I am a bit wary of Cory Doctorow‘s abruptly downward curve of “enshittification” since, as Richard Barbrook has been mentioning (at least since 1995), the shit was there since the beginning, altough there is always room for more. By beef is with this “Suddenly” in the title, I am a bood ol’ catastrophist (in paleontological terms) but a gradualist when it is about good or bad or worsening tech. Like the Gilded Age barons, today’s broligarchs are hardened capitalists, fed by public money and always ready to deny that. Claiming newness, “suddenness”, “acceleration,” and urgency has some merit in today’s distraction-addled world, but then we miss the continuities, the relevant dialectics, and historical tensions that coexist and exacerbate all the time. What is not is that much of the techno-optimism is gone, and what is left risks inflating into some huge economic bubble ready to burst.
But as always, who can actually argue against his well-documented examples of why it has been very hard not to see all the current spaces of platform capitalism as a benchmark case for what is wrong with Bit Tech. Not to say he is the only one to look toward or read under such shitty circumstances, but at least he does not peddle the techno-feudalism line everywhere, mentioning that capitalism is over or that. Degrading the user experience, maximizing profits, and treating users as prisoners on their platforms isn’t anything new; it is just that now it is being experienced at all levels and much more acutely because the tech monopolies are well-established. What is bitterly funny is that suddenly, the trouble with deregulation and the need for disciplining is again on the table. Nobody ever tried to discipline the Tech behemoths that are so eager to ass kiss Trump, and in a way, disciplining such uber-rich crazy rich spoiled brats becomes impossible nowadays using democratic institutions. Instead of a Big Green State, in fact, countries have been handing more and more to the private sector with disastrous outcomes. As digital theorist Alexander R. Galloway wrote in an excellent review of David Gollumbia’s cyberlibertarianism, all the signs were there when deregulatory measures, the embrace of non-hierarchical disorder (0ut of Control), and the rhetoric of computer liberation instituted a new order, as robust as the old and maybe even more difficult to budge since it now arrives driverless in the form of uberization.
One of the greatest pleasures of today is all the rotten, splendid carcases of B-movies and matinee SF glory days slouching around on the net waiting for vultures like me. You can find all these online gems restored at 4k quality on YT. There are literally tons of forgotten or well-hidden movies online, or even lesser-known classics like this one (mentioned by a favorite science fiction auteur like Adrian Czajkowski as “One of my all time favourite films, lord help me.”). That says something.
To call it a knock-off or a spin-off of Seven Samurai (1954) or the Magnificent Seven (1960) would be stating the obvious. It makes much more sense to consider such a sui generis movie. This is what I learned in my Eastern European teenage years – your Metallica or Mad Professor DUB t-shirt, drawn with a smeared ballpoint pen or marker, was the better, the correct degenerate copy. Wear it proudly, bc it definitely felt more real and touchable, and anyway, we could not afford (back then) the production costs or the textile sweatshop labor behind it. In a way, it was totally opposed to the fast fashions of today. What we have to figure out is how we got from that to the fast fashions of today. Battle Beyond the Stars is also probably one of the most unabashedly – shamelessly, one might say, examples of genre hybridizing beyond the borders of commercial success or market-driven hype. Let us consider it an example of horizontal or transversal gene transfer, but also a sign that ‘mature’ SF rarely hides its roots. The result is a tainted ‘space opera’ play that never quite grew out of imperial-colonial dime novels and penny Wild West pulp cradle. And still the copy goes beyond the original.
But let’s put all these petty considerations aside and enjoy this ludicrous piece of 80s cinema. What I miss in the recent spate of Marvel remakes and SW prequels that has gripped the Hollywood industry is the way they score rather poorly on the baloney aspect of a remake and sci-fi spoof. One should push the envelope, but completely try to bend it out of shape. Turn the quantitative into the qualitative. If you do a more or veiled remake, just see what lies beyond. Bring on hive minds, heat-communicating aliens, Valkyrie from outer space in tiny ships, decadent sapphire-studded mercs, and alien reptilians with lucious bodyguards.
One could be really wicked and say that The Battle Beyond the Stars was very mundane, it was the prospect for the entire actor-president 1980s Reagan era of finding a mate in the other, the Eastern (Perestroika) liberalized other. What does it take to spice up your competition, woo it, and transform it into your trading partner? Is it just about big space guns? In domestic terms (or Melinda Cooper talking about the New Family Values), maybe it was about how to make an arranged marriage for the two protagonists, fairly bland white cisgender heroes, more palatable (erotic, anyone?)? Battle Beyond the Stars is then the Panda show – how to avert the “Great Replacement” by mutants in terms of today’s damaged “volk capital“. Damned it, will they ever kiss, will they ever mate, will they follow the “Varda” scripture against the Social Darwinist imperatives of the empire and its mutant minions? Altough, important point, a lot of early SF was analysed by Jordan S. Carroll (who recently won the Hugo for the Best Related Work category) in his award-winning Speculative Whiteness point to superior mutant leaders (Sador!) as some sort of ubermensch aloof from the masses (“The enemies in many of the early mutant stories turn out to be the masses, who represent primitive throwbacks to the past when compared to the forward-looking mutant visionaries.” – read the interview here)
Hmm, what could be waiting after the 1980s arms race, when the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative (which Lucas sued for copyright), refuses to gett decommissioned? Nothing else but an AI gendered Voice of Nell spaceship (spaceship with tits) and completely incompetent baddies that, nevertheless (like the eponymous US empire at its zenith), are ready to incinerate planets and suns in order to get new organs or audience ratings from ‘lesser’ species. Batten Beyond the Stars is how solidarity and foreign policy were imagined during the 80s, where every friendly dictator or enemy of my enemy (Mujahideen) is my friend. All my allies have to commit suicide and die a “beautiful death” like a Valkyrie.
Decided to put here Quinn Slobodian’s forthcoming book where he tries to trace the madness that is now in the driver’s seat while the current coup in the US, smashing institutions and taking over the Federal government. Here is a preview and review of it by economist and inequality specialist Branko Milanovic on his substack. An excerpt:
“One has to admire Quinn Slobodan: in order to write his most recent book “Hayek’s bastards: The neoliberal roots of the populist right” (the title is modeled after “Voltaire’s bastards” by John Ralston Saul), he had to enter the world of madmen who produced movies, fictionalized novels, investment newsletters, and comic books detailing the forthcoming economic apocalypse (several apocalypses every year for half a century), invraisemblable conspiracies and own racial superiority. All of that was happening because the piles of money were paid by various tycoons to maintain in a comfortable lifestyle and publishing activity Mont Pelerin Society fellows, so that they could continue meeting each other and exchanging the predictions of doom and gloom in the luxury hotels of the Riviera, Alpine resorts and even on the Galapagos islands.“
A podcast with John Ganz of Unpopular Front and Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History at Boston University and author of the forthcoming Hayek’s Bastard’s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Among the topics discussed: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, cryptocurrency, Las Vegas, and NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang’s leather jacket.
Listening to this lively cross-talk between savvy historians, I must say that I’m somehow getting the feeling that even they are at a loss with what is going on and who can blame them. This is how quickly things are unwinding all over the place -(here is a good breakdown of the ideological make-up of Romania’s candidate in a similar vein) with the growing feeling there’s a Muskian IPad baby coup underway. Really liked how Grimes was brought into the mix making her the principal purveyor of coolness or general must-watch stuff into Musk’s life. Apparently, she introduced Musk to Adam Curtis’s documentaries on a private flight (of which apparently he got bored quickly). Interesting (and confirmed by many others these days) is the way industrial policy – or attempts at it (see the Foxconn fiasco) or bringing back the industries and forgotten Golden Age hard SF trope (“flying cars” and such) home or pushing a new network superstate (Thiel + Balaji), the main nationalist drive of Trump’s campaigns is completely contradicted by his alliance to the techbroligarchy and crypto scammers. The return of the materiality of the cloud is welcome though, but also feels half-hearted. The fact that “the cloud” and cloud computing are not something in the sky, but involve actual productive forces and manufacturing, that cloud computing needs huge amounts of energy and are major drivers of climate emergency (the footprint of cloud computing is now larger than aviation) keeps getting more obvious by the day. What is worrying and what has been going on for a while is that Musk, Bezos, and other billionaires pretending to save a “worldless” humanity (in Michel Nieva’s accurate phrasing) have been using these capitalist hard SF tropes constantly for years.
The novelty of US technofascism (in comparison with German or Italian versions) seems to be its speculative finance Anarchapulco vector . The simple fact that they do not promise full employment and ethno-economics but also crypto should give us pause. My only caveat is what I consider a bit risky – so say that China is not innovating, that everything is a knock-off (thus echoing a lot of techbro diatribes – especially Palantir CEO Alex Karp saying that China does not have a tech scene) except top-notch EVs. Here we should think more about what Cory Doctorow called memefacturing (the rapid transformation of memetic objects into mass-produced commodities), the process of shanzai-ification (on which I wrote before on SFitze), and small incremental (like my Miyoo mini example) improvements and big push for new telecom standardization. But otherwise I agree that what’s going on sounds like a bad idiotic knockoff of what the current anti woke coalition understands China is doing. All their measure are a deformed version of Hong Kong (exported oriented economy plus Macau (casino economy) or rather “Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore and Meyer Lansky’s Las Vegas” (in Slobodian’s pun). Evgeny Morozov also wrote 10 years ago about the wannabe Singaporization of the US economy (or what they understand of it).
TimeSpace Warps 