[issue 04 2022]
Thank you for reading the SFitze newsletter. If you’re interested in more SFitze issues please subscribe below or share with others. Here are some of my recent thoughts, recommendations, and ideas cooked up on the data embers supplied by others. This is a newsletter about both mundane, banal, absurdist SF happenings all around, not just in your mind, in literature, movies, or SF criticism/SF studies. Substack also joined the broken tech/content culture cycle, supplying unhedged profitable refugia for Internet toxicity and extremism. Feeling torn btw my own tech incompetence (moral turpitude?) and switching/platform-hopping to a more ‘friendly’ platform (to https://ghost.org/vs/substack/ or https://www.getrevue.co/ maybe).
A lot has happened: Russia attacked Ukraine, US in response banned diamonds and Vodka imports and delivered another hike to its already bloated military budget, Musk bought Twitter and right-wing ‘replatforming’ has just begun, China is confronting its worst COVID crisis yet, rationing and economic crisis in Sri Lanka and Nepal, the German greens switched priorities and started supporting unabashedly the MIC complex. It must be inconceivable that we’re entering a further dystopian phase - but it just feels that we haven’t seen nothin’ yet. How can one be a denialist of the dystopian consensus nowadays, when there is literally zero to cheer about?
Looking back on SFitze issue 03 it seems quaint, untimely and naively emphasizing east-bloc, internationalist, multilateral or ex-Soviet commonalities such as relatively benign and peaceful DIY bodybuilding in Kyiv or Moscow parks. How can the tinkerer, bricoleur exist in the face of fierce fighting, and war crimes, against both the author, the soldier, the general, or ‘the leader’? How can one enjoy mad Russian #birchpunk CGI videos or Ukrainian music videos? How is one not to give in to flag-waving, identitarian (or survivalist?! as if it is not a contradiction in terms) nationalism or cheering one side or heaping hate over the other, full of new suspicions & ready to decouple at the price of more fossil dependency & reopened coal mines. Ukraine remains in my heart since I have actually crossed over from Romania on foot and lived there, visited its cities, made friends, and enjoyed their hospitality during 2014 and 2015. Kyiv is for sure and will remain one of my favorite cities in the whole world. I am very sad and very grateful to have visited it before the tragedy struck and all this is happening while I write these very words. If one condemns one war one should condemn all wars. I am not denying that this newsletter feels at odds with the world we live in right now, but even if I had the choice I don’t think I would retract my framing of issue #03.
That was (is?) my feeble attempt to see beyond the necro-capitalist horizon of militaristic New Cold War pressures and military deficit spending, to address a fragile position that might soon become extinct or untenable. Nearly everyone agrees that again and again, we’ve seen a lot of Euro-American experts and patronizing pundits ‘westsplaing’ the East back to the East (a new term that has gathered force and deepened existing splits inside the left). A lot of ire has been flowing. Calvert Journal (that published a small review of Timpuri Noi show) a online zine specialized on Eastern culture & arts (especially from Russia), has temporarily chosen to close down its operations. Flame wars online have spiked, in many ways amplified by a very real and destructive armed conflict that has eclipsed all wars in the world (past or present). How easy it is to label one as a naive, foolish, useful idiot, traitorous, cowardly, unjust or unrealistic? Or be remembered (Internet data banks will help) as a denialist of current impending dangers and priorities (even if these priorities include a certain pre-apocalyptic lassitude & easy going’ atomic WW3 offhand attitude). It is fundamental to revise one’s position, to go back or at least try some form of self-critique and review everything under the beam of a forever changing present, getting rid of injurious, dangerous, and inert ideas. This does not mean instant deletion of your hasty TW or refurbishing your timeline or immediate (opportunistic) decoupling from the present trouble.
This is a freshly lifted TW out of the introductory notes written by Ian Campbell (SFRA review magazine editor) to the last installment - of SFRA Spring issue No 52 Vol 2. I urge you to read the excellent articles and interviews - especially since it features materials published on the occasion of the Hungarofuturism (Hungarian Futurism Symposium). I agree with Campbell that there is nothing more troubling than nerds becoming captains of industry, and what captains indeed. What makes it even more tragic is that both Musk and Bezos (and others of their ilk I am afraid) are declared fans of various SF authors (Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels) of celebrated new and old SF series (The Expanse, Star Trek).
Here I am reminded by Candian SF writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow’s video ‘Every pirate wants to be an admiral’. At the same time these ‘robber barons’ or declared antistatist ex-pirates prop-up US techno-economic hegemony everywhere anywhere. We tend to ignore how Venture Capital funds established and supported by the US government produced Silicon Valley innovation (big chapeau to Evgeny Morozov’s critique of muddled tech analyses that ignore that fact). Californian Ideology (described in Richard Barbrook’s & Andy Cameron’s 1995 tech critique) was never just the quantum foam on top of cyberdelia subcultural or the unique nesting site of free-floating cyber-libertarian oligopolies that Ooops! - birthed today’s carefree space billionaires.
Imagining them just as Big Tech monolithic corporate (standard cyberpunkish) behemoths in both SF & in our analysis does NOT take into account various other contradictory historical entanglements. Morozov calls for a reconsideration of the split of the political sphere from the economic in order to grasp how capitalism works nowadays securing islands of “Cheapness”. Keeping them apart just in theory and ideology has allowed in practice all sorts of profitable hybrids. The National Security State has had a hand in shaping these neoliberal nerds, weening them out of their garages and making sure they are out-bidding anybody.
No wonder were they able to consolidate so much and are now trying to profit from both Old and New Cold War windfall by being labeled ‘national assets’. The Tech frontier is not the equal opportunity Great Plains that Cyberspace Manifestos since the 90s have so pomposily heralded, but more of a neatly cut co-sponsored golf cours lawn with in-built loopholes. All 18 holes leaving backdoors into everything including anti-trust laws. Yes, Bezos and Musk have more or less the muscle to use SFodder for their vanity show ends because they had a really early start and this rich allowance enabled them to externalize their risks, out-spend and out-compete everyone else. Their exploitative attitudes and capitalistic unrestrained for-profit business models are not a bug but a security feature.
To read all the articles of the SFRA spring issue click here
Ascension/登楼叹 (documentary directed Chinese-American producer & director Jessica Kingdon 2021)
What is clear is that Chinese media is being too easily labeled nowadays as “state-affiliated” media as if the western media is free of any affiliations or strings attached. In response we should label various western media outlets, Twitter now as Musk-affiliated or Bezos-affiliated (Washington Post) media. I find this a ridiculous hyperbole, an example of a shameful double standard, a forgetfulness by Big Tech that is trying to rebrand itself as a ‘national asset’ in the New Cold War as mentioned above. Apart from a divergence explained by commercial rivalries, there’s a lack of social media overlap btw Big Tech and local Chinese tech companies and platforms explained by the specifics of China’s ‘Ascension’ since the 1970s libéralisation and gradual opening towards today’s economic modernization. Chinese innovation is thriving today because of this wise divergence in policy – they learned to exist and develop because the Big Tech was regulated by the Chinese state giving local startups a chance in the face of the Californian tech behemoths. So this disconnect has been partially useful and intentional +yet we’re living a cultural-linguistic & EuroAmerican – centric disconnect from the Sinosphere (the online world of wechat, Douyin, Weibo, Bilibili and more) – insuring a lot of misunderstandings and the usual faux pas. Purging the US. academia & technoscience as a response to current strategic realignment & divestment is not the answer (without considering the “role of firms from core capitalist countries in industrial relocation to and foreign direct investment in the PRC“).
to read the whole txt click here
Instituting the Beyond
I think one should dedicate more thinking to the various cinematic build environments, the iconic pop-cultural institutions and fictional modernist architectures hosting “the Beyond”. There are many instances of cinematographic altered state eeriness and paranormalcy that have an actual headquarters. There is a plethora of recent examples starting with Alex Garland’s massive wild nature surrounded mansions (actually Norvegian hotels) in Ex Machina and remote and secretive quantum computing facilities (DEVS series). Even more recently, Netlfix TV horror series Archive 81 presents an archivist painstakingly reconstructing a series of burned VHS 1990s tapes inside a remote 1980s brutalist ‘medialabs’ situated in the wilderness of Catskill mountains. I want to retcon this older article – in the light of the so-called Tartaria conspiracy – basically, a QAnon architectural (hyperstitional) conspiracy that sounds a bit like the Mandella effect but focuses on built environments, of their perceived ‘erasure’ 19th c historicist buildings by modern counterparts, a longing for a lost imperial grandeur and the pop-up fairgrounds (Potemkin Village) that have characterized International World Exhibition or Colonial Fairs and the like (based on a detailed article by Zach Mortice). For more read here
Article Recommendations
Here is one of the best long-read articles I have read recently. For the non-Romanian speakers, you can use Google Translate to get to the gist of what this is about. It was written by Alin Răuțoiu on Romanian tech news outlet Mindcraftstories. Entitled “The day the Internet did its self-portrait”, it is a careful technical analysis of the recent /r/place pixelart experiment that traces all the visible and less visible undercurrents that shape, animate and congeal works done ‘collectively’ on social platforms during a given time and in a certain place. This way /r/place enables us to tunnel through digital layers of what appears just a chaotic self-propelled pixelated dynamic. Using art criticism and his ex-Redditor experience - A.R. delineates trending e-authoritarianism emboldened by technological affordances increasingly facilitating mobilization around certain chosen personalities, celebrity cults, and what we could call anti-democratic ‘streamer-led’ politics (especially here on Substack).
Here is a super post by Steven Shaviro about Guy Lardreau’s 1988 Fictions philosophiques et science-fiction (one can find it under digital format online as well). It features I think some of Shaviro’s most recent thoughts on defining (with the help of Lardreau, Deleuze and Whitehead) the role of fiction vis-à-vis philosophy or science. Lardreau roughly cuts through the whole history of Western philosophy depending on what type of answer we get to the following: is fiction necessary or unnecessary? This makes for pretty strange bedfellows. ‘Real exceeds the Rational’ team (Descartes, Leibniz, Kant) is pitted against the philosophers Lardreau generally rejects (Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche and by extension Deleuze?). For Leibniz only by way of fictioning can we hope to approach the truth, to “better grasp the nature of our ideas”.
Here is a post by Robin James on differentiating vibes from vibrations. She is one of the most interesting philosophers to approach something as immaterial as sound and as consequential as ‘vibrational ontology’ with a tuning fork informed by critical race studies or counter-hegemonic phenomenology (feminist, queer, anti-colonial, and anti-racist). For her vibes are actually vernacular (as practiced by lay aka non-philosophically trained persons) phenomenology. She also makes some bold and interesting distinctions: “vibrations are fundamentally temporal, vibes are primarily spatial”. Vibes are according to her, one of the most important vectors through which we’re negotiating post-identity patriarchal racial capitalism.
Undoubtedly we have seen an increasing convergence around the dystopian imagination (from both left and right), that has birthed all sorts of ungainly and unhelpful monsters (‘techno-feudalism’, ‘digital feudalism’) that reflect our (mine including) inaptitude to explain a turn of capitalisms for worst of the worst. In order to dispel such recent political-economic confusions, felt both as theoretical and empirical weakness, well-known science analysts and tech-critic Evgeny Morozov goes back in his recent article for NLR spring 2022 issue to basic debates that have cast (according to him) a long shadow on Durand’s ‘economy of rent’ (from his Fictitious Capital and Techno-Feudalism books), David Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession, ‘digital capitalism’, Italian operaista ‘cognitive capitalism’ or Zuboff’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ conceptualizations. What is missing is geopolitics, innovation and ‘the (US) state’ public-private hybridity, well mapped by Linda Weiss in American Inc. - without which Big Tech would not Big Tech.
Enjoy ‘SILKROAD’ this short SF mockumentary done by Romanian artists/gallerist Sergiu Sas. It is a speculative little journey in a documentary mode through an alternate future where silkworms Bombyx m. larvae brought to the moon by Chinese space missions proliferate and manange to spin wormholes for all species to escape extinction. Done using a lot of found footage, it is a partially absurd, partially incredulous quite funny desperate story-telling weaves elements of sino-futurism and eastbloc technoculture in a permeable, fragile cocoon floating in space. Particularly telling are the various forgotten Romanian Silk Industry photos and diagrams that combine the forgotten skills of insect husbandry, Socialist zootechnic developmental policies & the lowly silkworms as totemic creatures carrying these hopes ahead.
This is a preview of a 2021 Chinese SF movie based on the celebrated classical Chinese fantasy novel Journey to the West (Xi You Ji, literally “west journey record”) published c 1562) written by Wu Cheng’en, a Ming dynasty writer. I discovered it with the help of Xueting C. Ni (author of From Kuanyin to Chairman Mao and editor of the recent SF anthology Sinopticon 2021: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction).
NEPTUNE FROST (out in cinemas on June 3)
“Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.” (YT Kinolorber intro)
A recommendation by the tireless Pawel Frelik on TW @Nomad93