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.

INFLUENCER CULT?!… Weird Truth About Breakaway Movement (YT video 2021)

“The Breakaway Movement is a bizarre Instagram Influencer “cult” seemingly designed to rope people into a pyramid scheme unknowingly. You start off in the breakaway movement thinking you’re going to learn things about business and how to be an influencer, but slowly the truth is revealed, that to join this elusive club you have to pay $5,000 for a kangen water filter, and sell for Enagic, which is an mlm for over priced water filters… So in this video I examine how the break away movement gets away with this scheme and stays under the radar while continuing to draw in young aspiring influencers into their mlm.” (YT channel description)

MLM schemes are some of the most pervasive expressions of neoliberalism and privatization transitional times in Eastern Europe (Romania and Albania both being rocked by such pyramid ponzi schemes immediately after 1989). There is very little chance that they will ever disappear, in fact, like this video demonstrates, they are mutating and taking on the hues of the particular times we are living in. If “abundance” is now the new mantra for both prosperity theology gospels as well as for the innumerable mantra and so called “abundance frequency” online videos, there are always new avatars and historically specific expressions of mlm. Roughly said this is a view into current ideological materials and also things in a moment of water wars. The fact that clean water is increasingly harder to get, and poor communities are forced to use lead-poisoned water such as the Flint water crisis is one aspect of it. The Breakaway – is not bizarre cult. It is just a scam adjusted to current anxieties and desires, such as the desire to work remotely (in Bali preferably), and working remotely or a nomad digital lifestyle is becoming one of the most polluting ways to exist. There is of course a lot of online BS regarding the environmental impact of becoming a digital nomad after COVID and cities being ranked according to their suitability for online remote working.

Same time this is a total takedown of celebrity – of online celebrity. Of course there is a lot of cultishness around such celebs and also the important thing to take home is that this is not an exception. It might seem exceptionally vacuous, and increasingly hard to pin down, but Breakaway does not stray far from the usual influencer ecosystem or entrepreneurship that is built on faking it on social platforms until you make it. It is a very good classroom example of current platform capitalism. What is interesting is also how all pretense at something slightly spiritual – or new agey, is gone, there is only some very thin layer of just vacation photos of happy white people (not that including black, brown or others into the picture might make it better) that promise you something completely shallow and hollow.

1522 – Rabid (2019)

Rabid is a remake by the Soska (Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska) sisters of the Cronenberg 1977 cult classic. It is rare to say that you can watch a remake without having seen the original, but this even works on its own I think. In this sense it is a re-imagining not a remake. From all the recent art horror remakes, especially 2018 Suspiria, I like this one the best.

Also from all the recent glam fashion horror that stick out as pure exercises in style which is perfectly ok, such as Neon Demon or the self-reflexive art world satires such as Velvet Buzzaw, I prefer this one. It is somehow in tow with Raw, Black Swan or Starry Eyes, or even Brian de Palma’s Passion.

When I say it is not a just rehash on the older Cronenberg – although choke-full or references, I do not especially care if it is a faithful homage or not, in fact it should be as unfaithful as a skin graft to its donor. Rabid 2019 is a new chapter in the exploitation of abortive new flesh, artificial lab grown tissues and liveliness of unwanted grafts. Fashioning oneself and fashioning others via proteins as well as wardrobes links to a larger pursuit of bodily success on par with financial one, good looks, malade beauty and catwalk Schadenfreude. The secretive reclusive 70s Keloid Clinic for Plastic Surgery shifts into a new big money Transhumanist enterprise with more defined Immortalist creepy ideals & skin graft wet dream. It not just catwalk horror, it is full with inserts, cameos, even TV sitcom moments, combined a lot of goofy gore, a lot of splattershtick that would make Sam Raimi proud, dismemberment, trembling foaming bodies, it’s a mess, and this I like. Even if over the top, I like the Burroughs-Frankenstein moments and direct quote, the fact that he seems to loom large over the power and control issues of the present.

Like in the high bureau corporate melodrama Passion, it plays on the highly pressurized and pasteurized, the toxic competitive job environments that capitalism is so good at fostering, all prone to back-stabbings, cancellations and public humiliations, everything that the Internet pundits and social platform critics abhor, the propensity to use exposure, shaming, revenge porn, character assassination, sextortion, dank humor, every vulnerabiliy transubstiantiated into some sort of easy satisfaction, gain or trade for LULZ. What is not apparent in the techno panic version is exactly how this plays out for the silent or the subaltern. When it’s not the boss making a point, they permit a cheeky contestation, pointing skilfully the faults of another in public, the reading, shade in queer or afro- code switching and the schadenfreude joy this brings, hacking of the very codes of competition allows such dissing of the powerful. Ultimately rabid bodies are eminently white, with greedy clinics catering for such clientele.

The Soska sisters really brought this new cosmetic ideal to Rabid, in a lusty, Mask of the Red Death-like over the top full of gory humor way. This has an overlay with contagion from pre Covid 19 era that blends into now, that I consider particularly helpful in the context of the epidemic as spectacle, as hype and fashion trend not just as scare.

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This was already there in Cronenberg and his interest in the stylishness of disease, the aesthetic and erotic appeal of bruises, laboratory chic, cool steel instrumentalism, clinics as new health temples and the surgical design being the new embalming of the dead alive rich etc but here they all contribute and prepare for the catwalk of disease. The wellness clinic is a ramp, and when it does so, it not only pampers the celebs and the rich, but infects everything around, nurtures the monster under folds of custom flesh. Both the cool interiors & medical devices are in contrast with the burning, scarlet red, hellish color of costumes, hidden floor levels, flesh corridors, blood iso drinks.

I especially enjoyed the relationship of delicate Sadeian Rose(perfect name), the quiet, mousy Rose that nevertheless is scarified by various accidents, horrible if ridiculous events- her perfect face already a broken mirror, and her expansive ‘friend’; the truly overpowering and obnoxious protector. I felt this has very much to do with how charities or rich donors actually play their goodness drowning their objects of care that they pick up from the gutter like little puppies to be offered the best. One does not bite the hand that feeds or caresses you no?

I like how all the characters have something repulsive in their goodness, how in this world of charitable rich people everything is “mercy-fucking” and “free experimental treatment” with no price tag attached, almost everything appears like a favor to the poor, luxury crutches for the down trodden, poisoned cups for the forsaken.