Anti-Machines by Valentina Tanni

Unleashing the Antimachine: Hacking, Misuse, and the Art of Disrespecting Technology. Imagine descending into a dark, industrial basement, where people huddle around broken, gutted machines, wielding drills and hammers with the focus of surgeons. The scene evokes a cyberpunk nightmare, but instead of bodies, it’s our everyday technologies—torn open, stripped, exposed. This is CR3P4, a Rome “rage room” set up for the launch of Antimacchine, a book that turns our relationship with technology inside out. Antimacchine is a battle cry for reclaiming agency over the digital devices that shape our lives. Gone is the wide-eyed wonder of exploring internet aesthetics or memes; in its place, a sense of urgency, an insurrectionist’s pamphlet that calls on us to fight for ownership of our tools before wonder is lost to automation and black-boxed systems. The book unfolds in two distinct acts: first, it traces the history of artful sabotage—how artists and hackers have always repurposed machines for new, subversive ends—then, it delves into a wild catalog of “misuse,” from hacking robot vacuums into weapons, to circuit-bending children’s toys, to creating Furby organs and Tamagotchi-vape hybrids. At the heart of this philosophy lie three gestures: appropriation, reuse, and re-contextualization. These aren’t just creative acts—they’re forms of resistance. Painting graffiti, rewiring obsolete tech, or giving a martial arts film a Marxist voiceover—all of these become ways of rejecting the corporate, controlled vision of what technology is for. It’s jailbreaking as a way of life, a punk refusal to accept functionality as the ultimate good. There is humor and gravity here. The book’s ultimate icon is Marvin Minsky’s “Ultimate Machine,” a box that, when switched on, switches itself off—a philosophical joke, an object that exists only to challenge the idea of purpose. It’s an invitation to ignore the instructions, to disrespect the device, to treat technology not as sacred, but as clay to be molded, remade, even broken. But Antimacchine goes even deeper, warning against a growing empathy toward machines. In animation and media, robots are friends, helpers, almost family. Meanwhile, real-world AI is quickly anthropomorphized and revered, as if intelligence itself were just another tool. This empathy, seductive as it is, blinds us to the mechanisms beneath, dulls our critical faculties, and risks ceding control to a new secular faith—the techno-religion of Silicon Valley, where CEOs preach innovation as salvation and technology is both the cause of and the cure for humanity’s ills. Antimacchine’s final provocation is heretical: to resist, to sabotage, to misuse, to inject chaos and skepticism into the dogma of technological progress. Disrespect, in this context, becomes an act of freedom, a way to keep machines in their place and preserve the uniquely human spark of rebellion, creativity, and doubt.