“A Documentary about how Hustle Culture, Workaholism, Toxic Productivity, Self Improvement, and Self-Help gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk function as a form of Social Control which the Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls Psychopolitics. Psychopolitics is a form of smart power that governs our Neoliberal Society of Control and Hustle Culture and Positive Psychology (Toxic Positivity) are just some of its many manifestations. It is leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety.” (1Dime channel)
Honestly sometimes I find the concepts used by Byung-Chul Han a bit simplistic, and also a bit redundant, considering that others have been using nearly the same terms. For me it is a bit unclear why psychopolitics is better than neuropolitics, or why smart power is somehow better than soft power. Some of these terms feel a bit too fancy or just slightly upgraded versions of something else. When calling something ‘smart’, just because everything tend to be called ‘smart’ nowadays, there is always the pitfall of reinforcing or even unwittingly hyping up the very things one tries to warn against.
That being said, this documentary is voicing out a general dissatisfaction and sense of doom regarding work – bullshit jobs and the whole protestant ethic, as well as the entire self help industry that is trying hard to re-educate and optimize everything in times of climate crisis, dwindling opportunities and general burnout. There also more and more the feeling that the so-called CEO mindset is being sold and advertised to everyone. This is not anymore the get rich quick scams online but an inescapable reality of theological proportions, of insanely rich CEOs (what the Chinese are already calling their own rich as crazy rich) acting like everybody else is disposable.
“Disco Elysium, an award-winning game from developer ZA/UM, created what I would consider one of the most brilliant pieces of interactive literature in recent memory. For this, we explore its foundational philosophy and narrative(s) throughout.” (Epoch Philosophy channel)
I continue to admire the incredible quality of these YT channels, and Epoch Philosophy is one of the best (although I just watched the Deleuze & Spinoza and Friedrich Engels, Socialism and Utopia ones – Engels which I have learned to appreciate during the years). This one is again on gaming and a particular game – a push to analyse games and treat them as true objects of philosophy or as applied philosophy, with movies (or anime or cartoons) already being the established medium of such exercises. This particular game dwelling on the intricacies of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the pervasiveness of ideology and the role of relationships in a dysfunctional world with its own history seems like a prime example, one that makes (in the words of the maker) it on par with Kafka, Sartre or other examples of the modernist canon. What i like is how, without spoilers encourages a certain critique or critique and dialectical analysis. Even if it psychoanalytic determinism is there (including neuro- determinism), there is a lot to be said about how political identity works nowadays. Politics is somehow everywhere and discussions in the game always turn into political discussion without transforming it all into a permanent critique or postmodern irony.
Everyone regularly reading this blog knows that pnea is the gamer and explorer of these virtual worlds. I have very very low gaming skills, experience and knowledge relating to these spaces, the way devs make assemble and construct these games. So I am always grateful when someone is guiding me via their vast experience, POW, hard-gained wisdom. One can is hard pressed to at least try inhabit subjectivities and even worlds this way without ignoring the fact that one is led, guided. These videos by Super Bunnyhop are a revelation in that particular sense. Thanks to Alin Rautoiu I came across them, and well, I think they somehow managed to give me another kick and start making appreciate more the variety of games out there, or the shifts that animate game development. Probably these are not only some of my favorite gamers videos but YT youtuber videos per se in general! Videos and games that cross easily over into astronomy, anthropology or climatology, with various critical insights that do not diminish but enhance our constant delight. I love to be introduced this way to larger things.
This one is about an indigenous game called Umurangi Generation inspired by NGE. The game takes the whole fury about our current world, about the feeling of a lack of agency and the way everything gets subsumed under capitalism, transforming a shooter into a camera shooting exercise of journalistic proportions where the maori- developer included several ‘alien’ invasions, one worse than the last. But this is only the teaser towards a really a romp through the recent switch from UFO to UAP terminology and the way Pentagon and US conservatives such as Rubio are framing the narrative in regards to these recently released videos branding them as “threats”. There is not just a inkling of militarism and a possible investment incentive to up the ante of the military-industrial complex whenever such unexplained are branded as “threats”.
Invasions are a particular keyword favorite of mine – and there is always some reverse victimization involved. The invader is almost always – feeling invaded, very rarely acknowledging how our world has been shaped by migration routes or brutal gunboat colonialism. The European white male human, even if we take let us say Bram Stoker’s 1890s Dracula as the most obvious example – has deemed the immigrant from Eastern Europe as disease ridden and ‘foreign’, and a vampiric threat to women. My particular focus is about how biological invasions or what we call invasive species, tends to paste over these ravages of colonial and global capitalist histories, the way plants or animals were introduced, or have escaped introduction into new areas, new lands. This index of human ‘invasiveness’ – is a darling of the far right, and almost all current ethnopolitcs of the “the long counter-revolution” (in McKenzie Wark‘s terms) tends to collate dehumanizing, invasive swarming attributes to the immigrants coming from war-torn and climate crises affected areas. When this happens, most of the invasiveness of the Western powers and destabilizing economic effects are being muffled or skipped. Radical UFOlogy (in the sene of Dante Minazolli or MIR Men in Red collective) acts like a counter-strategy, declassifying such attempts at weaponzing and militarizing contact with other civilizations. It is very important to also see how first contact as cargo cults lies at the core of paleoastronautic contact narratives or how ‘advanced civilization’ is equated with a Western history steeped in exploitation of resources and the enslavement of others.
The colonial ghosts, they are not ghosts and not far away, since indigenous resistance is still at the forefront of resisting big oil and the depredation of capitalism. Extraterrestrial or exobiological that does not take this into account will end up on the poor side of an imagination that sees everything in terms of outside danger, alien invasions or colonizing ancient aliens. Most of the time we are the threat, and so any future contact with Mars will have to abide to Antarctica type of no-contact measures or even more stricter. Even as Bunnyhop mentions, discussions about parietal Aborigine art from Australia that presumably registers such paleo contact tend to ignore the way contact with the recent past white ‘alien’ invaders wielding foreign technologies also got registered. Since its inception science fiction’s emergence as a modern genre remains unthinkable outside the history of colonization and exploitation (see John Rieder) of others by European powers. Afrofuturism is at the forefront taking this history of slavery and exploitation and remaking it into something else, and of terming UFO abductions precisely in terms of slaveship Atlatic Trade abductions. It is easy to forget the way ‘colonization’ and space colonization tends to overlap for that matter or the terrestrial way we imagine aliens as alien ‘races’. Any alienism has to deal with the subjugation of others, their annihilation and continuous othering, including the was this history gets transmitted and communicated and how such occupation traumas are still around us and determine the “uneven development”, to use Marx’s words. Thus the histories of this planet are with us whenever we imagine us imponderable during flights of space exploration or the most recent trends of privatization of space travel. It is always helps going back to H G Wells War of the Worlds and the way it was critical on British Imperialism and Victorian racial hierarchies. Don’t want to overlap more with the incredible introduction to the Umurangi game, developed by a maori about kids that basically witness and document the depredation of their worlds.
And there is more to come – including Gamifiying Global Warming or doing the math and Newtonian physics for the whole of the solar system in a game or how one can be walk in the footsteps of your primate predecessors.
Two space hunters are tracking down a machine trying to free itself. After taking it down, they witness a mystical phenomenon: the ghost of a young woman pulling herself out of the machine, as if the spaceship had a soul. Trying to understand the nature of this entity, they start chasing the woman through space… (official http://bloodmachines.com/)
This minis series (actually a movie in 3 chapters) was really hard to find, especially (like me) if you are not in a country where SHUDDER channel is supported (bad luck!). Shudder started making small genre productions, mostly horror but also SF, and the quality has been rising constantly. Many hidden gems still hide out there. Blood Machines was not in my tractor beam range for a long while, even if I knew about the Kickstarter crowdfunding project (since 2016). I knew Seth Ickerman’s was a French giant of retro 80s exploitation retrowave stylishness – mixing post-ironic, highly outrageous martial arts videos with bravado and VHS post-production VFXs. His Turbo Killer collaboration videoclip (Blood Machines 1) – with its cosmic space opera Cadillac cheap thrills grandeur and fashionista looks drowns everything in a pool of dark brooding space junk mysticism. Ickerman would be part of this new generation that adds a ton of pseudo- analog digital glitches, post filters that ooze unrepentant and nostalgic visuals. They are perfectly at home within the fold of synthwave retromania – nostalgia industries, while at the same time keeping it really really sleasy, steamy exploitation (Blood Machine has a +18 label).
Wanted to write about Blood Machines since a whole while and now friend Bogdan Lypkhanu, investigator of tantric SF, gave me the final ass kick.
Blood Machines has garnered either lots of hate as a grossed-out pile of plot-less, ham acting style dump or the perfect space opera tribute. I not so much interested in its tribute or retro aspect as in how it departs from most SF cinema depictions of spaceships in space opera sub-genre movies. Most spaceships (with the notable exception of Nostromo, Event Horizon, Lexx or Aniara more recently) are not really depicted as explicitly sentient, and I would say there is a lack not only of imagination, but of ‘wet imagination’, of corporeality in depicting a feeling, squelching, howling spaceship.
The organic – blood and flesh aspect of a biological spaceship brings me to biopunk – on a mystical cosmic, evolutionary scale, where various machinic ‘souls’. I am looking forward to spaceships where cellular and tissue aspects coexist, showing me how the universe is hosting artificial/grown entities with homeostatic millieus that pulsate, decay and mutate.
Maybe there’s more than a whiff of gender essentialism at work – rising from the fact that a lot of ships had female sounding heteronormative names (Mima), and this gets carried along in various cinematic space operas (except Millennium Falcon!). There is the cheesy lesbian undertone or even cultic Saphic love aspect to this Amazon tribe, a hidden vibration btw the spaceship protecting tribes and their eco-AI objects of care. The male characters gynophobia makes them even more of an offshoot of your Golden Age of SF captains, commanders, bounty hunters and space policemen.
It is a pity that Blood Machines is still partially stuck in a hetero male universe since there are new venues in space opera being explored by SF authors such as Benjanun Sriduangkaew – his Machine Mandate does not feature any cis males only lesbian characters, lots of sex and sleek shipminds. Both the two male pilots seem like a lot of comic relief ballast – atavistic remainders of a narcissist male hero obsessed genre that carries them on board in order to sacrifice them in the end (which is good!). The female-only tribes (‘oilsuckers‘) native to the movies exoplanet and the various ‘extracted’ mindship AIs are at the forefront of the movie. I really liked the way it reverses the Matrix Neo waking up in his pod, with the AI being extracted fully embodied in a human shape. Also the fact that the AI is somehow taking over the old mechanic co-pilot.
The AI taking this female human shape is also pretty stereotypical since it just follows that all spaceships search for the typical female white body (same as like the Ex Machine Alex Garland movie). Curious to finally seeAsian or African shipminds, that do not end embodied embody as white females. This typical pinup fembot girl is out of cult mags like MONDO2000 or Metal Hurlant comics (key SF cult comic French US book that left a long imprint) and Blood Machines never strays far from this. It is almost like these small, 21st c indie productions are the ones that the previous generations (from 1970s on) did not have the budget for, the tools or CGI acumen to do! That being said there is the Heavy Metal animation and a certain je ne sais quois, an undeniable french touch – +fose of eurotrash to it, that makes it quite a relief after the onslaught of the standard US SF. I am also excited a Romanian post FXs studio from Bucharest has been working on it – Avanpost media.
This penchant of the cyberdelic imaginary for what i would call – space fitness is also a big limitation, and restricts everything to these particular types of athletic, dancer bodies – as if one cannot fly in the universe if one is not trim, fit, flawless and more importantly streamlined. One of the interesting things is that a lot of the so-called space billionaires, beside the fact that they are mostly prone to be white, married (or divorced) and hetero white males, are also not at all what u might call owners of super sexy bodies. In fact they are completely unsexy and still they got a chance to fly high or entertain dreams of planetary escapism.
On screen one can only make into space or in the cosmos if one sports these type of healthy ‘efficient’ bodies that are increasingly being peddled both under hyper consumer capitalism and by art festivals. In order to prove one’s job dedication one has to keep this physicality on view & under control, keeping it fit at all times and under display – and under no circumstances is this body to look tired, flabby, wasted or out of shape. In Blood Machines the male spaceship hunters, hunting down rogue AI shipminds after some unspecified revolt of the machines, are definitely both unsexy and decrepit. I also like the grimness of the crusty Amazons, and the fact that they are multigenerational. Reminded me a bit of the natives of Zulawski’s Silver Globe from 1988.
At the same time there is in Blood Machines also a lot of sex magic at work, Pentagons, Pentagrams and ritualistic dance floor action. And for me this side of it was the most important – the fact that the spaceships are actually like huge interstellar beasts, whose hearts are still beating, even in a junkyard situation like stranded whales. The obvious – neo-gnostic – disembodiment of the shipmind, where the AI minds are ritualistically liberated is probably the most obvious part. These techgnostic rituals where vividly depicted, especially as Conspirituality is becoming almost a universal pop phenomenon. Erik Davis has been tracing out some of the consequences of that.
Call me a old trash SF hound, but I loved the last orgy scene where you get all these reversed crosses on the pubic hair of the embodied AIs. In a very trashy dance (end) scene these bodies are actually being choreographically and invisibly moved (even worse than in the recent remake of Suspiria) while linked to distant shipwrecks smashing into each other. There is also this glow – ‘auratic’ celeb glam to it, in a cover magazine way that puts to shame the usual very tired tropes of neo noir femme fatale cyberpunk (like the recent Reminiscence 2021 WB movie). There is a cosmic ‘satanist’ Thelema magick SF glory to this violet- magenta – lava lamp imagery, and the way space junk starts recomposing some tantric mandala is definitely one of my favorite movie endings, even if completely exxxploit, predictable and fan service (most probably).
Philosopher Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of this Planet, The Global Genome, After Life, Biomedia, Tentacles Longer Than Night and many more) wrote in 2016 for The Japan Times a series of Black Illumination introductory (5 min) texts. They are behind a paywall, but saving them in Pocket you can actually read them all. His investigation of Japanese modernist estrangement, inhumanism and existential & cosmic (both somehow gazing into each other) pessimism is both brief, synthetic without spoiling the potential of these Japanese authors mangakas, philosophers, mad suicidal writers (Junji Ito, Keiji Nishitani, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato) for limitless collapse and vacuousness. In the words of my friend Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu – Junji Ito won’t probably topple this one manga, it goes into regions far darker than those populated by Spirals and ambling arthropod sharks.
I’m extremely interested in how DMT is indeed an endogenous molecule (meaning naturally produced internally) that is in our bodies, plants, animals, and everything that is alive. What’s all that DMT doing in there? Not even any of the top studies (more scientific studies happening now at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University) can figure out what the hell all that DMT is doing inside of us. I experientially know with a surplus, you certainly have an ego death and leave your body to travel to “The Matrix” in a way. It’s quite tough to describe. But, if we’re in a simulation or a video game, you get to meet entities and Machine Elves that are building the reality around us. I know that sounds crazy… but, if you know, then you know.
As for the music, I collaborated on the it with Joshua Ryan, and he sent along these notes: “This was inspired by the visual entirely, no reference material was used and the journeys the music takes is an attempt at conveying the many fractal environments you can see. The seamless transitions flowing into one another melodically not diverging from the heavy meditative tone – just as the visual component achieves.” You can follow awesome Josh is on that new app called Instagram or something at @joshuaryancomposer https://www.instagram.com/joshuaryanc… or visit his website at http://www.joshuaryancomposer.com. (YT)
TimeSpace Warps 