“The story of Corporate Memphis, aka “Alegria”, aka the big tech art style.” (YT channel)
My thanks to A. Rautoiu for tracking this – history of Corporate Memphis. I urge you to read his longread article for the Romanian tech news Mindcraft stories (use Google Translate – works pretty well). He offers both an in-depth view on how ML works and how it does not work and how artists and creative work is not just endangered by AI art (like DALL-E and GPT-3 but suffering from its own chronic commercial pressures to fit into the new algorithmic capitalist world (be easily recognizable, get ranked by search engines etc.). At the same time, he does not foreclose the potential of AIs and both human-algo collaborative work to be satisfying and actually rewarding, although this depends on more than just full automation and Metaverse subsumption. It is also a question of training – swallowing all these huge databanks, making use of all these free public (public domain) data being used to train algorithms that are the private propriety of big tech companies.
The history of Memphis Corporate – is not a rare outlier, it actually describes how the general intellect has been privatized and copyrighted nowadays without any regard to its various sources. It is not just that the original artists are being disrespected or completely outsourced and deleted – but an entire previous history of design under contemporary cartelization has been completely rewritten under this new corporate revisionism. You see why the whole history of art is somehow a long history of struggle for recognition and why the under-representation of artists and their work is all around us. Creative Industries have been built on these sorts of deletion.
“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.
Actress/Director/Writer Gillian Wallace Horvat is starring as herself. I just felt that nothing escapes this movie – a movie made to kill all indie cinema pretense of the horror boom (Shudder production galore or the revival of Italo-horror). One can still make pitch black funny nihilist slashers without being impelled to quote Wes Craven quoting himself.
In the 1990s the male heteronormative serial killer was postmodern and making a career in cinema. Hollywood serial killers were making a living (or dying) out of franchising other infamous serial killers histories and organizing their own disaster detours. We always were dragged along a US of A, complicit in tracing out its topography of murder and mayhem (see Domiingnic Sena’s Kalifornia). Either this or triggering like David Fincher’s 7 – elaborate (scholastic even) domino effects, twisted moral plays, able to transfigure the meta criminal into the ultimate American symptom of procedural thinking turned inside out, decapitated and boxed. Like the last Mindhunter TV series – data gathering and profiling takes precedence, when it is not bogged down by its own particular attraction towards horrific details that is slow at allowing insights provided by newly recruited feminist and gender studies. New times are coming, yet FBI stale methodologies drag on. Finally there’s a hint that zooming in on patterns of misogyny, patriarchal & sexual abuse accompanies the rise of the serial killer in pop cultural mind. While everybody’s mind is on the oil crisis, the mind is the new nearly limitless resource, the ultimate frontier of both neuropolitics and neurobollocks. We see the psy ops for what it is – underfunded and then suddenly transformed into the posterchild of the new FBI reshufflings. Previous FBI COINTELPRO histories of infiltrating and destabilizing black liberation 1950s – 1970s movements and militant organizations such as the Black Panters is being pasted over. Hate against women and femicide cannot extricate itself from 1970s high weirdness that makes counterculture sociologists bedfellows with FBi agents, surfers of societal shifts, rapid & unsuspected technoscientific & economic upheavals that reverberate (Nixon shock for one). The beginning of the neoliberal turn is punctuated by events that cannot be put on hold or get closed down as solved cases, aberrant individuals or sensationalist fodder. One of the most important quips (that does not get developed) from Mindhunters is how profoundly germane are the captains of industry, the new CEOs, even Nixon himself (and other career politicians in general) to the caged sociopaths, in their contingency & non-empathy profiles vying with serial killers. They are no more monstrous – than your average HR layoff expert. Instead of being a scourge, such talents are put to use in capitalism and under specific (class) economic circumstance where they seem to thrive and go unpunished, by being constantly rewarded. Intelligence & smartness is being constantly re-defined after 1970s as impunity, because it became an ability to evade suspicion, face up to the direct consequences of your actions (smartness= an ability to evade taxes, or externalising risks etc); a skill set and job description of both hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs & corporate raiders.
With almost deadpan humour, something remniscening of Buster Keaton or a lot of early silent era comedy or even the beggings of cinema as avant-garde vaudeville medium, “I blame society” does not just offer relief, although nowadays relief is essential, but also full-on splatter spiralling (up or down, depending). A splatter run amok in front of the new wannabe audience, of thinly dressed bourgeois political correctness of the new bro mansplainers man-agers, the only good (if brutal) response to a society’s tolerance towards same old same old prejudice, arrogance, dismissive smirks, condescendence and self-entitlement of a barley camouflaged male-streaming.
It takes real courage to refuse the usual porn revenge male fantasies or even serial snuff stereotypes, by becoming both candid camera, selfie and stick killer and unsparing directors cut insider. Feel like it is impossible to disentangle the female protagonist from its milieu and not to subscribe to the way BF, hapless lovers or ex lovers, homeless people, celebs, even complete strangers are being poisoned, stalked, meticulously questioned and employed to assist and finally offered a helping (if poisoned) hand.
One can never decide if Gillian Wallace Horvat is really the same material as all these other nasty characters, but at least she trains herself, putting herself and us trough systematic even morbidly funny & increasingly ‘deviant’ behaviours, a majestic mockup of method acting and of finally using GOPRO cinema as a way to finally do things, not just talk about them! There is definitly a big step there, and there is also this incredible pull, when pretending one is on a vacuous outside, call it fiction, script etc is the perfect way, seemingly, to respond to the callousness of others in the movie or life.
Planet of the Humans is a 2019 American environmentaldocumentary film written, directed, and produced by Jeff Gibbs. It is backed and promoted by Michael Moore, who is also the executive producer. Moore released it on YouTube for free viewing (for 30 days) on April 21, 2020, the eve of the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.
One of the film’s main claims is that some environmental leaders and organizations in the United States who promote green energy have actually been promoting biomass energy, largely meaning burning trees instead of fossil fuels, which is neither carbon neutral, renewable, nor sustainable. The film also claims that wind power and solar energy cannot produce enough energy to save the planet from the climate crisis, and still require fossil fuels due to intermittency. The film has been widely critized for its misleading and outdated commentary.
TimeSpace Warps 