Goodman traces contemporary Sinofuturism, in a post-Cold War climate, to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War from the fifth century BC. “The reason why [it] is a toolbox for the ‘cutting edge’ of cybernetic capitalism, from business to military strategists, is that it contains an abstract flow chart or a fluid physics for survival ‘far from equilibrium,’ a tactics for turbulence.” Avanessian:Moalemi – Ethnofuturisms
Vexille (ベクシル 2077日本鎖国Bekushiru 2077 Nihon sakoku, full Japanese title literally “Vexille: 2077 Japanese Isolation”) is a 2007 Japanese CGIanime film, written, directed, and edited by famed Ping Pong director Fumihiko Sori, and features the voices of Meisa Kuroki, Yasuko Matsuyuki, and Shosuke Tanihara. (wiki)
A female agent named Vexille is dispatched to Tokyo to investigate whether Japanese are developing robotic technology, which has been banned by the U.N. due to its potential threat to humankind. (imdb)
As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.
In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.
From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation.
In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime. (VERSO)
Virtuosity is a 1995 American science fiction action film directed by Brett Leonard. Denzel Washington stars an imprisoned policeman whom is released to hunt down a virtual reality serial killer (Russell Crowe) whom escaped from cyberspace into the real world when he is uploaded into the body of a cyborg.
As LAPD officers gather evidence at the grisly crime scene, you can only ask yourselves: what kind of lunatic would commit such unthinkable crimes? The three adjectives which best describe this killer are sadistic, intelligent, and dangerous. (Acid Killer – Infected Mushroom)
“(…) perhaps the crash will look like a string of blockbuster movies pandering to right-wing conspiracies and survivalist fantasies, from quasi-fascist superheroes (Captain America and the Batman series) to justifications of torture and assassination (Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper). In Hollywood, studios run their scripts through the neural networks of a company called Epagogix, a system trained on the unstated preferences of millions of moviegoers developed over decades in order to predict which lines will push the right – meaning the most lucrative – emotional buttons. Their algorithmic engines are enhanced with data from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and others, whose access to the minute-by-minute preferences of millions of video watchers, combined with an obsessive focus on the acquisition and segmentation of data, provides them with a level of cognitive insight undreamed of by previous regimes. Feeding directly upon the frazzled, binge-watching desires of news-saturated consumers, the network turns upon itself, reflecting, reinforcing and heightening the paranoia inherent in the system.
Game developers enter endless cycles of updates and in-app purchases directed by A/B testing interfaces and real-time monitoring of players’ behaviours until they have such a finegrained grasp on dopamine-producing neural pathways that teenagers die of exhaustion in front of their computers, unable to tear themselves away. Entire cultural industries become feedback loops for an increasingly dominant narrative of fear and violence.”
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future