Last week, re:publica took place in Berlin. Almost on my doorstep, I could walk there. Unfortunately, I came back from Various Others in Munich with a cold, which is why I only got to see Hito Steyerl’s talk and the following panel with her and Karen Hao. The hour with Steyerl and Hao, the author of Empire of AI, was announced under the title Friction. And of course everything Hito Steyerl said in what followed was correct, only her proposed solution ultimately still falls rather short: the call to “Start building” as a form of resistance. Every now and then she added the word “stacks”, turning it into “Start building stacks”, although this did not make it any more concrete. This, in turn, reminded me of a talk I had heard a few weeks earlier at ZKM Karlsruhe during the symposium on the Connection Machine. Sarah Ciston, Professor of Computational Thinking & Aesthetic Doing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, spoke about the risks of technofascism from ELIZA to Anthropic. Her proposed solution was also “Start building stacks”. During the Q&A afterwards, there was a sense of bewilderment in the audience, and people kept asking, in ever new variations, what exactly this was supposed to mean and what one could concretely do. With Steyerl, too, it remained at “Start building”. One might also question how urgent it was for Steyerl to joke that Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, might be a con artist but is definitely a performance artist.Another artist, Simon Denny, has only just raised the topic of Karp as an artist in his precise and thoughtful text for Artforum (Epic Fury: The Dark Art of Defense Tech, 20 April 2026). He writes:“Karp even claims to be an artist, describing his role in making Palantir’s products as working as a kind of artistic mentor, shaping (and extracting value from) the talent of his employees as an artist would from raw materials.”But the more interesting question is whether criticism should move closer to the language of the world it opposes. If Karp a