Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist and research artist who has cultivated a diverse practice addressing media history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology. Author of more than thirty books, his deeply interdisciplinary writing has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish. His critical analysis provides a model and foundation for his studio work. This analysis considers the contemporary global nancialization of digital capitalism via the social and cultural impacts of AI, Bitcoin, surveillance, and Universal Basic Income (inter alia) as re ections of structural demands implicit in how the Enlightenment project informs both historical industrial capitalism and contemporary digital technology. He is a board member of the Art of Light Organization.