But have you seen the 1979 movie Alien?
I spent two thrilling days in the company of scholars this week and was intoxicated by their poetry.*
Who doesn’t love poetry? (Fascists, mainly.) But even within the liberating beauty of poetics – the language we use to escape the limits of so-called common sense – you might find artificial barriers; borders to be policed.
And so it was that while I listened to an amazing lecture about the nomos of the earth, I realized that my most authentic and thoughtful response would probably seem like a transgression – an evasion.
“Have you seen the 1979 movie Alien? It has the answer to your question!”
Sadly, there was no time for Q&A and so I didn’t get the chance to test the boundaries of good taste by citing a blockbuster (best known for a phallic monster) as an elegant solution to a 13 page, single spaced, densely footnoted lecture on the history of philosophy as it pertains to our understanding of humans in nature.
But, have you seen the 1979 movie Alien?!
It has the answer to some of our most important questions!
Despite claims by its main author that the movie is meaningless – and, my friends, you must always distrust any author who makes such claims! – Alien is one of the best, most useful accounts of the world we live in, as trenchant as it is pithy.
SPOILER ALERT: a corporation uses an artificial intelligence disguised as a co-worker to trick a crew of blue collar stiffs (miners!) into transporting a deadly biological agent.
(It has more in common with the amazing Wages of Fear than it does any sci-fi monster flick, but I digress.)
What makes Alien work is what the audience already knows before the movie begins: there is a new form of life on our planet which is threatening the survival of our species; the extractive capitalist corporation!
The movie doesn’t work without that apprehension and, well, that’s a BFD!
A few months ago I had a brief conversation with my Irish American friend in finance who said, matter of factly: “AI’s will be running a few companies soon, if they aren’t already.”†
Again, I point to the plot of the movie Alien, written more than 45 years ago and note that the writing was on the walls of that ship; the Nostromo, itself named after a Joseph Conrad story about the very extractive capitalism that is literally threatening our civilization, if not our species.‡
Anyway, I think we should take the movie’s warning very seriously; the alien danger that would kill us is not the “xenomorph” but the corporation as produced by extractive capitalism.
These agents don’t care if the world becomes uninhabitable to us because they already exist apart from us.
That is the creature that must be caught and contained before it's too late for us all.
Footnotes
*Being a scholar is/was an amazing gig, and explaining how it was once a career would probably explain a lot about the forces that shape our lives.
†The AI which is being produced by extractive capitalism is itself an evolution of the corporation. The problems of AI safety or ALIGNMENT are thus, and always have been, political problems.
‡If you’re asking: how can a blockbuster movie say so much? Movies may be a more densely layered and comprehensive form of communication than writing! And, for that very reason, much more expensive and difficult to produce; it has not one author but hundreds, if not thousands! To make a movie thus requires a degree of collaboration that is quite rare in our history. Consider this when you read the claims "AI will replace movies".