Which Variable Would Strengthen Democracy?

Welcome to the first episode of Hothouse, a limited series exploring experimental forms of demonstration, resistance, and civic imagination. Produced in collaboration with Future of Demonstration: HOTHOUSE,a renegade lab for democracy against technocapitalist authoritarianism, this series invites selected guests to expand upon their methods and perspectives. We joined the festival in Vienna this autumn through this podcast collaboration and a workshop during the Exocapitalism Euro book tour.

Thanks to Gerald and Sylvia for hosting us, and to everyone who participated with such curiosity and generosity. In this episode, I speak with Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler—artists, theorists, long-time collaborators, and members of Vienna’s Technopolitics collective. Their latest chapter, HOTHOUSE, stages a festival for an overheated world, asking what forms of resistance, solidarity, and imagination can still grow when everything is already too hot. We talk about art as infrastructure rather than spectacle, about Widerständigkeit (resistance as adaptability), the fatigue of critique, and democracy as an experiment under pressure. Our conversation unfolds along the festival’s framing: post-disciplinarity, willful volatility, and the necessity of doing and thinking together, before arriving at the figure of the renegade: the one who disrupts and sabotages to make change possible.

Sylvia Eckermann, a pioneer of Austrian media and game art, creates environments where participation itself becomes the question. She emphasizes the artist’s role in reanimating democratic agency and rethinking forms of participation.

Gerald Nestler, an artist and former broker turned theorist, operates where finance and aesthetics converge. He coined the term derivative condition to describe speculation as the dominant mode of world-making. We discuss how big tech mirrors hedge funds, and how speculative logics structure contemporary power. Nestler reclaims the figure of the renegade—the infiltrator who learns the system’s logic to subvert it from within—and extends it to artists, activists, and whistleblowers alike.

References:

• Eckermann, Sylvia & Nestler, Gerald. The Future of Demonstration. (2017–ongoing)
https://thefutureofdemonstration.net/.
• Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
• Avanessian, Armen, and Gerald Nestler, editors. Making of Finance. Merve Verlag, 2015. https://www.merve.de/index.php/book/show/493
• The legendary Technopolitics Working Group in Vienna and their open work “Technopolitics Timeline”, tracing information society: https://technopolitics.info/
• Sylvia Eckermann: http://syl-eckermann.net/
• Gerald Nestler: http://www.geraldnestler.net/
• “Making Sense of Finance.” Finance and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017). Introduces the derivative condition: how speculation shapes reality.
• Nestler, Gerald. “Renegade Activism.” Technopolitics Working Papers (2020). Defines resistance as insurrection beyond critique.
• “Algorithmic Cognition at the Turn from Representative to Performative Power” a lecture performance with special guest, high-frequency, crypto trader and whistleblower Haim Bodek, as part of the exhibition “Hysterical Mining” at Kunsthalle Wien (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekXxV7ry2A
• I also briefly mention T.J. Clark on political theatre and the self-awareness of the spectacle in the introduction: T.J. Clark. “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle.” London Review of Books, Vol. 47 No. 1 (2025).