SFitze issue 01 2021
-newsplatter by ST-
[issue 01 2021]
Living in Sci-fi times in 2021 (as Sherryl Vint put it recently) could mean a number of things, not all immediately identifiable as such. Since the 2020 pandemic, Sci-fi has been invoked in various contexts as an aid to describe what is going on. It was a ready-at-hand way to make sense of this inchoate planetary situation that made us painfully aware of systemic fragilities in the midst of a surrounding amplitude of things that left nobody untouched. Something that we usually encounter in the realm of speculative fiction (take your pick) was clearly happening, while at the same time Sci-Fi felt outstripped by this very reality.
This -newsplatter- will hopefully try to cater to both the immediate and relatable (SF proper) genre-bound tendencies & artifacts as well as Sci-fi reality aspects that we would not immediately include under this strict heading. This would include the rise of the human microbiome research that redefined us as larger interrelated wholes. This made all of us more like habitable, gigantic foldable non-euclidean spaceships full of swarming crews of various bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, and viruses adrift in geological evolutionary time. It would also offer us a way to assess something like the pre-mutated, ‘fake’ Shanzhai copyleft electronics as well as the new “optical governance” rising in the wake of China’s epidemic response (see below). Maybe this way -SF- might still be changing probabilities, estrange, counter-actualize any favored version of suspended animation capitalism realism.
Many thanks to all those who have kept me afloat these years via their generosity, meta-sharing their coordinates onboard this larger friendship-spaceship collective. Apologize in advance for any inconveniences, repostings, and promise to work better, harder, solve all the kinks and manage to send further signals. Links, aphorisms, tunes, and koans provided will be in English, Romanian, German, French in no specific order.
SHANZHAI
Books
On top of Cold War-like “economic decoupling”, Covid has produced a strong wave of freshly served sinophobia, G5- psychotronic panics, repurposed mass social credits engineering, Manchurian Candidate in Xinjiang, monolithic headlines, corporate buzzfeeed / official CCTV news (take ur pick). Because of all this and more, it is hard to keep up with the polymorphically perverse vivacity of open hardware, street-level (or street village-level) vernacular usage of technology in China and Asia at large. Here I have made a few book suggestions regarding what has been termed “Shanzhai” subculture and ethos in contemporary China. Shanzhai has been associated with non-standard mods, improvised, pre-mutated, pirated, either knockoff copies and/or improved versions of the original. First, there were “shanzai” (or Shanzhai) smartphones but humorous (prankster style) responses to official culture such as annual fashion shows or spoof versions of blockbuster movies soon followed. Books included:
Fashioning China: Precarious Creativity and Women Designer’s in Shanzhai Culture by Sara Liao
Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species by Dr Suzanne Livingstone and Dr Anna Greenspan
Blockchain Chicken Farm And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside by Xiaowei Wang
Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation by Silvia M. Lindtner
A Question Concerning Technology: An essay in Cosmotechnics by Yuk Hui
Boredom, Shanzhai and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China edited by Jeroen de Cloet, Chow Yiu Fai and Lena Sheen
Articles
China’s age of Invention (PBS interview from 2000)
Printing, paper money, porcelain, tea, restaurants, gunpowder, the compass—the number of things that the Chinese of the Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1280) gave to the world is mind-boggling. This vibrant period in Chinese history was marked by economic prosperity and remarkable technological innovation. In this interview, China expert Robin D. S. Yates, Professor of History and East Asian Studies at McGill University, describes this exceptional era and how it influenced the course of world history.
Whose Century? (by Adam Tooze British Historian of economics, statistics and financialization)
One article reviewing 5 different recent books: Schism: China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System by Paul Blustein (2019), Superpower Showdown: How the Battle between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War by Bob Davis and Lingling Wei (2020), Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis (2020), The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind (2020).
Optical Governance: The Roles of Machine Vision in China’s Epidemic Response (by Gabrielle de Seta who studies media anthropology, postdigital folklore)
Drawing on different use cases of machine vision in China’s epidemic response, Gabriele de Seta revisits James C. Scott’s concept of legibility and identifies a paradigm of “optical governance” emerging from the entanglement of social practices and automated sensing technologies.
China's entrepreneurs, living in a bubble where Apple's patents and trademarks were largely unenforceable, set to copying that design, and (this is the important part) varying it. Trying out combinations that were weird and unlikely (and almost entirely doomed). In the absence of a control-freak company with the power of the state behind it, variation flourished, a mini-Galapagos of Ipod-ish gadgets in every color and shape.
As Chinese demand for pork grows and grows, traditional small-scale farms are being replaced by vast, AI-assisted operations that feel more like smartphone factories than bucolic countryside havens
Chinese Haiduk mayhem
On okazii.ro printrecarti olx anywhere u can get cheap copies of 水滸傳 Water Margin aka "Shui Hu Zhuan", "Outlaws of the Marsh", and "All Men are Brothers" one of most entertaining and popular Chinese wuxia romance novels set in the Northern Song dynasty (the written version was attributed to Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong that probably collected previous oral folk tales) featuring the adventures of 108 outlaw haiduks, roadside inn cannibals, renegade drunken master Buddhist monks, anti-corruption Daoist spell-throwing immortals and hundreds of other characters fighting against the corrupt officials from their swamp fortress in Shantung province. A few volumes of this sprawling epos were translated in Romanian during the 1980s by the Editura Militara (by the translator couple Mira and Constantin Lupeanu), a huge translation effort that sadly ended after 1989. It was one of the favorites of my childhood and we used to make nicknames in highschool for each other inspired by these legendary Chinese haiduk characters.
Its purpose is none other than redefining modernity and even reason as reason to ensure that thinking will not cease to exist in the future. All this in the light of something that has never before dawned on human minds: that the universe can well do without those very minds.
Numerous mini chapters with memorable titles like “Bubbles of Cosmic Nonchalance”, “Eternalism and Its Discontents”, “Worst of All Possible Worlds”, “Tadpole Hedonists and Fatal Flower-Arrangers”, “Shitting on the Morning Star or the Uses and Abuses of History” remind me that we should cherish all the thinkers that know how to tickle the hyper-modulated nerve of maximally distracted 21st reading. Clearly one of the best ways to do it – is to zoom-in on hopelessly (till now) and shamefully lost metaphysical constructions (Stanislaw Lem once called upon the singular powers of Sci-Fi to peddle such disreputable – but oh so intriguing metaphysical beasts). X-Risk is full with the decadent splendor of abstruse, smothered in their cradle natural philosophies, full of enormities with blusterous cosmic (and comic) reach.
tags: #extinction #value #minds #planning #sapience #plenitude #X-risk #cosmos
My review of Out of their Minds Sci-fi book by Clifford D. Simack’s from 1970
While action-packed – Out of Their Minds speaks powerfully and cogently about how all existing (no just simply mind- based) creations past, present or future were never our own. The lack of control over our lives is mirrored by such inner mental releases into an unstable larger (panpsychist?!) world. In a way for Simak it is exactly the opposite of being locked-in, quarantined imaginary creations can never stay locked for long, they swap genes & mutate almost at the expense of every other living beings. Simak opens up the question of how we might bear responsibility for animating such slippery imaginary creations. Out of Their Minds – makes clear that there is no brain-barrier to keep things out or permanently in. Yes, minds are porous and might be just replicators of memes, and they do physically suffer the effects of these imaginary fevers good or bad.
tags: #tulpomancy #imaginary worlds #coexistence #imagineering #speculative
My review of A Glitch in the Matrix documentary by Rodney Asher (2020)
Asher was always interested in fanboys, in paraeidolia, in intensely jarring otakus and fandom effects, in relating to a very peculiar type of obsessive individual and an inner worlds inhabitant that has stopped being just nerdilicious trivia hoarder & seeker. What is important is that he is not being judgmental, he is not trivializing, nor pathologizing, in fact non- neurotypicality (even if unmentioned) seems to be one of the strengths of the documentary. Another one is exposing this underlying fear of the moderns – as W James said once: their biggest fear is just the fear to be duped.
tags: #simulation theory #fanboys #cartesianism #reality #otaku #gamification
This European medievalist trend has been growing in contrast with and as a reaction/retreat in the face of the rapid impact of industrialization, colonialism overseas (immigration at home), humiliation by non – European armed forces (Russo-Japanese War) and of changing power relations in the wake of tremendous productive forces being unleashed, the rise of robber baron monopolies as well as the collapse of the British Imperialism. Retreating to the countryside has had an appeal for those who could afford to retreat in comfort and not face the horrors of city life, industrial squalor as well as the growing bargaining power of the worker (mostly miner) masses.
tags: #roleplaying #history #pastoralism #class #industrialization #utopia #past
My review of Weitermachen Sanssouci (film directed by Max Linz 2019)
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 brainstorming!). 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 exercising market pressures to outdo any competitors by promising better tomorrows. It is a Welt am Draht (1973) without wiring and with visible strings attached.
tags: #concept sweatshops #university #gimmicks #climate change #VR #funding
Here is my Goodreads review of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics book by Nitzan Lebovic (2013)
This book may be an invaluable deep dive into the murky water and meandering currents of late Romantic tradition of German philosophy. A place & time so hard to follow (for me!), when biocentric conceptual clusters tend to coalesce. His study marks the transmogrification of Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life) from its 1900 radical aesthetic roots into Nazi biopolitics as part of a new discipline of Life (Lebenskunde) via the works of Ludwig Klages (1872-1956).
tags: #Lebensphilosophie #biopolitcs #continental philosophy #biocentrism
media
Seungriho aka Space Sweepers (2021) imdb directed by Jo Sung-hee
[A truly 21st-century #salvagepunk cosmo- political space opera adventure. Action-packed, spoken in various languages/idioms/pidgin English, etc with incredible world-building and hints of Cowboy Beebop]
Guai wu xian sheng aka Monster Run (2020) directed by Henri Wong
[Cyberpunkish Chinese fantasy minor movie inspired by Daoist alchemy based on Monster novel by A. Lee Martinez. A total Ghostbuster- salad mix, but I really liked the original setting: an ultra colorful corner shop and street hawker as the alchemist shapeshifter. Also pretty good Escheresque alternate dimensions FX & Kara Hui as interdimensional gatekeeper vilainess]
Seuwiteuhom aka Sweet Home (TV series 2020- ) co-directed by Lee Eung-bok, Jang Young-woo, Park So-hyun
[One of the best series lately, post-apocalyptic K-drama K-horror or otherwise. With a great manhwa (or manga) panache to it or rather the 2017 Webtoon of the same name by Kim Kan-bi and Youngchan Hwang. Incredible claymation creature FX and VFX by Vietnamese Cycle studio (who also worked on Monsters of Man and Shanghai Fortress). Black humor, gore, platter & pretty pandemically oriented setting. Expect mutants, mayhem, incredible old block & living unit interiors]
The Expanse season 5
[Based on The Expanse by James S. A. Corey, probably needs no introduction. Always a treat. Truly grandiose in scope and exo-planetary in vision, full of political intrigue, and non- geocentric social complexity and class (Belter) struggle. Also a “return of diplomacy” (as per Isabelle Stengers) on a cosmic scale. Although Amazon Prime gulped it, still hard science Sci-fi space opera as never seen before.]
Ceusestii Zombii si Elicopterul Partea II by the Arhiva de Sunet team: Paul Breazu, Roxana Bucată, Ionuț Dulămiță, Mihai Lukacs
[Romanian only. Please take my word on it, it is a milestone of Romanian media pop culture archeology and hauntological exploration of the last 30-40 ~odd years. Ceausescu curses galore. Cool tracks, puns, a lot of historical acts (punk, pop, manele and otherwise) lots of good, mad, crazy interviews with key pop figures. Hope to review it at large.]
Finally a RADIO DRAMA- Hörspiel [German only] based on Remembrance of Earth's Past (Chinese: 地球往事; pinyin: Dìqiú Wǎngshì) by Liu Cixin.
[Great sound effects and overall success in developing something as complex as to appear beyond the pale of cinema. This at least is the proof that Liu Cixin Sci-Fi trilogy can be at least be adapted successfully for radio.]
NTS corner
[been listening to a lot of nts during Corona lockdown so here is a selection of favorites]
Always Coming Home A Sonic Journey from Kesh (remix of Ursula K Le Guin tapes)
Chinabot (Asian music collective + platform)
Mushroom Music (Francesca Gavin & Daniel Breuer present an hour of music celebrating the new exhibition at Somerset House)
ГОСТ ЗВУК a.k.a Gost Zvuk is dedicated exclusively to the Russian and ex-USSR scene