The Dogs of Silicon Valley
What Beeple’s “Regular Animals” Actually Says About Power
In a gallery in Mitte, six robotic dogs work the floor. Their gait is careful, calibrated, slightly off: the gait of machines trained to approximate life rather than live it. On each chassis, where a head should be, sits a wax sculpt molded to a precise human likeness. Elon Musk’s squinting half-smile. Jeff Bezos’s polished dome. Mark Zuckerberg’s famously inexpressive face. Alongside them, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso stare from their respective platforms in silicone and paint, rendered with the fidelity of death masks. At intervals, a compartment beneath each tail opens and a photographic print slides out, AI-generated, already minted to a blockchain as an NFT. A few gallery visitors laugh. Most watch in silence.
This is “Regular Animals,” the installation by digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, which debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025 before traveling to Berlin, where it remained on view through spring 2026. The commentary it has generated falls mostly into two registers: admiring and bewildered. Neither has taken the exhibit seriously as analysis, which is a problem, because Beeple has made something more precise than his critics acknowledge and more troubling than his admirers have worked through.
The platforms Beeple selected are Boston Dynamics Spot units, quadruped robots developed for industrial inspection, military reconnaissance, and disaster response. Boston Dynamics, founded at MIT in 1992 and acquired by Hyundai in 2021 for approximately $1.1 billion, spent three decades engineering what its promotional materials describe as “dynamic mobility”: the capacity to navigate unpredictable terrain without falling. Spot units have been deployed on offshore oil platforms, in nuclear facilities, and at construction sites across the United States, South Korea, and Germany. Their commercial release price in 2020 was approximately $75,000 per unit.
These are not decorative machines in any ordinary sense of that phrase. They were built for environments too dangerous or remote for human workers, capable of carrying sensor arrays, cameras, and data-uplink hardware across terrain that would stop a wheeled vehicle. The United States Army tested Spot units in 2021 for patrol and reconnaissance purposes. Police departments in Honolulu, Los Angeles, and New York trialed Spot deployments in the same period, producing civil liberties challenges in each case. When Beeple mounts Elon Musk’s face on a Spot unit, the choice of platform is already an argument: he is using the specific machine that surveillance capitalism has developed to extend its reach into physical space, and he has dressed it in the face of the man who controls the information infrastructure those spaces increasingly run on.
The exhibit’s argument depends on the particularity of its subjects rather than the general category of “tech billionaire,” so the accounting needs to be specific.
As of early 2026, Musk controls X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. His October 2022 acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion transferred ownership of one of the world’s primary real-time news distribution networks to a single individual who has since reinstated thousands of accounts previously suspended for harassment and disinformation, reduced the platform’s trust and safety team from approximately 7,500 employees to under 2,000, and deployed algorithmic amplification in ways that multiple independent researchers have documented as systematically favoring his own content and that of accounts aligned with his political preferences. Starlink, operated through SpaceX, provides internet connectivity to approximately 100 countries and has been used by Ukrainian military forces, disaster relief operations, and journalists working under state censorship regimes. The uplink runs through him.
Bezos built Amazon into a company that, as of 2025, processes approximately 38 percent of all United States e-commerce by volume. Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing subsidiary, hosts data for governments, intelligence agencies, hospitals, banks, and media organizations across 190 countries. He owns The Washington Post. His logistics network has restructured labor markets across North America, Europe, and the Gulf. Amazon’s Ring subsidiary sold home surveillance cameras to over 10 million American households and, according to congressional testimony in 2022, shared footage with law enforcement agencies without user consent on over 1,800 documented occasions.
Zuckerberg controls Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the virtual reality hardware company formerly known as Oculus. Facebook had approximately 3.07 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2024. Instagram had approximately 2 billion. WhatsApp functions as the primary messaging application across South Asia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, with over 2 billion active users. Meta’s content moderation decisions determine what those populations can say to each other. Its algorithmic amplification decisions determine what they see. Its advertising infrastructure determines which political messages reach which communities at what cost. In 2021, internal documents released by Frances Haugen and reported by the Wall Street Journal showed that Meta’s own researchers had established that Instagram worsened body image issues for teenage girls in approximately 32 percent of cases studied, and that the company had suppressed those findings while publicly denying the link.
Taken together, these are not eccentric personalities with outsized cultural influence. They are institutional structures built inside individual men, and the distinction matters for what the exhibit is actually doing with their faces.
Most commentary on “Regular Animals” treats the excretion mechanic as the obvious joke: powerful men producing waste. The specific waste is worth examining more carefully. Each Spot unit produces not an object but a minted digital asset: an AI-generated photograph, permanently recorded on a blockchain as an NFT, with a unique identifier, a chain of custody, and a notional market value set by whatever the next buyer agrees to pay.
The NFT market peaked at approximately $25 billion in trading volume in 2021 before collapsing by roughly 97 percent over the following two years. Analysts described it widely as a speculative bubble driven by fraud, wash trading, and celebrity endorsement, which is accurate as far as it goes. What the NFT boom also demonstrated was something about the relationship between digital scarcity, financial architecture, and cultural production that survives the bubble. The blockchain records only that an asset exists, that it has an owner, and that ownership transfers have been logged. It does not record whether the asset has value. In the NFT boom, the assets were frequently nothing: procedurally generated cartoon apes, pixel art, screenshots of tweets. The financial infrastructure around them was entirely real. Value was a function of the willingness of successive buyers to believe that subsequent buyers would keep assigning it.
What Beeple’s robots excrete is a working model of algorithmic content generation on the platforms controlled by the men whose faces the robots wear. Each print is formally unique, generated by a model, slightly different from the last. Each one is automatically recorded, assigned ownership, and enters a market where its value is determined by the infrastructure surrounding it rather than by what it actually contains. The robots do not choose their output. The infrastructure decides what happens to it after. Beeple did not design the robots to make this argument explicitly; he designed them to perform it.
“Regular Animals” fits inside the history of satirical art that confronts power directly rather than above it, and the distinction is worth making.
Honoré Daumier spent much of the 1830s producing lithographs of King Louis-Philippe of France as a pear, a shape chosen because it resembled both the king’s face and the French slang for a fool. Daumier was arrested in 1832 under a law criminalizing attacks on the king’s person, served six months in prison, and resumed the lithographs after his release. John Heartfield, working under the Weimar Republic and into the early Nazi period, produced cover images for the AIZ newspaper that placed Hitler’s face into images of bloodied weapons, corporate machinery, and medieval gallows. The Gestapo raided his Berlin studio in 1933; he fled to Prague, then London.
What distinguished both artists was that their satire was forensic before it was funny. Daumier’s pear did not ridicule Louis-Philippe and stop there: it identified the specific quality of his rule, soft, rotting, absurd in its self-regard. Heartfield’s photomontages used the visual authority of the photograph to make verifiable claims about what fascism was and who was financing it. The work carried specific, documentable charges inside the aesthetic form.
Beeple’s formation runs differently. He became known through a discipline of daily digital image-making begun in 2007, maintained for 5,000 consecutive days, each image released publicly at midnight. The archive he produced was technically accomplished and thematically scattered; it established his reputation as a prolific craftsman rather than a political artist. His 2021 Christie’s sale of “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for $69.3 million made him briefly among the three highest-grossing living artists by auction result. The sale was itself conducted as an NFT transaction, with Christie’s accepting cryptocurrency. Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million, became the public face of the NFT market, and then built an exhibit premised on NFTs as excrement. Whether that constitutes sophisticated self-awareness or convenient recycling of the critique his own success helped produce is a question the exhibit is careful not to answer.
The exhibit’s second venue is not incidental. Berlin has a specific relationship to the art of political confrontation, one built from direct experience of two totalitarian systems within a single century.
The Berliner Ensemble, founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel in 1949 in what was then East Berlin, operated on the principle that theater was interruption rather than entertainment: a mechanism for defamiliarizing the ordinary enough that it could be examined. Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation effect, was the deliberate disruption of the audience’s comfortable identification with what they were watching, opening a gap between the spectator and the spectacle where questions about how things had come to be this way might take hold.
“Regular Animals” operates on a version of the same logic. The robotic dogs produce discomfort not because they are frightening but because they are almost normal. They move approximately the way dogs move. They share space with visitors approximately the way zoo animals do. The wax heads are realistic enough to be recognizable and wrong enough to unsettle. Every formal element of the exhibit is calibrated to activate the viewer’s existing understanding and then skew it just enough to force a second look. This is classic Brechtian construction, whether Beeple consciously worked within that tradition or arrived at it independently.
Berlin’s audiences carry more prior understanding of what the exhibit addresses than most. The city’s eastern districts contain the former headquarters of the Stasi, an organization that maintained files on approximately one-third of the East German population and operated a network of roughly 600,000 informal informants. The Stasi did not describe its operations as surveillance. It used the term Zersetzung, decomposition: the systematic disruption of individuals’ psychological stability through manipulation of their social relationships, professional environments, and sense of reality. Documents released after reunification showed that Stasi operations against specific targets included rearranging furniture in subjects’ apartments during their absence, leaving anonymous notes in their mailboxes, and engineering professional failures through false communications to employers and colleagues. The goal was not imprisonment but induced epistemic helplessness, a condition in which the target could no longer trust their own perception of what was happening around them.
The algorithmic systems controlled by Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg do not rearrange furniture. They rearrange the information environment through curation, amplification, suppression, and targeted exposure. The mechanisms differ. The destination, a population increasingly unable to maintain stable shared ground about what is real, is something Berlin has already named and filed under a specific bureaucratic category.
“Regular Animals” carries a structural limitation that its admirers have been reluctant to address directly. Each robot was priced at $100,000. The exhibit premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach, which drew an estimated 93,000 visitors in December 2025 and generated reported gallery sales of over $3 billion during its run. The collectors who attend Art Basel Miami Beach are not members of a general public alienated by algorithmic control. They are, in significant proportion, the beneficiaries of the financial systems that algorithmic control has made more efficient: private equity partners, hedge fund managers, technology investors, and the ultra-high-net-worth individuals for whom a $100,000 robot dog defecating Jeff Bezos’s face is a plausible acquisition.
The exhibit sells a critique of wealth to the wealthy, and this is not without precedent in contemporary art. Warhol, whom Beeple has placed on one of the Spot units, built his entire practice on the ironic reproduction of commodity culture for buyers who could afford the irony at prices that placed it firmly beyond commodity culture. But Warhol understood that the irony was the product, and that it implicated the buyer as fully as the subject. When a Spot unit wearing Bezos’s face defecates an NFT in an Art Basel pen and the print is acquired by a collector who will hang it in a residence in Miami or Mayfair, the critique has completed a circuit whose political charge is at minimum ambiguous. The exhibit’s argument about how power produces waste and calls it culture applies, with some precision, to the transaction that delivers the exhibit to its audience.
A real dog confined to a pen would eventually lie down, press its nose to the ground, and wait. The waiting would mean something: that the animal’s needs had exceeded the environment designed for it, that the design had failed to account for what the animal actually was. Boredom in an animal is evidence of a mismatch between a creature and its conditions.
The Spot units have no such capacity. They run their routines continuously, navigate the pen, return to position, and begin again. The faces mounted on their chassis, cast to the precise likeness of the men who have built the systems through which billions of people now process their understanding of the world, register nothing because they are wax. They were not built to register anything. The exhibit’s deepest formal question is whether the human beings whose faces they copy are running on a meaningfully different set of instructions, whether what presents itself as individual judgment and visionary decision-making is the operation of genuine agency or something closer to a well-optimized loop: inputs received, outputs generated, position maintained. “Regular Animals” will not tell you. That is the door it leaves open.