We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.
A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.
In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.
Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.
“How to Disappear” is an anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, searching for possibilities for peace in the most unlikely place of an online war game. It’s a tribute to disobedience and desertion – in both digital and physical-real warfare.
About Total Refusal
Total Refusal is an open artists’ collective which criticizes and artistically appropriates contemporary video games. However, as most mainstream game narratives employ the same infinite loops of reactionary tropes, the genre largely fails to challenge the values of their players and instead affirms hegemonial moral concepts. Acknowledging that this media is currently not realizing its cultural potential, we aim to appropriate digital game spaces and put them to new use. Moving within games but casting aside the intended gameplay, we rededicate these resources to new activities and narratives, looking to create “public” spaces with a critical potential.
Thanks to Alin Răuțoiu from the excellent, unsparing and vital Dezarticast, and his quest for a quality copy of this gem. So, now you got to see it too, spreading it around as far and wide as possible. All my gratitude to Gabi ‘Pnea’, peripatetic chronicler and modern-day Naturphilosoph for sharing his treasures, for his tech support and for kindly providing invaluable input whenever his nudging managed to keep me busy.
In its portraiture and depiction of a contemporary city – Los Angeles Plays Itself remains to my knowledge unsurpassed. From Kiss Me Deadly noirs to Chinatown to Cassavetes to Who Killed Roger Rabbit(still acid drenched in my celluloid melting memories), it has got it all.
Made from the heart by Thom Andersen, patiently foraging & carefully embedding his suspenseful history within this W coast city, marking its architecture, its urban layout with close knit social textures via clips from the whole breath of cinema. To call it an exemplary critical theory essay or run of the mill ideological critique would sell it short. It is a sprawl (sprawling horizontally like the city Andersen would never shorten or reify), nearly capping at 3h long, its either full immersion or ur do ur own cuts – in your own time, anyway its a total treat. It is a well spent time and a tangible place to return to and revisit. It gives much needed context to what a city is and can be. How the city is much more than the sum of its movie roles or extras parts, even if Los Angeles does strike one like a readymade Map to the Stars. Even if being a snitch – as the narrator remarks, in dire times of the McCarthy era insured some famous name with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
The whole essay somehow builds up on the way Los Angeles works and doesn’t work as a set piece. It is sprouting out from an uncensored love for a SoCal megalopolis that feels much mistreated, much misrepresented and downright brutalized whenever it gets glamorized or held up against big spotlights. Los Angeles Plays Itself always mistrusts the floating subjectivity of the omniscient narrator, even as it discards one camera-eye after another, able to follow what has been left out, making its own route trough many takes, jumps and cuts, managing in the end to somehow operate at ground level assembling blueprints, inserting press clippings with working class histories that do not make it into the limelight. Floating from camera to camera does not make for an unwieldy collage or jumble, but an even match of cut to cut, criss-crossing incompossible temporal jumps & slices of a kaleidoscopic urbanity. A slippery city that slips trough the fingers of best documentarists or cinematographers. It never relinquishes Los Angeles to its celebrated (American or European, lowbrow or highbrow etc) author star/ film directors. You can simply also enjoy every sample and wanna see more of the original source material (see below). As moviegoers for sure we can never go into full popcorn mode. Neither does it spare the film moguls that have calibrated & celebrated and selectively repurposed a city to fit their own projections and openly espoused ideological political agendas or class interests. The city cannot exist just as a pure disconnected location, as there is no “simple location” (as Whitehead puts in Science in the Modern World). No sequence seems to exists on its own. All sequences somehow communicate and each movie cut seems to intervene or presuppose another one. Without such overlaps any movie taken in its isolated solid state tends to eclipse the city underneath and beyond, even when it purportedly wants you to discover it. The city as a hidden reality is one that needs to be materially traversed.
A cinematic city abstracts from – and conceals whenever it ‘reveals’ or try to sell a ticket to an audience that buys its promised demi-monde land, the mondo tour, the shocking underbelly, the sleaze or the dazzling cyberpunk rain-soaked future (a washed out unresolved dream twinkling in the eyes of the city planners) or get lost on the byways of Sunset Boulevard.
Los Angeles police LAPD in movies part is just amazing. It is some of the best analysis of cinematic representation of police I’ve seen – especially during such a consistent proof of US police misdemeanor, militarization, brutality and point blank murder of African America or Lantinx. From the idealized self-image of a smug cop, to the incredibly arrogant and full of contempt Dragnet policemen to the unwittingly self-ironic scare quotes of “serve & protect”.
There is always streets and corners to be cut and entire building blocks that got razed, redeveloped, gentrified and that do not get credit, but also do not go completly under the radar of film crews – the only ones caring enough and painfully aware of filming another reality mostly (to me) by unknown black directors who are coming from a particular class background or from racially divided and economically oppressed segments of the city. Theirs is a completely different city. What could be more telling than a thermodynamically skewed 1980s – 2019 Los Angeles future?
Modernism – as a style and legacy seems to get a bad rap in US movies and Andersen makes it painfully clear that somehow most villains, even the most cliché tabloid high corruption, bribery, ‘confidential’ supposed conspiracy – are framed within the most stark examples of modern architecture, against the aims and even the histories of these buildings. And this in an almost complete reversal of the aims of the entirety of such modernist architecture. Think of those wide un-decorated, egalitarian spacious living, defined by the geometry of clear lines that openly rejected the shackles of the past. An architecture of light and transparency (thinking here of the European Bauhaus impetus by Bruno Taut and further back to the Scheerbartian utopic potential of light), buildings that get recast in Hollywood as scandalous dens of vice. To me Anderson’s retrieval of modern architecture’s bad wrap in Hollywood movies echoes more recent anti-modernist or sort of pre-modernist revanchist Tartaria conspiracies (part of the QAnon conspiritual bouquet) amply discussed in recent article by Zach Mortice. Yes, the lost “Tartarian empire” has an awful lot of confusion, unfamiliarity and cultural dislocation & also suffers from something akin to the Mandela Effect. Yet as this video essay amply demonstrates there’s tremendous Hollywood overwriting and cinematic overcoding onto the very urban and architectural landmarks. These architectural landmarks have been imprinted into memory only after been rediscovered via location scouting, getting heritage status only after they were filmed in and retrospectively recognized as icons. Their whole existence risks being dependent on becoming part of skewed movie worlds. In retrospect and after so many past/present/future architectonic projections, buildings start acting like bona fide labyrinthine multiverse portals like the one from the OA series or the spiraling House of Leaves. As a response to Tartaria craze – to the perceived suddenness of modernist takeover, I would rather reserve the same feeling for something more close to home, i.e. how former forlorn monuments or Communist party buildings have achieved cosmist brutalist sublimity after the fact; an uneasy after-life for ex-Socialist architecture, only too quickly misconstrued or recast as lost civilizations – irretrievable end-of-history procedural.
In its incredible ambition to excavate the ‘real’ city from underneath the movie reels, Los Angeles Plays Itself plays particular attention to the cars – (like the view from the train cut by telegraph poles) sequentially open on all window sides to a sort of permanent TV diorama where Americana takes place (cars to watch road movies). The car is where everything is about individual freedom, post WWII consumerist boom and free expression. In the light of car ownership & peak oil it becomes paramount to see how car industry shapes a city that becomes unattainable on foot by definition, only to be traversed via motorized access or super highway. This is a cinematic story of dwindling infrastructure, of empty boulevards and public transport or lack of public transport, of non access and a public system that has endures steady degradation.
As much as human commuters, traffic and Lowrider car culture are part of iconic Los Angeles, there is no discussion in this ample video essay about the ATSAC (Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control) system of traffic control in Los Angeles that has been operating and continuously developed in the city for almost 30 years. I came across this man-machine assemblage trough an essay about New Media Pharmacology that adopts N. Katherine Hayles’s example of a nonconsious and distributed cognition that does not eliminate or completly circumvent human technical support (Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious 2017). This panspectron (a term proposed by Manuel deLanda) view from the control room looks like a spaceship and it is not driver-less. Looks like any NASA ground control or main deck of an USS Enterprise – wholly made up of divided & continuous surveillance screens of roads and continuous automotive traffic monitoring. It makes its own movie in a different way, yet I am not sure if the functioning or real footage from from ATSAC rooms got featured in any Lost Angeles movies (something tells me it did?). Being adaptive, evolutionary and flexible it is fitting all of Hayles’s criteria for a cognitive assemblage. It would be unthinkable without its human decisions and selectivity, bridging and bringing congruence to the various unconscious and conscious inputs that manage to connect and assemble the city of Los Angeles in a completely new post-cinematic way:
“Drawing input data from innumerable sensors, cameras, and detectors, processed by diverse algorithms, it is a massive technical system that requires various levels of human oversight and collaboration, from those who attend the complex computer output to individual drivers and pedestrians’ daily routines.“(Joseph Schneider). This self-correcting, machine-human learning traffic system sounds definitely closer to Chile’s pre-coup Project Cyberyn in that it serves the city and its residents with ‘no direct connection to market considerations’(Hayles 2017). Definitely one such rare example that does not have the in-built Coded Bias that is intrinsic to so much of today’s Algorithmic Capitalism. It feels that ATSAC subroutines even if not really prominent as a feature of the city or in our collective imagination, could subtend a lot of what gets registered either sensorially or cinematically recorded (think here of a drone camera perspective) as a nightly city grid – as blinking neural streams without any apparent behind-the-scenes, a false image of no -planning and of absent -invisibly, progressively evolving- large scale coordination.
Finally, Rotten Tomatoes makes certain that the critical consensus and appreciation for the tremendous effort and research that went into this essay is nearly universal: “A treat for cinephiles, this documentary is a comprehensive, academic, and enlightening film essay concerning Los Angeles and its depiction in the movies.”
here is a nice portfolio video with a small biography from their late 1970s early 1980s art studies in Budapest, their works for Hungarian SF mags (Galaktika), poster art, cyberpunk Allianz calendars, commercial work (Pepsi), coverart, gaming (WoW), matte paintings, D&D etc
Somehow I feel really pissed that there is not much to be seen by this incredible cult duo of Hungarian illustrators (one of them, Gábor Szikszai lives in LA to my knowledge working inside the gaming industry). I tried to trace as much as I could about their work – altough I do not have the least knowledge in Hungarian language I managed to dig up a few things. Both seem to embody the best of the 80s- 90s, somehow combing pulpy-glossy, realist imagery, feeling like airbrush and looking like VHS tape covers. They did some great futuristic cityscapes (including a lot of fantasy character work & magicpunk game cards). Here I want to mostly focus on their proper SF work and tell you how I found out about them.
full German series translation of Sector General from the 1990s composing a coverart panorama with artwork by Boros Szikszai (Boros Zoltán and Szikszai Gábor)
I stumbled on their work via this incredibly nice panorama coverart work for Sector General cycle in its German translation. I would love to print out this panoramic view inside my room so one could actually sit inside the station looking outside – surrounded on all side by this picture. In fact if you collected or read all the books in the series – in the end you could complete this puzzle of an orbital galactic Hospital – the centerpiece of James White’s Sector General series. James White is a Northern Irish SF author that settles the majority of his stories and novel around Sector 12 General Hospital – an immense floating hospital station located in deep space. It is widely considered the first explicitly pacifist space opera (published from 1957 onward) in a stark contrast with contemporary US space operas, which were generally militaristic. In fact the station is seen from. The start as an ideal way to make peaceful first contact possible between very different alien species. Each section of the station is like the ISS a patchwork of various habitat each ward customized to the metabolic, chemical, anatomic requirements of its patients. Taking into account gravity, atmospheric pressure, respiratory needs (if respiration is your thing). White’s hate of war and xenophobia is an important feature driving the whole series. His ability to make goodness – interesting, moving and actionable (instead of battles, destruction, invasions etc) is quite unique. In fact he loathed violence so much that the only violence was that of planetary catastrophes, accidents, surgery rooms or emergency situations. It presents us with a credible and believable version of altruistic space doctors that work towards establishing xenobiological mutualistic or symbiotic relationships.
A few notes of the Hungarian Galaktika(1972-1995) SF mag where Gábor Szikszai duo published some of their early work) – like most of the East European, ex-Socialist countries, SF was a true mass phenomenon not a niche thing. The more I find out about the specific publications and distro histories of neighboring countries of Bulgaria and Hungary (as well as what I gather from my own experience with Romanian SF publications), the more I realize how deeply enjoyed and widely spread were ideas discussed by SF mags or anthologies, how diverse the available range of translations and how wide the outreach of these magazines was. I heard an anecdote about how the Bulgarian translation of Dune became the talk of the town. From the kids at school to the ladies selling flowers or the engineers on scaffolding of construction sites (this is a story I heard from Bulgarian historians of SF). Of course a lot of these mags plummeted after 1990, and their fortunes went up and down along the years. Of course a lot of East European ‘talent’, some of its best illustrators made it way towards better payed, more prestigious venues, starting their studios or continuing to work for the US or German video gaming or card board game market. At the peak of its popularity Galaktika had a print run of 94,000 copies (for a population of 10 million).
It is really hard to track the work of Boros Szikszai online and there is not a lot of archival materials so I am thankful for everybody that scanned or made available (not least to them!) their amazing work. I appreciate their airbrush style that reminds me somehow of the best of lonf 80s and 1990s, the slick chrome artwork of Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama without the explicit pinup poses or how they pushed Syd Meadesque cityscapes towards a cyberpunk straight-to-VHS or straight-to-DVD 90s trashy kind of look. I also like the fact that they made a lot of futuristic ads using the picturesque Budapest Danube shoreline, always quite recognizable in their 90s work. They even have a pretty cool dystopian Budapest cityscape. Sadly a lot of their SF and cyberpunk work is very hard to find online (most is just magic card decks and WoW).
A terrific debut. I have read a free sample of the book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. It is important for me to place Strange Labour within the vague contours of Eastern Europe for some reason. Eastern Europe, if such a thing exists, feels post-apocalyptic precisely in the sense that it does not fit with various standard post-apocalyptic tropes of existing SF. It feels like all the imaginings, fabulations, extrapolation of post-apocalypticism did not prepare us for this. Maybe in the same way that Laurie Penny wrote about the inability of ‘catastrophe porn’ or post-apocalyptic entertainment to prepare us for the new reality we are living at this moment.
The world-building – and this is not a building (but a world to be built?), is a work of Strange Labour that exposes us to the effects of abandonment, to the shadows of massive labyrinthine earthworks that suddenly ungrounded everything. I am maybe wrong but I feel there is a deep affinity with the outcome of rapid de-industrialisation, privatization, the dismantlement of welfare systems and abandonment of everything that happened after 1989 in Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland etc And I say this trying to avoid here the entire charge of Tarkovsky’s “The Zone”. The Zone appears as something immutable and thus zoned-off behind the specifics of a certain time and place, or even cordoned off by a particular historical chain-of-events. In a sense, Penner introduces us to something else, the dispersed drop-offs, the neurodivergent that cannot join the immense Stahanovist Çevengur voluntarism that has suddenly pushed the majority of humanity into a febrile and inescapable activity. Strange Labour has some affinity to most of what the best recent new weird (I am thinking about the works of VanderMeer – Borne, The Strange Bird) tells us – that definitely, something major happened, that it affected everything that came after, we just do not know exactly what. It does that without appealing to a biotechnologically-enabled posthuman frame, but at the same time, all the epileptics and the dementia nurses already inhabit that strange space. In a way, if we try and inhabit the world of Robert Penner it will not save us from disaster, it will maybe spurn us to appreciate its inchoate beauty and scavenge our own cosmology out of its shipwreck entrails. Such a world is not the wasteland of cannibals, murderous mutants and exotic dangers that most of post-apocalypticism abounds, but of care-work to be done, of temporary respite and mutual associations that do not settle into predictable patterns.
Somehow it makes us perceive the strangeness of that absent work. There is something else besides all the brutalist petroglyphs, cosmist mountain top sublime. Yes, the impossible monuments of Communist heyday – hold an almost intangible (for now) finality. At the same time, as a good friend wrote about The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party on Buzludzha Peak such remains became very quickly quite alien, almost unintelligible, its purpose unknowable or aims completely and increasingly irrecoverable. These are just the most scenic ruins apt for majestic ruin porn tourism – but what about this labyrinthine goings-on? What about the various lives, the experiences of people who live amongst such ruins, en route towards something else? What about that something that is being slowly digested and is digesting these natural-industrial habitats. Environments and habitats are indissociable from an entirety that is not larger than its parts. Many have made a home there, masses of people that once called it a place of work, are now rambling, searching, almost shambling but there is incredible wayside beauty. It is enough there is an after – but this after – has fused so seamlessly with what came all of a sudden as to be unrecognizable.
TimeSpace Warps 