: A deliberate act of refusal or disruption against systems that prioritize profit and power over human dignity. Communal Constraint
A large-scale job matching platform was found to be "soft-sabotaging" applicants from certain zip codes. The algorithm would accept their resumes, process them, and then silently drop them into a null queue without generating a rejection letter or forwarding them to human reviewers. The ASRG’s analysis showed that the sabotage was introduced via a purposely mislabeled variable in a sorting function—named temp_sort_key but actually coded as priority_blacklist . algorithmic sabotage research group %28asrg%29
: Identifying aggressive AI web-scraping bots and trapping them in a "tarpit"—a web directory designed to load websites at a near-frozen pace. This forces scraping bots to waste massive amounts of computational time and expensive processing power on useless garbage data. : A deliberate act of refusal or disruption
These ten propositions move from destruction toward a project of structural renewal. The manifesto itself has already been translated into at least eleven languages—including German, Greek, Spanish, Chinese, Swedish, Danish, Arabic, French, Brazilian-Portuguese, and Italian—and the group continues to invite new translations. The ASRG’s analysis showed that the sabotage was
: Rooted deeply in hacker culture and the legacy of the digital avant-garde, this practice forces neural networks to operate against their optimization goals. This includes generating conceptual prompts or breaking machine vision classification systems to lay bare the ideological biases built into commercial software. The Aesthetico-Political Context
The ASRG builds out its theoretical ecosystem through open, collectively authored projects and zines. A key component of their work includes the initiative , hosted on community infrastructure like Our Collaborative Tools. Core Conceptual Frameworks
She pulled out a laptop. On the screen was a new project folder: .