Cover: POWER TOOLS
Image: Collage of the Statue of Liberty, a rifle, menacing eyes, power tool ads and paper scraps. The words POWER TOOLs are in the top left of the collage and LIBERTY, JUSTICE, FREEDOM, and FOR SOME, are scattered throughout.
Inside Cover:
Image: A closeup of a man’s eye.
features
Issue #2 - 2026
About Power Tools - Page 1
Why Fascist Hate Art
Mythology of Human Amplification by Tim Requarth
Palantir, Epstein & The New York Times by Juan Sebastián Pinto
The Battle for Cognitive Liberty in the Age of Corporate AI by Courtney Radsch
Sex Bot Rot
Scheming for AGI & beyond
warfare queen
How did my date go?
Sound of Silence by Dylan Orchard
Editor’s Note
Page 1
Image: An abstract collage, with no definable elements.
Power Tools is a zine dedicated to critiquing AI and the billionaire toolmen behind it. The name is based on the common narrative that AI is just a tool. This zine asks readers, “a tool for whom?”
We’re not anti-tech, we’re against irresponsible tech, the kind that steals, exploits and endangers humans in the name of progress. We’re against “tools” that are anti-human and anti-labor.We’re against the mass piracy of all creative works.
We’re against unregulated AI systems causing harm to society, vulnerable people and our children.
We’re against massive data centers being built with zero concern for local communities or the environment.
We’re against the denigration of human expression, intelligence and ability, in favor of machines.
Sign up for our newsletter to be notified about future zine issues:www.powertoolsofai.com
Interested in contributing? [email protected]
Page 2
Image: An illustration of a rabbit and goat making art. The rabbit says, “Art poses a threat to corporatocratic systems because a purpose of art is to remind the individual of their inherent autonomy.” The goat responds, “Their humanity.” Illustration by Joshua W. Cotter.
Page 3 Why Fascists Hate Art
By Bart Fish
Fashy prop-up–gander,
hate images & social damages;
Art resists, while media insists,
Worldviews are corporate views are
influencer views & authoritarian cues;
Art resists, while threats persist; generated
abdication leads to eradicated speculation,
Bubbling hate leads to a technocratic fate;
Few places to hide, privacy becomes a luxury ride,
Art resists, while fascism exists;
Racist tweets spur hateful feats, ghoulish
beliefs & motifs, Bots used to persuade us and
raid, til their point is made, eroded norms
turn to fashy forms,
Art resists, like fists, raised
to fight, an undimmable light.
Page 4
Image: An old man wearing hat sits in a train, looking out a window that shows an abstract world he no longer understands. Strips of power tool ads frame the top and bottom of the image.
Page 5
Mythology of Human Amplification
By Tim Requarth
In 1981, a young Steve Jobs—bearded, bespectacled, brown corduroy blazer over an open-collared shirt—sat in front of an Apple II and explained what he thought a personal computer was for. He’d read an article in Scientific American that compared the efficiency of locomotion across species. The condor, he said, came out on top. Humans ranked about a third of the way down, “not too proud a showing for the crown of creation.” But then someone had the insight to test a human on a bicycle, and the cyclist blew the condor away.
“What it really illustrated,” Jobs said, “was man’s ability as a tool maker to fashion a tool that can amplify an inherent ability that he has. And that’s exactly what we think we’re doing.” The computer, he said, was “a 21st century bicycle” for the mind. Curiously, the original 1973 article on locomotive efficiency makes no mention of a condor, but Jobs’s point is taken.
In the age of AI, Jobs’ quaint bicycle has received an update from Silicon Valley. With the launch of ChatGPT, gushed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in early 2023, “We went from the bicycle to the steam engine.” Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s CEO, routinely calls AI a “steam engine of the mind” that will usher in a “cognitive industrial revolution.”
Page 6
Mythology of Human Amplification - Continued
I find the shift from bicycle to steam engine instructive for the current AI moment.1 In invoking the steam engine, there’s something about the bicycle that Jobs’s heirs seem to have forgotten. Like another 19th-century invention, the steam locomotive, the bicycle was a technological revolution. But a train traveler sat back and enjoyed the ride, while a cyclist still had to put in effort. With a bicycle, “you are traveling,” wrote a cycling enthusiast in 1878, “not being traveled.”
I think about this distinction a lot: between traveling and being traveled. Bicycles and trains are both technologies that move us from place to place. In that sense, in the sense of their outward function, it’s fine to lump them together. But the comparison falls apart when you consider their effects on the traveler. In terms of effort, a steam engine doesn’t really “amplify an inherent ability.” It replaces it. You sit back and the coal does the work. You arrive, but you’ve been traveled. So one way to look at a technology is how powerful it is, what it can enable humans to do. But an equally important question is what happens to humans when they use the technology.
I’ve started calling this the mythology of amplification—the assumption, buried so deep in Silicon Valley’s rhetoric that it goes unexamined, that its tools merely add capability without subtracting anything meaningful. Some tools really do work this way, or close enough to it. Perhaps the personal computer, in its early days, was one such tool. A true, literal “computer,” a machine that computes. But general-purpose AI, at least as the tech titans envision it, is not like that. And the difference has nothing to do with how powerful the tool is or how impressive its outputs are. It has to do with what the tool asks of you. Whether you travel with it or are being traveled by it.
Read the rest at: https://timrequarth.substack.com
Page 7
Image: Collage of Palantir CEO Alex Karp, juxtaposed with monster-like features (eyes and teeth), images of war machines (a tank, a helicopter and a fighter jet) pulled from Palantir’s website. In the top right corner, there is a surveillance camera. Scraps of power tool ads peek through in various places. Collage by Bart Fish.
Page 8
Palantir, Epstein & The New York Times
By Juan Sebastián Pinto
As a big-data platform with connections to the CIA and foreign intelligence operations, Palantir has likely been central to the waging of this kind of warfare: where nation-states try to win not only using conventional weapons, but by weaponizing data and influence for covert “hybridˮ
operations. Palantirʼs executives understand this more than anyone.
“The primary way to create peace in this world is to scare our adversaries when they wake up, when they go to bed, while theyʼre seeing their mistress. The most effective way for social change is: humiliate your enemy and make them poor.ˮ
- Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir
What Karp refers to here are ways of “dealingˮ with someone without necessarily putting a bullet in their head; types of hybrid operations which are opened up by the possibility of exploiting personal data for combined intelligence and war operations. The vast amounts of data that we feed into the internet — about our lives, our location, our relationships, and our plans
— can be used against us in ways we might not yet imagine.
Read the rest at: https://www.zig.art
Page 9
Image: Collage showing a family in a living room, watching a TV that has the OpenAI logo on it. Sam Altman is standing over the family, power tool ads are mixed in and the words BEHAVIOR POWER ARE in the top left of the image. Collage by Bart Fish.
Page 10
Image: Crop of collage on prior page.
The Battle for Cognitive Liberty in the Age of Corporate AI
By Courtney Radsch
Currently there are no clear restrictions on how corporations can interfere with human agency or with our mental autonomy. They can create products to manipulate users and sell them to the highest bidder. They can use their control over infrastructure, information flows, and generative AI tools to shape, punish, and promote whatever and however they want.
This was illustrated most clearly when Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot briefly censored “unflattering mentions” of United States President Donald Trump and Musk. But it follows years of curation and privatized censorship of our speech by corporate advertising-based platforms that underscored just how influential and lucrative manipulation can be. A decade’s worth of evidence provides ample evidence of how tech platforms manipulate search and autocomplete results, recommendations and prioritization, and personalization while selling anyone willing to pay the ability to target specific types or groups of people with their message, from advertisers and politicians to scammers and foreign propagandists. So far there are no constraints on adapting and supercharging these capabilities with and for AI.
Page 11
The Battle for Cognitive Liberty in the Age of Corporate AI - Continued
What we’re building now isn’t just technical infrastructure. It’s a new architecture of cognition, one whose defaults may determine whether the next generation encounters their own mind as a sovereign space—or as a site to be managed, shaped, and optimized for corporate profit or
political subservience.
That’s where we are headed with generative and agentic AI.
These systems are designed to manipulate users—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—without any legal requirement to act in the user’s interest. There are no fiduciary obligations for AI agents or chatbots. No duty of loyalty. No baseline prohibition on mental interference. Persuasion is treated as a feature, not a risk.
What makes this transformation so hard to resist is not that people don’t care, but rather that every layer of the system is designed to make resistance costly, inconvenient, or impossible. By the time a system feels inescapable, it usually is. The interfaces are sticky. The defaults have been set. The business models are locked in. People adapt, even when the architecture is hostile to their interests. Social media is proof of the power of this phenomenon.
And when market structures reward behavioral extraction and commercial dominance, there is little incentive to build systems that respect cognitive liberty and protect freedom of thought. In fact, the incentives run in the opposite direction.
Read the rest at:
www.techpolicy.press/the-battle-for-cognitive-liberty-in-the-age-of-corporate-ai/
Page 12
Image: Collage that says “We spent BILLIONS ON AI and all we got was sex bots.” There is a sensual image of a futuristic, cyborg-like woman on one side, and a humanoid wearing a tie, with a label “AGENT TOM” with Tina in parentheses. Collage by Bart Fish.
Page 13
Incel Imbeciles
By Bart Fish
a cure for cancer, they yell;
sex bots slaves ,they sell,
gendered bots to abuse, no
actions too crude to refuse;
lone men in cells, in self-made
hells; generating wow-men fantasies,
simulated fallacies,
a poseable figurine, a blank machine;
delewd and distract, made-up memories
and malleable feelings,
lone-sum profits, divorced from
revenue, begging the poor for more;
deep faked stalkers, sicko-fan-tick
talkers; monthly fees, generated tease,
but no cures please.
Page 14
Image: An excerpt from OpenAI’s AGI statement on their website, but with various parts of it redacted to infer there are hidden agendas. At the bottom of the redacted policy is OpenAI’s brand symbol.
Scheming for AGI and beyond
By Bart Fish
Our mission is to ensure that ████
█████ AI systems ██████████
████████ benefits █████████.
████ AGI ████████████ could
█████ elevate ████████████
███████ the ███ economy, and █
████████████████ change ██
the limits of possibility.
AGI has the potential to give everyone
████████████████████████
████ access to █████████████
████████████████████████
██████████
███ AGI would also come with serious
risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal
disruption. █████████████████████
███████████████████████████
████████████████████████ the
developers of AGI have █████ get it right.
Page 15
Image: Collage with these words at the top: “How would you like to do a billion dollar corporation a small favor?” and followed by the answer, “Use AI as much as possible.” The imagery below those words, show a man in some kind of prison with a shadowy figure extending their hand out to him. Scraps of power tool ads are scattered throughout.
Page 16
Image: Collage of different faces of Elon Musk, shapes and words that form a swastika like shape. The words say narcissist, white supremacist, sociopath and misogynist.
warfare queen
By Bart Fish
he’s a warfare queen---making billions
off govt green, channeling white rage
and digital cages,
a csam scene rivaling epstein, island
boys & ai deploys, nazi bots with govt
contracts and anime racks,
a litany of misogyny and dirty money,
brain links and hate kinks; con-troll,
no empathy, just psychopathy, drowned
in k-mines and doom scrolls;
fetishized con-piracy, milked for views,
at-tension seeking, division speaking
Page 17
Image: A man’s profile is close to a silhouette of a woman’s face, thats filled with a power tools ad, as if they were about to kiss. In the negative space between them, it says “ What if Tech Billionaires don’t care about the working class, democracy, society or the environment? What if it’s all about power & control?”
Page 18
“I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t they toys out of their hands, we’re fools,”
-Ray Bradbury
Page 19
Image: There are six hands, each holding or fanning out playing cards. Instead of the cards showing the usual symbols (hearts, clubs etc), they’re the logos of prominent AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Nvidia, Google & Palantir).
Page 20
Image: A man’s head with multiple sections of the same face coming out of the top of it. A woman’s head, separated into different pieces, revealing a distressed face underneath. Artwork by Meinhard Taxer.
How did my date go?
By Bart Fish
“You use AI much?ˮ asked Joan. Shaun grinned, “Oh yeah, for everything! Iʼm like a totally automated and optimized tech Alpha.ˮ As he spoke, he glanced at his phone, hurriedly typing something. Joan nervously took a sip of her drink. “Are you using it right now?ˮ Shaun paused, his smirk now gone from his face. He again looks at his phone, typing out something.
Joanʼs tone changes and she sternly asks again, “Shaun are you using AI on this date?ˮ
Page 22
How did my date go? - continued
Shaun puts his phone a way, looking past Joan. “Just a little. It helps put me at ease.” “What exactly are you asking it?” Joan asks. “Oh nothing, just how it thinks things are going.” says Shaun.
“How would it know that?” Joan asks, startled and confused.“Well, it’s listening to our date! I had this idea, it’s like Meeting Notes but for dates. Get real-time insights and coaching tips from your AI wingman. Mine’s name is Tim. He’s modeled off my best friend’s personality.” Shaun was beaming, seemingly proud of his AI concept.
Joan looks at Shaun disapprovingly with contempt. “You can’t just record intimate conversations without permission. WTF are real-time insights on a date? Does that thing record my voice? Does it know who I am?”
Shaun motions for her to stay seated and calm down. “Can’t you see that I’m doing this because I like you? Without Tim, I’m just another dude. He gives me an edge, keeps our convo going and make me seem more interesting than I am. Everyone is using AI these days. It’s really not a big deal.”
Jane leans in towards Shaun’s phone:
“Hey Tim, please tell Shaun to fuck off.”
Page 23
Image: A landscape of a mountain and trees, devoid of any buildings or modern technology.
The Sound of Silence
By Dylan Orchard
LLM as therapist, LLM as friend, LLM as lover, LLM as ghostly re-animations of friends and family - we’ve seen a growing trend of the artificial imitating the organic - superseding it
even in the eyes of some. It is there. That’s what it offers. It is always on, always receptive, always eager to reply, always attentive. The appeal isn’t hard to see. Even in the best of times, for the most healthy and settled of us that kind of arms-always-open ‘affection’, declared need, desire to engage and serve is a rarefied and wondrous thing.
It’s a representation of love, love that works free and unencumbered by all worldly effects. It’s the sort of hyper-fixation that comes with young love or the first days of passionate investment. The sort of attention that comes at other times with parental adoration, the newborn as the centre of the universe, awe at what’s created superseding all other considerations in moments of awe struck infatuation.
It’s also entirely, completely and relentlessly inhuman. Real love, real intimacy, human care - none of those things are relentless acts of fixated service.
Young love, if it endures, becomes a familiar thing – reflections of shared silence and mutual awareness, an entanglement between the two which sits amidst the vast and enveloping wilderness of human experience. A point of anchoring that doesn’t need to declare itself as the demands of the rest of the world make themselves known. Parental love similarly doesn’t fulfill the needs of the narcissist. The adoring stares at the newborn give way to varying rounds of overwhelming affection, the angst of care, irritation, treasured silences and a million other things.
LLM ‘love’ on the other hand sells its dull service as affection. An always on source of attention, interest and ersatz desire for engagement presents itself as what you should hope for from the human experience. A pandering fixation which leaves no gaps for doubt or desire or fluctuating waves of presence and absence, closeness and distance. No gaps for anything that either challenges love or rewards it. No space for silence.
Read the rest at:
https://dylanorchard.com/2026/02/03/sound-of-silence/
Page 24
Editor’s Note
dear readers,
thank you all for supporting the first issue! hundreds of physical and digital copies traveled the world, reaching 11+ countries. i had a lot of fun working with my hands, printing, cutting, sewing and packaging everything. i also learned a lot and am excited to keep experimenting.
a special thanks to all of the contributors. i'm always looking for submissions, whether it's essays, short fiction, poetry, comics or some form of art. you can even refer folks and their work. i've also created a guidelines document to help folks that want to create something specifically for this zine. shoot me an email at [email protected] for more information.
thank you again for the support and to all of those that have reached out and connected. in the words of brian merchant, hammers up!
cheers,
bart fish
Page 25
AI Critical Zines & Resources
Looming (Zine)
https://www.loomingthezine.com
404 Media ICE Surveillance (Zine)
https://www.404media.co/icezine/
The DAIR Zine Library (Website)
https://zines.dair-institute.org
FU AI - AI Sucks (Website)
https://www.fuai.sucks
Better Images of AI (Image Library)
https://betterimagesofai.org/images
Blood in the Machine (Substack)
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com
Say Yes - Do No (Website)
https://sayyesdono.pagecord.com
Zig.art (Substack)
https://www.zig.art
Shard (Zine)
Link to archive
Back Inside Cover
Image: An illustration of a racoon making art with a speech bubble that says: “Generative A.I. is part of an authoritarian corporatocratic effort to co-opt and commodify the creative process to rid the end result – art – of that which threatens its – humanity–.” Artwork by Joshua W. Cotter.
Back Cover
Image: Closeup of a sullen man’s face, with the words “AI bros really don’t care.”
