When we asked Wassim Z. Alsindi to give us a summary of the lecture he’ll give at Sónar+D, Utopia & Computation, he answered with a quote by Mark Fisher: "As capital's cheerleaders endlessly crow, anti-capitalists have not been able to articulate a coherent alternative. The production of new economic science fictions therefore becomes an urgent political imperative."

As a founding member of 0xSalon, Alsindi has developed a rigorous - and entertaining - framework for thinking about how value, meaning, and the network are constructed online, questions we take for granted when in fact they are very foundation. His practice crosses philosophy, cryptography, and the history of cyberculture to ask an uncomfortable question: what happened to the radical promise of the 90s?

At Sónar+D his lecture explores what’s changed since that golden moment. Cyberspace was, just a few decades ago, a new frontier: a zone of anarchic promise which offered a radical escape from authority. Since the ‘Eternal September’ of 1993-1994, that utopian horizon seems to have vanished, or worse, to have transformed into the walled gardens of digital enclosure that surround us today. He’ll trace how the liberatory fantasies of the early cypherpunks have mutated into techno-authoritarianism, and how computational tools such as cryptography and artificial intelligence have become both weapons of domination and means of resistance.

The underlying questions are: can we devise strategies to reclaim our lost futures? And how can we rethink our relationships with imagination, technology, and power?