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!

2354 – Nowness։ What on Earth (2023 short)

A Golden LA production @staygoldenla

Written and Directed by Jimmy Marble @jimmymarble

I really liked this short by Jimmy Marble (never heard or seen his stuff previously). I owe these last gems to Scotto Moore (and Erik D mentioning him in his last AI and Acid Western burningshore news) recommendations on This Newsletter Cannot Save You. Since the lockdown is over everything seems to live a FOMO existence – as if to catch up with everything that could have happened but did not. Maybe it is also a celebratory mood – a sort of death’s dance after death in the midst of several bloody wars, and the quadruple number of fossil lobbyists at COP27-Glasgow. COVID isolation seems suddenly to have evaporated in a purple cloud of vacations, still I am not the only one who feels this lockdown and what came after is one of the most significant and transformative events in our lives. What do we owe to the trail of the sick and dead? I deeply recommend a comics by Julia Gfrörer translated in Romanian by Dezarticulat about plague living then and now and the ongoing Plague Poems. Julia Gfrörer comics make it transhistorical and maybe such difficult anticipative comics make it easier to move with the difficult times we live trough. But zeitgeist is also something that gets pushed away, as there was hardly a recognition of that publication in the Romanian media I am told, even by the ones who should know better and have a long-time appreciation for the sequential medium. Gonna stop here with my toothless rant. I also did not write anything about the “Una cu Pământul” Laid Waste (2017) although it came out at such a significant moment, almost too painful to commemorate for a lot who did not have the luxury of working from home or actually being able to make a living.

The What on Earth heroine wades through the amalgamation of digital and the analog that always seems incomplete. It is not Pizza Delivery mob Wars and exclusive Metaverse clubs a la Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but a lot of bundled insecurities, worldwide misunderstandings and provocations, anxietities felt on many levels. It is the impending absurdist doom and slapstick world of imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, talking lamps and mumbling plants, AI hallucinations. Where are and who are the agents of change when we are following or posting on our foodie account or trying to make the perfect Insta Marble Smoothie? This seems peak depoliticized declinism (as Poenaru puts it). Yet it is good to go look into small creations and dablings into the sticky smoothie of today. Going out in the world or “the return” has never been so difficult, alienating and dumbfounding. We have to give up on thinking that things will be the same, or that we are all going to slide back into our lives.

How to

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2275 – Free To Choose with Milton Friedman (TV series 1980)

All the episodes here.

Depending on where you stand on the political-economic spectrum – you might find (like me) this documentary enlightening but also completely horrific and appalling at the same time. One cannot watch this popular show from the early Reaganite 1980s without making it responsible for a lot the troubles we are facing today. One can describe it as incredibly farcical, hypocritical and sincere at the same time. It is a unapologetic encapsulation of what free market fundamentalism is purported to support (not what it actually is). It was primarily a response to an earlier landmark book and television series The Age of Uncertainty, by the noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

I am not posting this here in order to endorse or platform the heinous views represented and propagated here, but only because under various forms and expressions or undercurrents they are very well represented and at work all around us. Ok, cannot stop myself saying that it is also a 70s baldie porn 🙂 like one friend put it. This PBS documentary hosted by that baldie at height of his fame, a Nobel prize winner – Milton Friedman features the most known face of libertarian neoliberalism today (just consider that the Mont Pelerin Society of which he was a member called themselves proudly neoliberal way back in the 1950s!).

Hailing from the Former East, having lived through the 1990s, I have been one of these (ex-commie) socialist kids that has been raised and reeducated on free market dogma but who has lived trough Big Bang liberalization, and has seen anti statist dogma take over much of the Romanian intelligentsia. I do not think that today’s political class in Romania, with small exceptions, caters to anything less than some form of libertarian thought or pro entrepreneurial policies represented here in this documentary. Although I remember both rationing, solid education, state provided vacations in the balneo-climateric localities and the days of the planned economy where I lived my teenage years, it is hard to reconstitutie this vision today, mostly because of 30 years plus of liberalisation and free market reign dogma have wiped all that. I agree also with the fact that under containment and inner nationalistic excess Romania became more and more a sort of buffer state used by the west against Soviet Union, while Ceaușescu was courted by Kissinger and Thatcher. Also fucking hated the PTTAP exercises in front of the school even if they kept you healthy and where supposed to build up patriotic spirit. Pionieri organizations was also not for loosers with poor school track record like me. Anyway those years are indelible. Under the circumstance Romania had it easier than Russia during it’s Privatisation phase, but it was still a time of hustling, being poor and waiting for visas, losing all your saving in pyramid schemes, and witnessing how the state was being captured from the 90s on by oligarchic interests, punctured ny US military black sites and enslaved by public private /corporate deals.

It is a good bet to say that the kind of free-market libertarian militantism represented by this series and this episode, in particular, guided many governments and brought us to where we are right now, especially in terms of fighting against democracy, denying climate change and deflating politics. Since the late 70s we have seen the cavalcade of the Chicago Boys (Friedman was perhaps the most famous Chicago boy) from Chile to South Africa to Bucharest and to Moscow. The dreams of Reagan and Thatcher in the UK were spiked by the holy word of these economists. They come in several flavors – and Quinn Slobodian a historian of neoliberalism has in his last (great) book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of A World Without Democracy (2023) basically made a taxonomy of their anti democratic dreams and also made me search for this documentary series and try and watch it. Far from being the end of history the nation state was seen as an impediment in the face of the Zone. And I also mean here the Romanian Km Zero – in Piața Universității Bucharest. This used to be called anti communist zone, basically a zone free of communism and also protection. In the end the protesters from the early 90s dreamed about full capitalism.

To be precise – I wanted to watch the first chapter on Hong Kong, because it was the first on the freedom index, the fist city-state model idolized by the neoliberal free market radicals. Why? Quinn discusses at large the context of the series and of “uncle Miltie” standing smiling with the back on the HK skyline of tall thin scrapers. For many HK was just Jackie Chan, the martial arts kung fu movies or the toy industry. HK was one of the “Asian Tigers” but it was also a model for deregulation which amounted to the fact that the tiny city-state and financial capital of Asia was being ruled like a corporation. The highest position was that of an economic Chief Executive (like the CEOnof a company), more powerful than the governor (till 1997 HK was still a colony of the UK and one built initially on the Opium trade). Quinn recalls time and time again how HK became something of a mirage, the first ‘smart city’, the first example of what became plans for Hong Kong on Hudson or Hong Kong on Thames (Canary Wharf). And although it had a unique colonial history, a local history and local situation connected with the Pearl River and Guangdong, ij the minds of the free market radicals it came to be seen as eminently transplantable and easy to copy.

Basically all that because the principle of “the sweatshop” and no labor protection legislation, no voting rights – became its. key to economic success. Everything that the West forgot or lost in the words of Friedman. This reverse Orientalism (reverse in the sense that it takes all the tropes of the lazy, unchanging Orient and turns it on its head) was taken directly from the very tycoons and wealthy families who steered the city towards “prosperity”.

This is for Friedman the place where the free market is unfettered and undirected and where the states exist only to protect the interests of the investors and business elite. To be sure, and even of James Clavell Noble House is half true – it eas a den of spies and it’s corporate world was totally enmeshed in Cold War dealings. It is also the place where workers have no protection whatsoever, where the market prices signal is clear, and where you do not need any coordination from above (oh yeah the invisible hand). He does not miss any moment to poke fun at the Soviet Model and to consider HK something completely inimical to the ‘unnatural’ socialist planned economy. It is both bland and incredibly annoying to hear him express his ideas about how his mom worked in a sweatshop and how that has been the birthplace of success. While this may be true like it was for so many East European migrants, the story was also one of racism, eugenics and anti-immigration and working class struggle. Working conditions got improved with demands and growing capacity to unionize. This is completly missing. So this is basically a propaganda documentary (or a dogma) that has helped bring about a dystopia we’re living in right now. This is not sci-fi, and this is not cyberpunk, it is future inequality sold as present solution. Here we have the origin of the destruction of the welfare state, the divestment from education, ecological concerns, health, and why we lack infrastructure.

One had to lower or eliminate tariffs, offer incentives for investors and corporations, and forget about voting rights, forget about labor rights, and forget about colonialism. So ethno states and tariffs and trade wars feel anti free market only of one realizes that all the protectionist authoritarians such as Orban or Trump have actually permitted free trade only in chosen areas. The bet was to import this model and hope that the carrots (or sticks) will work out. If one wanted to be “free” (free to be poor could be another subtitle for this episode) one had to work under horrific conditions and just be infinitely adaptable, resilient, and exploitable/flexible. Voting with your feet – its the first time when this expression makes sense. HK existed because a tightly controlled pool of migrant pool was always at its disposal. It was this combination of Confucianism, lack of democracy, and unfettered capitalism that HK was exuding in the 70s and 80s. That’s why it came to be seen as the way forward for both the new turbo-charged capitalism that both US, as well as the UK and Germany, saw as the way forward out of an economic slump, generally high wages and rising oil prices. One should never forget that the so-called Californian ideology – the deregulatory thinking behind Big Tech (Musk and Co) was a subset of this school of economic thinking. Apple amd Foxconn stems as much from Friedman’s ode to the markets power to innovate and keep the labor force disenfranchised and disorganized. When Peter Thiel talks about escaping the nation state – or establishing as maby secessionist micro nations he speaks the language of free market radicals. The pattern of Global Cities had to be eminently reliable, not interested in redistribution, only in absorbing and ejecting the global flows of capital. And that is where we are now.

The Flat Tax was also basically an HK fiscal innovation that became the rule in the 1990s in the former East and a lot of the EU countries (including Germany where it is called tax brake – basically a brake on how much the state may be allowed to invest in public facilities, infrastructure, education etc). Its ideals were basically to circumvent the barriers of politics by any means and to establish “zones” of exception within the state. Fragmenting the planet and supporting the formation of micro-nations and crypto coin enclaves all over the planet (there are currently over 5400 special zones grouped into around 81 categories) was the aim of such free market radicals. Anarhapulco – the libertarian convention in Mexico was also modeled around the same ideals. We know how that turned out.

The secret story is that even in HK the government action was at work, just that this government action was never in the interest of the immigrants (cheap labor from the Chinese mainland), and all the rights were also achieved with the cost of blood (and protests from the late 60s on. There’s also a total mesh of contacts and friendships across ths border even as HK became the bottle neck and preparatory area for China’s extensive reforms. It is ironic to see this whole idea of the free market zone taking root in China and being completely overturned (hear the Adam Tooze talk) after China joined the WTO with the US became sudden gatekeeper. China had just invited the world community to join its investment bank anf Cameron eas the only one to join. This was the first crack in the US/UK pact. Suffice to say Eastern Europe (including Russia) has become the playground of ‘intentional community’ micro nation building. The Rothbardian decomposition of the state and of the nation state is strongest there, and even it’s warlordism is a case in point.

One small detail, libertarians who advocate for a minimal state are usually called minarchists, and those who advocate for no state are anarcho-capitalists. One final word – Friedman filmed there while he was on a trip invited to the Mont Pèlerin Society meeting at the most luxurious hotels in town sitting on Plot Nr 1. PBS series was sponsored by Getty Oil and Sara Scahill Foundation.

2129 – Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (book by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022)

check book here

check an interview with the author here

Largely I would say Aris K. A. takes a wide look at how the speculative – as a vacuous category mostly understood as and defined by today’s encroaching financial markets. Here’s my first point of contention – why ignore or abandon definitions of how ‘the speculative’ has been reinstated or applied inside philosophical traditions. Before the high abstractions of abstruse financial instruments and even before let’s say the ‘speculative turn’ in recent philosophy, we’ve seen at the start of the 20th c philosophers such AN Whitehead understanding of speculative thinking as playing a vital role in the history and evolution of philosophical trends (see for this Whitehead and Bradley a comparative analysis by Leemon B McHenry 1992). Speculative constructions are what philosophical movements do. During historical periods entire domains of human knowledge get preoccupied & immersed in a feverish activity that results in these expansive theoretical constructions that are being pruned back by analytical rigor & methodological fasting. But then such a strict adherence to methodologies starts being stifling and exhausting and the central issues feel stale and burdensome, so speculation is needed to embolden and rejuvenate this thirst for understanding. At the time, from a minority position of sorts within the philosophical mainstream, Whitehead enlivened this productive relation by building his own metaphysical scheme, in a period when metaphysics fell out of favor with philosophers and was still railing after what some have called the ‘Kantian catastrophe‘. His fresh exercise in speculative thinking acknowledged that philosophical trends came to be dominanted by logical positivism or linguistic analysis: the new orthodoxies of the 20th century. At a time when the speculative in its philosophical sense was lagging behind, speculation was in fact flowering elsewhere, with physics and cosmology picking up on this relay – emboldened by new advances in experimental science, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, as well as evolutionary & organicist thinking in biology, areas that kept revolutionizing our understanding of the universe and surrounding reality.

At rhe same time one needs to somehow give due recognition to how communities and writers of speculative fiction have been using that term to specifically explore the variations and possibilities of an unknown and unpredictable future through their work. Here I am following closely a key text by Steven Shaviro that attempts to trace how speculative fiction and financial speculation interlace yet part ways when it’s about nurturing and multiplying possibilities (in the case of SF) versus just making them operational in the present or trying to actualize them and exhaust every potential (in the case of financial markets). Yes, one can subsequently attribute this current opening towards the speculative – as signaling a growing disposition towards and awareness of the ‘great outdoors’, of the ‘- exo’ everything or even growing larger participation than ever in fictioning as part of the growth of a vibrant SF global community and multiple translations. So it’s good to keep all this on my mind when Aris is talking about the (as yet incomplete) transition from the rational subject implied by most classical bourgeois economics of the so-called Homo economicus that was supposedly all about individual decisions, equilibrium, optimization and maximizing profits towards what he calls the Homo speculans of today characterized not just by risk-taking or betting on known probabilities (here he makes a distinction between betting and speculation) but somehow on increasing uncertainty, creating havoc while staying afloat when everything that previously seemed imposibile or improbable seems to happen. He is the newly evolved species that even social theory at this moment has not reckoned with. In the face of all the rising algorithmic injustice, in the face of inequality and the inherent insecurities of a financialized world there’s new communities coalescing that he calls speculative communities. And he adopts this in order to stay clear of how ‘mass delusions’ have been been described since the 19th c. Imagination used as a generative – productive capacity is not new its as old at least as the Industrial Revolution or International Labour’s Movement. Aris picks up on Benedict Anderson notion of imaginary communities – the development of ‘nation states’ and nations as invented, co-imagined communities birthed out of the volatility of industrial revolution and the breakdown of old worldview and formation of new ones. I’m also thinking a bit ahead – about working class organizations and even syndicates – that also form in the face of class conflicts and struggles that offered more than wage slavery and uncertain livelihoods. So one should not stop at brokers when thinking about imaginary or speculative communities. On one side this helps perceiving these old/new speculative or imaginary communities aggregating not as irrational mindless crowds but as mutating communities faced with more and more insecurity and uncertainty trying théorie best not to reap luxury benefits but to try and stay afloat among speculative bubbles that they don’t really control. This new Homo speculans is gregarious, swarming and animated by ‘animal spirits’ (in the words of Keynes) and hearsay because it knows how important it is to be more opened (than before) towards the possibility of radical contingency and oriented towards the absolute and completly unpredictable unknown (not just the calculated unknown of probabilities and risk management but one that is completely impossible to anticipate!). In a sense as financial markets kept making our way world more disastrous and prone to unusual outcomes, people have managed navigate dangerous waters, admitting unrecognizable configurations or vernacular practices tonemerge often as forms of counter-speculation. Yet sadly in the Anglo US world its not the Indian farmer revolts but the Anarcapulco crowd who strike one as a thoroughly speculative speculator community.

I at this moment have my own doubts about how much Homo speculans is as open as pretend open or indeed as adaptive if left to live (unaided) amongst the ruins of crumbling infrastructure and disappearing old certainities (and new very clear certainities such as climate change challenges). One big absence from this account is the existence of actual institutions or dirigiste hybrids that are both harnessing these speculative cyclical bubbles and that try to operate at a structural level instituting pockets of certainty, leveraging, changing probabilies and actualizing futures in a more planned and directed way. Here I am thinking about the real semiconductor Asian miracle and leveraging of highly skilled and complex tasks in the chip industry – essential and important to both to current algorithmic capitalism and also a (safe) way to surf the regular tsunamis of this Schumpeterian capitalism. Subsidies are the key here and this is not such a wild bet at all but a careful grooming. I am wondering about spontaneous groups & communities and how this spontaneity is only partial and inversely how the statal buffering against such rampant speculation keeps intervening to save those selfsame markets.

At this more lower spontaneous level, H speculans has also learned something dangerous under dangerous highly volatile times, that he can, under conditions of growing disempowerment & instability still change the odds or try to stay abreast by somehow and more controversially increasing unpredictability. This is how Aris reads these quite worrying & catastrophal political trends of ethno politics & populism in general because he somehow refuses to judge these newly formed conspiracy- swimming communities as purely irrational or just misinformed and lunatic fringe. Aris is a former economist turned sociologist and this already tells us something. Have not read the book – but his argument is surely more complex and I urge you to read the interview. His recourse to the mythical I find a quite problematic but i find his openness to subcultures and conspirative thinking amenable to high weirdness (as defined by Erik Davis). One last thing – I posted this after the podcast on Elon Musk because Aris AK also pics on Musk as an example of typical speculator (Trump and other recent demagogue aren’t also there) – pulling stunts, using memes, switching from one day to the next and fooling around with his own ability to spin tall tales, combine science fact with science fiction, inflame the imagination of his fans and plunge or push up stocks by tw most inconsequential affirmations on his twitter feed. To his credit Aris also recuperate the true origins of speculative financial markets in the 1900 Chicago, the first derivative market of abstract financial instruments in the world, developed initially (if i understood well) as means to hedge farmers against such risks as a bad harvest that they couldn’t control or risks of food products going rotten and nobody wanting to buy them. This is a story worth reading in itself but he goes further than economics or financialization into our daily app practices & tech addictions, our increasingly fluid and volatile love-lives as they grow or result from our increasing usage of dating apps and constant swiping. He considers imagination a guiding faculty to help us wade through the murky waters of speculation (here i have some trouble – stemming from Guy Lardreau’s critique of imagination that lags behind and how fiction jumps ahead of this poverty of imagination).

“Speculative Communities investigates the financial world’s influence on the social imagination, unraveling its radical effects on our personal and political lives.

In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.

For Komporozos-Athanasiou, “to speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance’s opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.”

2028 – Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, The Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin (essay documentary 2015)

A Film by Isabella Gresser

An Essay Documentary Film narrated by and featuring Korean-German Philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han talks about the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘Burnout Society’. He raises the question of how we want to live today, and uncovers the underlying themes of an achievement-oriented digital society.

Read more by Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books) available on libgen.is (YT)

interview with Byung-Chul Han

interview by art review with Byung-Chul Han

review in LARB of Burnout Society

Without reading none of his celebrated books, I still have a big reluctance of what I regard a well-qualified but still blatantly anti-technological stance that Byung-Chul Han professes. To me, that smells too much of Martin Heidegger and too little of Marshall MacLuhan. There is also the feeling that there is too much convergence with the current (fully digitized) mindfulness. In a sense ‘smart’ technologies themselves offer nowadays an improved default mindfulness setting, as if in agreement with what Zizek once called a ‘decaffeinated’ version, a new sort of Decaf Reality. Mindfulness apps abound. Remains to be seen if these are just adjustments on the go – another sign that there is more and more need for what is perceived as “growing disillusionment” with future prospects and what feels more and more like a ‘labor camp’ type Googlag working environment. Tang ping is another term that is being coined completely independent from Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of post-Fordist malaise, but has a lot in common with his ideas about the current threadmill.

I also think that Byung-Chul Han’s emphasis on Panopticon is still much too imprecise and tributary to Foucault’s own predilection for early modern examples, so it risks (in my mind) missing out on the current shift of digital governance from Foucalt’s older ‘panopticon’ to the (particularly in China but also Gaza Strip/Israel) new model of ‘panspectron’ (as highlighted by Gabriele de Seta and Rogier Creemers.

By posting this documentary essay that I quite like, it is important on Byung-Chul Han – a star philosopher of recent years. Yes, I consider his ideas timely, zeitgeisty and appreciate very much his slide from studying metallurgy to philosophy and art theory. I also think that anything that might help slow down or throw some light on the nature of time (of Money) transformations under financial capitalism, or on the ideology of work, on the workings of ‘hustle culture’ and the gig economy, on ‘death by overwork’ (過労死, Karōshi), for qualifying the so-called Asian economic miracle as capitalist mode of hyper-production, and on paradoxical modes of incomplete, non-utilitarian, Taoist (emptiness philosophy inflected) non-productivist, non-optimized living speaks to this very moment of tiredness and widening depression. His own wanderings trough both East/West and his necrosophic musings within cemetery grounds and poetry (as seen in this documentary) brings him very close to my own orientation and others that I have been collaborating with over the years. He also makes a very cool reference to the Momo novel by Michael Ende that turns out to be one of the most precious and timely books on accelerationism or today’s burnout society.

Special thanks to Felix P for sharing the books of Byung-Chul Han and especially this documentary.

1942 – The Burnout Society: Hustle Culture, Self Help, and Social Control | 1Dime Documentary (YT video 2021)

“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.

1894 – I blame Society (2020)

Actress/Director/Writer Gillian Wallace Horvat is starring as herself. I just felt that nothing escapes this movie – a movie made to kill all indie cinema pretense of the horror boom (Shudder production galore or the revival of Italo-horror). One can still make pitch black funny nihilist slashers without being impelled to quote Wes Craven quoting himself.

In the 1990s the male heteronormative serial killer was postmodern and making a career in cinema. Hollywood serial killers were making a living (or dying) out of franchising other infamous serial killers histories and organizing their own disaster detours. We always were dragged along a US of A, complicit in tracing out its topography of murder and mayhem (see Domiingnic Sena’s Kalifornia). Either this or triggering like David Fincher’s 7 – elaborate (scholastic even) domino effects, twisted moral plays, able to transfigure the meta criminal into the ultimate American symptom of procedural thinking turned inside out, decapitated and boxed. Like the last Mindhunter TV series – data gathering and profiling takes precedence, when it is not bogged down by its own particular attraction towards horrific details that is slow at allowing insights provided by newly recruited feminist and gender studies. New times are coming, yet FBI stale methodologies drag on. Finally there’s a hint that zooming in on patterns of misogyny, patriarchal & sexual abuse accompanies the rise of the serial killer in pop cultural mind. While everybody’s mind is on the oil crisis, the mind is the new nearly limitless resource, the ultimate frontier of both neuropolitics and neurobollocks. We see the psy ops for what it is – underfunded and then suddenly transformed into the posterchild of the new FBI reshufflings. Previous FBI COINTELPRO histories of infiltrating and destabilizing black liberation 1950s – 1970s movements and militant organizations such as the Black Panters is being pasted over. Hate against women and femicide cannot extricate itself from 1970s high weirdness that makes counterculture sociologists bedfellows with FBi agents, surfers of societal shifts, rapid & unsuspected technoscientific & economic upheavals that reverberate (Nixon shock for one). The beginning of the neoliberal turn is punctuated by events that cannot be put on hold or get closed down as solved cases, aberrant individuals or sensationalist fodder. One of the most important quips (that does not get developed) from Mindhunters is how profoundly germane are the captains of industry, the new CEOs, even Nixon himself (and other career politicians in general) to the caged sociopaths, in their contingency & non-empathy profiles vying with serial killers. They are no more monstrous – than your average HR layoff expert. Instead of being a scourge, such talents are put to use in capitalism and under specific (class) economic circumstance where they seem to thrive and go unpunished, by being constantly rewarded. Intelligence & smartness is being constantly re-defined after 1970s as impunity, because it became an ability to evade suspicion, face up to the direct consequences of your actions (smartness= an ability to evade taxes, or externalising risks etc); a skill set and job description of both hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs & corporate raiders.

With almost deadpan humour, something remniscening of Buster Keaton or a lot of early silent era comedy or even the beggings of cinema as avant-garde vaudeville medium, “I blame society” does not just offer relief, although nowadays relief is essential, but also full-on splatter spiralling (up or down, depending). A splatter run amok in front of the new wannabe audience, of thinly dressed bourgeois political correctness of the new bro mansplainers man-agers, the only good (if brutal) response to a society’s tolerance towards same old same old prejudice, arrogance, dismissive smirks, condescendence and self-entitlement of a barley camouflaged male-streaming.

It takes real courage to refuse the usual porn revenge male fantasies or even serial snuff stereotypes, by becoming both candid camera, selfie and stick killer and unsparing directors cut insider. Feel like it is impossible to disentangle the female protagonist from its milieu and not to subscribe to the way BF, hapless lovers or ex lovers, homeless people, celebs, even complete strangers are being poisoned, stalked, meticulously questioned and employed to assist and finally offered a helping (if poisoned) hand.

One can never decide if Gillian Wallace Horvat is really the same material as all these other nasty characters, but at least she trains herself, putting herself and us trough systematic even morbidly funny & increasingly ‘deviant’ behaviours, a majestic mockup of method acting and of finally using GOPRO cinema as a way to finally do things, not just talk about them! There is definitly a big step there, and there is also this incredible pull, when pretending one is on a vacuous outside, call it fiction, script etc is the perfect way, seemingly, to respond to the callousness of others in the movie or life.

Do not miss this movie!

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