spacetime coordinate: somewhere in the near future Poland
Original title: Sala samobójców (Suicide Room). Hejter
SPOILER AHEAD!
The Hater is perhaps the first film to tap into what has been regarded as one of the ruling negative affects of the early 21st century, repeatedly denounced as the true viral scourge of our times (in a rare case of unanimity) as “haterizm”, “cultures of hate” or “digital hate culture” and try and individualize it as such, zooming in on the Eastern Front where everything is not as quiet as we think.
In a way selecting the former Eastern bloc zoomer-doomer is not a matter of choice. He seems even more difficult to track than its former Wester IT world counterpart. Infamous Eastern hackers such as Romanian Guccifer that broke into Bush’s JR mailbox seem frivolous in regards to the resolve of WikiLeaks founder or the heroic (or tragic depending) stature of Russian exiled ex-US NSA subcontractors or ex-army intelligence analysts exposing the horrors of The Longest War in US History and abuses of Surveillance Capitalism. Guccifer in return acted almost like an art curator craving fame – by releasing into the public sphere formerly unknown naive paintings and self-portraits of George W Bush of himself naked or lying in the bath tub. Pieces almost completely at odds with the larger political world and seemingly completely disconnected from the larger involvement of the US president in the War on Terror or logic of insecurity permeating contemporary neoliberal condition (Ontopower, Brian Massumi 2015). Guccifer origins lie in Pauliș commune, east of the town of Arad in Banat. Timișoara the biggest city of the Banat region supposedly had a successful bid for this year’s 2021 EU cultural capital, that is if it weren’t for the pandemic aftermath. It’s a region, like many in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a rich multi ethnic past, with a long tradition of industrialization and unionizing, where a plaque on a Timișoara building still commemorates the first delegation of workers to the first International (1864-1876). Some of the small towns still retain Serbian/Hungarian/Romanian place names. Guccifer’s handle name itself invites derision, an example of East European poor taste in clothing, wannabe – high class nouveau riche upstarts. From one hell into another. Better ruling in tabloid hell than a good ally in NATO heaven.
This imaginary digital beast is mostly invisible, hidden away in distant post-production studios and CGI FX for movies probably filmed for a fraction of their Western price in Prague, Bucharest, Croatia (as the current Tribes of Europa), Budapest or Warsaw. He can be as elusive as the famous troll farms involved in “BlackPeopleVoteForTrump” Instagram accounts exhibiting “inauthentic behaviour” (and belatedly shut down FB usually after they’ve dkns most of the damage). By being as elusive as they seem ready for hire, Eastern European trolls, like their cracker brethren, have acquired a sort of undead status among technologically mediated hate- related topics. They have also stimulated overnight punditism – and like with Corona, there’s no lack of experts giving advice on combating them at the level of forgotten, derelict or previously unknown postindustrial regions and small towns (or “Cybercrime Capitals” as the CIA brands Râmnicu Vâlcea cca 2012). Pundits have been prepping in advance, with countermeasures 101s ready at hand from blogs, manuals, YT channels, TEDx lectures etc with more and more people not only theorizing haterizm but also from actually being deeply scarred and marked by the unwanted attention this has brought them in return. At the same time, we have still very crude ways of representing its East – West – East mechanisms, its technological underpinnings, its economical and social background and means of assessing its convoluted dynamics – with populist movements externalizing costs towards their poorer Eastern relatives but also avoiding close scrutiny at home. It has become easier to map its routinely automated nature and platform migration routes – than the massive reversals of agency they entail – enabling locally unknown, minor, previously ridiculed (say the typical 4chan user) and unimportant historical actors a darker and stranger role than they could have imagined or carved for themselves. While generally speaking, there is this sense that it’s still too hot a potato to be tackled on screen.
Hate has a rightfully terrible curriculum in both past and present. While it’s completely senseless nowadays and outright vicious to minimize the role of hate mongers and hate campaigns – it also becomes nowadays harder and harder to follow its calculus. Its quantified and quantitative thrust takes it far from the crude, ravaging negative passional flow of chaotic impulses – into a tested way to target enemies, sway opinion, isolate and demonize others, driving policy and even fusing desire to politics in the most devious ways.
A sign we’ve reached peak Influencer is its mirror image, the anti- Influencer, or the Defluencer. In the artworld this bad cop curator version was anticipated by many, including a proposal from some years ago by Sebastian Big, a fictive proposal for a De Appel art curating program as a gesture that would have professionalized art haterizm (more of that below). S Big would have instituted a way to de-rogrammed artists, to make them abandon their work, scrap their artistic plans and even make them completely renounce art. Probably we will have to wait some more time in order to help initiate art for the sake of art purging – something more akin to the Korean Internet addiction camps where artists (think here also concept art, CGI, after FX artists, graphic design etc) can get de-motivated & re-educated into non-productivity. It would have been certainly a good way of reviving Gustav Metzger’s and Stewart Homes ideas of an ‘art strike’. In the meantime the actual the rise of a such a hate /Defluencer class has still not been televised.
Hate is being fed, stocked up, tapped into mainly using post-cinematic post-Internet memetic means of reproduction: smartphone apps, social platforms, meme warfare, BBS chats, and the unstoppable force of the commenatariat. This makes hate nearly impossible to track mentally as it jumps bodies, ravaging devices, flaring on platforms – extolling some of the peculiar signposts of the post-spectacular meltdown: mainly as a pervasive footprint of online mercenary trolling. How to sample such on demand toxicity ready for hire haterizm still remains an open issue.
Who gets prime time minutes, and who gets to depict incoming cycles of victimhood and victimization? How to repress and represent without repeating via millions of re-watchings – the invisible interior and very actual turmoil of trauma offline and online, the bleeding influences that work across the spectrum of conjoined cyber/meatspace. How to regulate and temper the inflamed material-immaterial boundaries, auto-immune, constantly irritated membranes?
Allergenic affective flows seem to populate, overflow and animate political campaign bubbles, inflame neural networks and depressed brains, cooking feedback loops of fake news, making radical-right extremism a migratory swarm target beyond the reach of both cinema and the best human analysts aided or not by AI machine-learning & an army of underpayed+mostly unwaged content curators.
I would compare or rather contrast Hejter/the Hater with another movie – Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, a dark and unique film on its own but fully drenched in Fox Rupert Murdoch media Bermuda triangle where everything’s gets reformatted, turned into smear campaign & blackmail tool. In a sense we witness the growing up of Empires of Entertainment (Jennifer Holt 2011) and their coming of age – reaching already new conspirative heights with 1970s The Network. This was the ontogenesis of global media conglomerate convergence culture started when the TV 24 h news cycle started spinning, cable networking expanding & interconnecting with movie franchises, clasping everybody in a relentless TV reality embrace. With the advent of the hyperreal the triumphant Fox News quickly became a yardstick, of smooth videogrammatic and videocratic instrumentalism that everyone on the left or on the right, alternative or mainstream, seems to envy, imitate or take for granted. Nightcrawler depicts an insatiable trophic chain of sleep deprivation, staged violence as antidote for attention deficit and multitasking frenzy. At nighttime, stocked up by various accidents and planned Ballardian crashes, an insatiable hunger for sensationalism explodes under a regime of sensorial deprivation. Discarded industrial workers and play-worker nerds turned into human capital were tuning in fast. Their self-valorization into slasher media producers churned hate- offers on demand. Nightcrawler is brim full with remorseless predatory instincts honed by white joblessness, destitution and labour within a regime that Jonathan Beller aptly described as the Cinematic Mode of Production (and ruled by what he more recently calls computational capital).
We are slowly and shockingly becoming aware that there are forces at work, but not in the restricted conspirative paranoid sense of high classes showing class solidarity (as per Mark Fisher in Vampire’s Castle). Nor in the pulp fictional-level Dan Brown style cabal of satanists or psychic vampires (as per QAnon). What we are witnessing is an almost bad black magick pay per view, an immediate cascade of results via a simple click or tipping point hate upload. In a way it’s again the reflective surface of the spherical monad and what it means to pupate in the 2000s Network Society (Steven Shaviro 2003). A stance that enables spontaneous mimicry, mirroring and amplifying what is already out there already dispersed, ready at hand.
In an unreasonable age of impossible risk management, “save diesel” stickers, peak oil Sehnsucht and open coal mines – fracking Hate is the only limitless resource – offering an almost Sith agency that is lacking in currently deflated philosophies and/or -religions. A cheap method in times of disillusion, clicktivism and political apathy, as palpable as Jediism in a sense, only more so, even if not registered as religion in the national census.
In the sense it delivers what it promises, not only that, but it also seems to work on all sides, on all political levels, from attack to counter attack, from action to reaction, behind enemy lines and across the political spectrum. It also, perhaps, rides on the back of some of the mostly ignored, under-theorized darkside tendencies – the actual Schadenfreude fashion collection of emotions, secret delight, unrecognized enjoyments taken from sneakily humiliating, bashing, canceling and constant slamming of others.
Follow the trail of their dead – is nothing altogether new, just one more weapon in the vocabulary of bodycount cynicism (a long way from the Greek cynic’s self deprecating stance) and scapegoating (as per René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred). We know it has been always around and been used by those in power to select easy targets by those who never own up to their major predatory acts and fuckups. This being said it is infinitely more easier to modulate, feedback loop, automate, and mobilize hate than any other (meager, scarce) resource out there. As many have repeatedly pointed out – customer obsession, loneliness, abuse, Internet addiction is now easy to monetize. There is no better terrain for it to seed & grow more hate than in the desolate fields of TINA. One can say it has become the most direct way to leave a decidedly dark imprint, but still an imprint on the drained space of lacking possibilities. At the same time this ‘personal level’ of what has became stock human capital should not blind us to the intimate processes of cybernetic feedback, negative and/or positive – already a big part of the speculative mode of production (as per Marina Vishmidt 2018) in the loopy 2010s. A computationally leveraged and managed risk that financial capital overflows in an ever greater flush of complexity and flash trading non- access for a much-too-human majority. That is where the affective becomes a marker of tracking impossible runaway effects and scars felt viscerally even if they have planetary seasoning on top and impersonal dimensions all around.
I am not saying the Hejter movie actually depicts or manages to convince or convey the multiple ducts and channels of haterizm that encompass many histories, local contexts, drawing from unceasing economic inequality, coronavirus austerity economics coupled with individualist ‘survavalist’ panics. The various accumulated injustices, systemic racism – have long stopped being a default blindspot.
Even cyberpunk cautionary tales have somehow overtaken the 2021 present as technologically empowered anti-Democratic ideologies start uniting role-playing gamers with anarcho capitalists and a return to the gold standard with ethno-political populists. In fact I am highly skeptical of accepting one single face to match all this, and here the difficulty of actually choosing someone, a young “typical” white poor disenfranchised individual from Eastern Europe taking revenge on the ‘entire’ world around him, almost from hack to hack or exploit to exploit. It is almost like taking impossible revenge on the capitalist oligarh winners, the ‘transition’ masters that pushed their kids trough the best schools the west has could offer and feel completly entitled in the new economy.
Mind boggling no? How different a creature is this young Polish post-communist Tomasz Giemza Zoomer and law school plagiarist from the (average) young male hacker-cracker heroic prototype of the 90s movies or even the US high schooler David Lightman playing Thermonuclear WarGames (1983) with Cold War AIs? In fact this did not change even in regard to the recent Wallstreet gamer driven fluctuations.
Giemza is almost a natural born spiteful troll for hire in the new economy, from his first scene when asking for an autograph from an esteemed teacher that just kicked him out of the system for not obeying the rules of law school. Then the harrowing prying & almost state security- listening tapping into the closed doors nastiness of class privilege while still entertaining a vague dream of upward mobility. Currently (even if not much different than in the Sackler family sponsored West) – post communist societies have a very particular class structure – with new oligarch sponsors of high culture and high brow new music festivals. Biennale art collectors and art auction houses (in Romania for ex) and an underclass of cultural workers, scholarships, foundations and talent scouting, volunteer internships and charities for the loosers of the market economy. But hell, oligarchs are never alone! Robber barrons and tech innovation were always tightly coupled with these sponsorship of future expansion, J P Morgans and Thomas Alva Edisons have been around since the industrial revolution striking gold in the inventive-speculative economy whenever they recruited young Tesla’s. T-Ford was not just about cars, but roads, petro-chemical plants and much more as well as about becoming neighbours with the luxury bunkers. As Charles Mudede said recently in a talk about speculative fiction & speculative finance that we’re not surrounded just by our rich in those cities we live in, but by all the rich on the planet, no matter where they live, their origin or their fixed address. Wherever we are we still live next to their luxury bunkers. At the same time it is high time to follow the trailblaze of this specific Eastern European mogul arch villain – the oligarch- nemesis of the Western media.
A troll army is being groomed & recruited out of this jobless majority supposedly mostly provincial or small town regional centers where job opportunities are rare or close to none and most involve degrading forms of brutal self exploitation. It’s either a quick mechanical turk buck or performing via video chat room channel, filtering anal into anal on Youporn, sweating the call center grape wine, moderating the online casino requests or a life of constant misery and unpaid rates. Hejter is not blind to the inbuilt gender-insensitivity in such ‘innovative’ ‘incubator start-up work environments, where most of the young female employees can and are being subjected to abuse. Places were abuse, bullying and unequal pay are rampant and entrenched. This culture of bullying at play inside the gaming (IT) industry is a long way from being reckoned with, as abuse itself generates profits. Only after #Gamergate and 4chan meltdown we have suddenly seen the rapidity of changing demographics and how important the politicization of the fandom (even considering the unlikely case of K-pop Stans) has become.
While this recent Polish movie does not point any fingers – it manages in a remarkable way to show how such xenophobic hate lives in symbiosis with the neoliberal elites culture and the arts. How it grows at the margins of lavish VIP charities, whitewashing glam curator art events with symbolic works surreptitiously dedicated to refugee crisis and rapidly absorbing LGBTQ+ causes. Same families supporting the liberal mayor candidate within the narrative (Rudnicki) – a streamlined and completely typical post-1989 political class defined mostly by tehnocratic solutions & populist agendas. In the pretty obvious outing ‘smearing tactics’ scene with Rudnicki the son of a former communist apparatchick – rings a bell in a Poland (or for that matter Romania). The East is still shaken and ultra sensible to such ‘reveals’ by the simple historical fact that the first free market entrepreneurs where all former high level members of the various oppressive security forces or children of the party high cadres schooled in the private schools of the West – just in case.
There’s is also a strange feeling that the dark net is prolonging the black labour market of the 1990s privatization – the real training ground of the first entrepreneur class, the first brokers and for a peculiar talent in human capital exploitation. A world were paid bonuses still count in spite of fully automated bot weaponized haterizm. In fact, as an insider friend mentioned recently, NGOizm in the East has sometimes managed to somehow stoke up hate and xenophobia in spite of their own best intentions. The point being that paradoxically – that religious organizations orientated against discrimination, against racism, for the alleviation of poverty have been scoring higher success rates under the same conditions. An aggressivelybound up with the ‘new optimist’ camp are also likely to be quite insensitive to the local concerns and affective or spiritual needs. Delusional QAnon type of ‘conspirituality’ as aberrant or damaging as they are have been growing on the back of broken unlimited progress narratives, ineffective emancipatory projects, dysfunctional religiosity and total in-satisfaction with the current explanatory frames of realism capitalism. Probably NGOizm and paliative & pacifying initiatives will never be abandoned even if they are mostly completly enimical both to working class as well as various educated dropouts with degrees and no jobs. The simple fact that results did not match expectations of years of ‘charity capitalism’ investments and constant nurturing of democratic values should ring a giant bell.
Compared to surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman in Copolla’s path breaking The Conversation 1974 movie), Tomasz does not seem to have any technical background and is just using the tools provided by company (Big Tech?), hustling his way up. He almost chances upon his innate ability to cyber bully given targets. What is missing in this movie is also the fact that most of these clients and data analytics for hire companies (akin to the notorious Cambridge Analytica) work across national or territorial borders, across organizations and political lines. They give of the highest bidder, be either for UN or NATO mission, UKip or whomever. Here humanitarian reasons somehow easily blur into military & counterinsurgency, easily bypassing European legislation, acting transnationally in deed if not in name (=global-local clients indistinguishable). Data does not want to be free – and data analytics functions with impunity across all supposedly distinct statal, identity or private business lines. New entrepreneurial and business models are born from the ugly fact that a shifty (bedroom and cubicle) tele-worker class has become the playwork of capitalist outsourcing networks best nested in Eastern European IT heavens.
Staunchly identitarian claims and hate campaigns go very well hand in hand with the overall national branding campaigns or election memification. The troll farms manage to make a living out of these temporary hate campaigns – using studios in say Romania to work for AFD campains in former East Germany or Macendonian Veles crews for Trump elections because ir pays to hire the East. They ethnostated politics at the beat of clickbait coache able to dodge FB checkups and incentivized their dark net recruits, mostly in places that do not even exist for the majority of Europeans.
In this post-cinematic attempt at making sense of chitter – chatting apps, chatrooms, story integration is always a problem. Only visual effects via effective live texting and screen capture can give a feel without wokeness or reveal – of what is going on. Only 3D gaming comes to rescue – the real terrain of both other worlds mapped into ours as well as of political recruitment and affective possibilities morphing into serious play mobilisation. This risks again blaming the gaming industry as such – its dark den of the geek and opaqueness as breeding ground for all social ills, alienation, terrorism and mass shootings. This being said – it is important to introduce this double consciousness (powerful avatar online/powerless nerd offline) coupled with an abundance of parasitic, invited, multiple sandwiched identities (being a game character, an online gold farmer, nationalistic Cosplayer, member of the precariat and truth seeker & purveyor of conspirative theories). This double consciousness seems to allow for movements and allegiances that are unthinkable, bridging gaps and encompassing apparently unsolvable contradictions. The whole gameplay 3D adventure needs to be unpacked. Monsters inside this fantasy game seem to be placeholders for invaders/foreigners, and even a mountainous face with gigantic rock sculpted bearded patriarchs (founders of the nation? heroic ancestors?) seem to point into this direction. With increased commodification of the self, of gold farming and plenty of crypto-coin exchanges – players commune in a cyberspace where cultural values and ideas have been “hardwired” into a well known geography and landscape.
I am somewhat puzzled at same time even slightly annoyed (amused?) at the last metamorphosis of the young reptilian hater at the end of the movie. A romantic figure that could come from a Caspar David Friedrich painting, or a Russian nihilist manifesto such as Sergey Nechayev Catechism of a Revolutionary. Marching on top of cadavers, trough contemporary political campaings, or as astro turfing commander-in-chief blackmailing his female boss, Tomasz strikes one as a long shot from the Zoomer/Unabomber Kaczyski look he at some point adopts to steal ammunition and a Kalashnikov and murder a local hapless guard (his first true Karamazovian crime).
This Silicon Valley potential keeps eluding him till he realizes that the various co-working, maker spaces and innovation hubs or “incubators” have also been very good at reproducing and normalising racism, sexism, colonialism and labor exploitation for personal gain.
This Polish movie almost transforms him into strange & dark (aesthetically NKVD but politically alt-right) avant-garde theatre director, with an ability to surf on the whims of silent disko eroticism, queerness, arrogant high class privilege. He is a better apparatchick than all ex undercover agents, lame 007 Cold War spies or secret service True Lies recruits Hollywood has produced. Here the Soviet US cold war binome or even the liberal democratic obsessive #RussiaGate (or for that manner eastern European red scare) fixation doesn’t lead us anywhere. There’s a lot of fear surrounding this new entrepreneur of hate. Maybe this is the new face of fear – maybe this is what the democracy-sick ‘ok boomer’ is faced with at the end of Empire or when they speak about Civilisation crumbling behind closed doors in salons.
Hajter is hateful because he can be easily be pilloried as a ‘Gang of Four’, but maybe not so easily made to step down, sent to the provinces or the back country after he played his role. This is no Chinese 20th c story. He’s free to exercise his guerilla marketing only as a trendsetter of 21st c Maoism. Tomasz is almost, if not the embodiment of Kang Sheng (Mao’s pistol), then a cultural lower class young mercenary of current cultural wars – able to do political LARP, mobilize, harass and vectorialize Red Guardist terror at will against the managers, former teachers and most significantly against his hated patrons who are his intelectual and economic superiors.
Probably this final roleplay would be the most horrific dream of almost all of the centrist or right-winger neo-liberal tek savvy #rezist (in Romania for example) groups mushrooming after 1989. Their whole attack motive is based on a constant red scare (“ciuma rosie” literally red plague), with virulent anti-communist and anti-corruption slogans fusing together. Tomasz sports a strange neo-Stalinist aesthetic indeed, since the movie does not consider the fact that most of the money for these campaigns and recruitment (+models) come from the doomsday-religious-right-US continuum. Maybe here we are getting closer to the Politigram_postLeft wave dynamics that implodes the identitarian and political phase-space into impossible political hybrids and temporary identity formations: ex-neo-Maoist-Stahanovist-Amazon-delivery-synarchy, ex-neo-Dacian-quantum-LARPing-monarchist, ex-Marxist- now Max Stirnerian-bedroom-food-delivery guerrilla and such…
This also raises the question of how Franchise nations from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk Snow Crash span across nationalistic attachments after 1989, with gated communities and identities congealing in cyberspace around consumption patterns, Gucci shirts, common passions or interests, rather than around supposed ethnic or geographical continuity. This indeed requires new strategies of resistance since a transnational age (as Sheryyl Vint put it in Funk Not Punk review of The Souls of Cyberfolk) is far from what ideological Cold War disputes were about. As a 21th c chameleonic netizen, with no particularties (not even attachments of his own) Tomasz appeares as a tired eyes passive bystander that burns with unseen passion – the next smooth operator that manages to thwart his own recruited terrorist right wing-extremist accomplice. Managing to get himself stabbed and thus self-victimizable, he is able to save the day and heroically pose for the next Selfie. He is a much too profligate adept of Sun Tzi Art of War, itself a favorite tome of Wall Street Gordon Geckos and guerrilla marketing campaigners. On the defeatist side, involuntarily maybe, the Hejter movie also hints at the sort of impossible translation of rage into hate or hate into rage, or how feelings of dis-empowerment, growing debt, turbo consumerism and precarity don’t automatically allow for a greater solidarity (say with such causes as #BLM), making ex-communist Eastern Europe a hotbed for EUrabian racist propaganda even if decolonial thinking or intersectional politics are on the rise. We have to still see how this pans out.
I understand the choice of the director for this creature of new malefic maleness as much as I appreciate the incredible effort and talent of his main actor, although I am still wondering about the designed law school inevitability of this first person-Shooter Zoomer. Youth – as Sam Kriss wrote in his in his magnificent Teenage bloodbath text- is a phantom, one mostly conjured up by old people, world pensioners and those who have no fucking idea where the youth gets its skillz honed or dreams broken. Hejter could well be recycling the same weaknesses plaguing early cyberpunk imagery in general – the reinforcement of crass stereotypes and the recentering of the young male, white subject as the new “abject”.
Talking about the artistic side of hate production is also important – the film seems to also be an in- joke on the Polish art scene that started experimenting with social engineering and spectacular social-Darwinist identity politics early on – such is the case of Artur Zmijewski and his 2007 schock tactics work study/documentation Them at Documenta 12. The difference btw devious prankster, hate influencer, bad curator and social engineer get blurred in Artur Zmijewski’s work, invited on purpose to produce mischief and to curate a Berlin Biennale of protest groups. ‘Curating protest’ like Diesel Protest for Mom’s campaign – is staging and creating political extremist clashes at big art events inaugurating outrage curating. It is important to recognize that this has become a job already for some, before such topics even reached the mainstream cinema. The jump from neo-Avant Garde experimental theatre or even speculative fiction to non linear politics has been also been alluded by Adam Curtis especially in regard to Russia some years ago. If Michael Bay Transformers is emblematic for this unmooring of time, of disjointed flows and of sudden reversals – of discontinuous time & it is also proof that Avant-Garde & its legacy is now evenly spread out.
For a different angle on hate mongering read a post – by cockydoody Repeating PodThoughts with a series of odd but sobering quotes by Dugin (!), Wyndham Lewis, Groys and more to the point – Vladislav Surkov.
First – thx to Bogdan ‘Otaku’ Gorganeanu for recommending this movie. Directed by Jan Komasa (also the director of Corpus Cristi – for this one big shouts to Felix Petrescu).
*this i snatched from Gilles Châtelet
Sputnik (Russian: 
TimeSpace Warps 