2404 – The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF (the Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience) I+II part (2024)

I am indebted to Rusty Foster to these incredible pastiches of Adam Curtis.

“Silvia Dal Dosso predicts that The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF but the present is already in the past and the weird future ahead is here right now.”

SCAM FACTORIES

Yes, magicians, managers, and PR agents have always multiplied illusions to our disadvantage, but what if technology and innovation do not enhance reality but make scams even easier? Can one detach AI from what is happening in the actual geopolitical ‘shatter belt’ – like Myanmar (which is completely overshadowed by the ongoing genocide committed by Israel in Palestine). Nobody even talks about this region that used to be associated just with the Golden Triangle drug trafficking. From the Rohingya massacre to the Myanmar civil war, there is increasing instability and organized crime spilling over into China – but also fake gambling towns built overnight posing as “fake” part of the Road & Belt Initiative BRI – China’s and currently the world’s most ambitious infrastructure project. Also, fake job offers are becoming more and more sophisticated. It would be uncomplete to ignore how hustle culture online scamming and human trafficking have transformed into an industry since COVID. The Chinese movie “No More Bets” – was turned into an unlikely diplomatic success. While initially banned by several SE Asian countries the movie managed to bring about cooperation in “combating transnational crime and promoting cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region”. 

MACHINE LEARNING ILLUSIONISM

Machine learning consumes a lot of energy. It also seems to hallucinate a lot and upset a lot of people. What are we to do with this unregulated proliferation of illusions, deceptions, and mimicry in an era of post-post-post-post truth? Is it ok if AI offloads dreams and nightmares on us? Is this another externality? Does it matter if it gets powered by the sun’s seemingly inexhaustible energy? Or it doesn’t even matter what we think anyway since our energy thirst is just unstoppable – 20th-century industries and Carbon Technocracies have helped design our insatiable and energophage present. And then there is Oliver Stone promising us that nuclear power is the answer to the climate crisis and that several of his friends are working on it. Yeah, and seriously why blame Oliver Stone for cozying up with dictators when powerful CEOs dream of becoming absolutist monarchs and anti-state monarchists (Reichsbürger) are conspirationists with a pedigree? How is it that would-be emperors are invited as speakers and anarcho-capitalists cryptobros meetings, well maybe the answer is that technobros are actually turning the neocon world into a simulation theory by actualizing a form of the Truman Show.

It is weird as fuck already, and tomfoolery is the order of the day. AI hype boosterism combined with a good dose of deep fake scare is making things feel irrecoverable and irretrievable fucked. How to build up a coherent video of all the AI rampage and hyperbolic BS out there? Well, Silvia Dal Dosso demonstrates just that. Documentarists seem relegated to the trashbin of history because even Hypernormalisation sounds passé. Well, let us see what morphings and monstrous becomings entice and grab our attention. Who then will also offer us a fluctuating lifeboat through AI sludge and is this really unprecedented? As the YT video shows, animals were always cheating, fooling around and with each other. Octopi are masters at camouflaging themselves. Game theorists were always trying to find how cooperation developed, how animals (or plants, or viruses) evolved, and found ways to counter cheating, and the reality is that both mutualism and cheating promote multifarious complexity and deception is always a sign of intelligence no? (check Frans de Waal) At the same, there is a need for a broader genealogy of decision-making, the reconceptualization of reason, decision-making, and “freedom” – that for Orit Halpern “underpins contemporary relations between machine learning, reactionary politics, and neoliberal economics“. A change that he locates between 1950 – 1970 and that “systems might change and adapt nonconsciously”.

Play is everywhere, but today’s neoliberal regime has made it very easy for cheaters by deregulating (“desire for unsupervised learning in nets and the agglomeration of ever larger data sets” – Orit Halpern).  Everything was a bet on industries and corporations that would self-regulate and self-organize. Well, that almost never happens. When things get so tragic it is hard not to feel we’re at the butt of the AI jokes. We are hunted down by constant doppelganger effects, and it feels like Techgnosis and High Weirdness researchers Erik Davis and Naomi Klein critics of shock therapy and destruction capitalism meet on the same page of irreducible weirdness and farce.

Scams are innate to capitalism, and Eastern European countries entered capitalism by being exposed to nation-wide multiple pyramid schemes. Oligarchy in the East was born out of that and “financially illiterate East Europeans” became easy prey. On the other hand in a heavily mediated online world people are being now scammed precisely when they look for EXPERIENCE (aka unmediated and immediate immersion), AI -technology-empowered scammers had a field day since COVID struck and many developed into corporate-size businesses (not to say that corporations aren’t themselves overvalued scams). So it is not what tech billionaires are warning about – but simply put capitalism + AI = turbo-charging scamming. Already voice-assisted and image-assisted distress signals are being used to scam parents out of their savings.

Mimicking Adam Curtis does the trick but also completely outperforms Curtis at his best game – The Future Ahead will Be Weird is as weird as Fuck and dangerous as Fuck (to quote Whitehead) is a rare good addition, building up on all the online fake deluge and even historicizing it. Watch it laugh and despair!

2174 – After Blue aka Dirty Paradise (2022)

spacetime coordinates: on a distant Earth-like called After Blue planet in the far far future

directed by Bertrand Mandico (famous for Wild Boys made in 2017).

Synopsis: “In a faraway future, on a wild and untamed female inhabited planet called After Blue, a lonely teenager named Roxy (Paula Luna) unknowingly releases a mystical, dangerous, and sensual assassin from her prison. Roxy and her mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) are held accountable, banished from their community, and forced to track down the murderer named Kate Bush. Haunted by the spirits of her murdered friends, Roxy sets out on a long and strange journey across the supranatural territories of this filthy paradise. The newest vision from Bertand Mandico (The Wild Boys) plays like a lesbian El Topo (in space!) with stunning 35mm in-camera practical effects, otherworldly set pieces, and a dazzling score by Pierre Desprats.”

If there is somebody or someone who takes further the tradition of Euro-sleaze or Euro-trash tradition to new (exoplanetary) heights, then it must be Bertrand Mandico. What has been usually dismissed as a “low brow” form of European entertainment cinema under various labels of either Giallo (visually immersive and excessive Italian mystery/horror), or Euro-spy or Eurocop movie has also had a few Euro horror sci-fi gems (think Mario Bava) completely falling under what Linda Williams has called ‘body genres’ (the weepies, pornographic and horror movies). Combining softcore porn camp iconography with day-glo FX and artificial lighting (black-light or fluorescent makeup) results in a completely neo-psychedelic dirty mystical experience that has an abstruse plot and that basically screams altered states with every shot. The whole movie seems a collection of obsessions (including a Kate Bush mania that seems unrelated to the recent Stranger Things revival) – and it looks and feels more sword & sorcery than science fiction. In my mind, it has more to do with a recent neo-Ralph Bakshiesque animation – that I have been reviewing here. There is also something familiar to Andrzej Zulawski‘s Silver Globe planetary crash landing future & semi mystical science fiction (revived by Raised by the Wolves or Battlestar Galactica?) – in its insistence that the future might not be just about boys and their high tech gimmicks but also about nakedness, visions, dirt, rags and bricoleurs.

It is really a plot I could not follow (maybe because I stuck with the French original – which left me completely spell-bound and suspended in this excessive lava-lamp imagery) – and somehow was hard to take in all female witches, their obscure conflicts and the various unrealistic ham characters that seemed not only to pop out of nowhere but also be explicitly & thankfully out of tune with today’s SF canon. It all gave me a slight feeling of nausea that seems to pervade (for me) this whole cinematic Mandico experience. I somehow was not able to watch the whole movie and was drifting in and out of it, almost like I just wanted to wake up and see if I could randomly piece it together or if everything would melt down in a shimmering haze.

Finally, the slightly familiar & utterly strange exo-planetary landscapes did not just feel made-up or artificial but also touchable and an expansion of inner worlds and possibly LSD-drenched trips. They are not just green screen filming backdrops added in post-production (like the majority of today’s lavish special effects movies) by anonymous studios but hand-made spectacles of low-brow alien-made (?!) candor and uneasy (sleazy) embodiment. Maybe this is about glamour and ‘the auratic’ after effects of celebs in the age of digital (post-mechanical) reproduction (pace W Benjamin) – a bit like in Blood Machines (another recent Frenchwave SF ‘sploitation directed Raphaël Hernandez, Seth Ickerman, Savitri Joly-Gonfard which combines a lot of actual props with hand-made sets and FX), After Blue delights in simple light effects, low illusionism and practical effects reminiscent of Georges Méliès early SF (like Jules Verne inspired Trip to the Moon 1902). They are elaborate yet basic imaginary (more like dime show) sets that belie all the current high-budget CGI showoffs mega-spectacles (think Marvel blockbusters). In its literary form, I find this sensibility familiar to the one that combines seamlessly inner and outer landscapes in such recent SF works as Chris Beckett’s Beneath the World, A Sea.