2417 – Wege in die Nacht / Paths in the Night (1999 Germany)

timespace coordinates: Germany just after the 1989 reunification, in the transition years that have marked not just ex-Eastern Germany but the whole of Eastern Europe with a similar set of problems including deindustrialization, structural adjustment, shock therapy, mass layoffs, rising neo-nazi anti-immigrant sentiment, overnight privatizations, and defunding of the public sector (education, health, social welfare) and mass migration

Streaming here with English Subtitles.

Staggering yet not surprising if one recalls the post 1990 shock therapies inflicted on most, leaving 'cheap labour migrating' growth models in their wake https://t.co/gABSY2xUNo

— Daniela Gabor (@DanielaGabor) March 29, 2024

directed by Andreas Kleinert

There are not many movies that can transmit the feeling of rage and disenchantment that followed right after what Boris Buden termed “the honeymoon years” when literally Western fashion magazines with photo shoots of East Berliners marrying West Berliners next to the former Berlin wall.

Usually, we are familiar with the US hardboiled noir detective – of the 40s and 50s who is usually a sarcastic middle-aged male, a former or present alcoholic, a private detective ‘gumshoe’ brutally confronting and confronted by a corrupted and corrupting system. In film noirs, characters are lost and found or completely abandoned by law or justice according to merciless logic. They are delivered to their ineluctable dark fate and fall for the femme fatale as they always, bloodily and viscerally try to escape the pull of money, seduction, or a decent living. The main characters seem to be attracted to the darkest corners and they always seem to be followed by their past, falling deeper and deeper into a Kafkian maze that is masterfully lit and whose stark shadows evolved out of the German Expressionist movies.

In Paths in the Night – we have something else, a former employer, maybe even a high-ranking party member or ex-bureaucrat of the DDR who is somehow completely unadapted and unadaptable to the new society, where the only jobs available are night watchmen, bodyguards, or becoming an entrepreneur (like his former, more lucky or more adaptable colleagues). He is also a collateral victim of what has been termed the feminization of the workplace in the 1990s- or simply because in the new economy service jobs and care jobs are more available than factory jobs. East Germany and the former East bloc went from full employment to joblessness overnight almost. Not only jobs were lost but also careers, departments, and aims. History had an aim and its aim was the abolition of capitalism, when this did not happen the world turned upside down.

In a way, he is already a dead man, a ghost haunting the places that were familiar and close to him, the empty ruined factories and shutdown plants that were abandoned, destroyed, or sold out (in the movie someone asks him if the acquisition by a Japanese company was successful). In an extraordinary exchange with his wife who has a good job in a cafeteria or restaurant, he takes her to the ruined factory and she becomes more and more frightened somehow realizing that they are visiting some netherworld – the ruined factory is some sort of realm of the dead.

There is no explanation in the movie for a lot of actions, but they are all quite clear. He starts having a double life – which his wife is completely ignorant of, even if she suspects something. He starts joining a vigilante group that tries to bring justice in the subway – by way of suborning and beating up hoodlums and neo-nazis. This is done in the most brutal almost ecstatic way – and in fact, there is a sense that in the new capitalist society, where protection of any sort is lacking one is pushed to becoming a vigilante – a sort of ex-socialist Batman in a consumer society. He wants goods for his wife that he cannot afford so he turns to petty crime. It is not clear but he could even be an ex-Stasi, although meeting some of his former colleagues does not align him with the born-again ex-Stasi entrepreneurial state. He carries a gun and feels somehow important but at the same time, he cannot even find peace in his Schrebergarten garden.

But while Batman is a rich kid who goes psychotic after he witnesses his parents getting killed, this ex-East German somehow witnesses something else, not only just on the personal level but also the unmaking of this whole world. That does not mean he is more justified to do what he does, it just makes him less of an advanced, highly-trained superhero and more of a shipwrecked character, who has seen his ideals and progressive visions being trampled on. I would even say he is a figure of socialist realism – and also one that still gathers press clippings with the wars and even has an Internationalist memory left. What happens when the future is forfeited?

He seeks to be this model and still dreams perhaps of embodying this image of the model citizen of a better (German) state from the two, but ends up destroying or even endangering those who care for him or look up to him. It is also one of those movies that shows the dark side of transition – and not just this nostalgic (Ostalgie) tragicomic idea of communism and post-socialist pop like in Good Bye, Lenin!

It is definitely a highly interesting and dark movie, and I do not aim to discuss all its aspects here, just give you a taste of it- so just watch it and draw your own conclusions!

2128 – Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket (podcast series by Jill Lepore)

This is one of the most informative things on the net about the rise of tech billionaires, and specifically E Musk. It is not in any sense meant as promo at a time when he gets way too much attention anyway (we might say he came to dominate TW in the absence of Trump). It is public knowledge that this attention and influence is translated into the rise and the fall of stocks. Somehow this defines the US American entrepreneur from his Chinese counterparts (see Jack Ma). His tweetstorms are at time outrageous, post-ironical affirmations and tend to self-contradict. They are the most egregious examples that another sort of speculation in its financial sense somehow running wild at the center of economies in unpredictable and volatile ways. He is not even a cypher to decipher. Demystyfication clearly does not work if you do not deal with both the toxicity and the ‘aura’ of such online celebrities and the myth of their success feeding on itself. Not in order to ‘smear’, to sacrifice them (as Thiel fantasized in his sacrificial mythopoetic flights of imagination), nor to adulate or pimp them further. They do not need this because they have armies of followers (50 million on TW), nor is it interesting to focus on such idolized targets (and increasingly dangerous) – at a time where everything is tied to personhood. Musk is no superhero nor is he a monster or Marvel villain, although he likes to LARP as one. The media certainly encourages him to do so. That’s not say techno pessimism or tech billionaire bashing is the solution – but rather to see what gets excluded or how cautionary tales are transformed into realities.

What stands out is how he plays on certain SF tropes and a certain pop iconography that pre-existed the rise of Space X or Tesla. Such a mid-XX century infatuation with the future or a certain total future of societies completely transformed by technology does not hold currency in today’s best SF, yet it still pervades commercial mass culture (least Western mass culture) and the minds of tech billionaires. Or in SF terms the ‘rapture or revenge of the nerds’ on the societies that shunned them. The world of Mars colonization, of libertarian no-government no-interference and microchipped pigs – is the world of the Golden Age of SF. The new inventors are not new at all, they are revived American imperialistic Gilded Age dreams with its electrical wizards that are hardened callous capitalist inventors, and half wondershow showmen performing demo- spectacles for us all. This only happens, if it ditches and deletes the anti-colonial and anti imperialistic tenor of such early works as HG Well’s War of the Worlds. If you are still entranced by these tech billionaire’s self-confessed SF fannishness, please contrast them with the vibrancy and biting wit of an author like Alfred Bester. That is why in spite of its ‘dare-do’ and ‘no panic’ signs theirs is a severely constrained and conservative worldview. For all its preoccupation with X-risk, extinction and saving the human species, for all its buzz and veneer of newness, such enterprise is ignoring systematically the working condition of their employees. There is “no future” outlook – because they refuse systematically to actually stay with the trouble here on Earth. One can witness daily for oneself how this impoverished yet productive techno capitalist SF is selling huge amounts of easily repackaged “buzz”. That does not mean we should ignore or pretend such such “buzz” does not exist. So while annoyance is almost inevitable it is also important to address the obsolescence cycles, hyped attractiveness and overrated aesthetics of the “gimmicky” and the “gadget”– that Suzanne Ngai puts at the center of our hyper-consumer culture. Just consider like Lepore does the adventure of letter “X”. X is ubiquitous in SF. Lepore makes an incredible roller coaster ride through the history of this letter’s adoption by futurists, scientists and popular science accounts of progress. How did such X- become required, why does it stick to X- Risk? And how does X signal novelty automatically, or how does it conjure up eXtra planetary visions or X-files and X-men?

Lepore is a historian and as a historian, she digs into a lot background materials, pop residues and infusions, focusing on how such actual contemporary figures tend to look more and more like Marvel characters than their baseline human counterparts. She digs not only into family stories – the largely ignored South African Apartheid background of Musk, but also a larger background of ideas and fads like the Technocracy movement (not to confuse with the Bogdanovist tectological ideals of a meta-science of organization) of the 1930s that his grandpa was involved with. What is evident in this case is that entrepreneurs can cherry-pick and built-up on de-fanged versions of critical and ironic materials such as Douglas Adams’s The Hitch Hicker Guide, or even online jokes and (Dodgecoin) memes to exploit and build expectations and turn reality upside down, topsyturvy riding the speculative wave that runs rampant on fictions and online chatter. What proliferates in this milieu is a particular brand of reading and using such SF materials and then trampoline oneself across from startup to startup, if possible never admitting wrongdoing or losses. There’s also a worrying alignement of space colonization revivals and back to the moon plans and conservative politics in the states. There’s also no mystery about Space X having contracts with the military since it all turns out to bs less an escape plan than a battleground strategy. It’s visions are more Star Wars than Star Trek and the DoD is backing it all up with 1 billion $.

What Jill Lepore terms “Muskism” is plain capitalism don’t kid yourselves, yet this recognition can barely keep up with these unleashed speculative, no limits yet incredibly farcical, bland and gee whiz forms of extreme techno-scientific capitalism. This does not mean there is a qualitative change or that we are entering another stage of cosmic capitalism. Yet it is worth grounding it, looking into its material origins, its diffusion, productivity, institutional effects. It’s not about technological pessimism but accepting that there are trade-offs and question why its few beneficial effects never get mentioned or never never the press attention (such as the battery farm in Australia). What does get mentioned is how tech entrepreneurs and ‘founders’ actually read, pillage or speculate around such pop influences and preexisting iconography. What type of scientific and technological imaginaries are we left with? How can one understand the current political and economic situation by looking into the real Cold War foundation of Marvel’s (or Stan Lee’s) Iron Man that became such a model for Musk. What has Peter Pan and fairy dust and Neverland having to do with mining crypto coins, or what do other less discussed science fiction stories from the 1900 (The Moon Metal by Garrett Putman Serviss) tell us about gold, inventing equivalents to gold or 1970s getting off the gold standard.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics, history, law, and literature. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her dozen books include These Truths: A History of the United States, cited as “nothing short of a masterpiece” by NPR, and, her latest, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, longlisted for the National Book Award.

Listen to the episodes here

Her book on Goodreads

“The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists—“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.

The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.” (from the Goodreads description)

2068 – The Serpent (TV series 2021)

timespace coordinates: Thailand, India, Singapore, Switzerland, France, Afghanistan, Nepal 1963-1976.

“The Serpent is a British crime drama serial developed by Mammoth Screen and commissioned by the BBC. The eight-part limited series is a co-production between BBC One and Netflix. It is based on the crimes of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who murdered young tourists from 1975 to 1976. The series stars Tahar Rahim in the lead role as Sobhraj.”(wiki)

I wanted to post this 1970s exploitation style limited series – since it offers a particular sinister spin on the whole European or let’s say Euroamerican attraction towards the ‘fabled’ East. The East has been both admired and vilified (as exemplified in the previous podcast). The fabled and most of the time ‘rich’ (ik resource and labour force) lands of the Orient were coveted by colonial masters, each imperial power carving their own dominion and competing with each other with great brutality. The fabled East was pitilessly plundered (read about the original corporate raiders) and watched from afar with greedy, coveting eyes by the Western/Euroatlantic world entrepreneurs since Cristóbal Colón (who let us not forget tried to forge an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, and thus brake Portuguese spice monopoly). Since the hippie Flower Power revolution and anti-colonial liberation movements, various Western seekers started pouring in to Asia from the Beetles to Hollywood adepts of Maharishi Osho. It is important to realize that the 1960s where a backdrop for the ramping up and brutal US intervention in the Vietnam War, the vortex of Maoist Cultural Revolution as well as the 1968 student revolts. The 1970s saw the start of neoliberalism, the Oil Crisis and wage stagnation in the previously prosperous North, as well as start of a long Soviet-Afghan War (where the US started supplying weapons in its support of its anti communist Mujahideen factions). It was also the start of a very gradual liberalization of China under Deng Xiaoping that escaped the ‘shock doctrine’ that would hit Russia smd much of the Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. South Asia, Nepal, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia were crisscrossed by a multitude of rag-tag seekers. What they did not not expect is a serial killer.

Jenna Coleman as Marie-Andrée Leclerc

There is a connection btw the maligned horror sub-genre of slasher movies and the high-class serial killer genre (all the subsequent ones starting with Silence of the Lambs), continuities that have been remarked upon by movie critics (Natural Born Celebrities: the Serial Killer in American Culture by David Schmid). The Serpent does not seem to follow either, and his outlier position as an international tourist hunter on routes of the Orient also marks him as peculiar. He does not fit easily with the usual US celebrity killer either.

French actor Tahar Rahim as Charles Sobhraj

Sobhraj is good looking playboy of mixed French, Indian and Vietnamese origin. He is surrounded by beauty and gems. He is constantly code-switching and socially mobile. He moves from the rich aristocratic Paris jewel buyers to the gutter life of heroin addicts. He never makes a secret of his own felt entitlement for his crimes as a price for suffering racist abuse as a half-caste during his childhood and so seems to avoid any culpability.

There is this constant combination of jet set glam, trash and stylishness – all the trappings of an exaggerated Playboy 1970s lifestyle. Almost every scene is full of it, from cocktails to vomiting afterwards. Disaster befalls all the seekers and tourists that fall for the Sobhraj scam. And his scam appears chintzy has a fake gold glitter, yet always seems to work. Poisoning is the preferred method – and there’s an almost predictable nauseating unwinding of tourists victims first enjoying, their new-found paradise to end up fucked up with horrific physical consequences after that. Such collapse is in total contrast with their purported aim – seeking spirituality and escape from Western commercialism and consumerism. There is a very dark and sarcastic turn of events to this series – where free hippies, young adventurers and hapless pleasure seekers rub elbows. All manners of seekers fall prey to Sobhraj (played excellently by French actor Tahar Rahim), again and again. They do not even manage to start their journey for Enlightenment because there is Sobhraj introducing them to an ugly very physical bodily reality, making them puke their souls out. I know it sounds kinda vicious and I tell ya it very much is.

Maybe it is just me or somehow I find completely ridiculous all the Wuhan Chinese COVID conspiracies – while none actually find a target in the actual global jet-set. In our pandemic imaginary – there is nor dark bio weapon conspiracy nor ablame to be attributed to the global tourists flying first class and cheap flights well before COVID became a thing. A group that most probably became the first super spreader wave, but also most likely contributed to the huge yearly carbon costs of the global flight fleets. There is a definite link between an increasingly connected world and a tourist infrastructure that somehow permits such easy transport. Mutating viruses find it easy to hop on the world tour, with lifestyles & vacation choices unwittingly facilitating such zoonotic spill-overs from their point of origin whether we like it or not.

The Serpent series encapsulates this double-edged reality of tourism – as a permanent tourist trap victim and also ubiquitous hard currency provider for the local neo-colonial economies that became dependent on such hard cash revenues. This is maybe the most disturbing 1970s legacy – a touristic avalanche that has continued to flow towards cheaper & less and less ‘secure’ territories.

The horror that awaits is dressed up enticingly, it has a TV familiarity, or Vogue cover style and grows on a hedonist-narcissist substrate that belies all those spiritualistic quests for the mysterious Orient. There is apparently no overarching ideology behind these heinous crimes and tourist assassinations (no terrorism, no religious fanaticism, no patriotic or nationalistic dogma). In the end, one can say it is just about money, hard cash in an economy that will soon be ruled by plastic money (credit cards). Sobhraj is also a new type of entrepreneur – a sociopath happy to show off and at the same time live at the margins, between identities. He’s living off the dreams and dissatisfaction of tourist, stealing foreigner (mostly Westerners) identities and switching between Paris and Bangkok centers with great ease.

One can offer retrospective rationalization or even attribute a thin veneer of justice or an overall vague anti-Western sentiment, yet at the same time, these poisonings happen just because it is possible, just because people with money actually seek out cheap thrills and an escape from Western mainstream culture conformism. He (the Serpent) poisons his victims with dysentery drugs (in one eps) and then offers to help them, to them even more sick and eventually get rid of them when they are of no use to him. There is of course also a detective story or a Dutch journalist that nobody wants to listen to initially and slow dawning of the fact that he might have a point about all the disappearing tourists. There’s also this greater neglect and actual disdain for the victims by the very governments and countries they fome from. All in all it is an incredible fusion of glam trash, geopolitics, sexyness, tourist haterizm and new age 1970s hell.

imdb

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.

1784 – “Shanzhai”, Future Mutations, Cosmotechnics and other books about China now

First some things about “Shanzhai” subculture and ethos.

Paperback, 224 pagesPublished February 20th 2020 by Pluto Press

Goodreads

‘Shanzhai’  from Cantonese slang, refers to the production of fake goods in China, which enjoy an anti-authoritarian-like dissemination across the global market. Starting with mobile phones, now fashion brands are subverted in this way, with many women at the helm of design and production. Fashioning China looks at the women designers simultaneously subverting and reinforcing the nationalist-developmentalist, masculinist and technocratic dream of brands that are ‘Made in China’.

Broadening the digital labor debate beyond typical masculine and techno-utopic readings, Sara Liao studies the precarious practices of women trying to create sustainable and creative lives, vividly illustrating a fashion culture that exists online as a significant part of the digital economy.

Drawing on material from interviews, participant observation, archives, policy documents, films and advertisements, Liao takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic, charting out the politics of intellectual property rights, globalization, technocracy, patriarchy and nationalism in a non-Western context. 

A study of Samuel Butler, cybernetics and emerging technology in Shenzhen, China.

Absolutely love this book – "Future Mutation; technology, shanzai, and the evolution of species". pic.twitter.com/zYn1Xxu4fD

— Robbie Barrat (@videodrome) December 4, 2017

review

review

Goodreads

“A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism.” –Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing

From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world

In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.

From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Goodreads

How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007-8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.

Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces–makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends–in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production–tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation.

Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence.

Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

essay on Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics by Yuk Hui

notes on reading Cosmotechnics

Goodreads

This volume reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West.

Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with postcolonialism and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.

ebook, 289 pages

Published 2019 by Amsterdam University Press B.V.

download pdf

With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from “made in China” to “created in China”. Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and “soft power,” creativity has become part of the new China Dream. This anthology engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake stuffs challenge notions of the original and authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China’s fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers, contribute to explore, examine and problematize what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of “creativity”.