timespace coordinates: 2036 – 2037 Atlanta (Years into a benevolent alien occupation of Earth, the human race is still adjusting to the new world order and its quirky coffee table-sized overlords called the Vuvv. Their flashy advanced technology initially held promise for global prosperity, but rendered most human jobs – and steady income – obsolete.)
Cory Finley took inspiration from several Bravo TV shows, especially the Real Housewives and Below Deck series, when making the film. He drew parallels between the themes of surveillance and people having to film and commoditize their love and humanity.
spacetime coordinates: few hundred years after the apocapyse
Here are some possible reasons to watch SILO series (as usual no spoilers!):
Enjoy safely from home curvaceous neo-brutalist architectures that reminded me of a lot of gaming architectures (somehow related to subway or metro designs). And ask yourselves if SILO is Apple+ streaming reply to new Cold War fears? Ok, maybe you are too young to remember when Outer Limits and Twilight Zone series went into the details of “average” families and societies that either prepared for the apocalypse (or the “Red scare”) by closing in on themselves and their (commie?) neighbors. Yes, that was a time drenched with a heightened sense of paranoia when you could unwittngly marry a commie ( I Married a Communist 1949) or battle monsters brithed by radioactive fallouts (Them! 1954). That was also a time for underground living and atomic scares. Well for what it’s worth, the atomic fears are back with Russia’s aggression war on Ukraine getting close to the largest atomic powerplant in Europe and people raiding the apothecary for iodine pills. SILO is basically a subterranean arcology right out of 1950s scenarios, at the height of the Cold War or the Cuban Crisis. Private home ownership has been a flagship of the free world yet this private ownership had its under side: the bunker. With the 2008 economic crisis and the housing/real estate crash, the growth of bunker offers has been relentless. How did Western post-WWII democracies imagine the future home? From early on, future homes where showcases of industry and Western capitalist values in the face of Soviet or Socialist modernist ideals. Thus, the House of the Future was an outcome of these Red Scare fears and an eventual bulwark against possible atomic catastrophes, financial troubles, and worsening outside conditions as well as ideological encroachment. If house ownership seemed to drive housing booms, there was also an underside. The American Dream managed to exclude and evict certain portions of the population on economic and racial grounds. The “house of the future” was conceived as a perfect self-sustaining (and sustainable) dream if only it could keep the undesirables on the outside. It was a self-contained bubble that could hold at bay both toxicity, freak weather as well as human misery or discontent.
The SILO is almost a rehearsal for the colonization of other planets, which is why the outside is non-existent, mediated and akin to the deserted exoplanet. It is almost like living on a Mars colony or a spaceship. Take the Alison and Peter Smithson House of the Future designed in 1956 for the Ideal Home Exhibition in London – and we can see overlaps with plans and blueprints for ideal bunkers and spaceship habitats. What strikes a chord now is that this is a sort of pre-Big Brother setting, a staged and open habitat. It does not have a ceiling or a roof, it is transparent from above. This house was not a house to be lived in, it was more of a stage. It was meant as an exhibition platform – a showcase where the spectacle of futurity (and Western modernity) did its rounds and where visitors could peer from above as if looking into a laboratory maze of experimental mice. SILO takes this in another direction, since it is a multi-racial society, yet with a class-system and pro-natalist eugenist politics. Eugenics is back and tech entrepreneurs do not shy away to express support for such views that have a terrible and brutal history behind. So in contrast with the old 1950s House of the Future, the SILO was meant to be collective if layered and divided living quarters. The usual SF trope with a long an UP/DOWN axis makes it a vertical Snowpiercer of sorts. There is a race to the top but once born in a certain level or section you cannot go up. Yet there is some downward mobility with the main character (like Engels) choosing to the bottom. All utopian plans concerning collectivity in the Anglo-American SF do not have a good track recrod. Usually, collective living is reserved for ideological enemies. This I think is where SILO series deviates from the usual familial unit. It is a whole block – a community of a little more than 10.000 humans (though there are many secrets concerning its origin and the possibility of outside humans with their own societies). Generally speaking, it is a quite diverse lot (till the recent episodes) and even if restricted by The Pact (you shall not magnify or shall not mechanize bottom-to-top transport), social mobility stifled by nepotism, by regulations and rules, I would say it is a much more egalitarian than the capitalist world we actually live in today. There do not seem to be homeless or people starving. Even if it somehow superficially reminds us of real existing Socialist (or Eastern Marxist) historical examples with its repressive surveillance systems and Judicial arm, the economic differences btw the inhabitants are not at all as extreme as in our societies.
SILO Apple+ series comes at a moment when overall fragmentation and fragilization (not to say militarization) is rampant. We live in a moment when extreme forms of anarcho- and libertarian capitalist ideas keep on popping up, no matter what. Advocating for so-called “free ports” and “free zones” or smart cities (free of taxes, free of regulations and basically free of any oversight or responsibility) is not new. This model has been ballooning on and off all over the world with the most notorious examples ranging from the US and the UK to places as unexpected as ex-US army basis in Afghanistan now under the Taliban. The question of TRUTH which seems all-important in this series is also too close to the “Truthers” claim, but it can also be a play on all these revelations and “talking truth to power” – and a feeling that this, under the current capitalist system will lead nowhere. The same as all the SILO ceremonials and sports events – they are just reverted or degenerated forms of historical events (this is again something that Tea Part and Truthers hold in common). The Freedom Festival celebrates the victory over the separatist escapist fraction, yet the sovereign individual is today at the center of conservative thought. Freedom and anti-cancel culture campaigns have become a constant part of the deregulatory push of tech entrepreneurs (and outcome of TW takeover by Musk). SILO announces today’s race for the insular. No, globalization and free trade are not disappearing. Within certain renegade sections of the Austro-libertarian neoliberal family – there was an attempt to eliminate democracy and fuse economy with trade within smaller, tight-knit (and like-minded) communities. What is SILO if not the result of the touted failure of nation-states, or the flight from the grasp of federal governments? According to such views, geopolitical blocks and democracies failed to avert catastrophe, stick to climate agreements and placate the military-entertainment complex. The surprise is that this SILO micro-state is rather drab, ignorant of its past, slightly totalitarian, and at the whim of its agencies (as the US with its Alphabeth NSA/CIA/FBi agencies?!). Another (not unimportant aspect) is the fact that a kind of runners or gig economy workers are all the time running down the stairs doing all sorts of errands. Is it the result of The Pact interdiction? Probably, but it is also a reminder of our world where food delivery services with the poorest of pay and under the most polluted conditions are a click away! If it is a “zone” closed off from the seemingly polluted deathly surface, it somehow reverted to the ideals of the old West with its Sheriffs and Mayors. Apart from the brown-grey and visible worn-out look of surfaces and its forced recycling ideals and hack labs (very far from today’s Big Tech control), this could be a real existing socialist world. You can also start watching this way. At the same time – it also seems strangely lifeless. Following the lives of citizens feels like living in Hobbiton: THE SHIRE haunts SILO. This is the most displeasing feature (plus long repetitive dialogues) – a sort of Tolkeinesque like villager life, closer to Amish or Pioneer town role-playing. So no Moebius/Jodorowsky Incal 1980s vertical (shaft) city. No color and no excess.
Depending on your point of view (or ideological flavor or science fantasy feel), Silo may be a missed opportunity or a chance to tackle an apocalyptic imagination of billionaires and tech entrepreneurs hiring military security to survive a societal collapse. A collapse, that they are constantly obsessing about but actively contributing to. While SILO is not confronting the way luxury bunkers it is a fictional extension of the lifestyles explored in Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell. Such silos are the model for SILO and they are real not fictional. There is no need of fictioning in this sense. Companies such as Survival Condo have transformed ex missile silos into prime real estate. Cold War as a business model. Prepperism is so deeply entrenched in the US that there must be no surprise that every other tech AI entrepreneur has a bunker in his head (thinking here of ChatGPT’s Sam Altman).
Here is my favorite point. Watch SILO if you must as an answer to recent Chinese SF blockbusters such as Wandering Earth. I am referring here to the main character in the 2nd eps “Machines” – the proletarian figure of the engineer Juliette Nichols (played by Rebecca Ferguson of Dune fame). Watch her and her crew at the task of switching off the main generator for repairs. For me, this scene could be a perfect counterpart to the Liu Qi scene in Wandering Earth 1 installing the Lighter Core at the Sulawesi Earth Engine. That Wandering Earth fragment brought some of the most amazing scenes in recent cinema since it deployed intentionally some extant realist-socialist imagery by showing how humans (NO super-heroes), in a group effort and under great odds, manage to fix a very difficult issue. And VERY IMPORTANTLY this is an issue not dealing with chips or semiconductors, but with some huge engines. These mega devices are closer to giant mecha than high-precision equipment. Such engines appeared long since gone in cinema (and only part of the industrial age or Stalinist arsenal) or as said mecha designs. Here you have a gigantic rotating engine that keeps the entire SILO running by using some (what I suspect) geothermal energy source that can only be interrupted for short periods of time before catastrophic pressure build-up. Everything is against the clock. All the action in this episode was built around this engineering feat and “repair” moment. Where do we see such a repair scene? In my books, they are usually part of the Soviet Union or Romanian brochures about industrial achievements or stories my dead grandpa (a wielder) used to tell. This is very ironic, especially thinking that Apple is a company that has made repairs nearly impossible. Apple is particularly notorious for its closed hardware policy and for making eventual maintenance as difficult as possible for its utilizers.
Here is a series of tweet about that episode and more:
Eps 3 Machines was a surprise. I see here an influence of the Chinese #WanderingEarth movies. SF action based on a collective effort to repair a(geothermal energy) generator. Mechanic Juliette Nichols reminds me of Liu Qi installing the Lighter Core in the Sulawesi Earth Engine. https://t.co/v9VB4bNxlu
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) May 16, 2023
Photograph of the interior bedroom inhabited by two couples in the roles as inhabitants. House of the Future 1956, London.
House of the Future 1956 floor plan.
Drawing of a mat cluster of Houses of the Future 1956.
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:
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”?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
M3GAN is a 2022 American science fiction horror film directed by Gerard Johnstone starring Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, with Amie Donald physically portraying M3GAN and Jenna Davis voicing the character. Its plot follows the eponymous artificially intelligent doll who develops self-awareness and becomes hostile towards anyone who comes between her and her human companion. A sequel, titled M3GAN 2.0, is scheduled to be released on January 17, 2025. (wiki)
Raji: An Ancient Epic is an Indian action-adventure video game developed by Nodding Heads Games based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. It was first released as a timed exclusive for Nintendo Switch on 18 August 2020, and released on 15 October 2020 for Microsoft Windows via the Steam client and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
The game incorporates Hindu mythology and takes inspiration from epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Graphically, the game is designed in the style of Pahari paintings, and the in-game architecture is modeled after that of medieval Rajasthan. (wiki)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows 7 64-bit / Processor: Intel Core i5-4400 (3.1 GHz) / AMD FX-6300 (3.5 GHz) / Memory: 8 GB RAM / Graphics: GeForce GTX 760 / AMD Radeon R9 270 / DirectX: Version 11 / Storage: 6 GB available space / Sound Card: On board
TimeSpace Warps 