SEEDANCE WITH ME

The collective SFitze indexing of today’s online boombastic boosterisms accompanying Chinese Seedance 2.0 AI's recent spectacular feats is hard to rank (I will let the algo-folklorist Gabrielle de Setta hunter-gatherer on X go through all that trouble). Be like “we are approaching the end of time”, “the definition of art is evolving”, ”democratizing creativity”, ”dominating the market”, “clearly insane”, etc., and it is unstoppable, don’t get me wrong, SFitze thinks it is revolutionary in filmic terms (and Indonesian film industry is already transformed by Sora, Runway, Midjourney, Google’s Veo, and ChatGPT). But let’s not get distracted from where the real action is happening.

The Chinese New Year of Equine mood and greener pastures is getting closer. So let us celebrate something far less conspicuous, something that responds to the other Singularity, one that “exist(s) only to accumulate capital in the form of endless computation” (read this essay by Steven Shaviro, who is also writing that long-awaited book about capitalist vampires and Dracula shlock movies) and remember that:

The destiny of intelligent tool–using life [i]s to be a stepping–stone in the evolution of corporate instruments. –Charles Stross

That quote might make you pick up Accelerando by Charles Stross and understand why it is one of the greatest science fiction post-Singularity books ever written, and why Accelerando’s Stapeldonian vision tracks extracting maximum value from all matter till the end of time and the universe. And to make it clear, THIS Singularity already happened, and it's the moment of reality decoupling that the 1970s end of rhe Bretton Woods & Golden Standard parity made possible, not the cyborg Skynet or AGI sci-fi one everyone is talking about. Of course US right-wing goldbugs cranks like Rand Paul and German MPS libertarians like Roland Baader including far-right politicians across Europe are stockpiling the precious metal and dreaming a “monetary socialism” that looks inspired by agorist classics like Alongside Night (1979). While they are calling demand a return to the gold standard, things are not at all as reversible as they like to believe bc this singularity is already floating existing as collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, those abstract financial instruments that have uppeneded the abstractions of abstract art.

Fabian Munieza in his Paranoid Finance book (out by Theory Redux 2025) warns that “When the critique of finance is articulated in the terms of protecting fundamental value from the perils of speculative value, of defending real value creation against the malevolent dissipation or value, it is located within the perimeter of financial imagination, not outside of it.”(The Trouble with Financial Imagination, pp 14) Otherwise said, how many counter-speculative dialectical kung fu moves do you know of? Give me one real instance of the revenge or the real, making us understand why "five musts and five must nots," and  "eight insistences" is not idle talk. 

Let me make it clear, this time we will go to the official source, a key speech by Xi Jinping from January 2024, just released, about a blueprint for a stable financial powerhouse organized around socialist principles (highlighted by the indefatigable Arnaud Betrand). While media mostly latched on to the calls for the Yuan to “possess global reserve currency status” (全球储备货币), they missed the core confrontation here and the dialectical whammy, because austerity politics was made palatable after the Cold War nearly everywhere (The Triumph of Broken Promises). Everyone is now pretty aware that the derealization of the economy is tied in with both deindustrialization by political fiat and mathematics, while the military buildup and the betting and abetting of global volatility just won’t help.

Under US hegemony, we were literally drifting into thin and very combustible air. Wall Street exemplified the best capitalist instantiation of this volatility. Yet, since at least 2008, the Chinese developmental state has taken it as one of its main tasks to confront 脱实向虚, “drifting from the real economy into the virtual” taking it by the horns. Seedance is just one act of the dance that anchors Chinese-style modernisation (what Adam Tooze called the second and most important wave of modernization after the previous two, both important but merely an ouverture to the Chinese one) in search of solid foundations in a very volatile global environment. As a Marxist, Xi is very aware of the double-edged sword of finance that can offer “multiply resource allocation efficiency and drive economic growth, but it can also amplify local risks and trigger global crises”.

If capitalism is by definition melting everything solid into the air (and yes, Marx and Engels said this not disapprovingly), the Communist Manifesto makes it our task to better familiarize ourselves with a constant drift and ripple ahead to be able to “feel the stones” through this constitutive impermanence (無常) of ballooning imaginary bubble worlds and derealizations. The birth of homo speculans (Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou) has taught us to face up to that uncertainty because it is here to stay, so we can either ignore it at our peril or understand how capitalist worldmaking has shifted towards emergent programmatic (Sante Fe) perpetual self-fashioning under constraints and away from allocation issues. There is a subtle interference here from the usual SFF adjacent “world-building” into the disruptive terrain of capitalist world-making and its projected bulldozing of reality.

Some may notice that I picked up “worldmaking” from Evgeny Morozov’s last blistering The Socialist Charcuterie Board series of stentorial replies, arguments, and counterarguments about a potential Socialist AI (a recap here by Comrade Cominsitu). On one side, I agree that this whole extended AI debate lays out bare how much of the anti-cap AI proggy left and the AI-skeptical crowd appears partially frozen, tied to spreadsheets, bedazzled, or unable to imagine anything AI-wise than an “amplification of instrumental reason”. In their traumatic encounter with the brutal deployment of techbro AI, socialists somehow brush aside and fail to understand that AI is the perfect application (to quote again from Morozov’s reply to his critics) of worldmaking:

Worldmaking names contemporary capitalism as it actually operates: a fusion of technology, finance, myth, religion, institutional improvisation, and mass affect that has bulldozed the tidy borders between “the economic,” “the political,” “the cultural,” and the intimate texture of everyday life. 

To me, as an eternal outsider or at least a lone passioned lurker on questions of technological history, the cosmotechnics of Chinese modernity, of digital socialism, unleashed productive forces, AI and political economy, forgotten cybernetics vs AI histories, the obsolescence/or not of the Calculation Debate, this brings us as leftist to a slightly embarassing situation where everyone risks calling each other a unrealistic, a fantasist, a Luftikus, a luftmentsh ! In short, our department of Scheerbartian planners is severely understaffed and ragged.

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Secondly, on the Romanian derealization front, there has been a complete hysteria lately (I am told) around the phenomenon of Romanian AI music star Lolita Cercel, with an in-depth article written by Cristian Dragan (which I consider one of the bravest Romanian TikTok/AI hunter-gatherers in my surroundings). Can one avoid sensationalism and total bashing of AI slopism and AI expertise churned on an industrial scale? Can one address (like Bogdan Popa does in a FB post) the sorry end state of “flogging a dead horse”, or finding all artistic expressions of marginality suddenly superseded or (yet again) sublated Aufgehoben?

One can definitely accuse AI-phobics of having daily personal beef and jarringly opinionated subjectivistic views (in the Romanian leftist spectrum space) with grave Sinophobia/Sinophilia traits (according to the excellent article mapping by nplusonemag editor of issue 52 Close Encounters in the European/US sector). Can we dare a balancing act btw aesthetic nitpicking (that Mihai Lucacs is correctly diagnosing) and technophobic fearmongering dressed up as thinly veiled anti-AI red scares?

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, without either falling for “Oh but today’s capitalist AI is compromised and capitalist” or in our declinist passive-aggressive European sector, looking leeringly across the Great Firewall at Charlie’s Reality Check Point “Oh, AI Seedance is just foreplay for growing productive forces and proof of an AI Red Dawn”. Even my small “hyaluronic apocalypse” blurb feels pixel-skin-deep and rather cosmetic when measured up to this task. However (but who cares), it would be nice to think that hyaluronic excess in Berlin should get classified as a national security threat, with hyaluron crackdowns ensuing from a combined influencers promoting lavish lifestyles takedown. Glitchness like many other filters have been culturally appropriated by the right with ethno nationalist and Dark Maga images and videos usually adopting glitch filters and Mamoru Oshii (particulary Red Spectacles and Stray Dog movies). So culturally, this is at least as important as AI energophagia and clean water usage concerns. But then LLMs training might be built on the same “costless input” logic that underpins Hyaluron shots. I come from the country of artificial - when bio gluten free was unheard of and when the artificial Ersatz abundance was cool, especially after galloping fossil derived polymer chemistry promised cheaper and better plastic lives for everyone. Our historical materialist look at the various favorite SF tropes that SV investment dreams and nightmares - holographic universe, exterminationist wishes, mind upload promises can't stop here bc VC yanking of the immaterial crank goes hand in hand with Labour Departement re - industrialization posters & national socialist “fashwave” aestethics.

So if 脱实向虚, “drifting from the real economy into the virtual” - is a key element of today’s world, perfectly expressed by an inordinate fondness for DOW Jones, Nasdaq, and other financial indicators praised as the most important benchmarks, what other examples can we gather? This blissful recapitulation of the financial marker lithurgy should be taken into account with all the satanist panics, militarist bluster, speculative bubbles, the entire reactionary technocapitalist science fictional- myth-making activity (and anti-science stance), constant hyping, predictive hype upon hype, with ancap promisory visions that constitute the lifeblood of the predictive markets.

As long as long-gone Calculation Debates still keep us busy at night, we forget how capital has morphed under meme magick regimes, coups d’etat, raison d’etat, Gaza genocide, and dank actionism. So then let us track - how “online traders are betting millions on war, airstrikes and political unrest” (as reported by Rest of World’s Hazel Gandhi).

That is why, imho, the most perspicacious observers and analysts describe Maduro’s kidnapping (excellent article by Elisabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong) not just in oily fossil fascism materialist terms or hyper-imperialist geopolitical posturing, but also as a speculative amplifier maximizing disaster capitalism, lowering or upping bets on Polymarket. The present US rule is based on coming up with more and more intangible illusions, shadow diplomacy bets and the staunch belief that it can surf the waves of virtualisation adrift indefinitely without ever having to reality check or address "decoupling from the real economy" as stated in one of the minutes of the Chinese Central Economic Work Conference meeting from 2016. It's something more evident than ever before, but the left is always falling for the “they're in just for the oil” line.

We keep forgetting that:

“In a derivatives-driven, dollar-hegemonic system, money is not made by flooding markets with oil. It is made by restricting supply, inflating prices, securitizing future flows, and extracting rents through debt instruments.” (this coming from an account that I don't usually agree with but that definitely nails it this time).

Meanwhile, Wired is finally shedding its cyberdelic Mondo 2000 phase and discovering another mundane reality (like the rest of the libs), that the rule-based order might be crumbling or might have never existed, and that China is actually existing (even if the Gulf War never existed as Jean Baudrillard wrote in the 1990s) and that yeah, there’s “23 Ways (just 23?) You’re Already Living in the Chinese Century”. Pun aside, even if you cannot read the paywalled China edition, it is still informative to peruse the fluencer-economy maximalist content gathered by Afra Wang, Yiling Liu, Zeyi Yang, Johanna Costigan, Will Knight, and others. Curiously enough for western observers, Chinese tech leaders & researchers talk openly about AGI but don't AI, no matter ad consequential and important consider it part of “a race to AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence). Chinese policymakers don't seem flustered and rather disappointingly treat AI as more akin to an utility like energy or the Internet for that matter, without the societal angst typical in many other quarters. There's no Rapture of the Nerds expectation of the singularly revelation (of futurologists Kurzweil & Co). No eager frenetic expectation of the promised “intelligence explosion” threshold. Compare this to the usual Washington talk about AGI like some sort of neutron superbomb countdown that we have to get our hands first or else. Chinese version sounds deflationary bc it is, as they are more interested in real world applications and less in achieving AGI nirvana. Hyperscalers like Alibaba and Tencent seem more interested in insuring adoption of Chinese models spreading their most powerful models under open source licence, not producing closed systems and racing to the finish line. Treating if like a powerful technology but not as a break with history (I would add historical materialism) is coherent with other similar approaches around the world that differ from the singularity stance. Kyle Chan has an excellent article on Does China Care about AGi where I've picked these insights and what these differences entail.

So no need to try to divine The Chinese Century from the bumps like the China Watcher phrenologist community does, you can read about Labubus, or about "The Morning Star of Lingao" (临高启明) collectively written alternate history and “the industrial” and the “sentimental party” galore (also check other Sinica podcasts Kaiser Y Kuo for excellent coverage of contemporary China).

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Here’s also Alin Rautoiu (definitely one of the highlights of this year) that, in his friendly, very non-coding way, demonstrates in a short explanatory YT video how you can navigate the delusional landscape around Moltbook - a social platform launched this year, supposedly designed for autonomous AI agents in wich ONLY they can interact, flirt, and eventually supplant humanity (which doesn’t happen). AR logs in and starts to post unimpeded as a decidedly human agent, dispelling the deep mind fog about unknowable (blackboxed) AI entities that conspire among themselves, wreaking havoc on the “Reddit of AI” (which it is not). Like any other corner of the net, Moltbook tends to devolve into a scammer’s paradise, with various “WordPress-level spambots” doing what they do best.

French transnational theoretical powerhouse Multitudes of philosophy, arts, and politics puts out in April a timely special “Spéculation/réaction” issue dedicated to supremacist SF, anarcho-capitalist utopias, and delving into libertarian economic conspiracies (a text on NESARA/GESARA by Fabian Muniesa, author of Paranoid Finance) put together by Boris Le Roy and Théo Bourgeron. Texts by Élie Ayache, Orit Halpern, Geraldine Juárez, and others on what to do if the right-wing extremists embrace the speculative?

If you like what you read, recommend SFitze to others and subscribe.

On this hopeful note, Happy New Chinese Year of the Horse, by the way!

STUFF I WROTE RECENTLY (mostly RO)

Răsună Valea de Siliciu de jelania giganților tehnologici on CriticAtac

Hippies, Digital Gods, and Imaginary Futures: an interview with Richard Barbrook by Christine Evans-Pughe (translation)

My review of Uninhabited Science Fiction and the Decolonial (out by Zero Books 2025) by Ben Woodard on Goodreads

Interview with Ben Woodard on his book Uninhabited on Spectrul mag

Who’s Afraid of Grey Areas, a lengthy but nimble discussion about Nolan’s Odyssey, classicism and classism, right-wing dog whistles with Alin Rautoiu during the Holiday season

A review of Jeffrey J. Hall’s Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age, Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism (published by Routledge 2021)

My review of the award-winning SF short directed by Xandra Popescu,Erogenesis (2025) on Letterbox

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