The Promethean Mood, Before the Fire Changed

Laboria Cuboniks — a collective pseudonym, an anagram of "Nicolas Bourbaki," itself already a pseudonym for a mathematical collective — published their manifesto in an earlier online form in 2015, then as this slim Verso book in 2018. The timing matters. This was the last full year before the pandemic rewired every assumption about bodies, infrastructure, and domestic space. It was two years before GPT-3, four before ChatGPT, and six before the current moment in which large language models have become the most consequential repurposing of technoscience most people will encounter in their lifetimes. The Xenofeminist Manifesto called for exactly this kind of repurposing — the seizure of technological platforms for emancipatory ends — but it imagined the tools would be hormones, open-source pharmaceuticals, architectural redesign, and hacked social media platforms. It did not imagine that the tool would be language itself, automated and scaled. That absence is not a failure of vision so much as a signature of the era: in 2018, "technology" in left-accelerationist circles still meant something you could, in principle, hold or inject or build. The manifesto's call to "re-engineer the world" now reads less like a rallying cry and more like a description of what happened — just not under the conditions or by the agents they hoped.

What the text got right, and got right with uncomfortable precision, is the critique of what it calls "political melancholia" and the moralistic drift of online feminist and queer spaces. The passages on social media as a machine for producing purity spirals, callout culture, and a politics of confession rather than construction — these landed in 2018 as provocative. In 2026, after years of platform-driven fragmentation, after the collapse of Twitter into X and the scattering of activist communities across Bluesky, Threads, and group chats, they read as simply descriptive. The manifesto argued that microcommunity politics, however affirming, could not scale to meet systemic oppression. The intervening years have offered no serious counterevidence. If anything, the post-2020 period demonstrated that even massive, spontaneous mobilizations — the kind that briefly seemed to disprove this thesis — dissipated without the durable institutional infrastructure the manifesto insisted was necessary. The "mesopolitical" register it championed, between the intimate and the global, remains the least populated zone in left politics.

The gender abolitionism at the heart of the project is where hindsight cuts both ways. Cuboniks was careful to distinguish between abolishing gender as a system of hierarchical power and erasing the diversity of sexuate experience — a distinction that has since become desperately relevant. The years 2020–2026 saw an extraordinary political backlash against trans rights, nonbinary recognition, and bodily autonomy across the US, UK, and parts of Europe. The manifesto's insistence that "nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or 'given'" now sits in a world where legislatures are doing exactly the opposite, codifying biological essentialism into law at a pace that would have seemed improbable in 2018. The text anticipated this reactionary energy in the abstract — it warns against naturalism weaponized as politics — but it underestimated how effective and how popular that weaponization would become. Its confidence that technoscience could be redirected toward liberation assumed a contested but ultimately accessible commons of scientific knowledge. The politicization of medical research, the gatekeeping of hormone therapies, and the regulatory assault on gender-affirming care suggest the commons was never as open as the manifesto needed it to be.

There is also the matter of tone. Manifestos age poorly as a genre; their certainty curdles. But this one hedged its bets with an unusual structural move: it declared itself "open-source," mutable, subject to revision. That self-awareness has aged well. The prose is dense, sometimes to the point of self-encryption, drawing on Firestone, Haraway, Reza Negarestani, and the Accelerationist tradition while trying to outrun all of them. It gave subsequent thinkers — particularly those working at the intersection of trans politics, infrastructure studies, and platform theory — a vocabulary for talking about gender not as identity but as technology, not as nature but as design problem. Whether anyone has successfully built on that vocabulary at scale is another question. The manifesto's most lasting contribution may be its framing of alienation as a resource rather than a wound — a move that resonates differently now that so many people live inside systems (algorithmic, economic, linguistic) they did not choose and cannot fully comprehend, and must decide what to make of that condition.

If the Xenofeminist Manifesto was written to arm a movement that would seize the means of technological production for gender liberation, and if the means of technological production have since been seized — by venture capital, by defense contractors, by a handful of corporations training models on the sum of human expression — then the question the book now raises, which it could not have raised in 2018, is this: what does a politics of technological repurposing look like when the technology in question is not a pill or a platform but a system that generates plausible language about liberation faster than any collective can organize around it?