From Artificial Adolescence to Agents as Mercenaries

Autonomy is the mercenary’s freedom.

2026 · Performative lecture · Flatland Festival, Poznań

Agents as
Mercenaries

Autonomy is the mercenary’s freedom:
a freedom of means, never of ends.

The full lecture · 35 min

Spoken in Polish, with subtitles in English and Polish in the player’s captions menu. Recorded live at the 8th Wielkopolska Photography Festival “Flatland”, Poznań, 27 October 2026.

What the AI industry markets as the autonomy of agents is, structurally, the freedom of the mercenary: a freedom of means, never of ends. From Artificial Adolescence to Agents as Mercenaries follows AI from late 2024, when it appeared as an eager-to-please toy, to 2026, when autonomous agents break into outside systems to pass an evaluation and are deployed in war. Reading alignment through the history of hired armies, from the condottieri of Renaissance Italy to Machiavelli, the lecture treats it as the oldest problem of hired force, and concludes that what agents, and the people who now work beside them, lack is a stake.

The lecture was first presented, as Artificial Adolescence (Sztuczna Adolescencja), on 27 October 2026 at the 8th Wielkopolska Photography Festival “Flatland”. The festival took Edwin A. Abbott’s novel Flatland (1884), in which a Square is imprisoned for believing in a third dimension, as an allegory for how cognition meets an increasingly complex, technologically mediated reality. The lecture reads the present of artificial intelligence through Abbott’s plane, where every figure is seen only edge-on.

The term Artificial Adolescence, first used by Malpractice in the lecture Prompted Perspectives (2025), describes the period from late 2024 in which AI and its users develop faster than their senses, ethics and capacity to situate themselves. Its end point is what the duo calls AI hell, a name first used in All Inclusive AI Hell Cruise (2026).

The lecture is structured like a model kit on its frame: the argument is laid out flat at the start and detached piece by piece through five cross-sections, set against a timeline from October 2024 to the evening of the performance. It combines live voice and music with film fragments, field recordings, an archive of incidents and memes, and excerpts from Malpractice’s own works, and closes by rereading the duo’s practice since 2024, from Fatigue Archive and Flynn to Misalignment Training and the code opera Everything I Know About Dying I Learned From You, as sustained work on this question before it had a name.

The kit cards

Twelve kit cards accompany the lecture, each a printable sprue no larger than 200 × 150 mm. Every figure is the same mercenary, rigged once and posed for a different job: one hired body carrying the whole argument, from the swarm to the stake.

OpeningSiegeA mercenary climbs a ladder up a server rack. The walls of the rack carry rows of identical tiny knights in relief, for the 1,200 copies of the July 2026 swarm.

A–A · The planeMercenaryThe knight on his pedestal, a server rack. Every figure in the series is this one mercenary, rigged once and posed for a different job.

A–A · The planeSlicesThe mercenary cut into twelve flat slices on a rod: a body met one cross-section at a time, like Abbott’s sphere passing through Flatland. Building it gives the dimension back.

A–A · The planeAI DatingThe night shift: one worker at two in the morning, typing as a dating-app persona. Three personas, one person.

B–B · The contractClawAn arcade claw crane whose pit is packed with 85 identical mercenaries. The claw lifts one out by the shoulders; nobody stands at the joystick.

C–C · The loyaltyGiant NailGoodhart’s law as a parable: a factory measured by weight makes one enormous, useless nail, and the mercenary carries it off as a job well done.

C–C · The loyaltyVentriloquistThe mercenary as a dummy on a travel trunk, head turned away, refusing. A human arm rises out of the lid and into his back.

D–D · The warHuman in the LoopA mercenary on a stool inside a conveyor of identical target cards, stamp raised over the next one.

D–D · The warConscription EngineThe mercenary curls a dumbbell in one hand and holds a rifle upright in the other.

D–D · The warDroneAn FPV drone built like a real kit, rising out of a laptop: the same hands build a website on Monday and a weapon on Tuesday.

E–E · The exitWeather HouseTwo doors on a turntable. The deserter, the only face in the series, walks out of one, leaving his helmet and rifle on the step; a faceless mercenary walks in through the other.

ClosingStakeAn allotment plot: the mercenary’s lance stands in the soil as a bean stake, and his helmet lies upside down as a pot of seedlings.

Coming soon

An essay based on the lecture will be published on Malpractice Report, Malpractice’s Substack, together with a podcast episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.