Perhaps sensitized by Carlo Rovelli’s last book Helgoland: The World of Quantum Theory – here was an occasion to see how cinema would deal with the infinite copies of yourselves, taking the preposterous strangeness of Schrödinger theory seriously, by pushing it to its extremes. What could be well enjoyed as just another memory addled guilt-trip into young adulthood or nostalgia for college years, could as well be treated as a more philosophical trippy endeavor into ‘potentiality’ and ‘actualization’ (important A N Whitehead’s terms for process philosophy as well as various quantum theory interpretations). I am currently reading the Romanian translation of Religion in the Making by Whitehead, published in 1926, only one year after the momentous trip Heisenberg took to the lonely (and Pollen free!) island in the North Sea where he started to see the matrix mechanics taking shape from his math tables. This book is the only Romanian (ANW) translation I’ve found and probably one that most current Whiteheadians would skip, yet I found it rich in hints that his generally realist & naturalist metaphysics (&theology!) had also somehow absorbed the shock of quantum realities (and general relativity). In part, it’s almost as if even at his most ‘theological’, he offers living proof that one cannot ignore the latest results or skip the consistent questions raised by these tested and re- tested theories and permit a mindset that is ready to welcome the rattling & shaking of everything we thought we knew about the world. Even if completly remote from our daily lives, there’s this increasing ‘remote – close’ familiarity with the pleasurable absurdity of quantum theory interpretations, not in the preposterous quack “quantum therapies” (Rovelli also ridicules) but in its cultural or even aesthetic implements or speculative wagers.
First, I do not think one has to dabble in quantum theory speculations – or even pretend to do, in order to actually make such a movie or profess to intuit far flung influence. A lot of current good SF work is rich in diverting the fallout of quantum theoretical enrichment into pop adventures (even sexual proclivity in Sex Criminals comics where the protagonists freeze time during multiple orgasms), without lecturing or without even pointing fingers towards specific ‘favorite’ interpretations of it (take ur pick!). I think that Occupy by Tricia Sullivan offers the golden standard here. It is very intimately entangled (no pun!). Building a constructively hallucinatory experience, concerned with transmitting the ‘living through’ and delving into extraordinary examples of ‘wave functions’ and ‘collapsing the wave function’. As a inter dimensional being one switches first, second person to third person all in one, getting across what it might be to actually to live in a universe with higher dimensions or higher realities. The POW is still there, even if it always hovers as if it continuoiusly splits and gets twisted along those realities. What is best is that it is clearly T Sullivan isnot interested in the slightest in delineating technical details or getting bogged down in explanatory gaps.
What appears to be a drug-induced non-linearity (which it could well be), in Flashback movie aka the Edu of…. branches off into a “many worlds” interpretation (unmentioned in the frame of the movie!), where each “I” separates or exists simultaneously with all the others, each with its own branched world”. Although one could even say slow motion doubling, tripling etc would be a better visual characterization. There is a plethora of other recent movies that deal with multiple selves, but rather than making it a psychological (medicalized) multi-personality disorder, or claiming some sort of karmic or reincarnation multiplicity, Flashback makes these versions of a very slippery self all unnerving & ontologically real. Moving in repetitive and discontinuous (quite scarry) jumps enables one to move into various other existences, without renouncing the stable (boring) initial one. Ontologic surprises are not explainable just via substances, although substances are always a good way to start or to question. There is always the possibility that reality and memory is actually rich in staining those branching worlds, that these worlds are multifarious, and that there is always a sense of ‘out there’ enjoyment of all the missing splendor or decrepitude of this multiverse concretness. So even if I think Rovelli has a point about keeping the brambles of many worlds at a minimum and focusing on the infinite relations out here that make our world so vaporous and enticing, there is always a slippage. Affect, missing opportunities and unrequited love might also be a good guide among the various worlds.
Probability is not just probability but a gigantic real ψ wave in this movie. Carlo Rovelli is critical of this many world quantum theory interpretation on grounds of how it denies our own observable experiences of only one “I”, not its double, not its multiple (unless just as multiple personality disorder I guess). Yet, at the same time I would also say there is some sort of mixture going on, according to the process metaphysics there is always some concrescence solidarity of multiplicities going on haywire, with a more promiscuous now that is (always) being smeared or holding on the non temporal residue of what it could have been, or what never is, or what did not take place temporally. These atmospherics of the possible (according to a Whiteheadian scheme) are always, already part of each actualisation. The newly weds room of boxes is an apt reminder that in the current worst of worst worlds sold as best of, other realities, ‘many worlds’ become few, with less and less options and better left unboxed. Or who knows what might come out (Trump II? Another mutant Covid strain?), since clearly there’s no end to the worst case scenario and even easy cheapo escapisms have become impossibilties for a large majority.
What is a slow burn of a college love and various mysterious happenings, flashbacks, encounters, timeline and discontinuities built up into something quite remarkable in my view – an actual warped construction, cinematically speaking, of what it is to feel like one is dripping into some larger phenomenological reality that we can actually observe via the movie effects and the edits on screen. The non linear editing I found quiet elaborate and surprisingly unsettling and atmospheric. One has the feel there is also some monstrous selves out there, a sort of inchoate awakening. The college love is herself an incredibly guide into this larger, more generous reality that dangerously announces also some social and cultural precipes, of several lives lived, of turning points, of actual and very hellish limbos. The limbo aspect I found intersting – in one sense a very satisfying even if very cliché squatter hell of drug addled abandoned houses, but at the same time (from capitalist realist standpoint) one that is full of nasty surprises and literally the only divergence from the usual family-job-home ownership trajectory.
This I found very enticing – the exploration of an observable point of view, of ‘loosership’ as it is presented or constructed under capitalism, neoliberalism, call it what u want, achievement etc SAT scores. More and more of the young generation, including the gaokao exams in China and titles like “Scores Don’t Mean Security, Money Does”. Disappointing job offers (already well fused with life possibilities) in both US and China point to a certain expenditure of potentials, or of being handed out a lack of perspective in tge midst of general prosperity. Perspectival metaphysics takes this reality at heart – making ones own intersubjective perspective definitory in a way that does not slip into the old subjectivist or idealist trappings of the absolute point of view from nowhere. In a way, if we are to follow Carlo Rovelli’s last book and his relations RQM (Relational Quantum Mechanics), the way things ARE or appear, so long as they interact or intersect.
Found quite funny the stereotypical artist lifeline – the way he renounces his artistic creative side, a critical point, since creativity is completely commodified and remade into some sort of data mining or dreary pattern recognition job. It is ridiculous how such dreams of artistic life haunt the current lack of perspective – it is almost as when everything is artistic, when every ad and online advert animations involves lots of creativity one dreams of the 19th century painter with an atelier, a sort of displaced image of the creative, out of a job, the Romantic image of the 1950s US An American in Paris sort of trope that was already old at the time. Also this perspective no-perspective of an angsty, white hetero male tends to suck big time, I said it before and I will say it again. At the same time, I am in accord with Rovelli that one should always admit quantum strangeness in our vacuous midst, at the core of the slipstream cultural pop universe, under all forms and all shapes.
“In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at how white supremacy pervades not only the history of environmentalism and environmentalist leaders, but also how white supremacy now threatens the climate change movement and climate action today. The forefathers of environmentalism, conservation, and preservation like Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt all espoused white supremacist ideas that were often intermeshed with their views of the natural world and environmentalism. Later as authors like Paul Ehlrich stoked fears of overpopulation, these racist sentiments were blended once again into concerns about overpopulation. In short overpopulation and environmental destruction as a result of overpopulation were wielded as racist and white supremacist tools to oppress people of color, especially in the majority world. Now, mass shooters and eco-fascists are harkening back to the environmentalist, racist, white supremacist views of the past and using climate change as a dangerous weapon and excuse to harm people.”
Drawing from “A Drifting Life” by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.Credit…via Drawn & Quarterly
This is a book for anyone who wants to broaden the usual range of manga/anime beyond giant robots, samurais, chibis, monsters, hentai, mecha, kawaii, “Versailles literature” or bikers with ESP powers.
This my first Yoshihiro Tatsumigekiga manga. Since the late 40s, early 50s Yoshihiro Tatsumi and his circle pushed the limits of what manga could address aeasthetically and basically established the ‘graphic novel’ in Japan 40 or 50 yr before it became canonized in the West, or got its recognition at Angoulême. The gekiga (dramatic was initially developed by him and the group around him as an anti-manga, going against the already dominant tradition of funnies or gag-manga (funny images) formats to try and offer a serious image of the modern world. It is not humourless nor plagued by what Nietzsche called the ‘spirit of gravity’, yet his deadpan humour does not aim to please. His manga pages are not just depicting drab realism – but an unpolished nonjudgemental realism of the big cities, a decidedly urban perspective, of living collectivities and stark isolation, of urban delights and neon, coexisting with bizarre and disturbing proximities and dependencies. Drawing style is realistic in its lines, unpolished, and the plot is no longer than 8 pages max mostly. It is terse and incredibly effective as well as cinematically pleasing like all mangas (but also inspired directly by French Nouvelle Vague and noir cinema or even Mickey Spillane novels). It is realistic in a precise way because it looks where no mangaka before him dared look. He covers the existential byways, the long falls, old people abandoned by their kids and befriended by strangers (The Thirsty City), the underworld homeless friendships of people with pet cockroaches (in The Hotel under the City), following various uncensored lives through their sexual (including zoophilia, including various fetishes that he does not exoticize or use for shock value) proclivities, without condemning, without normative strictures.
When he follows goodness where there is no room for goodness, care work where care is not available, Yoshihiro Tatsumi makes visible this lack and the invisible emotional turmoil it fosters. Tatsumi follows all miscalculations and uncalled destitution, never imagined or told & drawn in any other manga before. This is a completely un-embellished Japan.
Disability is treated as I have never seen before (Little Goldfish), maybe only in Japanese movies. He is considered on par with Will Eisner, but as Stefan Panor writes in his Preface (in the “The Land Where Nobody Smiles: Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the modern comics and gekiga“), he is able to draw attention and get away without to a recurrent main character similar to the ironic detective figure of Denny Colt aka Spirit. There is no Spirit in his manga, no permanent characters even if we might recognize here and there a self-portrait of a broad face nose, unkept, uncommunicative, with weary eyes, closed mouth and a certain air of resignation about him. A character that can both free monkeys from Zoo in order to learn how to woo or sexually approach his chosen one, or one that is a fake employee, that wakes up, keeps dressing up like a normal employee just because he needs to cover up being laid off and living secretly just from horse races bets. He describes the hardships and lives of WWII army prostitutes in the Pacific and their vengeful STD jabs after the war near the US army barracks (War Diary of a Prostitute). From the time of reconstruction to the start of the Japanese miracle and the boom economy, Yoshihiro Tatsumi should always be kept at our side as a guide.
The gekiga selected in this volume might come as shock for the average manga reader or fan, as our first knee-jerk reactions might be to actually expect gags, memes, LULZ, and entirely dismiss anything serious as pretentious. Well, yes, we need the gags in order to survive the day or get a thumbs up from our peers.
IMHO, gekiga accomplishes or continues what the ‘proletarian novel’ did not have a chance to do as it became devalued culturally, financially and artistically. Tatsumi is illustrating our collective marching into cellular living, a perspective that fell out of fashion almost everywhere during the great rosy bubble economy but that keeps on inflating & bursting. Every one is singular but nobody is isolated, everybody responds to and is changed by encounters with others. There is a sense that all this anti-humorousness is necessary today not as an antidote, of sobering up, waking up, but to put things in proportion and get closer to the undeniable fact that vast majoritarian loosership is a key part of the success story of capitalism.
I am very thankful to have found this volume at the local Berlin library and am very impressed that they have collected all these wonderful comics and manga’s and made them available to everyone.
[[Was not able to jot down my thoughts on it, but that time has finally come. If I am to agree with other reviewers, I would have to keep a blind eye to my own abysmal editing of Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. So no complaints about typos. Good that I cannot or will not review my own book. I am all for systematicity, since my own instincts struggle with it and yet most of the time trying to find a clear path among the ferocious brambles of speculative theory fiction/SF fabulation defeats the purpose. I enjoyed the lacunae as well as the conceptual splits, nor was I deranged by an overwrought style, with my own checkered past and unnecessary terminological excess in mind.]]
So, “Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life”, a slim 80+ page volume, is worthwhile reading. More of an extended essay, and even out of Corona context, it’s a welcome mindfuck. It arrived in 2012, Ben Woodard’s tome is an early ZerO Books snapshot, born in the throes of new materialism, OOO, the ontological turn, a new appetite for metaphysics, speculative realism & horror of philosophy (one has to dig deeper into Jane Bennett, Meillasoux, Negarestani, Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Nicola Masciandaro, Steven Shaviro and others). It is prescient in its embrace of the putrescent & contagious and all things ‘biological’ that came to rule our quarantined days. It is biophilosophical as such and not just a tract on the philosophy of biological. Coming out of the various strains of non-correlationist thinking, it is an early, formative publication by a contemporary thinker whose involvement with natural history keeps on tracking conceptual clusters & updating a philosophy that kept itself too long at bay from evolving biological ideas. B Woodard’s texts are unavoidable for anybody interested even rhe slightest in these things. It makes a good untimely visit (or revisit) now, especially after the hype over ‘speculative realism’ is generally over.
On two accounts I consider Ben Woodard’s work important. First, from the standpoint of his familiarity and embrace of a whole plethora of weird and new weird literature, his unapologetic and almost relentlessly geeky – sticky ontological (?!) attitude towards all sorts of dirty media, no matter how remote trashy, be it over -theorized or not expunged from the canon. Secondly, these dumpster ‘horrorisms’ (from gaming, horror B movies fare, comics etc) are being stalked in a shambling lock-step by a whole gamut of Continental philosophy and Naturphilosophie + (more recently) ungainly(for me) and undigestible oddities such as the British Idealists. This includes a monography (which does not seem to be out yet, although finished) situating Francis Herbert Bradley at the very origins of that primordial split of Analytic vs Continental schools via monism & pluralism.
The Creep of Life – takes a cue both from Negarestani as well as Stephen J Gould. I must say I never read Cyclonopedia by Negarestani, although his influence has been nearly ubiquitous in many quarters & given the proper treatment elsewhere, while for me S J Gould has been important on a personal level. He’s a truly formative influence on some of my earliest biological and natural history musings, so I’m always curious about any potential Gouldian cross overs. I was keen on a work that promises to juxtapose these incompatible, maybe even incompossible forces. Woodard’s ‘Dark Vitalism’ – is a child of both lovecraftian radical openness (in fact he makes Lovecraft feel quite coy) toward unbearable outside dimensions (apud Negarestani). A radical opening that invites invasiveness, quartering, fostering and hosting the alien – as well as taking full advantage of how systematically Darwinism dispels any trace of human excepționalism & sense of purpose. Even a radical contingency as that of Meillasoux, the non-teleological keeps a lingering anthropocentrism, so Woodard makes sure any taxonomic superiority and upper level inevitability has to go. Evolutionary replays will not end up with the same or any kind of intelligence valorizing biped, math or no math. Against any vertebrate-centric or multicellular-centric view, S Gould, a Marxist paleontologist & naturalist, kept encouraging these views from the below – always disdainful & ridiculing our airs of superiority in regard to ‘humble’ Monera. This ‘low’ bacterial dimension, a planetary microbiome that extends in all directions, became protoplasmic base reality (something else than just the impeding doom of pathogenicity) -moving slowly into quorum sensing limelight, one that Gould would have undoubtedly recognized.
For Woodard the critical distance from strict adaptionism, Panglossian radical selectionism & selfish genocentrism peddled by the neo-Darwinian apostles (prominently Richard Dawkins), germinates what S J Gould seeded, stemming from a vast, historically grounded encyclopedic knowledge of evolutionary ideas, humanism & many byways of natural history amd geology + making sure many racist pseudo-sciences & faulty methodologies don’t get a second chance (phrenology, IQ testing etc that informed eugenic immigration policies in the US etc). This prepares one for tackling any socio biological vagaries, whatever one-sided Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge epistemic fraternization might promise us, or whatever circular ‘just so’ stories of the day might become institutionalized as evolutionary psychology trivia.
Slime Dynamics does not trace all this, and maybe better so, since it is tracking some more rare, viscous and opaque protoplasm – the one that tends to be avoided even by the best of biologically- literate philosophers (the usual French suspects: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze). It is as if thinking about living thought gets obscured, killed at birth, muddled whenever brought down in the mud it came from, just the minute it gets reminded where its mindfulness oozes from.
In a time of lacking transparency, of dodgy accountability, when black-boxed (and quite racistic) AIs become existential threats and discrimination machines, this ‘darkness’ might seem completely out of tune. Corona Pandemics, fake news, and G Agamben letters of biopolitical conservatism, ‘dark vitalism’ itself feels somewhat unnecessary, an exaggerated – Lebensphilosophical – mystification. Yet ‘darkness’ – does not equal obscurantist add-ons to obfuscate even more & multiply misunderstandings, or inflame anti-scientific pathos with more or less misplaced mistrust in sometimes imperfect yet badly needed biomedical advances. First things first, Slime Dynamics is steeped in the purposelessness of evolutionary drift, it is abiogenesis – friendly even when discussing outrageous panspermia, and it is clearly familiar with experiments/scientific theories or the historical significance of discovering deep time. This possibility to think beyond the biotic dimension & into unthinking anorganic origins of life keeps on overflowing, forever unsettling our relation to pure data & mere science reports. Slime Dynamics always enjoys using biologically informed horror in order to both update & degrade philosophy and dissolve the anti-biology inhibitors that have plagued phenomenology and Continental or Critical thought in general. It ultimately takes the obscene results and cool research data of science to their ultimate, unflattering devastating conclusions. In order to dispel this ‘darkness’ of the dark I am quoting the threefold aspects that Ben Woodard attributes to this new (deep time inflected) mostly unwanted vitalism:
“1. It is dark because it is obscured both by nature (who is to say that we can divine and comprehend the details of the universe from our limited brains) and by time (we are at a temporal disadvantage in trying to discern the creation of all things) since the cause of most of the nature we know has fallen back into the deep past.
2. It is dark because it spells bad news for the human race in terms of our origins (we are just clever monkeys that emerged as a result of a series of biological and cosmological lucky breaks), our meaning (we are just meat puppets based on our construction), and our ultimate fate (Earth will die and we will probably perish if not with it then eventually with the universe).
3. It is dark on an aesthetic and experiential level our psychosocial and phenomenological existence is darkened and less friendly to us, and our perceptions, given the destructiveness of time and space.”BW
Viruses and epidemiology play an important place in Slime Dynamics and spell out some of the most unsettling truths we have since come to loath, but can never ever again ignore (with the inception/global expanse of the Corona Pandemic). It is almost too close to home now that a very simple event of disease spillover, of outside contagion teaches us something the hard way about either complexity or basic simplicity – that medical under-development and patent trolling brings under capitalism.
Mushrooms and the fungoid also play an important role in Slime Dynamics, and I might say this is my favorite part since most of the newer The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins valuable additions tend to skip the central disgust associated with the undergrowth, the eminently -putrescient- slithering of hyphae or even the unavoidable weird (speculative lit) aspects that subtend it. In particular, space-time for Woodard is always warped along fungal apparitions – contrasting it with the networked contagion (“time overcoming space), the amorphousness and formlessness of fungal life is that of “the spatial overcoming time”, dragging life below ground, making it reliant upon down-trodden, plentiful disaggregation, dependent on the inorganic.
Slime Dynamics comes as good critical reminder of classical (altough contemporary xenobiology seems to have evolved) teleological attachments, its unimaginative program of ‘intelligent’ contact out there, its ignorance of the extremophilic non sapient possibilities out here. Slime Dynamics makes a fungus thriving inside a Chernobyl sarcophagus a much better candidate for sentient alien contact at home as well as outside of the bounds of our evolutionary bland & stationary ‘pinnacle’ position. I think Naturphilosophie has waited much too long for a comeback, and that J G Fichte and F W J Schelling in their liminal situation btw Kant and Hegel may act like a philosophic slime-mold, a composite multi-phase creature or answer to the Kantian-Blumenbachian program that can be many things at once, or one unified thing at different times. Slime Dynamics takes an important cue from H Grant making Nature After F W J Schelling as contemporary a thing as any nowadays, not just by mere retro recovery but by extending & activating ‘power metaphysics’ overall. Ben Woodard is well able to critically siphon out any romantic excess of Schelling – without jettisoning the precedence Schelling gave to base nature over thinking, as well as him being well aware of how intelligence (or better sapience) has been preserved apart from an inescapable basic materiality that keeps clinging to our angel wings. A clinging hodologic mucus not be confused with a pre-packaged and regurgitated as fixed ‘human nature’. A neo-Schellingian vibe lures our attention towards the net forces operating on environments, bodies and especially on thought as explored by another relatively forgotten German Naturphilosoph – Kielmeyer. Schelling is critical of vitalism because of his aesthetic romantic leanings, because ‘vitalism’ per se seems to entail something contradictory to him, almost feet in the sky, unopposed by any equal force, just forever exhaustive matter. Schelling thus appears to have been priming us for ‘dissipative structures’ – for riding vortices as the Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine thaught us. Maybe we have here the same ‘aesthetic’ engagement that seriously considered totality as a conjunction of opposing forces, of intensities & contrasts also vital in – A N Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, as he also came to appreciate the Romantics, beside his interest in metaphysics & history of science. To me, although Whitehead never mentions any specific German Naturphilosoph but only their British poet- adepts, he seems to qualify ‘eternal darkness’ in manner quite close to Schelling as “an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond”.
What i miss from Woodard’s examples are maybe hints of an eastern ex Socialist SF slime – as the DDR movie Der Schweigende Stern 1960 loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Astronauts. During the the shoots it apparently used up the whole country’s whole supply of glue. These tons of glue were used to simulate a post apocalyptic Venusian surface. This civilizational residue of muck overflows everything, a preview warning of the ultimate no-return extinction, if we would choose to follow the same path of megadeath militarism & weaponized science.
But let’s see how Woodard keeps on smearing ardently cleaned paths from this history of philosophy with a necessary creepiness that is of great benefit, so I better leave him the last word:
“The material being of humans, and of all life is a slimy one. Slime is the smudge of reality, the remainder and reminder of the fact that things fall apart. The shining path of humanity is only ever the verminous – like the trail of our own oozing across time and space – the trace and proof of our complete sliminess trough and trough.”BW
Swarming , extra-dimensional or extra-galactic organicisms and entities mentioned by Ben Woodards in his book Slime Dynamics:
Tyranods pf Warhammer 40,000 mentioned by Woodard in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
“The Tyranids are an alien race from the colds depths of the void that hunger constantly for warm flesh. They infest the stars in their billions, a raw force of destruction that has been likened to a locust swarm”
Zerg of Starcraft also mentioned in Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
screen capture of Zerg swarm from Starcraft
“Zerg Swarm is a terrifying and ruthless amalgamation of biologically advanced, arthropodal aliens. Dedicated to the pursuit of genetic perfection, the zerg relentlessly hunt down and assimilate advanced species across the galaxy, incorporating useful genetic code into their own.”
8472 Species of Star Trek also mentioned in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
the chapter on Extra-Galactic Terror also mentions “The Yuuzhan Vong—Children of Yun-Yuuzhan, also called the Chosen Race, known to the Chiss and Ferroans as the Far Outsiders, and sometimes incorrectly abbreviated to Vong (which implied that one was disowned by their family and their gods)—were a nomadic extra-galacticsentientspecies that nearly destroyed the New Republic, and were responsible for the deaths of nearly 365 trillion sentient beings during their invasion of the galaxy.”
Ubbo-Sathla, Ubbo-Sathla a short story by Clark Ashton Smith, originally published in 1933, also known as The Unbegotten Source or The Demiurge, is an Outer God which features in the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos. Art by infernvs
“colossal mass of protoplasmic goo, Ubbo-Sathla is a creature which has dwelt on Earth since its formation. Constantly spewing forth a plethora of primitive organisms, some believe that this creature was the source of all life on the planet, and that one day it will emerge to re-absorb all of its biomass.” source Monster wiki
Trivia: One interesting fact is that the celebrated actor Romanian Iurie Darie plays the role of Commander (could not believe my eyes!). S The captain of the ship Laika was played by Piotr Pawlowski. Another characteristic of these movies was their diverse cast – in fact the cast was supposed to reflect a similarly diverse future as well as the realities on board the Interkosmos Soviet space program. So, Polish, East German, Romanian, Serbian and one Egyptian actress Soheir El Morshedy are part of the cast of this SF.
Here is some informationabout the Subharchord, an early electronic sound generator made in East Germany by Gerhard Steinke and used in TV shows, movie soundtracks etc for its futuristic, experimental feel.
And here a cool slide presentation about SF fandom in the GDR with lots of details, about authors, covers SF clubs and SF zine publishing stats.
The movies is generally criticized for its lack of philosophic vacuity or for lack of ideas in comparison with its much more celebrated predecessor 2001 directed by Kubrick (that in its turn got inspiration from Ikarie XB-1 directed by Czechoslovak Jindřich Polák). A strange signal from space arrives and Research Station Ikaros supposed to search for alien life forms, goes mysteriously silent around Jupiter. One strange characteristic is the general non-involvement in matters SF of either the film directors or script writers. There was a gap btw current SF writing in East and these movies, a thing that also sounds familiar with today’s situation when most of the new, exciting and interesting SF voices (with the notable exception of Liu Cixin or Jeff VanderMeer do not manage to see movie adaptations made from their literary oeuvres). For film directors it seems it was mainly just a chance tryout or even something dictated politically, although they had quite a free hand. Another characteristic was that gender equality was actively promoted and women scientists and pilots were treated on equal terms as the men. Architects in contrast, or set designers were much more enthusiastic and many of them probably, we might suppose SF fans that finally found an opportunity to exercise their talents, shape some alien planetary surfaces or spaceship designs.
logo of the Soviet Interkosmos which allow various member states of the Eastern bloc to send their cosmonauts to space
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the East Germany 1960s 1970s 1980s
Somehow I cannot embed the link so here it is (sadly only in German! and only available till 11.05.2022 ∙ 23:59). Many thanks to Julia Linda Schulze for catching on with this documentary and keeping us in the loop with it!
//This is, without question, one of the best documentaries I have seen about the context, ideals and cinematography surrounding East bloc, ex-Socialist SF. Maybe this is again a demonstration as why it is such a niche thing and why most of the older SF movies do not getting enough of an exposure and why it is easy to get stuck with images of mostly US, English-language movies from the same period (mainly space-age 1960s and 1970s). There is lots of interviewed researchers including film directors, special effects contributors, script writers, set designers, costume makers as well as SF historians, SF writers, art curators etc from current Germany that dwell on the retro-futuristic, the ideological engagements of the DDR period and the general openness towards a better and definitely more Internationalist and Pacifist, non-militarist future. The usual triumphalist scientist vision of unlimited growth and untrammeled progress that hounded so much of the Soviet planning is not really prominent, there is more questions and warnings as well as usual problems carried along in space. A few ideas first of what struck me when watching it. If you want to know more and see a few screen captures I made, here’s my take on it with the TW thread like rabbit hole into various related directions.//
Cosmonaut in the front is played by legendary Serbian actor Gojko Miticthat is known as the East German Winnetou in the Karl May Easterns (Ostern), as well as for his cosmonaut in 1970 DEFA studios Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure):
— I°I¦¦¦¦2021¦I¦¦¦|I I I I蟬鳴:¦¦|I°°|¦|I (@TironStefan) May 19, 2021
Although there is a lot of aesthetic appetite for the retro futuristic Former East, its communist monumental art, brutalism and mosaics, there are very few detailed popular accounts about how pop cult was the future or space exploration during the Cold War. In retrospect, we are left with an openly nostalgic (Ostalgie – how it is called somehow disparagingly in Germany) feeling, as well as a lot of, I guess, normal misunderstandings about a period mostly labeled as a broken dystopia, a period of cultural creative and artistic censorship. In the eyes of the aggressively individualistic and ‘free speech’, a transgressive present, it all seems uber-controlled, stiffing, with education and history suffering from propaganda, party and state- induced inaccuracies and biases. It is really to fixate on Stasi terror Cold War or ’empty idealism’ since there really existed a repressive state surveillance, human rights abuses etc These of course existed and nobody needs to deny them. Cringe is ok, even ridiculing, but then nihilism and cynicism are at the order at the day every day. It is harder and harder to entertain any kind of ideals, other than ‘futurism’ or singularity as dictated corporate leaders (Elon Musk or Bezos entrepreneur ‘genius’ types) CEOs and their overbearing visions of how the future should be shaped and in who’s image. Promethean – ‘besting and bending nature’ to our will is clearly not the way, yet common will and reason must still have to weigh in if we are to somehow mitigate what mostly Western ‘growth’ has already done to the planet. Thus, under critical and trying times, it is becomes hard to acknowledge there was a playful side, a dreamy side and one that considered cooperation and pacifism as the precondition for space exploration, or avoiding the worst of the worst here on Earth. Visions of the East bloc Utopia are not a bloc, and are naive in any way, they are informed by a certain scientifically-informed outlook, of changing emotions and hopes in regard to the progressive fragility of modern human civilization as a whole, at a particular juncture, a difficult turning point characterized by that very modern separation of the ‘space of experience’ from the ‘horizon of expectation’ (highlighted in the work of German historian of Enlightenment and Modernity Reinhart Koselleck, especially his Futures Past). Our whole collective experience as an entire species, one might say of humanity as a whole, has not prepared us for what is around the corner, the existential risks around the next bend. This might mean unprecedented space exploration, material improvements, a more egalitarian space living, unusual and unsuspected medical & technological amenities, as well as the incredible and unprecedented material and ecological threats, that none of our ancestors experiences or current experiences can prep us for what’s coming. These split, the split between the lived and accumulated experience of previous generation and what lies ahead was particularly prominent in the XX East bloc, ex-Socialist, ex-Communist -call them what u want countries and political systems. This dissociation of the future from both present and the past – has, I think also characterized and formed these anxieties and hopes that animate and infuse these East German movies.
While the above cannot be ruled out, there is the exactly opposite feeling that experience, however slight and remote, back here on earth, can somehow introduce us to somehow that is beyond immediate reach, transforming us here on earth trough mutual communal play. That we, as communal playful primates can practice and the enjoy is essential in a period of tremendous technological & scientific changes. This happens whenever we have to face the future together. Yes technological and scientific overdrive – was popular in Soviet east, heavy ‘Taylorist’ industrialization started with Lenin, Chernobyl events immediately followed suit, catching up with the West and war against nature made sure the collapse came earlier than planned, but ecological and environmental (as well as what we would call X-Risk) thinking was also making strides. Especially during the long 1980s, the last gasp of those divergent regimes was reworked and visible in SF bookd amd movies. Some Socialist SF movies already started showing the dirty side of things, moving away from the totalizing ‘Star Trek’ futures, acknowledging there is pollution, there’s a visible tear & wear of progress and technological betterment, and the fact that the post-apocalyptic times or xenoplanetary worlds might be quite un-heroic, with ego-maniacal rulers, neo colobialism, and various forms of slavery, racism and sexism still very much alive. Even as a space faring civilisation you still had to recharge a spaceship’s hyperdrive from (sic!) – proto-technological remains such as a pair or phosphorus smeared matchsticks (like in Soviet Kin-Dza-Dza 1986). This planetary future was to be experienced, not just dreamed or read about in SF books, and one that cannot be faced as nations nor as corporate entities, not even as people or as a single species, nor race, gender, sex, origin and birth – should be made a priority. This universalist call it what u want – program, grand plan, vision, dream, etc has been a motor for a lot of very unlikely cosmic visions, from the Pioneer playgrounds, school visits, children’s books, TV programs etc. This was a practice foremost – of imaginary exercises in schools, during classes, in kindergartens, when one had to write and think in terms of the year 2000, write an essay about what one would do or one’s children would do in that incoming future! Everything was suffused (at certain periods more than others for sure) with the livable qualities of this kind of starry eye program, the idea that you can participate via present into a future. That you or your group of school friends are some small part of something much more grandiose that makes even the usually drab, scarcity prone and usually defective Socialist present livable. It was almost the runaway- dreaming of the weirdo Russian cosmists (Tsyolkovsky, Fyodorov etc) and shameless avantgarde lofty ideals but turned into something more humble, more terrestrial, (DIT) DoItTogether in a way that was not deffered (no waiting!), but constantly living it and experiencing it in the Now. There is a lot of nostalgia industry nowadays, although noirish 1940 nostalgia adds a different layering to – and makes retrowave cyberpunk post-Marxist itself divergent, diverging further more from a complacent belief in unlimited progress as such. Marvel is peddling tons of nostalgia, just thinking about WW84 or Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, yet calls about “retrofuturism” obscure the fact that what we are properly speaking about is not a nostalgia about something gone, something used up, but for the future – of valuing not just what was or is, but what could have been; those unrealized (maybe even more and more unachievable at the present moment) potentialities that coexist and suffuse what has happened or happening. What they lacked in action, plotline or even cerebrality, or the usual Kaboom competitive strife & big Star Wars fireworks, these Eastern SF flicks provided a vague, general background, a substrate on which a programmatically (much too rosy &) hopeful, universalist (in spite of everything – colonialism, imperialism, racism, instrumental reason, carbon ideology, patriarchy etc) belief that one can skip exotic bananas (as one of the SF writers in the movie reminisces), in order to entertain the possibility of contributing to exoplanetary adventures. At the same time, this strain of SF was not good at dealing with the past, especially the East German past during the WWII, or the way a recent past as much as an older past still lingers or may affect present outcomes and futural imaginings. Still, what Utopia in Babelsberg Studios manages to evaluate or value is that is is possible to approach such imaginings without fetishizing them. We are mostly thinking about Hollywood as the preeminent dream machine, even now in the rise of China Hollywoods seem to bend and become reinvested in the Chinese Dream. This makes me(and probably others) curious, since, like Frankfurter School cultural pessimism always maintained, Hollywood is too much real and not very much dreaming. It was never about dreaming, but about repeatedly selling the same waking nightmares or recycled capitalist tropes as realities in the form of dreams.
“When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all.”
This is probably one of the most important documentaries to address many issues that are not any longer strictly the domain of SF. Cod Bias is definitely within the bounds of any socially inflected SF worlds u can think of. Maybe it used to be just the figment of dystopian – Cold War tinged imagination, but now it is very much part of ours. Made me actually mentally revisit theat primordial Silicon Valley 1984 promo – the ad for Apple Macintosh PC released in December 1983. Feels puzzling how this new televised technological muscle was part of a much wider and concerted Reaganite response to the -(still) Socialist East. ‘Free World’ computing as easily turned and facing off the eponymous Orwellian 1984 villain, a drab, grey, docile citizenry of the standardized monolithic solid-state, the ideological ‘other’ where a repressive & monstrous surveillance apparatus – (be it Securitate/Stasi) enforced obedience & ‘rightminding’. Only that, in retrospect, the newly competitive Silicon Valley product was a launch-pad for a much wider privacy Dragnet and much more insidious scope and certainly fancier in looks & design. Buying into a system of personal, automated & generalized consumer surveillance that also brought the pretense of neutral, un-biased coding.
Coded Bias documentary is the strongest advocacy of algorithmic justice i have seen, watched or heard of. A critical introduction to the current algo-capitalistic trends & as well as some of the ways needed to counter act AI-supported disparities & disenfranchisement. It is no mystery that you actually need people from across the board, including industry ppl (call them what u want, ex- Quants/former flash trading brokers, tech renegades, whistle-blowers, technological deserters, industry watchdogs, etc). Yes, not only EFF members, STEMs, geeks and blerds, but also people from the social housing blocks, the hood, the street corner youngsters and those with migrant-background – those that are primary targets and have been already mis-measured, data stripped and data mined and whose bodies and faces are literally the training grounds of computational modernity. Most of them, are the unwilling informants and unpaid trainers of emerging tech deployments that under-girds surveillance capitalism.
One of the most important takes from this documentary – was for me the counter-intuitive demonstration that goes against old cyberpunk sayings (paraphrasing: ‘the future is already here but it is just unequally distributed’). In the 21st c we learn time and time again, that the 1%, or 10% or the rich, powerful and wealthy are not the future’s bleeding knife- since they have mostly lived live of unfettered privacy and non data retention. They are not a tested minority, and clearly not the ones who get first unwanted access beforehand and do not suffer the effects of those things that will get distributed later one a vast scale. In fact (as one of the participants of Coded Bias points out) – the post-apocalyptic poor, the unprotected, those with previous histories of discrimination, enslavement, incarceration, abusive family background, profiling etc those already under some state of surveillance, registration and control (ID checked mostly in terms of constituting some form of risk), are the ones who suffer the blunt of these new technologies.
They are the un-glamorized testers of unequal futures, and not the privileged rich beta testers that mostly seem to opt-out of their own companies technological wonders. Accordingly, technological transformation is so important that it should not be defined just in terms of access – or left at the whim of company board members, Big Tech, Innovation hubs or ‘smart’ city planners & cheerleaders. It is not just a question of ‘users’ – since it is about the ‘used’ more than the users nowadays. It is – without nostalgia or pre-technological naivity in tow, that in spite – of these tremendous and complex planetary changes, legislation and lobbying for digital rights & accountability seems to lag behind, since both public attention and consciousnesses gets bypassed. Direct oversight and regulation or consciousness itself seems so trivial, and yet it is constantly remade into a threshold to be bypassed by the free markets & mantras hailing for ‘disruptive’ transgressions. Nonetheless, there is this incredible alliance and (as seen below) a lot of initiatives have sprung up, that espouse not just a neo-Luddite conviction, but one of tekk-savvyness, informed by the above ‘renegades’and industry insiders and/or burnouts as well, by previous historical black liberation examples as by the new empowering SF alternate histories (i see some clear signs of Wakanda there) having been written (thinking about Solomon Rivers,Nalo Hopkins and Nisi Shawl & others here) or waiting to be written in collaboration with automated text generators or not.
There is emerging calls from both government and by popular demand to at least be able to opt-out of these technologies in the US and EU (face recognition being just the most obvious case), altough I’m not sure about the vast majority of the world (which is clearly not from the Global North) or even the accelerating use & deployment of drone wars & DARPA abroad in the wake of protracted but inevitable US retreat from Afghanistan. There of course the possibility to learn how optical governance works or is put to use/abused in other parts of the world, since the West does not hold the monopoly over AI. China, in particular is an interesting divergence, since machine vision has been widely rolled out by the CCP via its social credit score, as well as being repurposed from below during the Pandemic response. SF has been historically very wary with attempts to modulate or influence behaviors such as behaviourism, to tuning or pegging controls or strong emotional responses towards a common good (Just think of swath of movies from Equilibrium 2002 to Brave New World 2020 or the new Voyagers 2021). ‘Brainwashed’, ‘the Manchurian Candidate’ etc are just a few of the inherited standard fear responses churned by both Cold War warriors, strategists, Pentagon brass and the run of the mill Hollywood movie output whenever they tried to depict or describe actual, imagined or suspected ideological traitors and US army deserters. ‘Brainwashing’ especially was made up into a sort of explain-all – to cover a whole range of ‘enemy'(past & present) responses, as the only possible logical explanation for the divergent behavior of former US troops (many of them black) who decided to opt-out of the racist US capitalist system after living as POW (during Korean War). When former army personnel decided to question, defect & live outside their bounds they must have been ‘brainwashed’, especially if they happened to be choosing Mao’s China for a while (a forgotten history detailed with tremendous wit in Julia Lowell’s fascinating book: Maoism: A Global History 2020) instead of racism back home or in the army. Change of mind and qualms about incoming orders also equals treason as we know from the case of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning or Edward Snowden.
In a rare and courageous move – The White Space (Machine/Ancestral Night duology) space opera universe of Elizabeth Bear avoids the usual ‘brainwashing’ suspicion of previous SF dystopian conventions by offering exactly what so much canonic SF eschews. It opens the possibility of a wide, non-coercive future galactic union where every human (altough the union is made by many non-sapient but sentient syster species) has the option to decide how much it alters, allows or wants to dial-down or fine-tune (what amounts to certain AI assisted ‘mindfulness’) a central nervous system evolved to automatize responses to emotional distress. Changing developmental patterns etc including universal non-coercive(!) access (called “bumping” in the novel) to what amounts to puberty blockers is not automatically a bad thing or a monstrous unnatural hybristic act(altough there’s libertarian privateers who think so in that universe like in ours)!
White Space opens up a way to modulate, discuss and deal in other ways with trauma, isolation, addiction, puberty, dysphoria, sex or gender assignment by birth etc bypassing automatic, hormonal or non-cognitive ‘habitual’ responses, being able to imaginatively limit violent behaviors at a minimum. Curbing willingly so much of what is anti-social behavior was apparently frowned upon even in that far future, but there’s room for so much more. It’s of course always important to pay attention to who decides what and when one misbehaves or when disobedience becomes accepted & when not. Of course there is a thin line, and there are those who want to skip and actively propagate opting out of the opting out. Body (non modification) extremists surely exist in that future that deem it sacrilegious to intervene or to dabble with ‘natural’ responses, while acting (on whole) quite egoistically and self-centered. In this galactic union – new forms of piratical freeports keep offshoring resources and escaping the central taxing authority, thus harboring non-mindfulness terrorism arising in response to a largely benefic mental & emotional tuning widely available. Even if coding bias into hardware based on white wetware bias is the main focus of Coded Bias, it ultimately supports a malleable wetware-hardware continuum that allows for modulation and even requires it.
Black-boxing of the operative logics of machine vision or acknowledging that machinic cognition or decisionality is essentially collaborative, not isolated, nor impervious to questioning, thus, cannot just settle for the human/nonhuman or creator/created, nonhuman/posthuman binaries. It feels very wrong, since it closes down our own sensitivity either to the same old repackaged as new, or to a newer wider & largely collaborative nonhuman ‘worldy sensiblity’ that is always risks being tipped towards whiteness and reactive toxicity if left unattended. Microsoft’s Tay 2016 chatbot that developed 24h a proclivity for hate speech is a test in case. It’s not just the simple powerful logic of trash in trash out, but of how easily this tipping point might be achieved today under trolling & targeted attacks. At the same time, one should never loose sight of other machinic bridges &conceptually as well as emotionally more progressive examples that developed as part of writing practices & modernist techniques such as automatic writing or Alan Turing’s automated Loveletter generator.
One cannot unbox anything in a straightforward way, since Shalini Kantayya’s diverse cast of protagonists and invited guests make clear that not even programmers or makers do not understand how the AI does what it does. One more thing cannot be remedied with just more data, simply more information. Even acknowledging that we can fully understand those internal processes, we can still feel trh results, see the hard facts and harsh reality whenever these AIs tend to ignore black and brown or female faces. AIs do need some deep unlearning in order to ‘re-educate'(not such a bad word) themselves and make sure they will not act out just the mathematical sums of the worst of the worst and select by default for the chosen few while deselecting everybody else.
Pushing the logic of this documentary, it is time to find out more about how decisions, ‘chance’, contingency may still be directed so as to redistribute luck on a more equal way in an increasingly unequal world economy. Economy is itself futurism served frozen & pre-cooked, and different debt ridden lives and widely different futures are being handed down, bent along pre-selected trajectories, trajectories that are being doctored (who cares if knowingly or unknowingly, intentionality is always ulterior anyway) actively make impossible the lives of a majority. A ‘pan-selectivity’ needs yo be developed that refuses yo be ‘gamed’ easily and influenced only by the influent few armed with predictive algorithms – at the tip of a capitalistic drive that actualizes every potential out there, no matter how horrific and brutal as long as it pays dividends.
Like probably any ideological formation – bias is not just invisible, it probably maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but this should not stop us trying to change it and actively imagine what’s to be done. Bias seems to work and act by being unspecified, invisibilized, left out of the loop. Again, like ideology, it is the missing mass that bends everything according to its set of preemptive expectations, almost like a constant enactment of a single, unilateral inner experience, making itself ubiquitous. Bias is not simply an apparently whimsical conceit, it is not just a pre-programmed part of the system, but something that needs to be enforced, hard-coded and programmed at every level of future decision making, at ever threshold of resistance.
Bias is made seemingly non-existent each time output and prediction is put at a premium. If if blaring, it feels like an itch you cannot scratch, because it starts to seem so intrinsic & para-systemic. Technology or AI is not neutral nor is inherently bad it gas been often said, and it is getting as bad or worse or as good as the whole context/environment allows it, or the drift promoting it keeps on pushing it, or as long as the coded ideals and values are what they are. Remember even if everything is being turned into ‘driver-less’-everything, it’s not less of driven- market economy.
We can not see it and measure it because its effects are measured on those who are made to matter less and less, on those ‘others’ that even the states, law or constitution does not seem to ‘notice’ or care for any longer. It is easier to wave bias aside, to bring undigested misconstructions on board and heap them on top of those being distributed the loosing lots, the bad seats(if any), and even if those stories just give you bad dreams, goosebumps, depression or severe need to disconnect from another’s catastrophic or already dystopian reality. So this necessitates different, collective and directed research approaches & coordinated effort to ‘black boxing’ so many current decisional processes. There’s also a different venue (not tackled in Coded Bias) – a sort of related QWERTY bias, of path dependencies whenever we have historically & incrementally built conventional (man-made) computational infrastructures. This ‘convention’ not only only stands in the way of more evolutionary – developmentally inclusive, unconventional approaches to computation & computing, but might leave out or blind us to other venues or other modes of problem solving existing or evolved (as those investigated by Andrew Adamatsky studying maze-solving slime molds). While most computation & research nowadays follows old & certainly well-tested arhitectures, it only builds upon existing & specific constraints – all too human ones we might add, moreover a very restrictive & biased account of what counts as ‘human’ (amply documented throughout Coded Bias), one that both engineering and coding seems to take as granted. ‘Worth’ – in a constantly devalorizing environment becomes constantly threatened, at the same time we should welcome the erosion of old, gendered biased and individualistic notions of singular genius(unmoved mover?) and farcical ‘great men’ through our plural AI – human interactions.
Coded Bias gets the highest marks in advocating for an A.I.X -research, attempting to build an explainable artificial intelligence, a research that should be aware of ‘artificial unintelligence'(Meredith Broussard), as well as to demands that humans hone their response-ability (Haraway), both allowing for aesthetic, epistemologic and ethical responsiveness whenever technological 21st upgrades and optimizations start pouring in.
You do not need to be a tech expert to advocate for algorithmic justice. These basic terms are a good foundation to inform your advocacy. For a more detailed breakdown of how facial recognition works, see the guide titled Facial Recognition Technologies: A Primer from the AJL. For more on surveillance, see the Community Control Over Police Surveillance: Technology 101 guide from the ACLU.
Algorithmic justice. Exposing the bias and harms from technical systems in order to safeguard the most marginalized and develop equitable, accountable, and just artificial intelligence.
Benchmark. Data set used to measure accuracy of an algorithm before it is released.
Bias. Implicit or explicit prejudices in favor of or against a person or groups of people.
Artificial intelligence (AI). The quest to give computers the ability to perform tasks that have, in the past, required human intelligence like decision making, visual perception, speech recognition, language translation, and more.
Big data. The mass collection of information about individuals who use personal technology, such as smartphones.
Biometric technology. Uses automated processes to recognize an individual through unique physical characteristics or behaviors
Black box. A system that can be viewed only through its inputs and outputs, not its internal process.
CCTV. Closed-circuit television cameras are used by institutions to record activity on and around their premises for security purposes.
Civil rights. A broad set of protections designed to prevent unfair treatment or discrimination in areas such as education, employment, housing, and more.
Code. The technical language used to write algorithms and other computer programs.
Data rights. Referring to the human right to privacy, confidentiality, and ethical use of personal information collected by governments or corporations through technology
Data set. The collection of data used to train an algorithm to make predictions.
Due process. The right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without proper legal proceedings, protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A data rights law in the European Union that requires technology users consent to how their data is collected and prohibits the sale of personal data.
Facial recognition. Technologies – a catchall phrase to describe a set of technologies that process imaging data to perform a range of tasks on human faces, including detecting a face, identifying a unique individual, and assessing demographic attributes like age and gender.
Machine learning. An approach to AI that provides systems the ability to learn patterns from data without being explicitly programmed.
Racism. The systematic discrimination of people of color based on their social classification of race, which disproportionately disadvantages Black and Indigenous people of color.
Recidivism risk assessment – Automated decision making system used in sentencing and probation to predict an individual’s risk of future criminal behavior based on a series of data inputs, such as zip code and past offenses.
Sexism. The systematic discrimination of women and girls based on their social categorization of sex, which intersects with racism for women and girls of color.
Social credit score. An AI system designed by the Communist Party of China that tracks and analyzes an individual’s data to assess their trustworthiness.
Surveillance. The invasive act of monitoring a population to influence its behavior, done by a government for law and order purposes or by corporations for commercial interests.
Value-added assessments. Algorithms used most commonly to evaluate teachers by measuring student performance data.
Voice recognition. An application of AI technology that interprets and carries out spoken commands and/or aims to identify an individual based on their speech patterns.
TimeSpace Warps 