Cam Smith helped create Siri. He worked in Silicon Valley for six years, much of the time at Apple, where he trained nascent language learning models to parrot human language and perfect the craft of next-word prediction. Like a lot of tech workers, he didn’t grasp the extent of the Pandora’s Box they were building at the time. He also couldn’t predict the way tech oligarchs would wield AI. When he finally quit tech two years ago to pursue making art full-time, he set out to use his toolset to expose the corruption at the heart of those corporations. “I view my art practice as critically engaging with technology—taking ideas and tools from the tech industry and exploring and exaggerating them to show their shortcomings and weaknesses,” he told me over email.
Tonight you can see Smith’s work at Passable Art in his solo show Surveillance State of Mind. The exhibit features many of the ideas he’s been pursuing in the past few years, including gutting and hacking Flock cameras to turn them into engines for new media art.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Flock cameras are public enemy number one (or a top contender at least) in Seattle right now. Seeing a real one up close and pulled apart in Smith’s Belltown studio is a little unnerving. For one thing, they’re big—large and Darth Vader-esque with their sleek black plastic casing and many-eyed, glowing red eyes that drill down on every ant-like human scurrying across the city’s crosswalks. Inside, there’s a computer, modem, and a brick of a lithium-ion battery pack. With Smith’s modifications, they become cameras for art. Hacking these machines is easier than you think, he would like you to know. (His are all ethically sourced, he assures.)
Smith’s work spans a range of interactive devices. One of his signature pieces is a Mona Lisa-inspired digital painting that uses generative AI in real time to melt Mona and meld the viewer’s face with the painting. It’s a very surreal and (at times) uncomfortable embodied experience—a digital reflecting pool that mirrors and morphs in response to your proximity to an invisible camera hidden behind the frame. But the image of you is never quite right or accurate, nor within the control of the viewer to manipulate. Smith poses the question: “If a random artist with a cheap computer can hijack the world’s most famous portrait in real time, what are tech corporations capable of doing with your data?”
Other works are more literal takes on the state of surveillance, compiling hours’ or days’ worth of surveillance data (read: individuals) crossing the street, collaged into beautiful kaleidoscopic compositions that pulsate and blink across a redacted, blacked-out background. In some ways, Smith’s work feels incredibly romantic, old-world, and painterly-coded; it also couldn’t be colder and more contemporary.
Smith’s got an analog side too. Earlier this year, he collaborated with AI scientist Myke Walton to write and publish the zine AI MUST DIE. Inside its radioactive Brat-green cover (featuring a photo of a security robot nose-down in a fountain), AI MUST DIE lays out the sci-fi fantasies and tech ideologies driving Silicon Valley’s relentless pursuit to take over every corner of our wallets and lives. It also contains a huge list of resources reflecting the growing AI resistance movement.
The zine keeps going viral every few months—this past weekend, thanks to a random post on X (a site Smith doesn’t even use). Smith estimates he’s sold or given away at least 4,000 physical zines to date, not counting the free version viewed online. (He can’t track that info because he and Walton “hacked the website together out of raw HTML in 15 minutes.” There are no analytics.)
Ahead of his show at Passable, Smith answered a few questions about his background in tech and the way AI resistance is shaping up in 2026.
How old were you when you first encountered AI and what was the context?
I got really interested in cognitive science when I read How the Mind Works for a sixth-grade book report project. From there I got into Marvin Minsky and machine learning, but during this time period we were experiencing an “AI winter” and not much attention was paid to the field. After I dropped out of a PhD program, I found that some of the basic machine learning skills I’d picked up in cognitive science classes in college were in high demand, so I followed the money to Silicon Valley. I’m an atheist and materialist and was always interested in the “computational theory of mind,” but right now (2026) I’m worried that philosophical and technical discussions about AI systems are distracting from their real-world harms.
Were you ever excited about the potential of AI?
Yes. Like many in Silicon Valley, I believed in the liberatory power of technology—techno-optimism. Techno-optimism has now evolved into its logical conclusion—effective accelerationism (or e/acc), which advocates rapid AI development regardless of the costs, with the belief that the benefits of AGI (artificial general intelligence) will outweigh any downsides. Some of these beliefs were easy for me to believe in the mid-2010s when I was working in tech—it’s easy to think the products and tools you’re developing are more important than the political and social work being done by others.
Is there anything you find good or useful about it?
AI is a bundle of random tools. What they have in common is a metaphorical connection to “thought”—if you can describe your tool as “mind-like,” it’s AI. AlphaFold is an AI tool that mostly solved the protein folding problem, and its creator, Demis Hassabis, won a Nobel Prize for its creation. At the same time, the IDF uses an AI tool called “Gospel” for selecting targets as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.
What spurred you to make the zine?
1) The rapid realignment of the tech industry and federal government under Trump. 2) My co-author, Myke, worked as a researcher at Census—policy work to help democratically govern AI. When Trump came back, Myke got the DOGE email from Elon and decided to quit. We had a few conversations. The word “zine” came up, and I convinced him to drive up from Olympia for a two-day intensive writing session at my art collective’s print shop (Common Area Maintenance).
The zine talks about hype cycles and AI winters. We’re currently in a hype cycle (the third one, according to you). Do you have a prediction for when the next impending AI winter will hit?
As the saying goes, predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. What I’ll say is that an enormous amount of money and power is tied up with these AI tools, and it’s really important to talk about them in a way that’s critical and doesn’t hype up the product or downplay its real-world negative consequences.
When the hype bubble bursts this time around, will we be educated enough to get exactly what’s happening? Will we emerge from the next AI winter better equipped to resist the next hype cycle?
I hope that more zines, podcasts, news articles, books, TV shows, etc., will be coming out that criticize and push back against AI, so that we can make educated decisions about how it’s used. The people boosting AI products are salespeople, not genius innovators, and we have to be careful not to get swindled—even the few genuine scientists in the space (Dario [Amodei], [Ilya] Sutskever, Hassabis) are too lost in the sauce. I spent years exploring and critiquing “alternative medicine” and “pseudoscience,” and when people are educated about these frauds, they start making better decisions that save them time, money, and prevent negative health outcomes—it’s the same story with AI products.
Do you think most people see through the hype at this point?
Some do, some don’t. Most Americans have at least some intuitive sense that AI comes along with “bad vibes”—and some of us go further and explore why it feels so icky. But in my experience, a very sanitized and optimistic version of AI is exported overseas. I’ve had extensive conversations (workshops, talks, etc.) with organizations in Taiwan, and despite people there being highly educated, worldly, and technologically literate, few know anything about the ideological underpinnings of the Silicon Valley billionaires pushing AI. Even in Seattle, the AI ideologies exported here from Silicon Valley are highly sanitized—you have to visit a startup or a hacker house in the Bay Area to get the raw, unfiltered insanity.
Speaking of exposing the unfiltered, your zine traces the connection between Silicon Valley and eugenics—something that’s been substantially documented by folks like Valerie Veatch. Where do you see the eugenics thread showing up in our current moment, culturally? And what should people understand about it?
You don’t have to look far to find evidence: Some of Seattle’s tech elite/art patronage has its own eugenics problem. If you can optimize and control some technology system, the thinking goes, why can’t you do it with the human race? Technologists are often smart and very good at solving technical problems, and have all the confidence that comes along with success in their field. But despite the STEM acronym, technology and science are very different—science, in the classic Karl Popper formulation, involves making theories that can be falsified by experiment in an attempt to better understand reality. In contrast, technology is about solving problems to get work done. Science involves lots of skepticism, critical thinking, and getting really deep into the foundations of truth and knowledge. Tech less so. So when techies wade into the intellectual waters of anthropology or biology, you get half-truths, misunderstandings, and nasty pseudoscientific frauds like eugenics.
Something else the zine calls out is liberal passivity: “Governments and corporations have demonstrated their total unwillingness, incompetence, and incapacity to meaningfully commit to accomplishing this goal.” Does that mean there isn’t much at this point we can do in terms of organizing political action?
I think there’s a lot we can do. Continue holding governments and corporations accountable. Vote, and vote with your dollars too. The midterm “blue wave” was partly a repudiation of data centers—a very positive sign that when Americans are pushed to the brink, we can respond positively. But there’s also plenty of space for direct action—hacking and destroying surveillance systems, poisoning databases, leaking state or corporate secrets, if you’re involved in one of those organizations.
What about at the household level—is there a meaningful way to divest from AI?
Harm reduction approach: Think of all the ways you use AI today and write down the alternatives. Start with the easy ones, like buying a cookbook instead of using ChatGPT to come up with meal ideas for you. Then move down the list until it gets harder. If you’re still using AI and have some technical background, think about running your own models instead of using Claude/Grok/whatever. Continually ask yourself: Am I using the tool in a way that gives me power and agency, or am I turning over power and agency to the tool? Do I need to use this? What are the risks and what are the benefits? Is this something that only belongs in the workplace, or should I use this at home too? Where is the data going? Who owns this tool? What do the owners and creators of this tool believe about the world, and are those beliefs aligned with my own?
Something pretty much everyone agrees on at this point (across the political spectrum) is that they don’t want data centers in their backyard. What does an effective revolt against data centers look like?
This is something I’m optimistic about: Something like 40 out of the 41 anti-data center bills that were on the midterm ballot got approved by voters. It seems like there’s already momentum here, and I hope it grows into a bigger and more nuanced revolt against the tech oligarchy. On the other hand, we might end up in a Singapore/China situation: Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, was recently caught having an affair with the leader of an offshore Singaporean data center company—this company buys GPUs from the US, sets up data centers, and sells compute to China, circumventing US sanctions on exporting chips to China. We might end up in a similar situation, with data centers setting up across the border in Mexico.
What are the top resources you recommend if someone wants to read up on AI resistance?
The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran describes the rise of the tech oligarchy and its belief system. Empire of AI by Karen Hao focuses on OpenAI and Sam Altman; it also paints a picture of Silicon Valley belief systems. Valley of Death by Sharon Weinberger focuses on the convergence of private tech capital and the US military—an extremely important topic for the future of the anti-war movement.
