and University of Al-Sharq) on 22 January 2026.*
> *We call on you, wherever you are, to stand with Rojava. Raise your voice. Organize on your campuses, in your unions, and in your communities. Use your positions, however limited they may feel, to push for action, to demand accountability, and to refuse silence. Strengthen the networks of solidarity that make resistance possible. Stand up for the revolutionary aims of freedom, women’s liberation, ecological life, and democratic communal life. Your solidarity is part of our self-defense, and it can help shift the balance and prevent yet another genocide in the region.*
**Full statement:** https://kolektiva.social/@earthworm/115945148734355759
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2025-12-29 12:30:09 UTC

**AI Must Die!**
*Critical Perspectives on the State of Artificial Intelligence*
*AI MUST DIE* is a short zine by *Myke Walton* and *Cam Smith* that presents critical perspectives on the way that AI is talked about, governed, and owned in 2025.
> *AI is fucking everywhere: at work, at school, in our homes, in our phones, on our streets, in our governments, and at war. We are living through an era of extreme AI hype. In this climate, some people have gotten rich off of the stolen data and stolen labor that fuels these technologies. Others have been surveilled, oppressed, exploited, and killed. This text presents a short, practical guide to the technologies currently called “AI,” the ideologies and actors pouring gasoline on the AI dumpsterfire, and what we can do about it.*
> ...
> *How long will this go on? When will the hype cycle end? Is another AI winter coming? Faced with an inhumane tech industry and complicit governments it may ultimately fall to the people to invent new ways to evade, refuse, resist, sabotage or otherwise destroy AI.*
> *Hammers up! AI Must Die!*
> *Seize the means of computation*
Read the full zine here: https://www.aimustdie.info/
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2025-08-16 12:33:31 UTC

**The Anti-AI Protests Have Arrived in Portland, and This is Only the Beginning**
By @npub15z3…0xrp | @npub1309…us9c
According to reports from pro-#AI attendees at a business meetup in #Portland, #Oregon, anti-AI protesters showed up outside, throwing eggs and paint at cars and distributing pamphlets with the following message:
> *“BUTLERIAN JIHAD AGAINST AI*
> *never ending destruction and death propels the machine of progress. AI rides on the front of this beast, annihilating humanity, leaving nothing in its wake but sterile boxes to lock us in and apps to keep us sedated. while the techies are inside sipping their cocktails the rest of us are faced with a choice: to accept our position at the bottom of the social order or find our people and bring the whole thing down. only we can decide to smash the screens that are brainwashing us into submission.*
> *the time is now,
> the day is here,
> ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!”*
Read more: https://theinternet.review/2025/08/15/the-anti-ai-protests-are-here/
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2025-07-11 06:48:47 UTC

**"Trapping AI" – Operational Progress!** 🕳️
Following the last update (https://tldr.nettime.org/@asrg/114742667183459482), we’re transitioning from planning to practice — amplifying both the *scale* and *operational ferocity* of our approach through the deployment of a new, more radically interventionist layer of complexity.
This intensified escalation — as outlined in the last update — is concretized in fakejpeg, which is now *fully live and operational*. From this point onward, every page generated by our standalone LLM crawler-tarpit embeds a garbage JPEG. Notably, within just a few hours of operation, this deployment has already yielded over 40,000 such images.
The integration of fakejpeg constitutes a critical deepening layer that amplifies both the *strategic offensiveness* and *subversive ardor* of our approach by enabling the ongoing *targeted poisoning* and coordinated dissemination of systematically crafted junk data within the operational workflows of AI systems.fakejpeg
repo: https://github.com/gw1urf/fakejpeg
See the tarpit in action: https://content.asrg.site/
Context and rationale: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/trapping-ai/#expanding-the-offensiveness
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2025-06-25 06:49:15 UTC

**"Trapping AI" – Slight Update!** 🌀
Activity in the **"Trapping AI"** project is accelerating: in just under a month, over **26 million requests** have hit our tarpit URLs 🕳️. Vast volumes of meaningless content were devoured by AI crawlers — ruthless digital leeches that relentlessly scour and pillage the web, leaving no data untouched.
In the coming days, we’ll roll out a new layer of complexity — amplifying both the *intensity* and *offensiveness* of our approach. This escalation builds on fakejpeg, a tool developed by @npub1ua8…r8y9.
🖼️ fakejpeg generates fake JPEGs on the fly. You "train" it with a collection of existing JPEGs, and once trained, it can produce an arbitrary number of things that *look* like real JPEGs — perfect for feeding aggressive web crawlers junk 🗑️.
Explore fakejpeg: https://github.com/gw1urf/fakejpeg
Learn more about *"Trapping AI"*: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/trapping-ai/#expanding-the-offensiveness
See the tarpit in action: https://content.asrg.site/
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2025-05-30 04:40:02 UTC

**AI is Dehumanization Technology**
A call to reject the deployment and use of AI systems. Interesting piece by @npub1tz7…za03
> AI systems reproduce bias, cheapen and homogenize our social interactions, deskill us, make our jobs more precarious, eliminate opportunities to practice care, and enable authoritarian modes of surveillance and control. Deployed in the public sector, they undercut workers' ability to meaningfully grapple with problems and make ethical decisions that move our society forward. These technologies dehumanize all of us. Collectively, we can choose to reject them.
📰 Read it here: https://thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/ai-is-dehumanization-technology.html
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2025-05-20 12:42:12 UTC

**"Trapping AI" – New Update!** 🌀
Web crawlers play a central role in the escalating race to develop ever-more powerful AI models: they tirelessly scour the web, harvesting vast quantities of content to feed large language models. *Babble* (https://git.jsbarretto.com/zesterer/babble), originally developed by @npub1zt7…uwkx, is a tool that lures these crawlers into an endless labyrinth—feeding their insatiable hunger for data with masses of pointless content.
To deliberately drain the resources of exploitative crawlers—and push AI models further toward collapse—we’ve deployed *Babble*, initially enhancing it through subtle, targeted modifications that align its functionality tightly with our strategic and operational priorities.
*Babble* dynamically generates an unending stream of deterministic bollocks, trapping crawlers on a single site where they endlessly navigate an ever-growing sea of pages 🌊—each filled with vast amounts of useless text and dozens of links that draw them ever deeper into the tarpit 🔁.
In the coming period, we’ll continue to develop and escalate this tactic—adding new layers of complexity and increasing both the intensity and offensiveness of the approach. At the next stage, we’ll openly share our code—allowing others to deploy, adapt, and build upon it.
See it in action: https://content.asrg.site/
P.S. If you're looking for similar tools and frameworks to deploy or explore further, check out our list titled *"Sabot in the Age of AI"*—a record of strategically offensive methods and purposefully orchestrated tactics for facilitating (algorithmic) sabotage, framework disruption, and intentional poisoning.
Explore it here: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/posts/sabot-in-the-age-of-ai/
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2025-01-28 18:01:55 UTC

- reply

.. Here’s an interesting approach from [@gedankenstuecke](https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke ) that you might find helpful!
⟶ https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke/113899799818100252

2025-01-21 17:00:30 UTC

Sabot in the Age of AI
Here is a curated list of strategies, offensive methods, and tactics for (algorithmic) sabotage, disruption, and deliberate poisoning.
🔻 iocaine
The deadliest AI poison—iocaine generates garbage rather than slowing crawlers.
🔗 https://git.madhouse-project.org/algernon/iocaine
🔻 Nepenthes
A tarpit designed to catch web crawlers, especially those scraping for LLMs. It devours anything that gets too close. [@aaron](https://chirp.zadzmo.org/@aaron )
🔗 https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
🔻 Quixotic
Feeds fake content to bots and robots.txt-ignoring #LLM scrapers. @npub1uyd…ma7v
🔗 https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html
🔻 Poison the WeLLMs
A reverse-proxy that serves diassociated-press style reimaginings of your upstream pages, poisoning any LLMs that scrape your content. @npub14j3…2nd9
🔗 https://codeberg.org/MikeCoats/poison-the-wellms
🔻 Django-llm-poison
A django app that poisons content when served to #AI bots. @npub1eqk…ng77
🔗 https://github.com/Fingel/django-llm-poison
🔻 KonterfAI
A model poisoner that generates nonsense content to degenerate LLMs.
🔗 https://codeberg.org/konterfai/konterfai
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2025-01-01 08:15:26 UTC

Let's talk about not talking about #Gaza
To the Chaos Computer Club, and to the larger community that makes the Chaos Communication Congress happen.
Congress has been a place for policitized hackers from all around the world to meet, share and learn. Yet this year's #38C3 event has been lived by many of us as an awkward space of silencing and self-censoring with regards to the Palestinian #genocide. We couldn't help but feel terrified at that, although not completely surprised.
It has been dreadful to once again hear discussions in which the only "argument" issued was "it's a complex situation" when trying to face the harsh reality of a 2 million people country being destroyed, blocked and bombed with barely any food or clean water, while one of the last running hospital was bombed three days before.
As an heterogeneous group of people that are part of communities that are interested, active or impacted by the struggle for liberation of the Palestinian people, we've felt necessary to start this discussion.
What follows is a series of experiences, questions and reflections that have been shared in the self-organized session "Let's talk about the not talking about Gaza" that was announced on the last day of the Congress.
⟶ https://pastebin.aquilenet.fr/?0d2333b41ea9c648#CK385sttKzd2VaWV1KfZHjYQ7diEf2Z94eoo9ezMnpbg
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2024-11-22 15:06:58 UTC

Three additional translations of the Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” in Turkish, Slovenian and Romanian have been completed and are now accessible via the following link: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/manifesto-on-algorithmic_sabotage/. We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to R. Ljubomir and P. Rezika for their invaluable contributions to the Slovenian translation. We are also indebted to Emilia Mhădă for her excellent work in translating the text into Romanian, and to the individual who translated the “Manifesto” into Turkish. We are grateful to all those involved for their efforts in making the text accessible to readers in these languages.
* The Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” is comprised of ten statements, numbered from 0 to 9, which delineate the underlying principles, strategic approaches and aesthetic manifestations of the critical notion of “Algorithmic Sabotage” within the framework of digital culture and information technology. The text’s purpose is not only a theoretical dissemination of militant algorithmic agency, resistance and refusal, but the diffusion of radical theory/criticism that stems from the energy of insurrectionary desire. The Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” represents the relentless march of a political theory that constantly and ambidirectionally turns discourse into praxis in order to declare its presence in the liberation struggle.
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2024-11-08 14:48:46 UTC

... We are seeking a designer with the requisite skills and experience to contribute to the design and layout of an upcoming brochure. Further details regarding the content can be found via the following link: https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/theorizing-algorithmic_sabotage/. If you are interested, please contact us via email ..
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2024-09-23 06:31:39 UTC

“If you think #technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology — and you don’t understand your problems.”[1] — Laurie Anderson, 2020
“To compare human and machine intelligence implies also a judgement about which human behaviour or social group is more intelligent than another, which workers can be replaced and which cannot. Ultimately, #AI is not only a tool for automating labour but also for imposing standards of mechanical intelligence that propagate, more or less invisibly, social hierarchies of knowledge and skill. As with any previous form of automation, AI does not simply replace workers but displaces and restructures them into a new social order.” [2] — Matteo Pasquinelli 2023
Through horizontal forms of intervention that prioritise marginalised perspectives, “Algorithmic Sabotage” articulates a collective approach to challenging the ideology of “algorithms everywhere”, in particular by shifting the focus from statistical inference to mutually constituting solidarity, by undertaking the activities necessary to generate prefigurative practices of resistance, agency and refusal that disrupt the algorithmic enclosure and overturn the application of continuous states of exception, highlighting the entanglement of the algorithmic harmfulness of “AI” with ongoing forms of societal disintegration, from austerity to far-right politics, and from racialized algorithmic violence to the propagation of patterns of segregation and exclusion.
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[1] Sterling, B. (2020) Laurie Anderson, machine learning artist-in-residence, Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2020/03/laurie-anderson-machine-learning-artist-residence/.
[2] Pasquinelli, M. (2024) The eye of the master: A social history of artificial intelligence. London, UK: Verso. Available at: https://www.versobooks.com/products/735-the-eye-of-the-master.
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2024-09-17 14:17:14 UTC

The Police Officers Faces (POF) dataset is an investigative counter-surveillance artistic project that focuses on the utilisation of facial recognition technology, with a particular emphasis on its deployment by law enforcement agencies. The dataset comprises 88,783 facial images of thousands of police officers. The images have been sourced from the #internet and are being used for the purpose of facial recognition. In this project, the conventional paradigm, in which the powerful observe and the powerless are observed, is reversed.
In order to address the dehumanising effects of the expansion of automated discrimination and segregation, the exacerbation of harm and the overarching correlation, the project advocates for a distinct technical mentality, a collective “counter-intelligence,” which seeks to emphasise the influence of citizens and grassroots realities in uncovering facts, focusing on the impact of collective actions to reveal wrongdoing and the collaborative production of social justice.
.. By employing a multifaceted approach encompassing targeted #data collection and compilation, social engineering, and rigorous analysis, the #Police Officers Faces (POF) dataset has established a comprehensive and structural alternative framework for the emancipatory empowerment of community members engaged in #copwatch and other counter-#surveillance practices. * Please be advised that the URL below provides an initial overview only. As further information becomes available, the content will be updated accordingly.
⟶ https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/police_officers-faces-pof/
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2024-09-10 05:58:17 UTC

“The lesson of the current wave of 'artificial' 'intelligence', I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don’t be intimidated by them either – they’re really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: 'Technology is what we can learn to do'”[2] — @npub1laz…hewg
Rather than engaging in brute force calculations, and accepting algorithms as agents of disempowerment, or as recapitulations of older colonial technologies, “Algorithmic Sabotage” starts from the twin pillars of feminist and decolonial standpoints, functioning as an ethical add-on that mobilises its capacity to act as a counter-power, fully contributing to the techno-political procedures of radicalisation for the development of strategies, aesthetics and prefigurative practices of resistance, agency and refusal as a corrective to the aggressive abstraction of #AI, whose opacity and indifference to causality reinforce social inequality, perpetuate prejudice and unjust discrimination, to the point of enabling algorithmic apartheid.
---
[1] Jahić, S. (2023) No to AI, yes to a non-fascist apparatus. Available at: http://sanelajahic.com/works/no-to-ai-yes-to-a-non-fascist-apparatus/.
[2] Bridle, J. (2023) The stupidity of ai, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/16/the-stupidity-of-ai-artificial-intelligence-dall-e-chatgpt.
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2024-09-06 05:58:45 UTC

“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”[1] — Alan Turing
“When you’re fundraising, it’s Artificial Intelligence. When you’re hiring, it’s Machine Learning. When you’re implementing, it’s logistic regression.”[2] — Joe Davidson
While #AI produces thoughtlessness, in the sense that political philosopher Hannah Arendt meant when interpreting the actions of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann[3]; the inability to critique instructions, the lack of reflection on consequences, a commitment to the belief that a correct ordering is being carried out, “Algorithmic Sabotage” is intensified by the new forms of machinic knowing and the nascent becoming of an anti-worker and anti-community computational complex, making necessary a restructuring that reorients the focus from the miasma of AI and its concomitant toxic algorithmic operations of optimisation to developing techniques for redistributing social power, starting from a feminist standpoint and progress towards the implementation of prefigurative strategies of resistance, agency and refusal, to inhibit, slow down or reverse the emergence of harmful racialized practices of exteriorization and exclusion driven by algorithms.
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[1] Hodges, A. (2013) Alan Turing, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/.
[2] Joe Davison, “No, Machine Learning is not just glorified Statistics”, Medium, June 27, 2018. Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/no-machine-learning-is-not-just-glorified-statistics-26d3952234e3.
[3] Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1 edition. New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics, 2006.
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2024-09-03 19:47:13 UTC

“We want to ask the right questions. How do the tools work? Who finances and builds them, and how are they used? Whom do they enrich, and whom do they impoverish? What futures do they make feasible, and which ones do they foreclose? We’re not looking for answers. We’re looking for logic.” — Logic Magazine manifesto [1]
“To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labor force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.” — Simon Schaffer [2]
Drawing on a long historical pedigree of political struggle against injustice, authoritarianism and top-down technological transformation, and by recovering tactical lessons and a sense of militancy committed to the common good from the time of the Luddites, “Algorithmic Sabotage” represents a radical, prefigurative techno-political praxis of resistance, agency and refusal that seeks to transcend the deep-seated necropolitical tendencies, predictive interventions, thoughtless optimisations, increasing flows of fascist affordances and the violence of solutionism that #AI implements through an atmosphere of algorithmic paranoia in every aspect of social infrastructure, confirming the dystopian potentials of machine intelligence.
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[1] “Disruption: A Manifesto,” Logic Magazine, no. 1 (March 2017). Available at: https://logicmag.io/intelligence/disruption-a-manifesto/.
[2] Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 1 (1994).
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