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Cover Image for This is Not a Rehearsal—It’s an Alchemical Ritual

This is Not a Rehearsal—It’s an Alchemical Ritual

Cory Doctorow as Conductor

Happy? During the hour of the wolf? How dare he.

An early 20th century editorial cartoon depicting the Standard Oil Company an a world-spanning octopus clutching the organs of state - White House, Capitol dome, etc - in its tentacles. It has been altered: to its left, curled within its tentacles, stands an early 20th century cartoon depicting Uncle Sam as a policeman with a billyclub, with a DOJ Antitrust Division crest on his chest. On its right, one of its tentacles clutches an early Google 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button. Its head has been colored in with bands in the colors of the Google logo, surmounted by the Chrome logo. Its eyes have been replaced with the eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Nestled in one of its armpits is the Android robot. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

I *think* he says, “the joke about the podium is that it’s the only known USB-C compatible podium that they could find for me.”

Seen another way, he’s the conductor.
The room is filled by avant-garde virtuosos.

This is not a rehearsal—it’s an alchemical ritual. He and the hackers before him are smelting AI slop and surveillance capitalism into something transcendent. The future isn’t coming. It’s being sublimated from the bones of the present.

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet


Read it here:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition


Hero image:

The amazing collages from the talk:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208