2247 – TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before Congress (full hearing)

On several accounts, this is probably one of the most interesting pieces of current politics as a spectacle I have seen recently. It is several hours long and it is really interesting to skip through, on several accounts that I want to detail below. It is basically an almost textbook example of double standards and also a way to see how Congress politicians (US) that would normally disagree on almost everything (Medicaid, immigrants, Green New Deal etc.) are agreeing on one thing: that the popular social platform TikTok cannot stay under Chinese ownership. That’s a strange form of nationalisation- something that is anathema for both US liberals and cons. Also, one cannot understand this sudden Tiktok phobia without previous measures taken to curtail reliance on Huawei infrastructure or the whole scare around G5, with the Chinese leading the new global technology standardisation measures. So here it is:

1. This hearing is an unexpected proof of the links between the Silicon Valley tech giants and NSS, an institutionalized relation that has been amply explored by Linda Weiss in American Inc.?. That amazing book from 2014 gives so much insight into the e U.S. innovation system. It ends on a warning note – a perceived un-productivity or inefficiency that has stifled innovation, a decline that has only accelerated these last years. This history of institutional bootstrapping that has grown out of the Cold War pursuits of technological supremacy and permanent defense preparedness in front of external threats – has produced a very successful combination indeed, yet it has stopped bringing in the expected results. This combination of geopolitical threats and domestic political constraints that has been such a catalyst for countless start-ups, for huge technological breakthroughs in robotics, space technologies, and nanotech, and that had this tip-toe coordinating role in the private-public relationships was starting to wobble and crack up. Financialized corporations are being regarded as stifling innovation and actually boycotting R&D in today’s world. Since about 1910s monopoly capitalism has been the name of the game, and huge corporations (big firms socialized by banks and stock markets) found themselves not in competition with other firms so much as with the growing power of trade unions. Responding to these pressures as well as Bolchevik fear mongering, Maynard Keynes opus called The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money basically (as Charles Mudede put in a recent post) basically advices and advocates for the transformation of the working class (mostly white) into white collar workers that defined the second half of the 20 century. Now that middle class has declined in the West and is mainly growing in China and India (and probably Africa in the future). According to others he didn’t stabilize capitalism as much as save a crumbling British Empire. Right-wing Keynesianism and military deficit spending may try to do just that for the American Empire but there’s other forces at work. BRICS (India, Brazil, China, South Africa, Russia) signals a change and willingness to avoid over-reliance on the dollar as an international currency reserve (and by extension the US Fed). What’s more fascinating than to see a world power that promoted free trade for decades turn into a “protectionist”?!
2. The fact that this TikTok hearing is not like the Facebook Zuckerberg hearing before Congress four years ago is also a sign of the times. There not only a premium of Congress to show off its patriotic alliegence and anti-China sentiment in public, but also a huge benefit to be reaped for Big Tech that has shown itself a national assett on the global stage. Everything is allowed on the global hegemony stage, even kamikaze gestures like fucking up the careers of scientists that have previously worked for you, and are now considered unreliable or potentially a liability in the new climate of China Initiative launched by the Trump government in 2018 and continued under Biden.
3. Another thing that comes across from various reactions and comments and online memes produced after the hearing (from the Sinosphere as well) is that it is all a witch hunt. The majority of proof brought by the Congress was frankly laughable. This hearing has been really working against the intentions of the Congress, and actually gained support and even celebrity status for the relatively unknown Shou Zi Chow, a citizen of Singapore not mainland China.
4. What is again quite clear is that politicians (US and elsewhere, with the exception of China maybe) are completely at the mercy of technologies that they do not care to understand, regulate or mitigate. They are basically (as one friend put it) surfing platforms that are managed by their campaign managers or specialists, while they live in a sort of blissful ignorance. It is very clear that they do not care to understand what these platforms are about, as long as they can reap benefits or if they think that the surveillance, misinformation and addictive-behavior-inducing apps at home is provided by what they consider American-patriotic platforms. Also, Red Scare is apparently not a bygone thing, and everything can be mobilized in the new Cold War. It basically made them look both ridiculously united and also completely out of their milieu in terms of the Internet and social media.
5. The increasing sensation that TikTok has somehow gamed the algo capitalist economy and has suddenly offered or at least intensified things in a new direction. As my friend Cristian Dragan and Ion D sez (both have taken to exploring TikTok new hybrids), the platform seems to create overnight popularity, turbo-charging popularity sky-high like nothing seen before (with the likes of Insta or FB) and also allow a much higher degree of horizontal shuffling or at least a combination of otherwise invisible content (from countryside location, to menial jobs, to the city to areas considered completely isolated). This comes with a greater susceptibility to vibes and to hybridization of styles visual or musical.

Bruh, I don't recommend watching any of the TikTok Congress hearing.

It shows how technologically behind our governmental officials are.

Peep this fucking dude.

My pupils are so fucking dilated right now bruv. pic.twitter.com/zPfVtq0KC9

— AMadamWebuss (@AplatypussTV) March 23, 2023

2127 / The Anarchists (HBO docuseries 2022)

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.

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2101 – So Close 夕陽天使 (2002 movie)

spacetime coordinates: close to the year 2000 HK

I am indebted to seeing this movie in a particular context – as part of the Fatal & Fallen – program curated by Jade Barget and Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee at the Bi’bak/Sinema Transtopia in Berlin cinema hosted at the House of Statistics. It was followed by a very funny intervention presentation by Mie Hiramoto (Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at National University of Singapore.)

Fatal & Fallen was first presented at Singapore’s Asian Film Archive in the context of their Re:frame series from September – to October 2021. Here I will post some of their framing of the selection featuring movies from South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong.

So Close is directed by Corey Yuen and starring Shu Qi, Zhao Wei and Karen Mok.

“When a gang of assassins murders their parents, two sisters inherit the family business – a state-of-the-art computer surveillance system. Armed with new skills, the sisters become the most accomplished assassins in Hong Kong. But after killing a wealthy magnate, an undercover detective is suddenly hot on their tail. Loyalties are tested, alliances are questioned and survival becomes the most extreme sport of all. As part of the second wave of the Girls with Guns subgenre, So Close is an updated version of the 1980s films that were built on strong, female leads portrayed with ostensible power. However, the film masquerades female empowerment under the guise of a highly sexualising male gaze. Expressed in definitive Y2K stylisation and featuring quintessential early-2000 gadgets, fashion, and special effects, So Close captures the new millennium’s techno-optimism.” (Sinema Transtopia program page)

What can I add to that? I was a total surprise with the distance of the years to watch this movie. It feels both incredibly cheeky, cringe and fucked up and really dated in many ways (at the time when sexual harassment has been outed as endemic to the very bureau corporate environments the movie is set in), yet still a fun watch. I like how the technological absences play out, and how everything is so gadgety – close to Sianne Ngai’s “Theory of the gimmick”. If we associate gadgets with a Macguyver gendered action cinema here is a welcome reversal. The hackers are Asian and female (and the male US white expert is incredibly clunky and cartoonish), physically and technologically able to stand their own.

The gimmick is everywhere, it has escaped the stores & stalls or the visible Apple or Microsoft brands and it seems to solve almost everything in order to even out the odds in a very unequal world. So Close is a fabulous, sexy (sexist or cisgenger one might say but there is a few surprises at the end), unapologetic movie from the Y2K era in HK (as Elizabeth G Lee mentioned in her intro). After reunification with China, one can feel this whole mad energy and explosive expansive mood. As mentioned by Hie Miramoto, girls with guns are really more than ur usual – wuxia heroine – that still felt a need for a male’s martial arts counterpart Confucian acceptance or inclusion

The movie is brim-full with forgotten gadgets, and imaginary interfaces, including the famous 90s and 2000s electronic dictionaries that were so popular at the time (I also happen to have one) and influenced so much of the later ‘Galapagos effect’ of Chinese homebrewed tech. For me, it puts every Mission Impossible or James Bond to shame. It sometimes feels like it’s just about tech stalls and (soon to be extinct but still exciting) devices fresh off the assembly line anywhere around the world (be it Bucharest Red Dragon or Hong Kong). Please check the fantastic Chaoyang trap substack post intro to that technological wonder in what they call “The Decade of the Electronic Dictionary: 1995-2005. As Emily point out in her quick, electronic dictionaries offered a lot of transgressive possibilities under the guise of ‘educational’ tech.

GIF adapted from this 
Bilibili look back at the Electronic Dictionary era. (from Chaoyang article)

Finally, another great thing is the way the ‘camera shot’ travels the entire length of the net – the way one has the POW of the impulse or the message or data. Surveillance is not an issue and the more CCTV cameras the better. It also feels an incredible mix of advertising and music video. Every hair swoop and bubble bath shot seems lifted out of an industry ad, yet it all makes sense. You get a the sense these electronic dictionary universe is both an anticipation of the smartphone environment – and an alternative to it.

The Choreography is just amazing, superb as expected. Computers are already at the forefront of cyber attacks – you can ghost yourself or replicate or simulate yourself in the feed. We always have to remember that So Close is far from the current ‘deep fake’ craze yet it anticipates it by a long shot. The satellite communication – ‘eye in the sky’ is both clunky & physical, and always reminds us how dependable we are on this infrastructure that is always present and somehow invisible. There is an interesting alliance (even sexual innuendo) btw the forces of the state (police) and female sister crackers against mostly male corporate transnational structures. All the drama and action makes the men (except of the sexy yet still hapless BF) feel caricatural, bogged down, really superfluous. Even the (man) villains feel overpowered, not really expecting to confront such apt adversaries.

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2028 – Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, The Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin (essay documentary 2015)

A Film by Isabella Gresser

An Essay Documentary Film narrated by and featuring Korean-German Philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han talks about the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘Burnout Society’. He raises the question of how we want to live today, and uncovers the underlying themes of an achievement-oriented digital society.

Read more by Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books) available on libgen.is (YT)

interview with Byung-Chul Han

interview by art review with Byung-Chul Han

review in LARB of Burnout Society

Without reading none of his celebrated books, I still have a big reluctance of what I regard a well-qualified but still blatantly anti-technological stance that Byung-Chul Han professes. To me, that smells too much of Martin Heidegger and too little of Marshall MacLuhan. There is also the feeling that there is too much convergence with the current (fully digitized) mindfulness. In a sense ‘smart’ technologies themselves offer nowadays an improved default mindfulness setting, as if in agreement with what Zizek once called a ‘decaffeinated’ version, a new sort of Decaf Reality. Mindfulness apps abound. Remains to be seen if these are just adjustments on the go – another sign that there is more and more need for what is perceived as “growing disillusionment” with future prospects and what feels more and more like a ‘labor camp’ type Googlag working environment. Tang ping is another term that is being coined completely independent from Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of post-Fordist malaise, but has a lot in common with his ideas about the current threadmill.

I also think that Byung-Chul Han’s emphasis on Panopticon is still much too imprecise and tributary to Foucault’s own predilection for early modern examples, so it risks (in my mind) missing out on the current shift of digital governance from Foucalt’s older ‘panopticon’ to the (particularly in China but also Gaza Strip/Israel) new model of ‘panspectron’ (as highlighted by Gabriele de Seta and Rogier Creemers.

By posting this documentary essay that I quite like, it is important on Byung-Chul Han – a star philosopher of recent years. Yes, I consider his ideas timely, zeitgeisty and appreciate very much his slide from studying metallurgy to philosophy and art theory. I also think that anything that might help slow down or throw some light on the nature of time (of Money) transformations under financial capitalism, or on the ideology of work, on the workings of ‘hustle culture’ and the gig economy, on ‘death by overwork’ (過労死, Karōshi), for qualifying the so-called Asian economic miracle as capitalist mode of hyper-production, and on paradoxical modes of incomplete, non-utilitarian, Taoist (emptiness philosophy inflected) non-productivist, non-optimized living speaks to this very moment of tiredness and widening depression. His own wanderings trough both East/West and his necrosophic musings within cemetery grounds and poetry (as seen in this documentary) brings him very close to my own orientation and others that I have been collaborating with over the years. He also makes a very cool reference to the Momo novel by Michael Ende that turns out to be one of the most precious and timely books on accelerationism or today’s burnout society.

Special thanks to Felix P for sharing the books of Byung-Chul Han and especially this documentary.

1771 – Weitermachen Sanssouci (film directed by Max Linz 2019)

timespace coordinates: somewhere in the present or near-future Berlin (or close to you)

Attempts at reviewing this movie might fail miserably. It is an incredibly – very dry though very funny – slapstick movie about some really serious shit. It is many things – for one it is probably the best recent German (and probably contemporary) film on the increasing corporate interests and pressures encroaching upon students, assistants, researchers, postdocs, universities and high education institutions.

Most probably one of my favorite movies lately. It is a very low budget looking movie. Its made-up and unreal low aesthetic serves its scope perfectly – toning down the huge investments and media craze behind variously hyped “technological fixes” and gimmicks (as this TechNO-fix book argues) that seem to worsen up things the more they juggle quick ‘solutionism’ with hidden costs and a big price-tag. The most ridiculous fixes and exploitative solutions abound in such a desperate situation (dire annual reports, accelerating ecological collapse). Although there are probably very good reason to attempt large-scale geo-engineering, there is also the feeling that there is no grand plan and that everybody is trying to circumvent, ignore or redirect the increasing flows of climate migrants. Blue screens only makes the VR developers attempts at making the forest fires or hurricanes more realistic, more close to home seem impractical and plainly wrongheaded. Everything is muddled, completely detached from anything outside holodeck. The main character is Phoebe (Sara Ralfs) who is not an actress – and this helps bringing some real picaresque cine verite – as well allowing all the other proper actors to play ham (and quite hateful) roles. Phoebe is completely enmeshed in Academic exploitative situations. Instead of a “quant” role – she gets mired into the machinations of higher faculty members. She lands a university bullshit job (David Graeber with a smile in heaven) that isn’t even a part-time (25%?!). A precarity that proves what Universities risk becoming, and how insecurity and exploitation go hand in hand.

At no other time in history has Innovation, A.S. (artificial stupidity), VR/AR founder magic leaps, transmedia festivals or generally VR development (dah! experience economy!) – felt so just-in-time, just simple cover-up gimmicks (that is why we need apud Suzanne Ngai a Theory of the Gimmick). Expensive gadgetry that seems to basically exists just in order to secure badly needed (and dwindling) research funds. There is nothing to predict, there is nothing to anticipate, since it all seems crystal clear from the point of view of the scientists (and a good part of humanity as well as various other species that are forced to adapt as well as they can) that the current situation is untenable and leading only to an increasing sense of doom.

And yet almost in symbiosis with the above, lots of initiatives are bound up in the same display (rut) of smartness & innovation. There’s lots of money especially in desperate times – funding is not lacking if you’re in the high-tech Demo branch. In fact the core team in the movie has so much unspent money from the previous assignments that they feel one should buy new furniture, new lamps (more decor for more meetings and farcical brain storming!). Yet, funding bodies themselves seem oblivious, complacent and bound up with the same carousel of justifying their own investments – encouraging high-tech low concept toys and exercizing market pressures to outdo any competitors by promising better tomorrows. It is a Welt am Draht (1973) without the wiring and with visible strings attached.

Both the university, the creative sector and the NGO environment seems to veer towards what amounts to a cognitive sweat shop (“concept sweathops” mind you – which u could extend to anything: from corporate boardrooms to neo-Stakhanovite (стахановец) brainstorming- heartstorming workshops.

This is a movie about the huge arrogance and cynicism of (how else can u call them without espousing the same balmy anti intellectualism & anti-science tropes?!) specialists, elites and (even worse) tech gurus & pundits everywhere giving paid advice on how to motivate depressive and increasingly loan-dependent and indebted students. Weitermachen Sanccouci is about how to incentivize and still keep all hierarchies intact (the constant joke of the movie is nudging – a sort of neo-behaviorist Pavlovian methods dressed as evolutionary cognitivism, behavioural economics or hokey evo- psychology). Let’s pretend and keep things afloat during austerity economics via minimal positive reinforcement (cookies, medication, drugs, gamifictation? or anything else in btw) with a theory behind: Nudge Theory. The abstruse self congratulatory language of seminars, bizarre surreal PowerPoint presentations is also being fully explored and ridiculed.

It is not a dark or spiteful movie – and it is easy to identify with the main heroine that seems to stray off beaten paths and genuinely try something different. She teaches math that actually listens to the problems of her students (not much younger than her) and tries not to transform everything into a Monopoly game.

A VR or augmented reality that fails to augment is a basic glitch – (not only in the sense explored by Asher in his recent documentary A Glitch in the Matrix) but also as a feature of post-cinematic, post-phenomenlogical media apparatuses (Steven Shaviro). Glitches, bugs, technological failures should not be seen just as breaks of an otherwise smooth technological progression but as valid manifestations of what lies beyond current capabilities of technology. A ‘demonic realm’ featured in recent paranormal found footage horror (Paranormal Activity series) and recent meta horror sci-fi (Resolution or Mandela Effect) movies seem to communicate with hapless humans correspond more often than not with new technical devices that stand outside of the human sensorium. What is untouchable, inaccessible – peers trough the boundless technological promises where another reality might find itself excluded, junked and reduced to the status of a blindfolded audio walk. The unreality of our current hell gets simulated because we don’t seem to take notice, leaving us immersed as before, Sanssouci -like the title. No worries. Keep going as if. The air cooling systems in the main university building goes crazy starts an artificial snow storm almost in solidarity with the planetary climate system. The same chaotic effects of a buildings thermostat that augment the student strike (as most student strike go gets shut down or gets described as minor nuisance by the VR faculty staff). The climate change inside faculty hallways unexpectedly makes it finally experienced and touchable.

This slapstick situation becomes almost our default way to express harsh truths. Weitermachen S – humorously retrieves another forgotten or slowly emerging backlog – the history of Socialist computing via its Chilean Cybersyn Project. A decentralized computer vision that was never fully implemented (stopped short by the military CIA backed coup) and that was not trained on War Games but on managing economic emergencies red blinking in a slick room designed almost like a futuristic planned-economy example of a Star Trek-like spaceship deck.

read hear another review

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