From a distance, we might imagine that technological tools—digital platforms, artificial intelligence, applications—are antagonistic to cultural processes that have the streets as their primary space of interaction. However, as Marshall McLuhan already observed, every technology is, first and foremost, an extension of the human. When we look more closely at these two currents, it becomes clear that today’s technologies are in fact drivers of cultures created by earlier technologies.
Cave painting, writing, early instruments, musical expression, terreiro music, classical music, and Brazilian popular music are all ways of recording, organizing, and transmitting experience. As Vilém Flusser would suggest, they are systems of codification: data produced by society, processed by makers of art, and returned to society in the form of interpretation—thus creating culture.
These expressions continue to perform this work in cities, countries, and in global favelas and peripheries. Emblematically, Brazilian and Lusophone culture in Lisbon continues to develop, and through its creations it narrates the living history we see being built day after day. This is a process of cultural hybridization that redefines centers and margins, displacing narratives and producing new forms of belonging.
These processes are not abstract; they manifest concretely in everyday urban life. The Coletivo Gira, for example, occupies the city with its samba, overcoming countless struggles to remain alive. Creating from Portugal, rooted in ancestral Afro-Brazilian cultures, they generate through this fusion a new local culture. The audience—composed of Brazilians, Portuguese, and people from many other nationalities—absorbs the making of samba, digests it, and gives it back to the city, transforming it profoundly. This is a collective process of cultural individuation that echoes Gilbert Simondon’s idea that technique, culture, and society are mutually constituted.
This intense cultural fusion, strongly observed in European capitals, reshapes urban language. New slang and dialects emerge rapidly; tastes and behaviors shift. It is an accelerated mutation, the result of the speed of contemporary flows—something Paul Virilio already pointed to when discussing the impact of technological acceleration on perception and social organization.
Such changes are amplified by digital technologies. Artificial intelligence, for example, also processes all data created by humans—oral, written, and visual culture. In other words, AI engages with what we might call affective technologies: memories, symbols, desires, fears. By reorganizing them, it also transforms them profoundly.
Affects, in turn, are the link between culture and technology. As Félix Guattari proposed, there is no separation between social, mental, and technical ecology. Technologies should serve as tools for human affect; the human dimension must always prevail in this equation. We are not creating something to replace the human, but instruments for the continuity of the generation of affects—and affects, in turn, generate new cultures.
What we call here the technology of affects is not a metaphor, but a concrete way of thinking about and designing technical systems as living ecosystems, in which technical, social, and subjective dimensions operate inseparably. Platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligences are not neutral; they modulate sensibilities, reorganize desires, and influence ways of being.
When designed according to extractive logics, they produce affective impoverishment, isolation, and the capture of attention. When conceived as tools of care, listening, and collective creation, they become devices for reterritorializing the sensible—capable of strengthening bonds, sustaining living cultures, and expanding the creative power of communities.
The technology of affects, therefore, is not only about what we do with machines, but about the kind of subjectivity and the kind of world we choose to cultivate with them.
Platforms that facilitate the work of cultural promoters, ideas that allow artists around the world to live from their own art, tools that expand human creativity—the path is open for all of this to materialize. Still, it is necessary to recognize that technologies are created by humans marked by contradictions—emotions, ambitions, greed, and the desire for power.
The democratization of technologies can, then, allow not only the holders of great power—the holders of capital—to access the creation of robust technological structures. As Yuk Hui suggests, every technology carries a worldview; by multiplying those who can create them, we also multiply possible futures. The advance of artificial intelligence and its duality may, in the near future, represent the emancipation of society with regard to the creation of technological tools.
Culture and technology do not merely coexist: they dialogue, absorb data from society, and transform it into continuous creation—and the way we choose to mediate this dialogue will define the worlds we are still able to inhabit.
by Rods Rodrigues // Membrz.Club General Manager
