2403 – The Century of the SELF (2002 BBC documentary by Adam Curtis)

timespace coordinates: the long 20th century

To say that this epochal documentary with all its flaws, its non-sequiturs, and under-theorizing has marked our generation is an understatement. Some things are left unsaid in retrospect (it is almost 10 years or more since I have watched this series), particularly one should situate this in the context of modernity and the transfer of peoples of ideas that went on between Europe and the US, none of which went one way only. Again this is a very Eurocentric history (for a different perspective on techno-modernity check here), so it has definite and clear limits as it is mostly about the Euroatlantic world and Central Europe. The Century of the Self is also the triumph over the European Old World bourgeois civilization of the US consumer culture zeitgeist aptly described by Victoria de Grazia in her magisterial study Irresistible Empire.

Source: Charnysh 2022 quoted by Adam Tooze (not Curtis!)

But then, on the other hand, you have had the immense impact of these foreigners with bad Middle European or Eastern European accents forced to flee, outernational émigrés escaping anti semitism arriving in troves from the continent. Besides the German Frankfurter Schule critical theory – you also had another cultivated emigree diaspora from the former Habsburg Empire that brought to the East Coast with them the vivaciousness and sophistication of Viennese 1900 cultural life and went on to define advertising, marketing, and even how Western liberalism identity started defining itself during the Cold War against the Communist bloc. Another history that barely gets mentioned is how the Western democracies have been using for example – “rational choice theory” (and here the names of William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan stand out) – to try and immunize the ‘Free World’ and its values by constructing a ‘scientific’ approach to social science research against the Marxist critics of Western democracies. Some ideas found a better reception across the ocean,

Psychoanalysis is just one such example to follow in the wake of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. One could pinpoint others, starting with the Genevese school of neoliberal economics. Another one, followed in detail by Adam Curtis is the trajectory of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays (developer and early pioneer of PR) and Anna Freud in the United States. We should be wary of a pharmakon way of explaining everything or giving too much attention to ‘interiority’ and inner mental states, but since Foucault, detailing such genealogies and discoursive fields helps us understand how we came to be where we are. This documentary is also influenced by The Century of the Self is still a very compelling history of how the SELF became so central not only to advertising but also to identity politics and individual freedom of liberal capitalism also to the anthropotechnics – ways in which Western counterculture has tried to free the human subject or a hidden identity through mindfulness, techniques of meditation, human potential, yoga retreats, actualization what is known as New Age – especially as developed by the Esalen Institute since the 1960s California. It is also the perfect documentary about control after “decentralization”, or what follows in the wake of the uneven transition from the disciplinary society to what Deleuze has termed the society of control in his seminal essay from 1990 (some even say that this was his most important testament). The century of the self has become even more evident in the 21st century – the time when protocols or algorithmic capitalism is really ruling the day and when AI-driven scams, influencers, and deep fakes abound. The century of the self should be also put into dialectical relation with its inverse – the “personality cults” and authoritarian styles of the former East it was meant to overcome, and such a retreat into interiority and VR, when faced with the horrors of Vietnam War, and the government of the US supporting dictators abroad or signaling a failure of nation-building abroad or a certain developmental model. Silicon Valley is itself a piece in this puzzle, an innovation hub based on a startup model supported by Venture Capital funding to ensure US technological hegemony by sponsoring former dropouts of the counter-cultural revolutions of 1968, raised on psychotropics and weaned on petro-dollars.

2384 – The Man in the High Castle (TV Series 2015–2019)

timespace coordinates: Set in 1962, the series’ main setting is a parallel universe where the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan have won World War II in 1946 after Giuseppe Zangara successfully assassinates United States President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, creating a series of developments that include the Germans dropping an atomic bomb on Washington, D.C. (now renamed “District of Contamination”). The German Reich extends to Europe and Africa and the Empire of Japan comprises Asia, but most of the series is set in the former US and in Germany proper.

Western North America, now part of the “Japanese Pacific States”, is occupied by the technologically less-advanced Shōwa-period Empire of Japan, which has assimilated its formerly American citizens into Japanese culture, although high-class ethnic Japanese are extremely fascinated by pre-War American culture. Japan’s Trade and Science ministers work in the Pacific States’ capital, San Francisco. The Japanese rulers subject non-Japanese people to racial discrimination and grant them fewer rights.

Eastern and Midwestern North America is a colony controlled by the Greater Nazi Reich (GNR) under an aging Führer Adolf Hitler. The colony, headed by a “Reichsmarschall of North America”, is commonly referred to as “Nazi America” or “the American Reich” and its capital is New York City. The Nazis continue to hunt minorities and euthanize the physically and mentally sick. The superior technology of the Germans is highlighted by the use of video phones and Concorde-like “rockets” for intercontinental travel.

The US as depicted in the television series. Though Denver is the capital of the Neutral Zone, Cañon City, Colorado, is a major setting.

A Neutral Zone, which encompasses the Rocky Mountains, serves as a buffer zone between the Japanese Pacific States and Nazi America due to Cold War–like tensions between the German and Japanese blocs. Another buffer zone is present in the Urals.

Films collected by the eponymous “Man in the High Castle” show views of numerous other Earths, including some where the Allies were victorious, some featuring executed Allied leaders (such as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin), and some where an American resistance is doing well.

The Man in the High Castle is an American dystopian alternate history television series created for streaming service Amazon Prime Video. It was created by Frank Spotnitz and produced by Amazon Studios, Ridley Scott‘s Scott Free Productions (with Scott serving as executive producer), Headline Pictures, Electric Shepherd Productions, and Big Light Productions. The series is based on Philip K. Dick‘s 1962 novel of the same name. (wiki)

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2269 – SILO TV series (2023)

spacetime coordinates: few hundred years after the apocapyse

Here are some possible reasons to watch SILO series (as usual no spoilers!):

1. Enjoy safely from home curvaceous neo-brutalist architectures that reminded me of a lot of gaming architectures (somehow related to subway or metro designs). And ask yourselves if SILO is Apple+ streaming reply to new Cold War fears? Ok, maybe you are too young to remember when Outer Limits and Twilight Zone series went into the details of “average” families and societies that either prepared for the apocalypse (or the “Red scare”) by closing in on themselves and their (commie?) neighbors. Yes, that was a time drenched with a heightened sense of paranoia when you could unwittngly marry a commie ( I Married a Communist 1949) or battle monsters brithed by radioactive fallouts (Them! 1954). That was also a time for underground living and atomic scares. Well for what it’s worth, the atomic fears are back with Russia’s aggression war on Ukraine getting close to the largest atomic powerplant in Europe and people raiding the apothecary for iodine pills. SILO is basically a subterranean arcology right out of 1950s scenarios, at the height of the Cold War or the Cuban Crisis. Private home ownership has been a flagship of the free world yet this private ownership had its under side: the bunker. With the 2008 economic crisis and the housing/real estate crash, the growth of bunker offers has been relentless. How did Western post-WWII democracies imagine the future home? From early on, future homes where showcases of industry and Western capitalist values in the face of Soviet or Socialist modernist ideals. Thus, the House of the Future was an outcome of these Red Scare fears and an eventual bulwark against possible atomic catastrophes, financial troubles, and worsening outside conditions as well as ideological encroachment. If house ownership seemed to drive housing booms, there was also an underside. The American Dream managed to exclude and evict certain portions of the population on economic and racial grounds. The “house of the future” was conceived as a perfect self-sustaining (and sustainable) dream if only it could keep the undesirables on the outside. It was a self-contained bubble that could hold at bay both toxicity, freak weather as well as human misery or discontent.
2. The SILO is almost a rehearsal for the colonization of other planets, which is why the outside is non-existent, mediated and akin to the deserted exoplanet. It is almost like living on a Mars colony or a spaceship. Take the Alison and Peter Smithson House of the Future designed in 1956 for the Ideal Home Exhibition in London – and we can see overlaps with plans and blueprints for ideal bunkers and spaceship habitats. What strikes a chord now is that this is a sort of pre-Big Brother setting, a staged and open habitat. It does not have a ceiling or a roof, it is transparent from above. This house was not a house to be lived in, it was more of a stage. It was meant as an exhibition platform – a showcase where the spectacle of futurity (and Western modernity) did its rounds and where visitors could peer from above as if looking into a laboratory maze of experimental mice. SILO takes this in another direction, since it is a multi-racial society, yet with a class-system and pro-natalist eugenist politics. Eugenics is back and tech entrepreneurs do not shy away to express support for such views that have a terrible and brutal history behind. So in contrast with the old 1950s House of the Future, the SILO was meant to be collective if layered and divided living quarters. The usual SF trope with a long an UP/DOWN axis makes it a vertical Snowpiercer of sorts. There is a race to the top but once born in a certain level or section you cannot go up. Yet there is some downward mobility with the main character (like Engels) choosing to the bottom. All utopian plans concerning collectivity in the Anglo-American SF do not have a good track recrod. Usually, collective living is reserved for ideological enemies. This I think is where SILO series deviates from the usual familial unit. It is a whole block – a community of a little more than 10.000 humans (though there are many secrets concerning its origin and the possibility of outside humans with their own societies). Generally speaking, it is a quite diverse lot (till the recent episodes) and even if restricted by The Pact (you shall not magnify or shall not mechanize bottom-to-top transport), social mobility stifled by nepotism, by regulations and rules, I would say it is a much more egalitarian than the capitalist world we actually live in today. There do not seem to be homeless or people starving. Even if it somehow superficially reminds us of real existing Socialist (or Eastern Marxist) historical examples with its repressive surveillance systems and Judicial arm, the economic differences btw the inhabitants are not at all as extreme as in our societies.
3. SILO Apple+ series comes at a moment when overall fragmentation and fragilization (not to say militarization) is rampant. We live in a moment when extreme forms of anarcho- and libertarian capitalist ideas keep on popping up, no matter what. Advocating for so-called “free ports” and “free zones” or smart cities (free of taxes, free of regulations and basically free of any oversight or responsibility) is not new. This model has been ballooning on and off all over the world with the most notorious examples ranging from the US and the UK to places as unexpected as ex-US army basis in Afghanistan now under the Taliban. The question of TRUTH which seems all-important in this series is also too close to the “Truthers” claim, but it can also be a play on all these revelations and “talking truth to power” – and a feeling that this, under the current capitalist system will lead nowhere. The same as all the SILO ceremonials and sports events – they are just reverted or degenerated forms of historical events (this is again something that Tea Part and Truthers hold in common). The Freedom Festival celebrates the victory over the separatist escapist fraction, yet the sovereign individual is today at the center of conservative thought. Freedom and anti-cancel culture campaigns have become a constant part of the deregulatory push of tech entrepreneurs (and outcome of TW takeover by Musk). SILO announces today’s race for the insular. No, globalization and free trade are not disappearing. Within certain renegade sections of the Austro-libertarian neoliberal family – there was an attempt to eliminate democracy and fuse economy with trade within smaller, tight-knit (and like-minded) communities. What is SILO if not the result of the touted failure of nation-states, or the flight from the grasp of federal governments? According to such views, geopolitical blocks and democracies failed to avert catastrophe, stick to climate agreements and placate the military-entertainment complex. The surprise is that this SILO micro-state is rather drab, ignorant of its past, slightly totalitarian, and at the whim of its agencies (as the US with its Alphabeth NSA/CIA/FBi agencies?!). Another (not unimportant aspect) is the fact that a kind of runners or gig economy workers are all the time running down the stairs doing all sorts of errands. Is it the result of The Pact interdiction? Probably, but it is also a reminder of our world where food delivery services with the poorest of pay and under the most polluted conditions are a click away! If it is a “zone” closed off from the seemingly polluted deathly surface, it somehow reverted to the ideals of the old West with its Sheriffs and Mayors. Apart from the brown-grey and visible worn-out look of surfaces and its forced recycling ideals and hack labs (very far from today’s Big Tech control), this could be a real existing socialist world. You can also start watching this way. At the same time – it also seems strangely lifeless. Following the lives of citizens feels like living in Hobbiton: THE SHIRE haunts SILO. This is the most displeasing feature (plus long repetitive dialogues) – a sort of Tolkeinesque like villager life, closer to Amish or Pioneer town role-playing. So no Moebius/Jodorowsky Incal 1980s vertical (shaft) city. No color and no excess.
4. Depending on your point of view (or ideological flavor or science fantasy feel), Silo may be a missed opportunity or a chance to tackle an apocalyptic imagination of billionaires and tech entrepreneurs hiring military security to survive a societal collapse. A collapse, that they are constantly obsessing about but actively contributing to. While SILO is not confronting the way luxury bunkers it is a fictional extension of the lifestyles explored in Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell. Such silos are the model for SILO and they are real not fictional. There is no need of fictioning in this sense. Companies such as Survival Condo have transformed ex missile silos into prime real estate. Cold War as a business model. Prepperism is so deeply entrenched in the US that there must be no surprise that every other tech AI entrepreneur has a bunker in his head (thinking here of ChatGPT’s Sam Altman).
5. Here is my favorite point. Watch SILO if you must as an answer to recent Chinese SF blockbusters such as Wandering Earth. I am referring here to the main character in the 2nd eps “Machines” – the proletarian figure of the engineer Juliette Nichols (played by Rebecca Ferguson of Dune fame). Watch her and her crew at the task of switching off the main generator for repairs. For me, this scene could be a perfect counterpart to the Liu Qi scene in Wandering Earth 1 installing the Lighter Core at the Sulawesi Earth Engine. That Wandering Earth fragment brought some of the most amazing scenes in recent cinema since it deployed intentionally some extant realist-socialist imagery by showing how humans (NO super-heroes), in a group effort and under great odds, manage to fix a very difficult issue. And VERY IMPORTANTLY this is an issue not dealing with chips or semiconductors, but with some huge engines. These mega devices are closer to giant mecha than high-precision equipment. Such engines appeared long since gone in cinema (and only part of the industrial age or Stalinist arsenal) or as said mecha designs. Here you have a gigantic rotating engine that keeps the entire SILO running by using some (what I suspect) geothermal energy source that can only be interrupted for short periods of time before catastrophic pressure build-up. Everything is against the clock. All the action in this episode was built around this engineering feat and “repair” moment. Where do we see such a repair scene? In my books, they are usually part of the Soviet Union or Romanian brochures about industrial achievements or stories my dead grandpa (a wielder) used to tell. This is very ironic, especially thinking that Apple is a company that has made repairs nearly impossible. Apple is particularly notorious for its closed hardware policy and for making eventual maintenance as difficult as possible for its utilizers.

Here is a series of tweet about that episode and more:

Eps 3 Machines was a surprise.
I see here an influence of the Chinese #WanderingEarth movies. SF action based on a collective effort to repair a(geothermal energy) generator. Mechanic Juliette Nichols reminds me of Liu Qi installing the Lighter Core in the Sulawesi Earth Engine. https://t.co/v9VB4bNxlu

— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) May 16, 2023

Photograph of the interior bedroom inhabited by two couples in the roles as inhabitants. House of the Future 1956, London.

House of the Future 1956 floor plan.

Drawing of a mat cluster of Houses of the Future 1956.

House of the Future, 1956, floor plan.

Floor plan of the various SILO levels.

Actual advert of Survival Condo Project in a ex-Cold War missile silo.

2243 – Women Talking (2022)

spacetime coordinates: 2010, unnamed, isolated Mennonite colony

Women Talking is a 2022 American drama film written and directed by Sarah Polley. It is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, and inspired by real-life events that occurred at the Manitoba Colony, a remote and isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia. The film stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw, and Frances McDormand, who is also a producer on the film. (wiki)

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2203 – The Menu (2022)

spacetime coordinates: 2020’s Hawthorn, an exclusive restaurant owned and operated by celebrity chef Julian Slowik, located on a private island

The Menu is a 2022 American dark comedy horror film directed by Mark Mylod. It features an ensemble cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Hong Chau, Janet McTeer, Reed Birney, Judith Light, and John Leguizamo. (wiki)

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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.