I am a bit wary of Cory Doctorow‘s abruptly downward curve of “enshittification” since, as Richard Barbrook has been mentioning (at least since 1995), the shit was there since the beginning, altough there is always room for more. By beef is with this “Suddenly” in the title, I am a bood ol’ catastrophist (in paleontological terms) but a gradualist when it is about good or bad or worsening tech. Like the Gilded Age barons, today’s broligarchs are hardened capitalists, fed by public money and always ready to deny that. Claiming newness, “suddenness”, “acceleration,” and urgency has some merit in today’s distraction-addled world, but then we miss the continuities, the relevant dialectics, and historical tensions that coexist and exacerbate all the time. What is not is that much of the techno-optimism is gone, and what is left risks inflating into some huge economic bubble ready to burst.
But as always, who can actually argue against his well-documented examples of why it has been very hard not to see all the current spaces of platform capitalism as a benchmark case for what is wrong with Bit Tech. Not to say he is the only one to look toward or read under such shitty circumstances, but at least he does not peddle the techno-feudalism line everywhere, mentioning that capitalism is over or that. Degrading the user experience, maximizing profits, and treating users as prisoners on their platforms isn’t anything new; it is just that now it is being experienced at all levels and much more acutely because the tech monopolies are well-established. What is bitterly funny is that suddenly, the trouble with deregulation and the need for disciplining is again on the table. Nobody ever tried to discipline the Tech behemoths that are so eager to ass kiss Trump, and in a way, disciplining such uber-rich crazy rich spoiled brats becomes impossible nowadays using democratic institutions. Instead of a Big Green State, in fact, countries have been handing more and more to the private sector with disastrous outcomes. As digital theorist Alexander R. Galloway wrote in an excellent review of David Gollumbia’s cyberlibertarianism, all the signs were there when deregulatory measures, the embrace of non-hierarchical disorder (0ut of Control), and the rhetoric of computer liberation instituted a new order, as robust as the old and maybe even more difficult to budge since it now arrives driverless in the form of uberization.
This is a second movie I watched as part of the Berlinale attempt to bring back some old German (forgotten) classics. For today’s taste – this DDR /DEFA (East German film studios) comedy might seem quaint, incredibly silly and cringe. Yet, like everything that came out the former DDR, pop materials included it never got a wider audience.
Most East German authors (theatre, literary, etc ), cultural materials are still suffering from a lack of exposure, a lack of interest, and a general inability of today’s Germany cultural establishment to find a way to bring them back or analyze them in some form like other products – say B movies or genre cinema.
This has been a very critical lack – one that has to do with East Germany’s subaltern status since the reunification and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Today the extreme right party Afd holds a majority in the former East Block part of the land (with a few notable exceptions namely Leipzig), and in spite of how West Germans portray the situation (as a failed investment basically), Eastern federal parts have lagged behind the West economically and also been completely sidelined in the governmental and cultural sphere. But there are timid signs that this is changing.
You can blame the previous ‘political’ taint, the totalitarian past, the inability to adapt to the market economy, or the historical persistance of high vote shares for the Nazi party in the late 1920s/early 1930s had also higher vote shares for the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party in 2016/17 state elections, and many such explanations.
But I think one of the most consistent is still a bad (unequally) distributed fruits of the German reunification. Thinking about today’s techno-fascist push for annihilation or shackling the state in the US – I think the east German example is crucial in that sense. What happened with East Germany TREUHAND pop-up institution privatizing overnight and bringing ‘efficiency’ into East German industries and cooperatives very much anticipates what happens now with the DOGE takeover department in the US.
Wages, academic careers and titles, cultural productions, everything got largely scrapped, sold or thrown into the dustbin of history without much ado and consideration. Today’s inequality still largely cuts through to the older East/West cleavage. To be sure, the morphing of the ordo-liberalism (the German version of economic liberalism) into straight neoliberalism and market extremism has contributed to today’s fascist rise as many economists point out today.
Anyway, I am not neutral in here, so here are a few points of my assessment of Carnations in Aspik:
It is a very strange, whimsical and self-ironic movie about having a central Advertising institution in a State Socialist country like DDR, a complete contradiction at first sight, is at the heart of this absurdist comedy. But if one follows an analysis as that proposed by Fritz Bartel in The Triumph of Broken Promises is how differently the East and the West have justified austerity politics (which according to Samir Amin is endemic to the capitalist system) imposition after the Oil Shock of the early 1970s. If one follows this, then the East’s socialist countries and their fairly egalitarian societies existed in a kind of hiatus in the 1970s, on borrowed time so to say, because their entire economy depended on low URSS energy prices (under the market value). A provision based on Cold War ideological alliances and quid pro quo between ‘brother countries’. DDR and the rest of the East did not swim in a vacuum but they had all these dependecies – (here comes depedency theory), they actually had to sell their products (good or bad, faulty or not) on the world capitalist market for cash (aka dollars) since the whole world economy was dollarized.
I also appreciate the open portrayal of sexual relations in the movie, take it as propaganda or an answer to the usual stereotypes that communism and sexuality don’t make good bed partners, but the active role of women comrades is visible in the movie, altough all comradely sexual options seem binary and cisgender. At home or at work, Schmidt portrays a sort of alternative masculine subjectivity, able to talk his way out of everything but able to shut up. He is not machoistic, nor assertive, nor sexually prolific even if he gets the girl or rather Cilly gets him. Of course, all seems to be geared towards reproduction under state socialism – so it is reproductive futurism of sorts, sex appears as completely mundane. Anyway, it is an interesting cinematic example of the East German GDR had better sex discussion.
In the movie, the hapless advertising agent Wolfgang Schmidt (played by the excellent German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl – who also had a memorable role in The Thirteenth Floor 1999 SF movie) constantly has to make ends meet in a Mangelwirtschaft (scarcity economy). He not only missed a few front teeth, but is always in a kind of race to invent new ways to sell Eastern products in the West. The movie is full of zany humour (in Sianne Ngai’s optic), a kind of constant foolishness, of loosing it, Eulenspiegel “zanni” in the stock characters of commedia dell’arte, sixteenth century Italian theater – beause the origins of “zanni was traditionally an itinerant worker “defined by a specifically nonspecific work: personal services provided in the household on a temporary basis.” There is a constant fluidity – and polimorphic ability to change professions, and Schmidt is “the zany character with the multitude of roles s/he is able to take on and the frenetic speed with which s/he transfers from one to another.”
I really liked the fake mistaken visits to the West. Schmidts gets sent to some San Franciso computing fair to sell some East German electronics, but ends up doing a mad Pittiplatsch und Schnatterinchen puppet TV show (known to all East German spectators at the time) for the American customers, because (in a typical slapstick manner) his luggages gets mixed up with an actual DDR puppeteer going to a Tokyo fair. Schmidt ends up saving the situation – making this strange Mechanical Turk show with fake robots (he pulls the levers and strings and manages to entertain the Americans) and even selling a Pittipatsch production to some archetypical Texan plutocrat, while his East German colleague sells transistors to the Japanese puppet fair. Like any good commie – Schmidt realizes he can’t play level field under capitalism. Nobody in the East Block could afford to ignore the economic system and world market. Who can afford such moralist views when you’re betting against the house in the capitalist casino?
One can ask, is this all an immense joke about planned economy? Is it a pun about Mad Men in Socialist DDR? The attempt to satisfy the “creative” needs of a paradoxical advertising agency fails in a strange spectacular way – a sort of whitening of the whole that seems particularly ominous if subversive (there is briefly a black foreign exchange student appearing), that almost is the reverse of the guerilla tactics developed by Vokswagen ads, and the revolution that shook the advertising world during the 1960s.
I also like that the airport in the movie is a sort of construction site, and even if we do not see very much of Berlin, there is the feeling East Germany was trying to be a bit of the model Socialist state of the East with all that ensued. In fact, everything seems propped up, a farce – trying to put up a good show for the eventual capitalist customer. Yes, this is the hard truth of the East.
Yet DDR ha to respond and make a living in a very prosperous and increasingly combative capitalist world economy armed with a sexualized libidinal economy, as well as bring forth an alternative to the gains made during the liberal sexual revolution that was sadly bound more than often with rabid anti-communist propaganda. It was a funny fact always that advertising manuals, booklets existed in Romania before 1989. In its brochures, there were various attempts at arranging showrooms and products in interesting way and even think creatively about how a good shampoo and a good detergent might have to look. The reality is that a lot of these products became quite easily recognizable brands. Was this a gauche attempt to be up to date, to be cool and hip and to respond to the whole counterculture hipsterism of the West as well as its unacommodity fetishism? One can connect this with the various attempts at Socialist Market economy (in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia), and what lessons China drew from all of this.
Schmidt and his entourage seem like a madcap fucked up satire of the capitalist advertising, were erything you say, or suggest, every joke and every prank gets somehow used as selling point. Anyway, it is not for everyone, as some of the jokes might fall flat. In a sense, the whole Socialist way of life was supposed to be a great advertisement without an advertising agency (the state and the party were enough). That being said, this is a very rare movie, and I do not think many English speaking cinema lovers will get to see it.
The final joke is a new DDR department – that centralized all errors, glitches and failures.
I was pretty sure I covered this momentous ad somewhere else. And yes I found it – it was on the occasion of reviewing Coded Bias (a documentary by Shalini Kantayya from 2020). For ease and to not be overly redundant, here is what I wrote back then. The richest man in the world has now gone full techno-fascist lately, supporting right-wing candidates all over Europe and backing Trump.
I think today the discussion around this ad is even more actual today than back then 5 years ago (and with the hindsight of 35 years). And yes, MacIntosh ad also comes from the era when Neuromancer (which I am currently reading for the first time in original), a key cyberpunk thome got published:
“Coded 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 part of ours. Made me actually mentally revisit that 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.”
TimeSpace Warps 