Artifact from a lost world
Slovakian filmmaker Viera Čákanyová’s POZNÁMKY Z EREMOCÉNU (Notes from Eremocene) is a melancholic message in a bottle, a dialogue that takes place after humanity’s collapse between a human agent—or perhaps their digital remnants—and a future artificial interlocutor. The film is a speculative exercise as vertiginous as the world we currently inhabit, mixing analogue film with machine vision systems like LiDAR, reflecting on the futures that dwell with us now and those that might reconfigure our world. COVID-19, the weakening of global democracies, the variegated threats posed by AI, and the climate crisis loom large here, even as the conceit of the film functions to keep them at a distance: what we’re encountering, after all, is an artifact reflecting on a world that no longer exists.
Alienated from one another and ourselves, Čákanyová describes this epoch as the Eremocene: The Age of Loneliness. The film opens with the static noise of a television tuned to a dead channel and a question and response:
‘How can I help you?’
‘Can you help me find my original character?’ our narrator asks.
In fandoms, an original character, or OC, refers to a character developed by a fan fiction creator that is not part of an official media franchise canon. Here, it underscores something related: decentralized, non-sovereign agencies that must be discovered through processes of memory, longing, and (dis)possession. As the film’s protagonist scans through layers of digital artifacts in an attempt to recover their OC, the AI clusters concepts and affects to assist in the effort. Biological organisms have wetware. And that OC wetware, seemingly, felt sad and stuck: ‘Depressed? It might be political.’
A fraught utopia
POZNÁMKY Z EREMOCÉNU peers beyond the felt political impasses of our shared present, instead gesturing towards material and speculative reconfigurations of the future. For those of us forced to inhabit a fraught now, radical visions of a world to come emerge through myriad forms of self and collective support, whether going to the beach for a walk and a swim, or attending a climate change protest. One might seek to abandon the crisis ordinary by abandoning the grid and buying a farm, or escaping through the bacchanalia of Burning Man. Then, too, there are scaled-up utopian visions, like the horizontalist promises of a world without nations, where everyone’s basic needs are met and we are free to pursue our individual and collective betterment.
Of course, there are other ways to imagine and realize the future, like the techno-utopians who dream of a system of global governance run by AI and blockchain. Sometimes this futarchy suggests an escape from the ruthlessness of capitalist extraction and exploitation. Take Satoshi Nakamoto—the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin and key figure in the development of blockchain technology—who wanted, like earlier techno-libertarians and cypherpunks, to break up big banks and other monopoly powers through the use of new technologies. In the film, Nakamoto is associatively linked to an abandonment of the grid through the portmanteau ‘botomori’—boat death. In the speculative history-to-come, Nakamoto disappears at sea, seemingly horrified by the consequences of his creations. In this future world, AI and blockchain have been used to form a G-DAO, a Global Decentralized Autonomous Organization, that governs humanity and distributes resources. Until it doesn’t, apparently: ‘I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
Often, ideas about how to reconfigure present and future simply reflect and threaten to magnify existing inequities, positing such conditions as virtually inevitable. Think of the transhumanists who want to upload their consciousnesses to the cloud so that they can live forever, or the billionaire doomsday preppers making plans to fortify themselves against the effects of climate change. Technological determinist dreams of a future, perfectly refined general AI are confronted by the reality of our current algorithmic systems, which often reproduce rather than undo oppressions. ‘When you think of AI, it’s forward-looking. But AI is based on data, and data is a reflection of our history. So, the past dwells in our algorithms.’ Čákanyová’s film suggests much techno-utopian thinking is less a dream of freedom for all, than a mirror reflecting our current realities: and its worst, techno-utopian thinking bears the hallmarks anti-democratic and even fascistic ideas of present and future alike. We should be less worried about the rise of the machines and more worried about the rise of the Right and our pained intimacy with Gaia.
The film ends with our narrator connecting with the depression felt by her Original Character. ‘Good, the game is over,’ the AI approves. If only depression could be relegated to a virtual sandbox! Meanwhile, I will take a cue from the fictionalized Nakamoto; I’m not interested in uploading my mind to the cloud and endlessly stimulating my pleasure centers. Instead, I’m off for a swim in a real ocean, with friends.
Shaka McGlotten the author of “Virtual Intimacies” (SUNY Press 2013) and “Dragging: or, In the Drag of Queer Life” (Routledge 2021), is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY.
