SFitze issue 05 2022
-newsplatter by ST-
Thank you for reading the SFitze newsletter. If you’re interested in more SFitze issues please subscribe below, support or share with others. This is a newsletter about mundane, banal and absurdist SF happenings all around, recognized or not. As SF melts into thin air - it infuses the forces of production, commercial culture, pop iconography, X-Risk institutions, the dreams of Big Tech billionaires, as well as the mundane-as-fuck growing category. Think about the unbearable lightness of billionaires in space and presidential candidate Mélenchon projected as hologram in several cities during the recent French elections (thx Ion D. for this one) but also about Muslim teens and China’s nascent green hydrogen sector. SFitze is about how to trace SF spillovers independent of scale. Two things I've come to appreciate: never be dismissive and also never accept SF labels or outright denials thereof (“this is SF or this has zero to do with SF”). As the email version is shorter than the original one please scroll down the original substack post.
Frefans, Black Markets, and Uncertainty in the Wild or not so Wild East
Previous SFitze newsplatter has featured a fair amount of East European, African and Asian materials, in an attempt to keep it planetary and to balance Anglo-American SF dominance. Science Fiction in its early scientific romance ‘adventurist’ phase was full of colonial, triumphalist and racist tropes of “colonizing”, “conquering” & “settling” new ‘wild wild’ worlds (which were never wild in the settler colonial sense nor empty), because it coalesced during High Imperialism’s scramble for resources and global depredation. Cities like Chicago were becoming a setting for Gustave Le Rouge’s and Gustave Guitton’s 1899-1900 early SF feuilleton La conspiration des milliardaires (check the full pdf ebook I vol in French with fictional William Boltyn as a proto-Elon Musk figure). The Windy City city was also the center of the first and largest (at that time) futures and derivatives market in the world - the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (as Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou details in his new book) as well as as Chicago’s Haymarket being a rallying cry for internationalist unionist, socialist, anarchist Mayday protest movements.
I briefly covered the political history of 20th c US SF and split-off groups such as The Futurians in an early example of progressive SF fandom that would leave a mark on future developments. This episode is and isn't a departure, because it will broadly deal with something that was on my mind for a while - the world of Libertarian US SF nerds and more precisely its most implausible doctrinaire product: the Agorist ideology of Samuel Edward Konkin III (a.k.a. SEK3). From just a few clicks one can gather that SEK3’s Agorist doctrine influenced quite a few cryptobros and (through its cypherpunk legacy) keeps popping up as an obligatory reference for the Dark Web enthusiasts, well beyond its Silk Road bust (check out Silk Road: Drugs, Death and the Dark Web 2017 documentary) as well as with Anarchapulco crowd (the recent Netflix 2 part docu is worth checking).
In spite of its touted 1989 triumphalism over socialist statism, laissez-faire libertarianism has never been more ill-conceived and more brazen in its outlook than today (somebody on TW gave a good current definition of what that amounts to: “nothing is going to stand in my way of me standing in your way”). I am not interested in either contesting the place that Agorism has carved for itself during 1970s, 80s or 90s schismatic left- or right-leaning libertarian splinter groups nor trying to explain why it felt both marginalized and welcome in the fold of an extended and increasingly influent ancap family that helped steer much of today’s hyperbitcoinitization. I would rather spend my time reading or speculating about China’s next 14-year plan or Elizabeth Bear’s White Space space opera - and its treatment of the galactic confederation known as the The Synarche. While not exactly egalitarian The Synarche is still a way better place to live than ours - with a fair amount of rational resource allocation and redistribution as well as sentient/sapient AIs enjoying the same rights as organic intelligences. Machines do actually take care of bullshit jobs. E. Bear conceived this galactic-wide multispecies Synarche as organized (or guided) neither according to the laissez-faire (or freeport piracy) credo nor according to a military-colonialist paradigm (which is quite rare for a space opera).
In the wake of Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou’s book Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World launch at KWs Cafe Bravo I felt this is the moment to tie in the bugbear of Agorism. The strength of economist turned sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou's recent book (which I just started recently reading) in my opinion lies in (at least speculatively) considering how financialization might be amenable to other logics or illogics than its own and how it might foment in us a new openness towards uncertainties to come. At the same time, there remains the question of whether reclaiming ‘speculation’ (a question raised by Quinn Slobodian during the talk) does not bring more of the same or why not approach this through the lens of the old Socialist Calculation Debate (a question raised by Bahar Noorizadeh if i recall). Aris cast his net of key examples that try to re-imagine counter-speculation or anti-speculation across a wide-ranging technological and socio-political spectrum (including K-pop ‘stans’ & TikTok teens, Yellow Vests or BLM “hashtag hijacking”, TW takes and even the new volatile intimacies grown out of dating apps and haruspicying your life using astrology apps). His aim was to sense if there was anything else besides a reactive stance toward the future’s inherent unpredictability. My main issue is with that concerns his latching on to imagination - as a primary tool for sensing the unknowable. That said, I am also trying hard to wrap my head around his throwing in the same basket - pension fund managers, climate migrants and GameStop at-home-investors. What follows is my attempt to add something slightly different to the table - since from what I gather [Agorism’s] central tenets revolve around counter-economics and opacity as a primary quality of any transactions.
Here comes Agorism (from Agora Greek term for market) - and its vaunted proximity to a particular kind of US SF. Agorism grew out of SEK3’s discovery of R. A. Heinlein’s 1966 libertarian SF classic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress also happens to be one of Elon Musk's favorite sci-fi novels (thx to Anselmo Quemot for clarifying that). The science fiction the techno- billionaires grew up with shape their current worldview and speculative outlook.
Enter the frefan (short for libertarian SF fan - a term coined by Konkin himself apparently). I do not have a lot to say about Heinlein in spite of dedicating an essay to one of his early Generational Ark SF stories in Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. Not surprisingly the Heinlein Prize or Heinlein societies - should be seen as incubators for today's neoliberal capitalism (both Musk and Bezos were recipients of the Heinlein Prize for commercial space activities). The only thing that interests me is how Agorism was tainted by its open association with SF. How might this embrace of fiction and this perceived fannishness have contributed to the fall-out between Murray N Rothbard and SEK3? In return, Agorists cast the most influential antistatist of the ancap camp - the economist of the Austrian school Murray N. Rothbard as “Darth Vader”. Maybe that’s inevitable when you mix speculative fiction and antistatism with speculative “resistance and disobedience in economic activity” (was reallz Counter-Economics a thing during the 1970s & 80s?!). By embracing black-market (crypto) speculation as a credo and economistic model, a big part of it is the juvenile attraction towards everything banned, illegal, smuggler- or piracy-related. Most of these freeport fantasies tend to completely ignore what Fred Motten and Stephano Harney (*check pdf) in their homage to black radical tradition - take into account such as Brazilian quilombo established by Brazilian slaves.
Piracy was part of the attraction of a (Western) counter-culture as well as part of many SF narratives since Buck Rogers in the 25th c AD. Using E. Bear’s recent White Space duology, I have started to question the radical individualist (and frankly sociopathic) piracy freeport value systems that dot so many space operas (including the extended SW universe) and tried to picture them in my mind more like blueprints for libertarian tax evasion paradises. Today's UK conservatives dream about ‘buccaneering microstates’ that can stem or ride out the tide of unwanted climate crisis refugees and avoid regulatory compliance. It is not a stretch to say that a lot of today’s web3 companies (most notoriously Uber) operate according to a sort of more or less covert Agorist ideology - employing all manner of dirty tactics (bribing governments, tax evasion, dodging the police or audits) to make sure nothing stands in their way and every competitor is taken out.
When saying piracy - I am saying it with a certain loud Ahem, because I briefly organized a (peer-taught) quest study course on the World History of Piracy in 1994 at Steller Alternative High School, Alaska during my senior year there. You were actually encouraged to organize and teach such a course - an alternative history course (what a perfect way to re-organize the curriculum!). So, by choosing this outlaw perspective of all things piratical starting with ancient Phoenician pirates, I could also focus on pirate radio and book piracy (+other contemporary manifestations of piracy), but at the same time I was ignoring how this might get wrapped up in seasteadying and freeports. There is no doubt that there is a historical legacy of egalitarian and piratical communes (or escaped slaves communes) that became laboratories for revolutionary thought in the Atlantic and West Indies where there is a rich history of slave revolts, and placing of human rights on a global agenda for the first time. Of course, there is no reason to deny a High Weirdness (discordianist?) aspect to Agorism, and there is also a psychedelic LSD spillover of wild visions (see how legal & semi-illegal governmental and non-governmental expérimentation became available in the 1970s)that did not just have eyes for new markets but also for the doors of perception. This LSD chemical/experiential aspect is covered in meticulous detail and much gusto on Burning Shore substack by Erik Davis. Importantly, before the Internet became a thing there was AIDS patients that still struggled to get recognition, fight criminalization and find medical support - building illegal networks of drugs that helped people in need find treatment and much sought-after experimental medicine (a situation depicted in Dallas Buyers Club movie). Informal black and grey markets were not glamourous or explicitly radical but grew as lifelines for those involved. You cannot glorify these informal markets. They were just a trivial yet vital, crummy (accidentally colorful) and unavoidable part of my and anybody else's (of my age and older) life in the former East when state support system and the big bang theory of overnight price liberalization struck. In my experience, black markets did not proliferate during the planned economy but afterwards when shock therapy became promoted as the only viable alternative.
So no wonder, this was a sensitive point during China’s recent lockdown and liberals in the West were quick to jump to the conclusion and draw on the supposed link btw planned economies and (potentially speculative and predatory) black markets. As a Romanian teenager before and after 1989 during a time of scarcity, Western decadent yet coveted goods made their way across the Iron Curtain not on the back of black marketization (like after 1989 and the 90s), but during bouts of liberalization and more or less accepted copyleft and diffusion practices that worked as leveraging or catch-up strategy in the East.
Science Fiction fandoms in Romania (as pointed out repeatedly by official mainstream figures such as Alexandru Mironov - I have seen his presentation at a recent gathering the Antares SFest in Brasov 2022) have enjoyed some important protection and we should not completely banish nor deny the fact that a lot of translations happened under protection with the help of connections or interested high-positioned party members. Vying for the name of the longest-running specialized science fiction collection of Science Fiction magazines in the East the C.P.S.F. collection thrived under the auspices of the popular science Ştiinţă şi Tehnică magazine (Science and Technology mag) that has flourished under the supervision of key contributors such as Adrian Rogoz. In general, everything that has to do with supported culture, or planned (*directed) SF clubs activities or centrally planned progressive agendas has been seen as tainted or corrupted by official party channels. Why has nobody looked into the other direction - to the neglected possibility that futurism or fan-related activities needed support, or that the outcome of 1970s constellation of +50 Romanian SF clubs would also trickle the other way around, influencing or at least keeping higher cadres informed or in touch with social critique or speculative thinking. I think this has to be further recognized and critically developed.
In this light video cassettes, punk, black metal, blue jeans, nylon, porn, comics, and reverse-engineered junk food traveled across the border during Socialist Romania’s late false-isolationist austerity period (+a lot of exports to pay for Romania’s debt to the financial institutions) as part of a permitted (if uncomfortable) strategy. Nobody wanted to stay in the dark with the latest developments, trends or with the most developed parts of the Western capitalist world and SF tried to stay abreast of this. As I came to understand it, a lot of official pirating was going on also as part of a ‘catch-up’ technological leveraging strategy (what the West would label industrial espionage or allow as part of their western goods seduction campaign) during participation at international conferences, discussions with SF authors during rare encounters or acquiring tech (new or old) that would be reverse-engineered at home and transformed into mass production for the average east bloc consumer. For the east bloc youth cultures in the 1980s this of course involved exchanging highly valued originals, comic books printed for France such as PIF or Rahan (with the support of French Socialist party) or poorly made knock-offs & even local versions of semi-legal copies, openly modified and adapted. Several Romanian artists such as Matei Bejenaru and Dan Panaitescu played on their own involvement in these pre- 1989 networks (trafficking blue jeans or DIY t-shirt aesthetic) in their later work. There was a continuity of semi-legal trade happening along the Black Sea route towards and from the fabled city of Istanbul and back. This megalopolis (before Neo-Tokyo or Blade Runner’s L.A.) was The Great Gate to the West that facilitated my (and others) access to a pluralistic galactic world, mediated by specific secular Islamic East- Turkish translations and local variants of Western pop such as those discussed by Dr. Jörg Matthias Determann at the recent Cozzzmonautica Forrest of Antennae event which I co-organized in Timisoara (hear below):
Also, the first Chinese-made household electronics arrived on this new Silk Road route across Turkey and the Balkan peninsula - as the first empirical signs of China becoming the shop floor of the world. One would trade let’s say Romanian-made export-grade cut crystal vases and glasses (some smuggled from the Vitrometan Mediaş furnaces) and coffee table sets for cheap Turkish gold like my grandpa once managed to do. Being a bad tradesman his profits were really meager - but he loved trying & actually went just for the excitement of Istanbul to return with tall tales of fat-tailed sheep. That said, one of my first Conan the Barbarian comics was a Turkish translation I got my hands on at the Romanian seaside port town of Constanța in the 1980s. Turkey even had its own barbarian Karaoğlan and Tarkan series comics created by celebrated artists Suat Yalaz and Sezgin Burak respectively. Yeah, even my first Return of the Jedi comics arrived to me with the help of Turkish-Romanian neighboring kids in the city of Ploiesti were my grandparents were from. Black markets only really took off after 1989 with local oligarchy weaned directly out of modernist kiosk boutiques (“buticuri” literally) to lavish London villas. This notoriously hyphenated “turbo-” capitalism was not entirely an add-on nor opposed to Romania’s general adoption of shock therapy, price libéralisation, and unfettered overnight market reform. Being a “speculant” or “bișnițar” (basically interchangeable pejorative words for both speculator, businessmen or scammer in the Romanian language) harks back to this early 1990s period and carries much of this pragmatic suspicion and refusal (from the street vernacular level up that is) to completely decouple high (finance or hegemonic neoliberal economics) from low (black) market speculation, especially after major 90s Ponzi schemes hit the recently desocialized East. As recent histories of neoliberalism (with Indian, S American or Chinese examples) have demonstrated, we need to look at global and local histories, beyond the industrial core countries. The same goes for the diffusion of ideas beyond the Mont Pellerin Society focus or even arriving in underappreciated forms (such as fiction) that have nevertheless contributed to this ‘market civilization’.
This brings me back to the staunch antistatist stance of Agorism. Here as in other instances, I follow Linda Weiss’s revealing analysis in America Inc. (which came to my attention after reading Evgeny Morozov’s last article for NLR). She identifies a big explanatory void - the absence of accounts that factor in the role of state-guided (and geopolitically motivated) public-private hybridization. This amalgam at the very core of US American Antistatism, in general, has worked to the advantage of speeding up innovation and devising early VC funds that would be ready to jump in, groom, and provide a helping (invisible) hand whenever tech startups were at their most (speculative?!) vulnerable stage, in spite of strong anti-statist sentiment. So take with a big (kidney stone alert!) pinch of salt the purportedly, avowedly, and rabidly antistatist SEK3 New Libertarianism statements as put forward the first time in 1974 Free Enterprise Forum in Los Angeles. Take this rhetoric at face value, BUT never forget all the ways (mapped by Linda Weiss) in which the National Security State had to circumvent, obfuscate, embrace and find ways to indirectly support highly uncertain outcomes while taking into consideration exactly all these contact phobias in order to hybridize or cross-fertilize with its most vocal critics & frefan enemies in the name of US technological and geopolitical supremacy.
Here is a nice thread on SW and commodity fetishism that you could follow inside and outside the franchise, stuff like SW Hansel & Gretel merch crumbs pulling the plotline along. You could say at the core of both Obi-Wan and the Mandalorian series - is not just the acquisition of stuff but the acquisition of legal stuff traded not on the black markets controlled by the Hutt Cartel in a Galaxy far far away, but closer to home, inundating this very planet with legal Disney-Lucasfilms marketed products right here right now.
Article Recommendations
Google’s Sentient ‘Chatbot’ Is Our Self-Deceiving Future by Ian Bogost in the Atlantic is one of the best articles I recently read about a watershed case of a Google engineer losing his wits and his job, after being “bewitched” by the LaMDA chatbot. The AI apocalypse after Ian Bogost is not that of the Super-Intelligences transforming the Whole Earth into computrionium fodder to solve some innocuous tasks, but a fairly familiar one, maybe even a philosophical or metaphysical one - one in which either we get lost in our Hyper-Ouija parlor games, or one in which AIs get recast as “oracles affirming prior obsessions”, a worrying sign of an “engineer’s faith in computational theocracy”. I asked myself after reading Bogost - why all this search for the human bias (attributing sentience to things) and not take this story as an example of that older speculation, the fictional thought experiment (as Jimena Canales traces in her recent book) - the cartesian malicious demon that with "utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive" and try to convince us there is no external reality.
‘An Ecological Provocatrice, a reflection on Chris Korda’s universe’ by Andra Amber Nikolayi for CLOT mag is a great article on the subversive work and nihilistic oeuvre of one of the most important “anti-humanists” (inhumanists?) - or even overtly extinctionist (pitch dark) voices out there. In times of demographic fears and X-Risk debates, there seems to be nothing more jarring yet timely than Korda’s message as her controversial long-term support for euthanism against transhumanism becomes ever more plausible. In spite of not aligning with neo-Malthusian thought or negative biopolitics, I strongly feel that “Thank You For Not Breeding” has some merit, especially nowadays when climate change denialism, anti-abortion laws, and gun rights activism seem to go hand in hand. Andra follows Reverend Korda, co-founder of the Church of Euthanasia into both the recording studio and the astronomy lab because there’s no comfy way back to good ol’ breeder culture.
Is DALE-E or GPT-3 a threat to human creativity? - by Alin Răuțoiu for Mindcraft stories in Romanian (again readable with the more and more efficient Google Translate - that still does not know what it translates from what we can gather with our own puny human minds!). Alin R. long(read) answer to such alarmist questions that feature prominently in the media comes close to the proof that AIs are neither unstoppable nor completely bothersome or opaque (noodle takeaway) black boxes. Like fallible machine learning and neuronal networks (+oh that other infinite resource!) - called human creativity and artistic output - is already being trained, privatized, and enrolled by larger social and economical transformations heralded by the Industrial Revolution. Combining interviews with Romanian creatives and commercial art workers with an example of the first comics entirely made by an AI, he turns down the false choice of choosing btw neo-Luddites and techno-utopians.
ART show
This year’s alternative educational experiment Cozzzmonautica is being hosted by artist-run space INDECIS and Minitremu space in Timisoara on the 23rd of September 2022. Much of the program is still in the works but some of our Cozzzmo speakers are already scheduled: celebrated computer scientist Andrew Adamatksy, well-known Chinese Science Fiction writer Chen Qiufan, and Islamic SF specialist Jörg Matthias Determann have announced their participation. We are also very happy to exhibit the SF works of Russian artist Irina Petrova. This year’s theme: FOREST OF ANTENNAE
LISTEN
E521 | Islam and science fiction have more history together than you might expect. In this episode, we [Ottoman Hist podcast] speak with Jörg Matthias Determann about the many ways science has fueled the imagination of people in Muslim-majority contexts over the last few hundred years. In his latest book, he shows how artists and missionaries participated in "cultures of astrobiology," or the study of life on other planets. Exploring the ways that a variety of authors, artists, and governments have imagined a future with and for Muslims, Matthias shows that there are many overlapping and competing visions of Muslim Futurism.
More at www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/02/scifi.html
Multifarious, relaxed & forked paths encounter with @adi_skiop and @Engineeredd around sinophilia and sinophobia in Romanian hosted by the amazing @dezarticulat666 podcast. Wish we had more of these. Finally feeling like all things Chinese/Asian are getting a better coverage.ÎNCEPE https://t.co/xbC3KZCXSg https://t.co/bPOqV4xJgVdezarticulat666 @dezarticulat666
