That struck a chord, and a powerful chord and powerful cord, with its power chord parody, both visual and audio. Nicely done art-political intervener. The redneck (forgive my mistaken attribution of the authentic voice, powering this, as I am a brit guest at the table viewing) “”grassroots”” parody-composition is totes on point, if I can strike a semi-informal posture.
I am looking at the sidelines as someone who took early retirement from education, and I myself taught and straddled many of those texts and approaches that were being poked loving fun at (was fun seeing semiology being poked at) as well as, here, teaching vfx as part of my own little cocktail.
So this video made me laugh, but sympathetically. I reflexively laughed. This word “reflexively” needs care as it has so often been taken off-piste (“don’t be reflexive” “that’s performative” “deconstructing democracy,” etc) at work in that most proper pisstake, and the fun-house mirror approach mirrors the nervousness of everyone. Nicely done, entity.
I’ll spare a close reading, and just sit back and admire the storytellling around the bluecollar whitecollar existential odyssey that was so expertly staged here, and kind of felt like a C21 Falling Down odyssey around the issues, without a central character.
You had to admire (I admired) the cultural politics that were behind this usage of AI, and perhaps worth that water bill inflation or increase that was worth the price of admittance. Spent well, entity, in displaying this great wave so “autopoiesis-acally” at work.
Yup, this is obviously much much bigger than the NFT wave in a paddling pool, that now seems like a preparatory foreshadowing of all “this" that is “this.” Not to speak too “syntactically” (I am on guard from all the structuralism pisstaking, even if I am a “deconstructionist,” lol) but this is obviously part of a much much bigger storyworld without narrator (itself a cliche thanks to some great work on puzzle films that eat into “reality” instead of representing or misrepresenting it), and some crisis is certainly under way. Go figure.
The existential angst of the white-collar joining the blue collar so very quickly is very visible in the political nous that is very visible in this little work of genius. Whilst I hated the NFT (see separate post) as a clear grift economic offering, this AI grift economy is far more insidious, and cynical, and yet cynical without a narrator or narrational agency to hire of fire. The political impotence was beautifully rendered, as well as obviously (““masterfully””?) llm sourced. Hurrah on the locating of all the pieces, turned back upon the machine for copious shits and giggles.
Just one small point of admiration, is the little bespectacled kid copied and pasted from retro-80s Stranger Things but with the blue collar economically affected (my friend, who’s also left education, did a great fat tome.study on Steven Spielberg that might be hiding or buried somewhere in that very enjoyable surfaced-database) with the kid who looks up to his dad but is already readying himself for the trauma of his incoming memories when his dad “passes” from the fallen work world that made him who he was. All the pictures of him with his buddies will be looked back on soon after the funeral. Yes, that “intertextual” painting/depiction/sourcing/building of the kid in the specs, not looking confidently up to his “daddy” (and mummy, as the video rightly starts out with) is very nicely passed on to the white collar “trades.”
I remember in the 80s and 90s (and all those 00s Brit films of old trade workers from steel works and coal mines) being retrained by southern choreographers (Billy Elliott) that showed the third-way transformations taking place within the workplace (young girls showing their coal/steel working daddies who to use t’computer) now coming across like false or untimely promises.
Substituting the bepectacled bluecollar family 80s kid for a whitecollar dinner table in the 2020s and so not being able to look up to his household economy is a very well depicted kitchen table issue. It is a beautifully crafted AI-aided (autoimmunitory) piece that perfectly paints the sequel that this is. The “cinematography” (without any grips or pullers of focus to school-up to a deeper craft algorithm) is obviously beautifully ET’d (parents seen as roles and semi bodies to the kid at decentre re-stage), and the whole package, the whole piece, is a work-in-progress surfacing of these ripples as the story continues to unfold. I felt like some low-rent Frederic Jameson looking at the economic speech taking place in Dog Day Afternoon and it’s allegory of multinational capitalism, as opposed to the ye olde nation-state Christmas comforting capitalism of It’s A Wonderful Life)
As semiology and narratology (the 90s study era) gave way to performativity and non-representational theories, this AI-slop-targetting reflexive piece so perfectly represents that frustrated work of algorithmically agitated people who have a deep politics bubbling away in the background, and have found a fantastic use of the tool. Southpark move aside, innit, for an equally cutting wit, but pointing the finger at larger economic issues of white collar creative workers being unseated and cruelly cast adrift by some wizard ultra-tech without any heart to point to, or to damage.
I was highly impressed with this piece, and I can imagine that there will be much more to come.
As a related aside, up in my Youtube feed yesterday (as I tend to watch videos on economic changes) came a video on people intending to leave Dubai and seek shelter from the fast-pace of life there, where everyone has to be on it, or be taken away. I watched the first “offering” and then two more to set the pattern. The first was from some millionaire dude who could afford to go back as he set himself his two year window before going back to a more “organic” space of “relationships” and “nature” and “water” that would offer him the electrolytes that he needed (he never worried about the charges for the bottled water, like something out of Soylent Green), and all he could do was, in speaking about relationships was to enumerate it (render it, surface it for the viewer/baited-clicker) through the 70% male to 30% female competitive environment that he can help you with or warn you against (“I hear Andrew Tate puts bums on seats, so let’s join the party”). I was not impressed with his morals and his need to sound off with his free help or tour guides.
Then he let slip that most of the “70%” (going for the “30%”) was nothing to worry about as “they,” those others, were just workers who worked, or beavered away within the amorphous background. Basically machines to replace and certainly nothing that the 30% would wish any “seed” funding from. The next in the feed was “of” one of those workers who offered no seminal threat to this alpha-male who could afford to leave and go back to rivers that can give him all he needs, now. This other person (we all have heard the story) couldn’t get his passport back, to leave, without having two workers taken economic hostage through one month’s pay each, signed as agreements on pieces of paper kept in the safe, evacuated by that borrowed passport that will allow him through the gates (I never thought that the I passed through that airport on an a380 on the way to somewhere else). “Luckily,” he was not a building worker, but a hotel worker (pictures of him at reception, etc.) and he told the story of his quasi-escape (quasi as it didnt’t quite involve brute or mere lawless force). It was not a bluecollar dystopic story of sneaking across a border, but a “white-collar” story of simply leaving and then paying a month to one of the other white collar workers that had been taken from their paypacket when he left: he didn’t give the month to the other signee, his manager, and I think he suspected he was a dummy signature to add weight). After watching this, I zoomed back to the alpha male white collar autobiographical “20-minute pros and cons of life there,” and ultimately why he left, and there was not an ounce of empathy, like he was some key player on a stage, and these non-threatening males were no threat to where he could plant his seed, if he chose to do it. He used the word “utopia” a number of times, and you can imagine what he thought was so cool (no dirt, great place to work without alcohol or drugs, no income tax, etc.) No, he chose to leave with his increased money and go home and seek out more “authentic” environments, having got his seed funding for his next venture. Memories, eh.
AI was not mentioned in either of these stories from two sides of the tracks, but the middle one of the three was about someone involved somewhere in AI (I didn’t look at his other stuff, as was on to other things) and his environment in his apartment did, indeed, look functional sci-fi sad, in ways that this, above, depiction had a little too much blue-collar 80s nostalgia where excess was available in helping the consumption society to thrive. Maybe I will see what he is getting with his AI there, before, like the richer dude, getting back more permanenty to nature (spends 6-months out of the year in that cool capsule with the cat)
That was a bit of an aside, but the current economic ripples (“garyeconimics” YouTube channel tells some nice insider stories of economic inequity “from someone whose seen both sides”) are far from lifting many boats, or offering other vessels to jump onto. So we are left with very many stories of either woe, and then those who are not caught in “the woe” that this algorithm offers on seeking to leave (also there are a tonne, unsurprisingly, to leave the USofA) are encouraged (or afforded) to be rather heartless as they seek out other, or home, shores. The guy in the pros and cons really, I hate to admit, made me want to vomit in my open mouth at the heartlessness in the face of what he did not need to worry or ripple himself about.
The economy, the larger economy outside or co-encompassing this, thus seems rather divisive (famous images of trans or homeless being “scapegoated” or “punched-down” and those not currently drowning or uncomfortable looking out and implicitly feasting upon where they are in comparison to where they, luckily, are not, and hope they never will be (Trading Places, etc.). It’s all so totes Snowpiercingly loud, and the cutting edge of those who cannot make it onto the train, in the right forward carriage, is becoming more naked by the day.
In this world of spreading AI (and we should find other words for it, to defamiliarise ourselves) is like NFT’s on steroids, and I feel here most for “the animals” who have no idea what they have gotten themselves into. One of the Dubai guys had a cat (that humanimal shaped thing that we all know and love) in his Dubai dwelling flat with flatscreen and quickly flippable white walls but, and yet, all those critters currently still circling and cycling around the earth, looking for their share, have never been in such danger, until now, though hardly living the life. F’in freeloaders, get a job, “dung” beetle. Species death accelerationism (be careful of the word “accelerationist” as some strange dudes knowingly shelter below that sign) is accelerating hugely and when we look at those local ducks housed with their local ponds (a local humanimalised cutesy thing) we should also spare a thought for all the insects that have no idea at all that “we’re” coming for them as they die off in increasingly record numbers.
We still think that we are protected in some townscape or towns-capable bubble, and AI (again, we need another word) is so much larger than any trade that might be dying off, or might be being “taken” as some latest tool, albeit a rather shattering autoimmune economic one, but the stripping out of nature is obviously reaching that tipping point (F off Gladwell, glad not to read you), and blind panic is murmuring away in the background.
Films, such as the truly excellent Aniara (adaptation of a Nobel winning epic poem, a prize that Trump should be awarded, in literature, as well as peace, where his great work is inaguable [sarcasm, obv]) meditate so well on this nature that “we” (don’t forget “they”) can never get back (scenes where passengers kill off the finite motherly holodeck space like drowning existential passenger on an endless void/sea: obv reminds of that scene in Tarkovsky’s Solaris with the horns paper in the air vents as echoes of taken-for-granted trees), but what about the nature that can never come back, that we have the right to drown out in the din of graphics cores?
This turned into more of an (impotent) rant than I intended, but “freeloading” nature tends not to get enough of a look-in in this story of economic changes (“cloud” metaphors still hide the energy expenditure, etc.), but it is so obviously underneath all of it, and its muffled screams are getting louder (again, depicted so well in Aniara that does not take shelter under heroic central characters who sort it out) and it is no distant scream as the second order law of thermodynamics is a cruel mistress (Mother Nature often depicted, as well bountiful) and the promise and promotion of AI as some god who will, fingers crossed, come to save us, is perhaps running into the fire, whilst begging not to be burnt. I’ve watched a few of those interviews about AI algorithms that will form into some “Maxwell’s Demon” and the drop of cadence in the voice speaks of a compulsion to confess the, can we call it, “lie.”
I enjoyed that video of the kid at the dinner table, narrated by those power chords, and for a moment I forgot the power cord that was plugged in to make all the magic happen.
Cheers
Tony
