2408 – Origin (2023)

timespace coordinates: 2010’s United States, Germany, India

Origin is a 2023 American biographical drama film written and directed by Ava DuVernay. It is based on the life of Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she writes the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Over the course of the film, Wilkerson travels throughout Germany, India, and the United States to research the caste systems in each country’s history. (wiki)

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2370 – The Secretive World of Germany’s Super Rich (ZDF report 2023)

Full report (in German) here: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-die-geheime-welt-der-superreichen-100.html?at_medium=Social%20Media&at_campaign=YouTube&at_specific=ZDFheute (available online till 12.12.2028)

Like any other successful capitalist society, Germany sports some of the highest inequality rates in the world (according to the Gini Inequality researchers Julia Friedrichs and Jochen Breyer have also made a documentary for the German ZDF channel – sadly it is not yet available on English translation, but I felt it was important to post about it here to complete the last series of dedicated posts. Currently, as of 2023, Germany has 237 billionaires (China has 969 and US has 691 resident billionaires). This is a really insightful look into the special tax counseling the rich get. A majority of the secretive richie rich refused to be interviewed but a few accepted – so Jochen Breyer goes on their private jets and yachts to get their opinion on several key issues. So even if the others seem especially camera shy, we still get to meet Hans-Peter Wild (majority holder in Wild Flavors – maker of Capri Sun and leading manufacturer of so-called natural flavors for the food industry) and one of the richest people in Switzerland (he left Germany long ago for the Swiss tax and banking heaven). Billionaires are also a highly volatile transnational bunch, so in order to satisfy their tax phobia, states or rather their governments are constantly lowering taxation and establishing special Economic Zones beyond the purview of democratic regulatory means of control.
They also exert incredible influence on policy for a so-called social market state that prides itself on its social welfare programs and democratic values.

I herby have to acknowledge the ever-informative newsletter by economics historian Adam Tooze Chartbook 254 on world macroeconomics. His recently titled Crazy Rich Germans .. . and the hypocrisy of the “social market economy” was just epic, and below is a telling extract for you to chew on.
By the way, Adam Tooze is also the foremost expert on the economy of the Third Reich with such key books as “Statistics and the German state 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge” (2001) and “Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi economy” (2006).

“When it comes to monitoring elite wealth, the sources are much scarcer. Forbes magazine counted 117 individual German billionaires in 2023. But since large wealth is organized in family holdings, it is more meaningful, as Germany’s Manager Magazine does, to count billion-euro “fortunes” (Vermoegen). The Magazine in 2023 counted 226 such fortunes. The list, however, is clearly incomplete. And the magazine has acknowledged that it has been subject to behind-the-scenes legal pressure to omit several notable families.

We know this startling fact thanks to a new surge of public interest in inequality in Germany. German activists are beginning to flex their muscles and unlock the power of expose and muck-raking. Websites like ungleichheit.info do a great job telling the dramatic story of inequality.”

The two richest German families own more wealth than the bottom half of the German population.

The distribution and gender of Germany’s super-rich is also telling. We are talking here about white, manly, and predominantly West German. Statistics and data analytics are always important, even if hard to come by for us mere mortals amongst so much noise – but ZDFs researchers and investigators made it easy just scroll down on the https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/superreiche-vermoegen-deutschland-100.html?at_medium=Social%20Media&at_campaign=YouTube&at_specific=ZDFheute to the map provided and click to find out where the top 25 Germany’s richest actually live.

And if the data is to be believed, by the 2010s German wealth-holding was more concentrated than in any other European society (!!). In terms of the gini coefficient (Gini ratio= a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent income inequality, the wealth inequality, or the consumption inequality), Germany is closer to the US (wealth gini 0.81-0.86), than other European countries like France and Italy who have a gini closer to ex-socialist countries like Czech Republic or Poland.

2251 – Norco (2022 video game)

spacetime coordinates: near-future Norco, Louisiana / other portions of the state around New Orleans.

NORCO is a text-based point & click adventure that immerses the player in the sinking suburbs and industrial swamplands of an increasingly surreal and distorted South Louisiana.

The game’s developer goes by a pseudonym, Yuts, derived from a nickname for his grandfather. Yuts spent his childhood and some of his later life in Norco. Growing up, Yuts was “frightened yet transfixed” by the landscape in and around Norco, which has been shaped by the petroleum industry and hosts a major Shell facility which has twice experienced catastrophic explosions.

The game grew out of a multimedia documentary work by Yuts and a friend, started in 2015.^[3] The work incorporated writing, interviews, and audio-visual components, focused on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana and its landscape. In addition to Yuts, members of the development team, Geography of Robots, include Yuts’ sister, Aaron Gray, Jesse Jacobi, and pseudonymous musicians fmAura and Gewgawly I. Part of the multimedia project was a side-scrolling game in which a robot attempts to enter a refinery in Norco; this game became Norco, and the earliest version of the current game was created in 2016. Yuts and Geography of Robots designed the game in the pixel art style. Yuts relied on internet research to teach himself how to create the illustrations he contributed to the game.

Gewgawly I was Yuts’ original collaborator. Gewgawly I and fmAura worked to design the game’s soundtrack, attempting to “capture the… mood and ambience” of the River Parishes. The game incorporates field recordings by a friend of the development team, Matt Carney, taken around Baton Rouge.

Norco will be the first game in a trilogy.

(wiki)

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows 7 / Processor: Intel i5 or AMD equivalent / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: Intel Iris/AMD Vega 8 or equivalent / DirectX: Version 10 / Storage: 4 GB available space

steam

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Superduck: Superduck is, what else?

A network.

A system of signals.

Wireless communication of locusts and frogs. Cypress roots. Disease vectors.

Internet of flesh. Biomimicry. Internet of internet. Radio towers.

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2133 – Manifest (TV Series 2018–)

Manifest is an American supernatural drama television series created by Jeff Rake that premiered on September 24, 2018, on NBC. It centers on the passengers and crew of a commercial airliner who suddenly reappear after being presumed dead for five and a half years. It stars Melissa Roxburgh, Josh Dallas, Athena Karkanis, J. R. Ramirez, Luna Blaise, Jack Messina, Parveen Kaur, Matt Long, and Holly Taylor. (wiki)

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