2059 – Reproductive Futurism and the Politics of the Sequel (video essay 2019)

“This video essay examines the politics underlying the gendered past and future of Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017). It argues that the sequel form endorses an ideology of reproductive futurism that normalizes stereotypical gender scripts and perpetuates nostalgic notions of family, heterosexuality, and biological reproduction.

Original essay published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 6.3 (2019): mediacommons.org/intransition/reproductive-futurism-and-politics-sequel“(vimeo)

Eastern Europe, including Romania has seen a concordance between homophobic transphobic pro-Family marches and the politics certain brand of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has thrived on deregulation & disruption. As a pejorative term it is being being used in a confusing way and it is important to understand that while it is not an ideologic monolith and there’s plenty of internal controversy – there’s also general common traits that make it instantly recognizable, based on the ten points of the ‘Washington Consensus“.

So how come ‘traditional family values’ , the most non disruptive things one can think of – are being elevated during neoliberalism as sacred? How do free markets – go together with supporting anti-choice anti-abortion reproductive politics and “family values”? What has the individualism and atomism of utility maximization (the concept that individuals and firms seek to get the highest satisfaction just from their economic decisions) at the heart of neoliberalism have to do with families?

Well in the absence of a welfare state (disappearing pensions, failing – because underfunded public health system) the whole responsibility, deficit spending debt payments all of it and care work is placed on the family and not any family, but the global poor.

This explains the paradoxical alliance of social conservatism and free-market promoters since the 1980s Thatcher and Reagan. It was not just union busting and cutting government spending but also propping up traditional family values. Why did families vote for those that would apparently endanger or make financial cuts that would endanger their existence even more? Why did they vote against social security and how did the racist and derogatory term “welfare queen” (see Romanian centrist media attacks on ‘asistați social’) got to be used as a campaign scare, attracting such families into practically accepting the destruction of the welfare state? When Thatcher said there is no society, few people remember that she never said that there is no family. Families (at least on paper) tied people more and more to value extraction. You can actually see this – in Romania where migrants are sending money back home. There is an increased dependency on these family ties as a guaranty for continuous (“plata in rate” in Romanian) sources of money in rates, as payments to banks, etc Household debt is paid by migrant workers working under harsh conditions, working far from home yet tied to family relations with the ones back home.

Melinda Cooper a researcher of biopolitics has been exploring this strange unlikely US alliance that has also became a staple in Eastern Europe. Her 2017 book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservativism aims to explain and trace the history of this unlikely alliance that we now see everywhere, including in both Trump’s USA and Putin’s Russia. I added this to the above wonderful video essay exploring something else the critique of “Reproductive Futurism” – through various SF franchises, because I think that this dependency and “chrononormativity” fits in very well Melinda Cooper’s study about ‘family values’. In most current SF the image of the child as wager for a selfsame future (the new is more of the same) – or the mother/child link exists to basically justify all current injustices (everything is done so a future kid may enjoy it) or to reproduce current conditions ad infinitum.

1851 – books mentioned in the Coded Bias documentary

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.

Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

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1675 – The Time of Money by Lisa Adkins (2018 book)

Speculation is often associated with financial practices, but The Time of Money makes the case that it not be restricted to the financial sphere. It argues that the expansion of finance has created a distinctive social world, one that demands a speculative stance toward life in general.

Replacing a logic of extraction, speculation changes our relationship to time and organizes our social worlds to maximize the productive capacities of populations around flows of money for finance capital.

Speculative practices have become a matter of survival, and defining features of our age are hardwired to their operations—stagnant wages, indebtedness, the centrality of women’s earnings to the household, workfarism, and more. Examining five features of our contemporary economy, Lisa Adkins reveals the operations of this speculative rationality. Moving beyond claims that indebtedness is intrinsic to contemporary life and vague declarations that the social world has become financialized, Adkins delivers a precise examination of the relation between finance and society, one that is rich in empirical and analytical detail.

Read Excerpt: Money on the move (Chapter 1)