Crimes Against Consciousness
Public philosophy and systems inquiry into the institutions, technologies, narratives, and information architectures that participate in constructing reality and shaping the conditions of agency.
An inquiry, not a criminal code
Crimes Against Consciousness is an ethical and institutional inquiry, not a proposed legal classification. The title names a research lens for examining systems that may diminish agency, manipulate attention, erase consequential context, simulate relationship without reciprocity, or make refusal, appeal, and remedy materially harder.
The project does not presume that artificial intelligence systems are conscious. Machine consciousness remains an open scientific and philosophical question. The immediate concern is how sociotechnical systems affect conscious beings, relationships, communities, and collective judgment.
Governing reality
Who governs the conditions under which we construct reality and one another?
The show treats technologies and institutions as parts of larger systems. Rather than begin with a verdict about who is good or bad, an episode asks what happened, which structures made some facts salient and others difficult to see, whose perspectives were missing, who gained or lost practical power, and what evidence would alter the interpretation.
Inquiry before verdict
- What happened, and what can actually be established?
- What information architecture made some aspects salient and others difficult to see?
- What human need, norm, incentive, or vulnerability interacted with it?
- Who benefited, who bore costs, and in what currencies besides money?
- Which rival explanations remain plausible?
- What could interrupt the reinforcing loop without simply replacing one central authority with another?
- What is known, inferred, contested, or still speculative?
Cases across systems
Topics can include AI and synthetic intimacy, recommendation systems, media and public discourse, gender conflict, work and institutional authority, classification and representation, attention markets, ownership and knowledge commons, nonhuman interests, and the design of systems for contestability and reciprocal relation.
The aim is not to make one discipline or guest the final authority. The format is designed to keep evidence, competing explanations, lived experience, technical mechanisms, and unresolved questions visible together.