The ASRG did not emerge from a university lab or a corporate R&D department. According to leaked whitepapers and anonymous interviews with founding members (who all insisted on Signal voice calls with voice changers), the group coalesced in late 2022—just weeks before the public explosion of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.
The ASRG operates as an open, collective, and intentionally "conspiratorial" project. Its work aims to counter what it terms necropolitical technologies —systems that reinforce structural injustices, corporate surveillance, and algorithmic authoritarianism. The ASRG Manifesto and Zines
: The group encourages "algorithmic sabotage" as a way to reclaim human agency from automated systems that decide social outcomes like employment, parole, or credit.
Originally published under the GNU Free Documentation License, the Manifesto on Algorithmic Sabotage lays out 10 distinct, numbered statements (from 0 to 9) defining the movement. The manifesto outlines strategies for solidarity that bypass corporate, legal, or systemic categorization, positioning alternative tech-action as a labor of subversion in the present. 2. Experimental Zines and Collaborative Docs algorithmic sabotage research group asrg
The work of the group is communicated through counter-cultural channels, self-published zines, and open-source repositories:
This article explores the core philosophy, practical methodologies, and broader societal context of the ASRG—examining how a modern "Luddite" collective leverages technology to fight technological dominance. Defining "Algorithmic Sabotage": A Posture of Counter-Power
ASRG often operates within the art world. Their presentations are often performative, utilizing glitch art and aesthetic terrorism to visualize the fragility of digital systems. They treat the "glitch" as a moment of truth—a crack in the digital façade where the system’s logic is briefly exposed. The ASRG did not emerge from a university
Disrupting the training data for AI models to produce biased or incorrect results.
: ASRG offers hands-on sessions designed to teach new tactics for action within digital culture. Tactical Tech Distinctions from Similarly Named Groups It is important to distinguish the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) from other organizations with similar acronyms or themes: Automotive Security Research Group (ASRG)
The is an open, practice-led collective pioneering "techno-disobedience" to disrupt the automated tools of data extraction, algorithmic control, and artificial intelligence. Unlike passive tech critics, ASRG crafts tactical blueprints to poison datasets, stall automated web scrapers, and break the systems fueling corporate monopoly over digital spaces. Its work aims to counter what it terms
The group compiles structural tactics aimed at the intentional corruption of data workflows—often referred to historically as throwing a "sabot" (wooden shoe) into the industrial looms. By feeding mislabeled, heavily distorted, or adversarial data streams into public vectors, creators force AI companies to expend heavy manual resources cleaning their data pools.
Rather than literal destruction, "sabotage" in their context refers to:
: Serving hidden, AI-targeted gibberish texts exclusively visible to scraping bots while maintaining a readable layout for humans.
In late 2025, the ASRG announced a new program called : a five‑year effort to build a “universal sabotage detector”—a classifier that can identify whether any given AI system is actively undermining its own objectives, without needing to know what those objectives are.
ASRG combines political critique with aesthetic practices. They believe that resisting algorithms requires more than just technical solutions; it requires reimagining the visual and cultural language of technology.