I am indebted to Rusty Foster to these incredible pastiches of Adam Curtis.
“Silvia Dal Dosso predicts that The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AFbut the present is already in the past and the weird future ahead is here right now.”
SCAM FACTORIES
Yes, magicians, managers, and PR agents have always multiplied illusions to our disadvantage, but what if technology and innovation do not enhance reality but make scams even easier? Can one detach AI from what is happening in the actual geopolitical ‘shatter belt’ – like Myanmar (which is completely overshadowed by the ongoing genocide committed by Israel in Palestine). Nobody even talks about this region that used to be associated just with the Golden Triangle drug trafficking. From the Rohingyamassacre to the Myanmar civil war, there is increasing instability and organized crime spilling over into China – but also fake gambling towns built overnight posing as “fake” part of the Road & Belt Initiative BRI – China’s and currently the world’s most ambitious infrastructure project. Also, fake job offers are becoming more and more sophisticated. It would be uncomplete to ignore how hustle culture online scamming and human trafficking have transformed into an industry since COVID. The Chinese movie “No More Bets” – was turned into an unlikely diplomatic success. While initially banned by several SE Asian countries the movie managed to bring about cooperation in “combating transnational crime and promoting cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region”.
It is weird as fuck already, and tomfoolery is the order of the day. AI hype boosterism combined with a good dose of deep fake scare is making things feel irrecoverable and irretrievable fucked. How to build up a coherent video of all the AI rampage and hyperbolic BS out there? Well, Silvia Dal Dosso demonstrates just that. Documentarists seem relegated to the trashbin of history because even Hypernormalisation sounds passé. Well, let us see what morphings and monstrous becomings entice and grab our attention. Who then will also offer us a fluctuating lifeboat through AI sludge and is this really unprecedented? As the YT video shows, animals were always cheating, fooling around and with each other. Octopi are masters at camouflaging themselves. Game theorists were always trying to find how cooperation developed, how animals (or plants, or viruses) evolved, and found ways to counter cheating, and the reality is that both mutualism and cheating promote multifarious complexity and deception is always a sign of intelligence no? (check Frans de Waal) At the same, there is a need for a broader genealogy of decision-making, the reconceptualization of reason, decision-making, and “freedom” – that for Orit Halpern “underpins contemporary relations between machine learning, reactionary politics, and neoliberal economics“. A change that he locates between 1950 – 1970 and that “systems might change and adapt nonconsciously”.
Play is everywhere, but today’s neoliberal regime has made it very easy for cheaters by deregulating (“desire for unsupervised learning in nets and the agglomeration of ever larger data sets” – Orit Halpern). Everything was a bet on industries and corporations that would self-regulate and self-organize. Well, that almost never happens. When things get so tragic it is hard not to feel we’re at the butt of the AI jokes. We are hunted down by constant doppelganger effects, and it feels like Techgnosis and High Weirdness researchers Erik Davis and Naomi Klein critics of shock therapy and destruction capitalism meet on the same page of irreducible weirdness and farce.
Mimicking Adam Curtis does the trick but also completely outperforms Curtis at his best game – The Future Ahead will Be Weird is as weird as Fuck and dangerous as Fuck (to quote Whitehead) is a rare good addition, building up on all the online fake deluge and even historicizing it. Watch it laugh and despair!
timespace coordinates: present-day China \ mostly in the province of Sichuan
I have mentioned this movie in a post in 2022 on the SFitze substack. It came to my attention after a post by respected geek and translator Xueting C. Ni’s TW below:
…at last, the kind of contemporary work I've been waiting for from mainland China. A #scifi retelling of Journey to the West. About a magazine editor going to a village to investigate mass UFU sightings, meets a poet there and they embark a journey (of self discovery) #filmpic.twitter.com/tWVnuSt6qD
He recommended watching it with some good tea or some good booze in a warm, cosy place. And this I did. I do not pretend to know why this small-budget funny, melodramatic, nostalgic ‘first contact’ weird movie made such a big impact on him or his peers or why he scored 8.4 out of 10 score on Chinese movie/book/music recommendation network Douban. But I will try to say why you should watch and search for a subbed version of this small serendipitous gem.
What is the merit of such a movie in a country that tries so much to vaunt its role as a leader in scientific and technological breakthroughs? What is the value of small-budgeted SF films in an era when bombastic productions dominate the market? We expect a contemporary cinema audience to be dissatisfied or nonplussed if it does not get its portion of stellar battles, kaboom FX and wandering planets jumping from their orbit. This movie begs to differ and carves a niche for itself. Important to to mention that The Wandering Earth director Guo Fan aka Frant Gwo makes a cameo. He’s the one who buys the damaged cosmonauts costume – it’s almost self-ironic in a sense. How do these big productions get made with money trickling from the successful ones or is it more like we need attention for big ones so small ones can also co-exist?
On the technical side: the movie starts with a VHS report from 1990 – with a youngish Tang Zhijun, the editor of the popular science magazine Universe Exploration Magazine obsessed with aliens talking about the importance of first radio transmission of Berlin Olympics and SETI. Flash forward and we get this aging and completely Absent-Minded Professor like figure with the remaining contributing odd-ball members of the Universe Exploration Mag in their rundown bureau. It’s an image of funny helplessness with even a Hello Kitty vaporizer ij the room. There’s the unmistakable sense they are unable to wade through a world full of attention economy traps and accumulating bills. They rent out their old Soviet cosmonaut costume for an advertising campaign for an energy company called “Apollo”. They are the first to fall for the exploitative viral media advertising extra sensory phenomena with click bait sensationistic news. They seem to be at the bottom end of the economic system having to eke a living on the underbelly of a booming, technologically competitive, attention grabbing and gimmicky world. Such mags existed all over the whole East bloc, but they had to either close down or try and reinvent themselves in order to survive in an era of boom and bust, and a constant defunding of the research institutions they depended on. It is for me very easy to relate to something like this. Some became allied to the start-up world and others had to try hard to keep up with various technological hypes.
The movie uses a lot of faux documentary material, and has the feel of a digital phone recording with a selfie stick – almost like small TikTok reels. Nevertheless, this does not represent an instantly clickable bait-click material. Media and especially old (dead) media is present in a very direct way – snow crash TVs (the Poltergeist effect), radio and even an ominous Giger Counter are all present and waveform receivera. But they are channeling somehow the background radiation of the universe not radioactive fallout or TV news. They are also channeling the inner worldof these characters.
These old 20th century technologies, no matter how dated, or even Cold War tech they seem, have gotten other uses. In a sense ufologists have been re-engeering them for their own (higher) purposes.
So now imbibed with some new meanings, extraordinary energy or hidden power, they are ways to access the very basis of reality and a dreamworld that escapes the rest. A reality that throughout the movie is most unreal, surreal or anti-real. The movie is considered by some as “literary science fiction” – and this might instantly label it as something pretentious or nostalgic, which is completely at odds with a lot of hard SF popular in China. But if you want to consider it literary SF – then it is so by its appeal to a sort of lyrical, poetic and evocative power that SF irradiates in comparison with realist, mimetic fiction. It is not literary in its bookish immediate sense. The most salient characters are somehow all neurodivergent (even it does not get an explicit mention as such). Characters have lived trough various troubles, have various sensibilities and somehow stay open to the outside, no matter how unimaginable or even incredidble. These ‘specially endowed’ persons in the movie do not allow us just access to parallel worlds, multiverse, portals, aliens visitors or UFO landings like in the traditional SF narratives. They are very much linked to embodied realities, to the very dirty, muddy countryside, the sort places where these encounters happen apparently. The boy with the metallic pot on his head (a sort of blessed fool character almost) is a dictionary carrying poet, not just shaman (poisoned mushrooms also have an important role) but also some sort of spoken word performer in the middle of fields and a Taoist inchoate landscape. He is closer to the “cosmic” and the “comic”, a dramatic creature close to an embedded SF reality that does not get mentioned in many SF on-screen narratives.
One of my favorite characters is the trolley bag – carrying madame. For most of the movie she seems the only realist (sane?) person in the movie. But I think she is the true Sun Wukong. She is the Money King. I say this based on the fact that she is the only one that pulls faces and pokes fun at the elderly ufologist nincompoop master Tang Zhijun. If you read the original recently you will understand what I mean. I did not ask my Chinese friend what he thinks, but this is my feeling. I also take my conclusions from the above poster that makes her hold a selfie stick – the only up-to-date person in a whole ufologist team that does not feels technologically out of place in the contemporary world.
She complains all the time but she also carries the batteries for his Giger counter in her trolley. Isn’t that enough? These are my cue for the Monkey King, that is always an unwilling member in the original 16th century epos attributed to attributed to Wu Cheng’en. Like the legendary monkey, she is forced and incarcarcerated by Buddha in the original Journey to the West and obliged to follow the witless and frankly easy to poke-fun-at monk Xuanzang (602–664), the Buddhist sutra translator. She is the practical person, she is the one that is always debunking and always telling things how they stand: “A lunatic grand party”.
Of course there are several contenders for that role – even the character of the drunk could very well be the monkey but he is mostly the pig in my view, but why not think of the Monkey King like a sort of distributive or collective character, since this is what it was. I believe in the original reading from the Maoist era or even earlier this may have been an embodiment of the voice of the people, the voice of the masses and also of the unrepentant and the tricksterish.
With that in mind, she might be the only one having a bit or reason or some sort of materialistic compass in a place of illusions and near-hallucinatory experiences. I really like the fact that she always is the one to question the whole quest, and also the one to remind us about the harsh laws of thermodynamics under the market economy (and energy scarcity): someone has to pay for the heating, someone has to pay for the repairs and for the upkeep! I of course like the Red Cap guy, the one that travels in his childish UFO car and has met Tang at some earlier phase and is now a mysterious meteorite hunter.
In the 1990 your entrepreneurial plans did not guarantee you will be a winner later on. Having a great idea did not guarantee it will become a commercial success. Following the “everything goes” mantra of the 1990s, why not thinking that you could live off selling telescopes, because how cannot one not look above? Yes, but increasingly throughout the decade the push to encourage curiosity about new discoveries became second fiddle to other priorities or it pure and simply made some people appear like complete loosers of the market economy. Is it great to make your passion something competitive, or at least transforming a telescope into another commodity – like TV sets, radios, mobile phones etc. There is something eminently ridiculous in using cosmonaut suits to sell products – but we are living in this world. Daily I see adverts for banks, various products, shoes superimposed on CGI imagery with cosmonauts, or Black Friday adds on the moon.
There is here an obvious hint at how some of these pops sci dreams of the 1990s did not played out. Or even the mystery, weird, fringe Fortean things came to be transformed into conspirative thinking. Maybe there is also a kind a moralistic play here. The movies shows a lot of missing pathways, a lot of possible venues that did not bear fruits, a lot of missing opportunities and questions. How did those initial drives, the early naive belief in the basic science popularization got abandoned for more commercial or more infotainment pursuits?
There is also the possibility that this Journey to the West talks about larger issues that bedevil those that got really involved in the China Dream at this historical moment. There is an immense need for diverting more investment into its social sector (the percentage of the GDP allotted to social issues is very small compared to even its nearest economic competitors). All in all, the scope of alleviating poverty AS WELL as raising its education and reskilling its still unskilled rural population are looming big. No mean task, because China has still a lot further to go. At the same time the movie presents some sort of “Science Wars” between humanities (understood as non-math, poetry, even sentimentalism) and a different approach to math or physics (thinking about the entire Sokal hoax affair and what Andrew Ross said at the time about how positivism opened up a second front – beside the anti-superstition campaigns).
Superstition or what one might call folkloric beliefs, including signs and remains of residual village belief systems–are tolerated, but also considered deviations. This has been the whole deal about modernization from the May Fourth Movement on – of overcoming superstitions that are slowing down China, old ideas and old ways hamper it joining modernity. The result is that there is a new hybrid – in the way ufology overlaps with these living folkloric traditions brings about a sort of whimsical, millenarian expectations about first contact which have been pointed out by researchers of UFO religions previously. But it’s unjust to call it just ufology as superstition – it’s also hidden even more profound meanings regarding nature or the natural world as a place of encounters, of odd adventures that lead back to very banal and worldly happenings. Happenings such as erring newlyweds in search of best shooting spots in nature or photographers lost in the wilderness while searching for such commercially ideal spots.
But there is new High Weirdness out there. Hard-to-believe scams (think canned Martian sand for sale online) and doughy aliens frozen inside homemade freezers are everywhere. This is not Area 51. They appear to be the product of a wish to attract some city tourists to the remote corners of the land, areas in need for cash and a bit of attention.
Isn’t this worthy in itself? What could be devious in bringing a group of hapless alien seekers to the most unmodern, and underdeveloped areas? In places where they could also listen to the locals’ needs, while initially following the “carrot” of stories mentioning preposterous things? Journey to the West (in Sichuan) may the difficult travels out of the precarity of local pop sci initiatives to the remote precarity of villager life, where mostly women and odd figures live, places that have been left behind by migrant laborers traveling in search for work in the big cities. What is the carrot?! Is it baitclick? Is the carrot the UFO? Is the carrot some lingering SF feel?
That does not mean that you can pay your electricity or heating bills by doing these UFO scoops. Some will of course complain that the ufological is getting politicized, but there is no way around it, ufology was birthed during Cold War and America’s paranoia around Soviet technology.
In this geopolitical historical sense the Sputnik was instrumental in garnering the funds for the establishment of DARPA and Darpanet. So, ultimately, this new Journey to the West is in a sense a Journey along ideological encampments as well. Inside capitalism, you had various critical ufologies as well as conservative ones. There is the bizarre Posadist end-of-the-world Trotskist World Revolutionary visions. Others leaning towards the conservative, highly anthropocentric, modeled on the capitalist model. Do not know if “right-wing” and aliens go together, it is almost a contradiction in terms – should not aliens be different from what we already have?
If stock Independence Day aliens are just advanced (read rapacious or exterminist) humans in search for more planets and species to enslave, Tang appears then a diverging view akin to the radical ufologies (here I would put Italian art pranksters Men In Red). For Tang advanced species cannot be predatorial but somehow akin to some socialist ideal of universal peace. There is also another version – a more Taoist one maybe, where the first contact results not in answering all the existential problems but in recognizing the universality of such questions as well as the impossibility of a straight 0 or 1 answer.
I get how somehow the Fuxi or Fu Hsi (伏羲) Chinese creation myth rhymes so well with the entire Human Genome Project so that the Journey to the West director or scriptwriter could not let go of it. But for me and maybe others following closely the history of biology, DNA is such a 20th century imagery (or even mid-20th c or at least 2000s). Instead, it would be interesting to see how SF movies overcome such hurdles in an age of epidemics, epigenetics, metabolomics, microbiomics and viromics, proteomics, metagenomics or synthetic life. But of course, who can deny that a plethora of biotech companies have entrenched this evocative double helix imagery, including the early 1990s Jurassic Park movies. In this new Chinese movie at the end the universe, DNA is a ladder to the stars, the macro reverses into the micro of the DNA. Although even this may be secondary to the main search for love.
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.
“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)
spacetime coordinates: a US enclave in Acapulco Mexico cca 2015 till now
It showcases a series of events that unfold over six years. An impulsive one-time gathering in Acapulco, turns into an annual event. Directed by Todd Schramke. It showcases a series of events that unfold over six years.
I have posted in the past an in-depth documentary in 3 parts directed by Ramonet (Tancrède) about anarchist history, thinking and various experiments, and even mentioned in passing the figure of Murray Rothbard (1925-1995). In comparison this documentary feels like a joke or a mock-up but for many it might still spell the truth about current anarcho-capitalist trends. Others have done a much better job at outlining the intellectual history of that particular school of extreme market capitalism from which it sprung called neoliberalism, and how its birth after WW1 out of the ashes of the multi-national Habsburg Empire was much more than the usual key figures everybody mentions (Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), yet they are the ones who left a lasting and one might say pretty damaging imprint on today’s brand of globalism. It is in this context that historian Quinn Slobodian mentions a few important others (such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin), that struck a different path than their predecessors or contemporaries not supporting the usual laissez-faire economics but ending up on some bizarre intellectual paths of their own (including preparing some of the actual racist enthno- politics or one might say).
As capitalism arrived in Romania after 1989 with layoffs, unprecedented deindustrialization, price liberalisation (and the follow-up: gig economy and precarity), the usual fare of shock therapy (at least in Eastern Europe) was also accompanied by a sleuth of translations from some of these and other writers. Since these ideas suddenly started being so pervasive, so ‘natural’ in our societies, their influence ranges from government edicts to from movies and (sadly) school textbooks. Hard to trace their history or to even question them nowadays as presentism rules. Still there’s family resemblances. One characteristic they have in common (even the Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin might agree on that) is in the words of another important historian – Ellen Meiksins Wood – the differentiation of ‘spheres’ in capitalism, in particular the separation of the ‘economic sphere’ from the ‘political sphere’. The way in which capitalism exploitation works along in history is by transforming certain “essential political issues—struggles over domination and exploitation that historically have been inextricably bound up with political power—into distinctively ‘economic’ issues.”(check Ellen M W essential article from 1981 on that!).
Here come the anarcho-capitalist of today. Californian Ideology is drenched with that too. It is a direct child-brain of the Reagan-Tatcher compact. In other obnoxious ways it keeps vaunting its purity & pseudo outcast veneer – by affirming its libertarian credo. Year they have a mottled base and have drawn members from all sorts of corners (and this docu makes it amply clear): affluent types ex-finance ex-Wall Street types, Tech Billionaires, Dark Web traffickers dominante to which one might add gun ownership rights promoters, preppers, ex vets, home-schooling activists, tax-resistence activists, even the odd pacifist, conspiracy theorists etc. Still, most vizibile in the end are PROMOTERS OF HYPERBITCOINITIZATION and its almost as if this subtends their whole experiment, without any questioning ot tech scepticism (as long as they sponsor you & coin pays). But to talk about real – thermodynamic costs. It’s a crypto data mining bonanza world where thermodynamics (Gottfried Leibniz’s point about mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace’s demon – an argument wisely made jn regard to Blade Runner by C Mudede) is forgotten, magically suspended. It’s not at all far-fetched to say ideas espoused or ideological commitments expressed by ancaps had a say in both the alt-right and the 2021 United States Capitol Attack as well as the current crypto boom and bust. Bitcoin and blockchain tech are part of what could be coined Silicon Valley Solutionism – of preffering a technological fix for everything or pushing their inventions and solutions especially if they benefit the providers of those very solutions (sold with an invisible higher prize tag than what the city administrations have payed to make it snug & comfy for them). Anarhapulco seems like a bizarre neocolonial enterprise in US backyard: Latin America. Since end of 19th c ghe rising US Empire has played dirty, brutally pushing its interests and orchestrating numerous anti democratic political coups in the name of democracy, subverting local power and increasing misery and instability. It’s NSS apparatus, it’s corporations and elites have been instrumental in that. Important to understand that these flimsy overnight positions and ideologies are not at all as spontaneous or self-made meaningless Anarcapulco ‘joke’ had deep roots in the Cold War era narratives and paranoia of movies such as Red Dawn or books such as Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand where the enemy was either US state (or IRS) described as a hideout for ‘commies’ or ‘parasites’ at home. Movies such as Tge Hunt also speak of this shifting paranoia that characterizes uses of ‘RINOs'(Republican In Name Only) to blame those deemed un-loyal, ‘bad actors’ and especially the strawman of Cultural Marxism or malefic liberal elites at home.
The reality is much more complex, and there is actually historically and institutional reasons why this complicity btw the National Security State and its covert support for such radical free market elements or entrepreneurial ideas works almost because of ideals that otherwise would deny all state involvement and all goverment aid. Did the at any point ask or consult even the local communities were they landed? Did they use any democratic means to inquire what the locals think prior to their arrival there? Noy at all. All this whining over taxation and constant victimizing over government interference actually hides the way cities in the US have been declared “failed cities” (see Detroit – who also makes an appearance in The Anarchist as a ‘white’ commune ? almost the counterpart of Anarcapulco). They ignore the almost complete systemic racism, non existent welfare, rampant environmental injustice sjd unwillingness to act on it, a minuscule public spending and endemic lack of goverment interference – since for all its global reach, tech supremacy, influence in world affairs and military over reach (800 mil basis around the world) the US internally is built on feet of clay.
Important to understand that these anti- government ideas did not go away with Tatcher or Reagan, but have been very cooking up, alive in the dotcom boom rise & fall, the foundation & impunity of (national asset) Big Tech entrepreneurship since the early 1990s, well before COVID 19 pandemic struck and expose how the trust in much public institutions had been eroded, or if public infrastructure and even liberal democracy was itself worth saving, well before the UBER leaks scandal hit us.
So maybe you won’t find anything of the above in this docuseries, and on watch lists and recommendation. I find these things pretty blaring. The Anarchists is more about the celebertarians and seasteading than their actual history of ancap encrouchment (although u see a lot of Ron Paul and even clips with Ayn Rand – tough that would be enough to put you off). Watch it if you must, keeping in mind all of the above or enjoy a conventional beach resort party gone sore. The only interesting part (beside its almost cheapo reality TV feel) is how made-up and how unconvincing sound this cries for freedom from normal affluent mostly white (apart from very few notable exceptions) mostly bachelor, well educated and mostly male (the women had almost scripted exclusive nurturing roles). The only unstable elements – the sad PTSD vets are almost colateral, but they are the only shadow of constant wars abroad (Irak, Afganistan) and the way imperial foreign policy strikes back, becomes war as mass culture. Militarism abroad has a tendency to spill over into militarization of police violence and disastrous & multiplying mass shootings.
Apart from a vegan place there is NOTHING absolutely nothing about the local Mexican anarchists or rich local resistance and anti-exploitation anti imperialist histories. Where is the history of the Mexican Revolution, of of the earliest revolutions of the XX c? Where are the Trots’s in exile or the Zapatistas in the South? All these counter-histories seem forgotten, delete. Nothing about the terrible costs inflected upon migrants that want to move North in search of a better life no matter what the cost to their personal liberty and freedom or the risk from de-hiydration or being hunted down by vigilante right wing border patrols. None of that here! It is a history in a bubble of another bubble. Nobody is questioning the criteria on which this on rush for so-called boundless optimization, efficiency and guaranteed benefits is built. Here are the absolute total normies you might say – and look how easy it is nowadays to self-identify as ‘anarchist’ or be reborn overnight as libertarians or have a friend in crutches hand you a book on the EVIL gov, and then instant ‘alternative’ lifestyles suddenly feel part of ‘your’ orientation and mission. This generally tends to end bad for the unprotected. Is it odd, is it ‘radical’ to be one of those suddenly moving from the rich Global North to the Global South being moved by ‘vibes’ and crypto-currency sponsorship and blogging platforms?! Don’t think so. It’s striking that most ‘crypto scheme’ promoter plan to revolutionize the economy only in impoverished, deregulated, and de-funded countries and mostly having suffered directly under the US neo-colonialism. They are either reeling after neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ or finding themselves squeezed under crushing private international debt & austerity measures. This possible explains how crypto arrived in Salvador via goverment promises and Philippines via gaming. The whole cheaper than at home (low cost) hotel- ballardian (Cocaïne Nights) environment living in Anarchapulco is actually what the utopia of this seasteding (fiscal paradise) crowd was all about.
“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.
TimeSpace Warps 