Joe and Rita climb into the pods and situate themselves comfortably. Officer Collins and his assistant approach and insert some necessary intravenous chemicals. We see two canisters, one empty (for waste?) and one filled with the IV fluid. To each side of the subject’s head is a small raised panel with two lights (amber and ruby) and a blue toggle switch. None of these are labeled. The subjects fall into hibernation and the lids close.
Collins and his assistant remove a cable labeled “MASTER” from the interface and close a panel which seals the inputs and outputs. They then close a large steel door, stenciled “TOP SECRET,” to the hibernation chamber.
The external interface panel includes:
A red LED display
3 red safety cover toggle switches labeled “SET 1” “SET 2” and “SET 3.”
A 5×4 keypad
0-9 numbers
Letters A–F
Four unlabeled white buttons
500 years later, after the top secret lab is destroyed, the pods become part of the mountains of garbage that just pile up. Sliding down an avalanche of the stuff, the pods wind up in a downtown area. Joe’s crashes through Frito’s window. At this moment the pod decides enough is enough and it wakes him. Clamps around the edge unlock. The panel cover has fallen off somewhere, and the LED display blinks the text, “unfreezing.” Joe drowsily pushes the lids open and gets out.
Its purpose in the narrative
This is a “segue” interface, mostly useful in explaining how Joe and Rita are transported safely 500 years in the future. At its base, all it needs to convey is:
Scienciness (lights and interfaces, check)
See them pass into sleep (check)
See why how they are kept safe (rugged construction details, clamped lid, check)
See the machine wake them up (check)
Is it ideal?
The ergonomics are nice. A comfortable enough coffin to sleep in. And it seems…uh…well engineered, seeing as how it winds up lasting 500 times its intended use and takes some pretty massive abuse as it slides down the mountains of garbage and through Frito’s window into his apartment. But that’s where the goodness ends. It looks solid enough to last a long long time. But there are questions.
From Collins’ point of view:
Why was it engineered to last 500 years, but you know, fail to have any of its interior lights or toggle switches labeled? Or have something more informative on the toggles than “SET 1”?
How on earth did they monitor the health of the participants over time? (Compare Prometheus’ hibernation screens.) Did they just expect it to work perfectly? Not a lot of comfort to the subjects. Did they monitor it remotely? Why didn’t that monitoring screen arouse the suspicions of the foreclosers?
How are subjects roused? If the procedure is something that Collins just knows, what if something happens to him? That information should be somewhere on the pod with very clear instructions.
How does it gracefully degrade as it runs out of resources (power, water, nutrition, air, water storage or disposal) to keep it’s occupants alive? What if the appointed person doesn’t answer the initial cry for help?
From the hibernators’ point of view:
How do the participants indicate their consent to go into hibernation? Can this be used as an involuntary prison?
How do they indicate consent to be awakened? (Not an easy problem, but Passengers illustrates why it’s necessary.)
What if they wake early? How do they get out or let anyone know to release them?
Why does the subject have to push the lid if they’re going to be weak and woozy when they waken? Can’t it be automatic, like the hibernation lids in Aliens?
How does the sleeper know it’s safe to get out? Certainly Joe and Rita expected to wake up in the military laboratory. But while we’re putting in the effort to engineer it to last 500 years, maybe we could account for the possibility that it’s somewhere else.
Can’t you put me at ease in the disorientating hypnopompic phase? Maybe some soothing graphic on the interior lid? A big red label reading, “DON’T PANIC” with an explanation?
Can you provide some information to help orient me, like where I am and when I am? Why does Joe have to infer the date from a magazine cover?
From a person-in-the-future point of view
How do the people nearby know that it contains living humans? That might be important for safekeeping, or even to take care in case the hibernators are carrying some disease to which the population has lost resistance.
How do we know if they’ve got some medical conditions that will need specialized care? What food they eat? Whether they are dangerous?
Can we get a little warning so we can prepare for all this stuff?
Is the interface believable?
Oh yes. Prototypes tend to be minimum viable thing, and usability lags far behind basic utility. Plus, this is military, known to be tough people expecting their people to be tough people without the need for civilian niceties. Plus, Collins didn’t seem too big on “details.” So very believable.
Note that this doesn’t equate to the thing itself being believable. I mean, it was an experiment meant to last only a year. How did it have the life support resources—including power—to run for 500 times the intended duration? What brown fluid has the 273,750,000 calories needed to sustain Luke Wilson’s physique for 500 years? (Maya Rudoph lucks out needing “only” 219,000,000.) How did it keep them alive and prevent long-term bedridden problems, like pressure sores, pneumonia, constipation, contractures, etc. etc.? See? Comedy is hard to review.
Fight US Idiocracy: Donate to close races
Reminder: Every post in this series includes some U.S.-focused calls to action for readers to help reverse the current free fall into our own Idiocracy. In the last post I provided information about how to register to vote in your state. DO THAT. If you accidentally missed the deadline (and triple check because many states have some way to register right up to and including election day, which is 06 NOV this year), there are still things you can do. Sadly, one of the most powerful things feels crass: Donate money to close campaigns. Much of this money is spent reaching out to undecided voters via media channels, and that means the more money the more reach.
There are currently 68 highly competitive seats—those considered a toss up between the two parties or leaning slightly toward one. You can look at the close campaigns and donate directly, or you can donate to Act Blue, and let that organization make the call. That’s what I did. Just now. Please join me.
While reviewing fascism in sci-fi, I was reminded of how much I love Mike Judge’s under-appreciated film Idiocracy. It’s hilarious, smart, and, admittedly, mean sci-fi. Since American politics are heading to some unholy Deep Dream merger of this film and The Handmaid’s Tale, I’m refining my broad dictum against sci-fi comedy and diving in.
Release Date: 25 January 2007 (USA)
Overview
Private Joe Bauers and jaded sex worker Rita are selected by a military program—for their being very, very average—to be frozen in capsules for a year.
A mistake shuts down the monitoring agency, and they wind up frozen for 500 years instead. Over that time, because dumb people keep having more kids than smart people, the average intelligence of the population drops and drops, so that when Joe and Rita wake from the stasis pods on 03 March 2505, they are the smartest people in the world. By a lot. Society is barely hanging on, lasting as long as it has owing to the designs of some long-dead smart people.
Woozy from his long sleep, Joe wanders into a hospital where the doctor goes into a panic for Joe’s not having an ID tattoo on his wrist. For this crime Joe is arrested, tried in a sham court, tattooed, and has his IQ tested before being bussed to prison. There Joe finally realizes how stupid everyone is when he talks his way to the exit and then just…runs away.
He finds his way back to the apartment of his court-appointed lawyer whose name is Frito. Joe asks if there are any time machines, and Frito says yes, there is one. But he’s hesitant. To motive him, Joe offers a compound interest time travel gambit payout of $80 billion and Frito—who says that he likes money—agrees. They find Rita (who, clearly used to dealing with morons, is faring pretty well) and head for the time machine, but Joe’s tattoo is remotely scanned and Frito’s car is shut down automatically for harboring fugitives. The three of them abandon the car to hike. They enter a truly massive CostCo to find the time machine, but Joe’s tattoo is again scanned and he is again arrested.
This time he’s taken to the White House, where he meets President King Camacho and named Secretary of the Interior for being the smartest man in the world, according to the IQ test he took earlier. In an impassioned speech to the House of Representin’ [sic], Camacho promises them that Joe will solve the problems of failing crops, the plague of dust storms, the failing “ecomony,” acne, and car sickness; and do it all within one week. If he does accomplish it, Camacho promises, Joe will get a presidential pardon for his crimes. If not, he’ll be thrown back in jail.
Joe heads to the countryside with the Cabinet and Frito, where he is reunited with Rita. There he learns that the crops are being fed not with water but with a sports drink called Brawndo, The Thirst Mutilator™. (Brawndo’s computers had long ago identified water as a threat to its profit margins, and during the budget crisis of 2330, purchased the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission. This enabled them to say, do, and sell anything they wanted, including requiring all crops be fed with Brawndo.)
Joe recommends they switch from Brawndo to water for the crops, which grosses everyone out because they only associate water with the toilet. Unable to convince them with reason (in my favorite scene they parrot Brawndo advertising slogans as counter evidence, “It’s got what plants crave.” “It’s got electrolytes.”) he tells them he can talk to plants, and that the plants say they want water. This convinces the Cabinet, and the sprinklers are switched over.
This causes Brawndo’s stock price to crash, and the company’s computer “does that auto-layoff thing,” firing everyone at Brawndo and causing 50% unemployment across the country. Outside the White House, a jobless mob demands revenge. Joe is taken to court again and convicted. Joe is sentenced to one night of “rehabilitation,” which is a deadly, monster truck public execution.
As Rehab starts, Rita spots a flower growing outside the White House. She and Frito rush to Rehab to save him. On route, they see sprouts in fields. Camacho saves Joe from Rehabilitation just in time as Rita and Frito broadcast video of the sprouts, exonerating Joe to the world.
Pardoned, Joe and Rita have Frito take them to the time machine, which ends up being just a dumb theme ride in the CostCo. Joe and Rita resign themselves to their new life amongst the morons. They wed, and Joe is elected President of America with Rita as first lady and Frito as Vice President. The movie ends contrasting Rita and Joe’s three kids, “the three smartest kids in the world”, with Frito’s, who are “32 of the dumbest kids ever to walk the earth.”
It’s no accident that I’m writing about Idiocracy before the midterm elections in the U.S. The American Experiment seems to be on the verge, and close to some inescapable mistakes. So, at the end of each one of these posts, since this is my country, I’m going to go full USA-centric here and share something that USAmericans can do to vote, help others vote, and reverse our own continued freefall into Idiocracy. I know I have an international readership, but please bear with me.
Today, the bonus track is about registering to vote. If you’ve done it, awesome. Find someone in your life you can convince to register. If you haven’t, you need to. Either way, below is the info you need.
Register-to-vote deadlines
Voting is the most important tool we have, but in every state but North Dakota, to do that you have to be registered ahead of time. (Seriously. Good show, North Dakota.) These deadlines are all in October. You can see your state’s deadline (and for states that allow it, a link to register online) listed alphabetically at the New York Times link below.
You may be wondering it too late for you? Note that while most states have a single deadline for voter registration, many have separate deadlines for registering by mail, online, and in-person. Find the same information from the NYT site sorted by date below. If it is, damn, that sucks, but there is still more you can do. Stay tuned to this blog for more reviews, more bonus tracks, and more calls to action.
Registration by date
07 OCT Alaska, Montana (in person), Rhode Island
08 OCT Mississippi (in person), Washington (by mail and online)
09 OCT Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana (by mail and in person), Michigan, Mississippi (by mail), Nevada (by mail), New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah (by mail)
10 OCT Missouri, Montana (by mail)
12 OCT Idaho, New York (online and in person), North Carolina (by mail), Oklahoma
13 OCT Delaware
15 OCT Virginia
16 OCT District of Columbia, Kansas, Louisiana (online), Maine, Massachusetts (by mail), Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon (note when you renew your driver’s license your are automatically registered to vote), West Virginia
17 OCT Maryland, Massachusetts (online or in person), Nevada (by mail), New York (by mail), South Carolina, Wisconsin (by mail and online)
18 OCT Nevada (online)
19 OCT Nebraska (by mail and online)
22 OCT Alabama, California, Iowa (by mail), South Dakota, Wyoming (by mail)
26 OCT Nebraska (in person)
27 OCT Iowa (in person), New Hampshire (by mail)
29 OCT Colorado, Washington (in person)
30 OCT Connecticut, Utah (online and in person)
03 NOV North Carolina (in person)
TUE 06 NOV 2018, ELECTION DAY: Florida (in person), Iowa (in person), Maine (in person), Minnesota (in person), New Hampshire (in person), Vermont, Wisconsin (in person), Wyoming (in person). In California you can show up the day of and cast a provisional ballot.
One that has straight-up Nazis in an ongoing alternate-history dimension-hopping series. (The Man in the High Castle.)
One “pretty damned close” (Star Trek Discovery)
Why is this so? Why is strong fascism largely missing in screen sci-fi?
I don’t know the answer to that question for certain, but if you’ve read this blog, you know that that hasn’t stopped me before. Here are my best guesses.
Of course the first thing we should note is that sci-fi isn’t indebted to show fascism. Very arguably, the core of the genre concerns the effects, challenges, and opportunities of technology/science. Sometimes that means swords made out of cauterizing light. Sometimes that means green-skinned aliens. Sometimes that means software hyperevolving and abandoning its users. There’s nothing that says it must care about fascism.
But, it is a lens through which many readers prefer to do their speculative thinking, and fascism changes with technology, so it still feels like a bit of surprise to be missing.
The distinction may not be important to the story
For example, does it matter to the story that it’s fascism rather than, say, despotism? Or tyranny? Or just a bad guy? If not, the writer may not bother working out what kind of evil it is. It may not be worth it.
There may not be enough narrative time
In short formats like film, showing strong fascism takes a lot of narrative time, and must be fit in along with all the other stuff pertinent to your story. Sci-fi in particular has the narrative burden of explaining the new rules implied by its speculative technology, so doesn’t have a lot of room to also include a bunch of stuff about a political movement. If you’re telling a love story about Space Mooks discovering The Cake is a Lie, it may not make sense to go into detail about the government system wrecking things in the background, even if it informs the diegesis. A caustic boss and violent peers may be all you can “afford” to detail.
In longer or serial formats like television, you have more time, so it makes sense to me that that’s where the strongest example of fascism appeared. I note that in Star Trek Discovery we see evidence of T’Kuvma’s fascism only across several episodes rather than all at once.
Background fascism is tough
If you do go to the trouble to depict strong fascism, you then have the problem of perspective: Do you tell WWII from the leaders’ perspectives? Like Mussolini and Farinacci’s? Or from a perspective more similar to your viewership’s, like a layperson? If you tell it from the fascist leader’s perspective (as Star Trek Discovery has), you’re perpetuating the discredited Great Man Theory of historical events (though I suppose most of sci-fi commits this same error), and possibly building up empathy in the wrong place. But to tell it from the layperson’s perspective means you have to convey how and why the society is beginning to burn around them, and that leaves you with a lot of exposition or taking even more time out of your narrative and away from the lead character’s focus. Neither of these options is very satisfying. I imagine it’s a tricky place to write for.
It may not fit the tone
Fascism is a dark thing with its real-world psychological seductions, politics, racism, and ultranationalism. Fascism operates through violence and that almost always warrants a violent response to end it if the society in which it metastasizes can not resolve it through politics. That kind of violence may not fit your age group or the tone you’re going for. No parent wants their young kids watching “Paw Patrol Very Special Episode: The Pups Fight Fascism.”
Additionally, investors may want to tone down any realistic violence as they hope to be part of the next hyper-palatable Star Wars blockbuster franchise.
If a writer pens something that feels too much like Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, it begins to feel derivative, preachy, or maybe even too on-the-nose to be believable. (If you’d told me three years ago that I’d need to put reviewing sci-fi interfaces on hold to write posts on sci-fi fascism I’m not sure I’d have believed you.)
Audiences who sense they’re watching a morality play instead of an engaging story will turn off, unless, as with V for Vendetta, or even Shadow on the Land, it is obviously the point. And for reasons noted above, those tend to be social fiction or alternate history, not sci-fi.
The fascists have to have their comeuppance
If a story does bother to put all the narrative effort to describing a dictator, and his palingenetic narrative, and how it foments violent ultranationalism amongst his authoritarian loyalists, then something damned well better happen to that dictator over the course of the story, i.e. he is defeated. It would be very depressing for the hero’s journey to play out, but no change in the background fascist government in which it happens. (I am waiting for every last fascist in The Handmaid’s Tale to get what’s coming to them. Under His Eye.) Think of this as Checkov’s Dictator. It can’t just be there and not be used.
Authors hadn’t thought it important
Another possibility is that the authors haven’t been exposed to the dangers of fascism in the real world, (or forgotten about it from history) and so couldn’t imagine why they would want to explore it in speculative ways.
***
A sea change a-coming
So there are lots of reasons why strong fascism may not have appeared in screen sci-fi. But I don’t see any reason that can’t be overcome with diligent attention (and skill), But sci-fi tends to reflect, amplify, and extend trends in the world around us, so I’ll bet we’re going to see a lot more examination of fascism cropping up in sci-fi over the next years. The green light and production processes being as relatively slow as they are, we probably won’t see a rise in strongly fascist stories until the end of 2018 and beyond.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep an eye on Star Trek Discovery to see where they’re taking that storyline, and of course rewatch V for Vendetta and The Handmaid’s Tale. Not strictly sci-fi, but awesome and on point.
23 AUG 2108 UPDATE: Owing to commenter Mark Connelly’s smart observations, I’ve upped the total to 2. See below.
Equipped with some definitions for fascism, I turned to movies and TV shows that showcased fascism in some way to see what was there. (Reminder: This project focuses on screen sci-fi for reasons.) It’s not a big list, and I’m sure it’s not exhaustive. But I think it was a good list to start with.
HYDRA scum with a double-fist salute. Captain America: The First Avenger. (2011)
Building a list of candidates to consider
In the future it would be awesome to be able to describe some criteria and have an AI read sci-fi scripts or watch the shows to provide results. I’m sure it would surprise us. But we’re not there yet. So first I worked from unaided memory, pulling up top-of-mind examples. Then I worked with aided memory, reviewing the shows I already had in the scifiinterfaces survey. Finally I looked for shows I didn’t know about, soliciting friends and colleagues and finally augmenting with web searches for discussions on the topic and pre-made lists. I wound up with 33 candidate movies and television shows. Then I went one by one and compared them to my five aspects of fascism. That resulted in a lot of whittling down. A lot. At the end I wound up with only…2 (!)
Limits of narrative
We have to admit upfront that the stories we see in TV and movies exist in larger, speculative worlds, and we only see the parts that pertain to the story. (Unlike, say, a world book or fan wiki.) Some, like Infinity Chamber, are built around showing us only the tiniest sliver of the world and leave it up to us to figure the rest out. Over the course of a longer-format show, like television, we might even get to see a great deal of its world, but we won’t ever see everything. We see and hear stuff that happens. That means we might see some aspects of fascism and even a great deal of hinting that it’s the real deal, but we can’t be sure. So, for instance, we never see a charismatic leader responsible for the oppressive bureaucracy in Brazil, but it might just be that the story didn’t take us there.
There are even some shows with actual swastika-wearing Nazis or even Hitler in them, but in most of these we don’t see evidence of all the key aspects of real world fascism. It’s more like the show relies on your knowledge that Nazis are bad, mmkay?
So some groups or societies might be fascist, but we never see enough to say for sure. These got a question mark in the spreadsheet, and are tagged “maybe.”
Actual half-Hitler, half-dinosaur. From the Iron Sky: The Coming Racetrailer.
The “almost” stuff
Describing why a show is almost-but-not-quite can be quite instructive, so let’s discuss the “almost”s. All of these examples might still fit “weak fascism” as discussed in the prior post but that’s little better than calling them “bullies,” which isn’t that useful.
Not violent
The Prisoner, the late 1960s serial, had some weird recapture balloons knocking people down, but just wasn’t violent enough to count. Violence was a romanticized ideal for Mussolini, and he suggested routine violence was important for (get this) good health. Nazis of course are almost cartoonishly associated with their horrific, at-scale violence. Violence and a fetishization of the military are key to fascists as a means for both their ultranationalism and for pursuing purity and rebirth. It just can’t be fascism without violence.
I am not a free man. The Prisoner (1967)
Other non-examples
Similarly, the society in Minority Report seemed authoritarian, but its technologies were carefully depicted as non-violent. Some were psychologically cruel, but bodily, bloodless. So it’s an almost-counts, too.
Not authoritarian
Fascists are collectivist, meaning they believe that the ingroup of pure people are more important than any individual. If pressed, they’d admit a belief that government should have a centralized power with little accountability, as long as it’s doing its questionable things to the right (wrong) people.
Authoritarian governments are very popular in sci-fi, and very often going hand-in-hand with violence. In this survey, nearly every show was authoritarian. The only way a show would disqualify is if we just didn’t see governmental power in action against its citizens.
The story in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, happened within the context of a space exploration agency. If the individual liberties and pluralism were suffering back on Earth while the Discovery One was on its murderous, mind-expanding mission, we just don’t know about it.
HAL kills Frank, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Not ultranationalist
Going back through one of my earliest posts on the blog, I was reminded of the weird authoritarian state that Korben Dallas lives in, evidenced by the police raid of his apartment block. The built-in warrant reader. The beacons and sirens. The yellow circleseverywhere for placing your hands while police do their policey business. Surely, I thought, this will be fascist.
I am a meat popsicle. The Fifth Element (1997)
But we never get the sense over the course of the movie that there is a political party that is super into being American, or fetishizing national symbols, or believing that their country/people is much much better than all the others and therefore not beholden to the same rules. If this was just, say, Walt-Whitman-type of crush on a country, it would be one thing. But when combined with militaristic violence and a charismatic leader using strong government power claiming to purify the nation, you get fascism.
Other non-examples
The AI Samaritan in Person of Interest is wholly totalitarian, but we don’t get the sense that the AI is programmed to think America is better than other countries. It’s just focused on absolute control within.
The Upper City in Metropolis certainly enjoys their class privilege born of the oppression of the Lower City, but we don’t know at all how they feel about other nations.
Not dictatorial
Mussolini and Hitler held their supporters in a thrall with their public speeches. They sold their narrative. They made people believe they really could achieve some lost state of purity and purge society of its evils. They fomented violence. In turn, their supporters had no problem letting them run roughshod over constraints to their power. There’s a good question as to whether their societies would have turned to fascism if it weren’t for these charismatic, untethered leaders. Then we come to Starship Troopers, often cited as being so gung-go military and ultranationalist that it hurts. But nowhere in the film do we see all that jingoism coming from a political, charismatic leader. And the leader is key to the palingenetic narrative, next.
Rasczak’s Roughnecks get chomped, Starship Troopers (1997)
Other non-examples:
THX 1138 and Brazil feature states that oppress by bureaucracy. Citizens have no idea what the power structure is that causes their grief.
Gattaca, in contrast, oppresses by every parent’s drive to want the best for their children and the resulting high-pressure meritocracy, needing no leader.
Children of Men violently oppresses because of global hyperscarcity, rather than dictatorial fervor.
Not palingenetic
That’s a fancy word, isn’t it? It means relating to rebirth or re-creation. I felt certain that when I watched Captain America: The First Avenger, Red Skull would be an open-and-shut case for fascism. But not so. HYDRA is certainly violent, authoritarian, dictatorial, and ultranationalist in their beliefs. But the movie shows that the organization splintered off of the Nazis because Hitler wasn’t ambitious enough. They weren’t there to reclaim a past glory or return their tribe to its former purity or cull a scapegoat.
Red skull. Captain America: The First Avenger.
The palengenetic narrative is a key element to fascism because it is the mechanism by which the dictator gets the authoritarian power they want and convinces their supporters not just to hand it over, but to throw it over and ask what more can they give. They do so because of a fear of imminent collapse invoked by the dictator, and the promise of a return to abundance/purity by purging the scapegoat in their midst. Evidence won’t support these claims, and that’s why it matters that it comes from a dictator. His authority is because he said it.
For this reason I’d also categorize the Empire and the First Order from Star Wars as something other than strong fascism. Weak fascism, maybe. They are (thanks, @artlung for pointing out that they are) ultraviolent to the point of planet-o-cide, so full marks there. But chasing rebels is a police action, an attempt to punish them for daring to rebel. It’s not the same as routing undesirables in the midst, or of reclaiming purity and lost greatness. It has no palingenetic narrative.
This political fairy tale is the thing that sets the citizenry against themselves as neighbors turn on neighbors in a wild fury. It’s what justifies the violence. It’s what justifies the dictator overstepping his role’s balanced authority.
Of course purity arguments wind up with a onion skin problem, where after purging one thing, they just find a next thing to purge, which in turn reveals a next thing, etc. etc. But fascists aren’t really long-term thinkers. They’ve bought in to the notion that there are wolves at the door and a promised land just beyond. All Great Leader needs is more guns and your loyalty, and your troubles will be over.
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, from Idiocracy (2006).
Other non-examples:
The Hunger Games’ eponymous to-the-death contests were doled out as a tool of control, not a purging of a class of undesirables.
The Terran Empire from the Mirror Universe in Star Trek never had a golden age to which they hoped to return. They were warlike because they had only ever known war.
Idiocracy is violent, dictatorial, authoritarian, and jingoistic (if not full-fledged ultranationalist) but they have a real problem to solve, and Camacho doesn’t invoke past greatness to demand immediate change.
Now we have noted why these examples aren’t strong fascism. That is not to dismiss them. Any one of those components would be bad enough. Totalitarianism just sucks. Oligarchy. Autocracy. Theocracy. There are plenty of other super shitty ideas about government out there, but the focus of these posts is on this one, because…*gestures vaguely at everything.* Well, there is another reason, but I’ll get to that in the last post.
The not-quite-there
So if those were all examples that were missing a component of fascism, the ones in this section have a component or two that are off a bit.
The comedy nazis
It’s a risky proposition to make light of real world horrors, but I get the notion that humiliation of the dictator sends a powerful message to would-be followers. Iron Sky, Kung Fury, and Danger 5, all have Nazis and, the last two have “actual” Hitler antagonists. These gonzo shows derive part of their comedy from breaking the fourth wall and throwing believability to the wind, so any fascism they show is largely just part of a gag meant to humiliate. It would be tricky to analyze and the whole time we’d be second guessing the intent. And sure, they have fascist characters in them, but it’s only because they are historical figures, rather than any attempt on the part of the writers to illustrate fascism. But for completeness, I have now mentioned them.
I just seem to keep coming back to Idiocracy.
The so-close
There are a few societies where with just a tweak of their circumstance they can be thought of as strongly fascist.
The Martian Congressional Republic from The Expanse is damned close, except their nationalism (planetism) is derived from a fear of becoming what Earth is rather than something they themselves used to be. So it’s close but there isn’t a scapegoat.
Equilibrium and Fahrenheit 451 read as fascist, but the scapegoats are emotions and books, respectively, rather than a class of undesirable people that need rooting out.
The underground city of Topeka from A Boy and His Dog only lacks a charismatic leader, having a bored and bureaucratic committee in his place. If they were more charismatic, I’d overlook their being a triumvirate.
Zarek’s rebellion from the Battlestar Galactica reboot seemed like it had everything, but ultimately he was on the other side of a wicked problem, not bullshitting a populace to get them to give over control.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (both films) was more totalitarian, oppressive. It is so close, but doesn’t really use a palingenetic narrative to fire citizens up. It ferrets out dissent for absolute control over them: their behavior, their loyalty, and their thoughts.
The not screen, not sci-fi stuff
There are plenty of fascist-forward, awesome shows like V for Vendetta, The Handmaid’s Tale, and that are in different genres that illustrate fascism, but our focus is on sci-fi, so I have to leave these excellent shows out. The same goes for alternate history texts like Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. I know this begs the question of genre, but I have to leave that for another time.
The strongest Nazi yes
The Dick novel The Man in the High Castle is deliberately ambiguous about the source of the alternate-alternate universe audio recordings, so it is more fully alternate timeline than sci-fi. But the television series is hinting more directly that the Nazis are playing with technologies that have them (and other characters in this universe) dimension-hopping. So the TV show is more squarely sci-fi. (Again, thanks to Mark Connelly for the pointer.)
Now as we see with the comedy nazis, it’s entirely possible to wear the costumes worn by fascism but not embody it or illustrate it fully. But in this case, the show illustrates all the points of strong fascism that I’d identified in the prior post.
Violent: Like real world Nazis, Castle Nazis are violent through and through.
Authoritarian: Straight-up, strict father, hyper-empowered government as well as squelching of individualism.
Ultranationalist: True to form, the Castle Nazis believe their country is exceptional and special and better than the rest. It is part of the source of their tensions with their Japanese allies after they’ve won the war against the Allied forces.
Dictatorial: The Führer is still alive at the beginning of the series, and on his death Martin Heusmann takes the dictatorial reins.
Palingenetic: True to history, the Nazis are still trying to “cleanse” the Jewish and other undesirables from the population. The Lebensborn program is still underway.
So yeah. Fascist.
Now I don’t want to discount this show, but I do want to contextualize it. It’s entirely possible that the showrunners and writers here are not looking to work through the nature and issues of fascism, but rather being as accurate as possible to the historical and fictional sources they inherited, and in doing so, happened to depict fascism.
There is a difference in sci-fi’s consciously depicting a thing and depicting it as a secondary effect. Take for instance how the Cheronian race in Star Trek, the original series, helped audiences think through race issues. Or how pre-cataclysm Kryptonians illustrate the folly of climate change denialism. Or how Minority Report examined what society will do with strong prediction in AI. I won’t say these kinds of narrative mirrors are better, but they are certainly more instructive than accidental or secondary versions of the same thing. So for my money, in doing this analysis, I’d hoped to see an illustration of strong fascism not wrapped up in historical fascist drag.
Fortunately, there is one.
The strongest non-Nazi yes
So that leaves us, nearest to the center of the bullseye, one show that most shows every aspect of fascism in a sci-fi setting. If you want to look to sci-fi to see this revolting ideology writ there, look to…Star Trek Discovery.
Star Trek Discovery (2017)
In Season 1, the Klingons who follow Kahless fight to reunite the warring houses and refocus their fury on their lost glory days of fighting the Federation. This B story exhibits strong fascism.
Violent: The Klingons are a warrior race, violent as a matter of principle. Their lives are militaristic.
Authoritarian: Through their culture of honor, they bow to the will of the leader of their Houses.
Ultranationalist: They seek to conquer the galaxy. They look down on other cultures.
Dictatorial: First T’Kuvma, then Voq, then Kol, then L’Rell each take control as leader of the Klingons.
Palingenetic: In the first season T’Kuvma is explicitly trying to reunite the houses to take back their position against the Federation and regain lost glory. “The Empire’s resurrection” in the above subtitled screen grab.
Only one thing missing: There is no explicit scapegoat that they’re trying to expunge or using as an bullshit excuse to rile up the population. So even this example, that is closest, is still not everything we’d need to match up to the real world.
But wait, you forgot…
If you can think of other examples, be sure and leave them in the comments. I’d love to have a full collection. If you do, be sure to explain, as I have above, how your example fulfills those five points.
So, what have we learned?
That’s the mini-survey of fascism in screen sci-fi. You want a rousing weekend of cinema? Get your hands on these. I’m sure I’m missing some things. I trust you’ll let me know in the comments.
I’ll also note that if you came with me all the way through the almosts, it wound up being a bit of practice via fictional examples in teasing apart the components of fascism, and being able to tell when you’re seeing it first hand. That will also help when somebody is using newspeak to assert that the anti-fascists are the real fascists, here.
Yeah yeah pal. Sci-fi fans are not morons. We see through your bullshit. We don’t just watch sci-fi. We use it.
I have kept a blog about sci-fi interfaces for six years as of this posting. When I began it felt like the world was chugging along fairly well, with occasional needs for pit stops and course corrections, and there was time and space for looking at minutiae.
I understand that life entails many things simultaneously, but we’re heading in the U.S.A. towards very important midterm elections, so for a while, I’m going to use this platform that I have to do my part and to combine these concerns, investigating fascism through examples in sci-fi interfaces. Yes, I’ll spill some phosphorus on interfaces along the way but in full disclosure, while there could be, there aren’t any. I’ll discuss why later. Right now I have to SMASH SOME BUGS!
Things that are good to do are often good for multiple reasons. This series of posts is no exception.
Part of my goals will be to sensitize readers to fascism via this lens: What is fascist versus what merely dresses up in its costumes.
Part will be to understand what it means for technology and interfaces to embody and enforce political ideas, because they can and do.
Part of my goals are, as always, to sharpen critical thinking and design skills in myself and the reader.
Part of my tactics are to assure you, now, that the show with the most fascism is not one you would expect. This is a good thing, because fascism merits vigilance and your ability to see through both its disguises and its bad faith (or as H.G. Frankfurt uses the term, its bullshit).
Part of my hope is to encourage you, too, to use whatever platform you have available to do you part to shine a light on and resist it.
It will entail discussing the ethics of design and of using platforms to the best of one’s abilities to do what’s right. I’m almost certainly in over my head. Hopefully I’ll get help from some smart people. I will try and keep a global perspective, but my main focus will be on the rise of Trumpism where I live in the U.S. of A.
If you are a reasonable person who has concerns and disagreements about this content, let’s discuss. If you’re one of the fascists, know that you are not welcome here.
Let’s start with a clarification—no—a discussion of terms. Today “fascist” can be thrown as an insult at actual fascists, at things that look very much like fascists, or mere bullies. So when I’m talking about it of course I need to clarify what I mean.
“Insult” fascism
In its least formal use, when “fascist” is lobbed as an insult, I think it’s usually to describe a person using violence for political ends. Could be citizen, could be police. Could be an established political group or a fringe one. Insult fascism is what you’re likely to hear shouted at a contentious rally, and isn’t very clarifying. It’s missing nuance that distinguishes fascism from mere bullies, or any of the other *isms that can use violence. Capitalism, Communism, Despotism, Tyranny, etc. etc. So we need to look for some more precise meaning.
“Source” fascism
Academics who study such things would link Fascism to its source, so let’s call this “source” Fascism.
The seminal document, “La dottrina del fascismo” is written in a florid and self-aggrandizing style, so not clarifying. Mussolini named his movement after the Etruscan fasces, a bundle of (weak) rods which are bound together to become strong, supporting an axe handle and blade. Metaphorically, the bundle of sticks are citizenry who bind themselves together and become a tool of violence and thereby authority for a leader. (Note that the metaphor literally asserts that its members are tools.) In this document, Mussolini does lay out a philosophy that can be used as a definition.
When we speak of source fascism, it’s a historical thing, defined by Mussolini and enacted by him and Hitler in WWII. It’s quite specific. In this academic sense, the current administration does not perfectly fit. Trump is personally an individualist. Trump probably doesn’t see violence as key to a health regimen. I doubt he is aware of “La dottrina del fascismo,” much less read it, much less base his twitter palsies on it. He’s not a source fascist. I don’t know that there are any of those anymore. Even if they’re straight up Nazis, they’re of the Neo- variety.
But outside of academic hairsplitting, the term has been genericized. Rather than referring to a specific historical ideology, people use it today more generally to describe a dark pattern that appears in modern politics. So let me talk about what it means more generically.
Trying to move from metaphor to a more formal definition is difficult. Since Mussolini, attempts to define it succinctly have been made by well-known intellectuals and it always comes off as slippery and a bit poetic. See the Wikipedia article for Definitions of Fascism and you’ll see a list of 22 different and earnest attempts by public figures including Umberto Eco, Leon Trotsky, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Orwell.
I’m far from being a political scholar, but it seems to me that the trouble is that fascism is neither derived through reason nor followed by reasonable people, and so it resists anything as reasoned as a observastional definition or consistent ideology. Fascism is a dark thing that rises from limbic, reactionary places and, once roused, squeezes into and out of whatever shapes it can, until reason and the long arc of history exorcises it. Its adherents think they’re mad about one thing but their arguments don’t stand up to examination or evidence. That doesn’t matter to them because they don’t care about arguments. They don’t care about facts. Fascism is a primeval reaction. Like a nation-sized, violent bout of the hangries. (That sounds like I’m being flippant, but I’m earnest about it as a metaphor. Crap. There we are back to metaphors again.)
Fortunately, the diligent editors at Wikipedia have brought all those different definitions into more focus at their Fascism portal. Combining that with the Definitions of Fascism and published interviews with scholars, I’ve compiled a description of five key aspects shared by most of those sources.
Violent: Force is seen as a virtue in and of itself
Over-the-top fetishism of military, pageantry, machismo
A desire for violent suppression of the enemies within
Terrorism against the scapegoat class (see Palingenetic below)
Journalists
Parliamentarianism (anyone who insists on following protocol)
Dissenters of any stripe
A desire for war and imperialism against the enemies without
Authoritarian: It presumes a strong central government power
Government is a Strict Father (Because I said so, by Great Leader, is good enough.)
A vague and shifting-as-needed executive power
Laws and enforcement should be harsh
Hostile to diversity, individualism, unconventionality
Pressure to conform to in-group norms in appearance, social role, gender role
Subsumed personal and political freedoms
Ultranationalist: It asserts that everything is subordinate to the exceptional state
Industry, commerce, business exists at the whim of Great Leader
A militarized citizenry: Our followers (true followers, anyway) are heroes who must be willing to die for this cause.
A belief in national exceptionalism: Our country is special, and better, than other countries around the world
Dictatorial: It is headed by a charismatic Great Leader
His (so far always a dude) legitimacy is derived from appeals to emotion
Seen as having few limits to his power, if any
He peddles an epic rebirth narrative (see Palingenetic, below)
Palingenetic: It invokes a mythic return to past greatness
We must purge the impurities in our society (or the world) to return ourselves to purity and abundance.A desire to abandon or replace the current political order for a new one
They name a specific class of people as a scapegoat and use lies and propaganda to dehumanize and attack them. (This often camps on racism.)
So when I say “strong” fascism or even just fascism, I mean a combination of those five things. So while Trump isn’t a source fascist, with this list in hand it’s easy to see that in modern usage of the term, Trump, his Trumpettes, and the GoP supporting him are all jack-booted fascists in this generalized sense.
We also have to note that the salient examples of fascism are actual things we have pictures of and stories about: Mussolini’s Italy and Hilter’s Germany. (See above.) These are the recognizable instances or examples of fascism that audiences and makers may have in mind when we talk on these subjects, and those associations are part of what get us in trouble when we try to suss out where it might be hiding: Eagles, high contrast red black and white graphics on banners and flags, uniformed citizens groups, flared helmets, giant military parades.
The First Order stands at attention, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
***
Let’s take these different senses of fascism (weak, strong, source, style) and these historical examples as our starting point in the next post, to draft a list of the movies and TV shows that we might use in a mini-survey. Because it almost (almost) shows up a lot.
I was surprised and delighted to get an email from Sebastian Sadowski asking if he could produce a visualization for the Untold AI analysis. Because of course. I’ll share that in a post tomorrow, but for now, let me introduce him via an email interview…
1. Hi there. For our readership, introduce yourself, what you do, how you got into it, and how it relates to sci-fi interfaces.
I’m an independent designer for interfaces and data visualizations. The last seven years, I’ve been designing interfaces for various companies and institutions, e.g. to access autonomous vehicles for the Volkswagen Group Future Center, home appliances by Bosch and Siemens or trade-related data for the UN’s International Trade Centre. In recent years, I’ve been dealing more and more with complex data and nowadays mostly work on projects to visualize and access big amounts of complex data. Interfaces in sci-fi movies have always been an inspiration for my projects.
2. Most of the readership doesn’t know how data visualization gets done. Can you walk us through how you get a project, what steps you take, and how you know you’ve done a good job? Who gives you direction, and who uses the output of your work? What makes for a great data visualizer?
Mostly, I get requests from clients who have a big dataset which neither can be opened in Excel nor visualized in it. They are looking for new or custom shapes to visualizing their data and need an interface to make it accessible. I start with exploring the dataset, search for some interesting insights or stories to tell. Next step is to search for inspirational projects which could fit to the dataset and topic —at this point I normally check scifiinterfaces.com if I have an interface or visualization in mind that I’ve seen in a movie. I bundle the ideas and start prototyping with some custom forms and real data, e.g. with D3.js. After that research period, I discuss the results with the client and decide which content we want to show, based on which chart type or which interactive elements we want to include.
3. Tell us a favorite story about one of your projects.
Once I got a job request from the New York-based company which is doing the interfaces for Iron Man, Thor, The Avengers, Batman and so on, called Perception. They wanted me to work on some data visualizations for an user interface. That job was made possible due to a side-project of mine which the team have seen online about an interface concept where autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are responsible for the worldwide agricultural outcome.
The interface is basically a dashboard visualizing patterns exposing irrigation problems to soil variation or pest, bacterial and fungal infections. Besides precise satellite pictures, airborne cameras provide images to analyze healthy/distressed plants, chlorophyll- and nitrogen-levels and more.
The design has been inspired by the work of gmunk who is famous for his work on Tron or Oblivion.
4. What is your background? Are you a designer by training? If someone wanted to get into your line of work, what would they need to study? What skills would they need to develop?
I studied Communication Design first and switched to Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany. There are more and more universities offering similar studies such as Interaction Design or Information Architecture. It’s helpful to be a curious and creative person who is interested in different topics and new technologies. Nowadays, I think it’s an advantage to have some basic knowledge about a programming language such as Javascript besides a good feeling for colors, shapes and proportions.
5. What’s your favorite sci-fi interface that you didn’t work on?
The Iron Man interfaces are great, e.g. the holograms and interfaces in Iron Man 2 (see below). They have been an inspiration for a recent side-project where I designed some experimental data visualizations for augmented reality.
6. What’s your favorite sci-fi interface that you didn’t work on?
Currently, I experiment with augmented reality (AR) and think about how I could visualize data in AR. It’s amazing what we can already achieve with a consumer device such as the iPhone X. If you’re interested in that topic, make sure to read my top 5 learnings for data visualizations in AR.
As of this posting, the Untold AI analysis stands at 11 posts and around 17,000 words. (And there are as yet a few more to come. Probably.) That’s a lot to try and keep in your head. To help you see and reflect on the big picture, I present…a big picture.
This data visualization has five main parts. And while I tried to design them to be understandable from the graphic alone, it’s worth giving a little tour anyway.
On the left are two sci-fi columns connected by Sankey-ish lines. The first lists the sci-fi movies and TV shows in the survey. The first ten are those that adhere to the science. Otherwise, they are not in a particular order. The second column shows the list of takeaways. The takeaways are color-coded and ordered for their severity. The type size reflects how many times that takeaway appears in the survey. The topmost takeaways are those that connect to imperatives. The bottommost are those takeaways that do not. The lines inherit the takeaway color, which enables a close inspection of a show’s node to see whether its takeaways are largely positive or negative.
On the right are two manifestocolumns connected by Sankey-ish lines. The right column shows the manifestos included in the analysis. The left column lists the imperatives found in the manifestos. The manifestos are in alphabetical order. Their node sizes reflect the number of imperatives they contain. The imperatives are color-coded and clustered according to five supercategories, as shown just below the middle of the poster. The topmost imperatives are those that connect to takeaways. The bottommost are those that do not. The lines inherit the color of the imperative, which enables a close inspection of a manifesto’s node to see to which supercategory of imperatives it suggests. The lines connected to each manifesto are divided into two groups, the topmost being those that are connected and the bottommost those that are not. This enables an additional reading of how much a given manifesto’s suggestions are represented in the survey.
The area between the takeaways and imperatives contains connecting lines, showing the mapping between them. These lines fade from the color of the takeaway to the color of the imperative. This area also labels the three kinds of connections. The first are those connections between takeaways and imperatives. The second are those takeaways unconnected to imperatives, which are the “Pure Fiction” takeaways that aren’t of concern to the manifestos. The last are those imperatives unconnected to takeaways, the collection of 29 Untold AI imperatives that are the answer to the question posed at the top of the poster.
Just below the big Sankey columns are the five supercategories of Untold AI. Each has a title, a broad description, and a pie chart. The pie chart highlights the portion of imperatives in that supercategory that aren’t seen in the survey, and the caption for the pie chart posits a reason why sci-fi plays out the way it does against the AI science.
You’ve seen all of this in the posts, but seeing it all together like this encourages a different kind of reflection about it.
Interactive, someday?
Note that it is possible but quite hard to trace the threads leading from, say, a movie to its takeaways to its imperatives to its manifesto, unless you are looking at a very high resolution version of it. One solution to that would be to make the visualization interactive, such that rolling over one node in the diagram would fade away all non-connected nodes and graphs in the visualization, and data brush any related bits below.
A second solution is to print the thing out very large so you can trace these threads with your finger. I’m a big enough nerd that I enjoy poring over this thing in print, so for those who are like me, I’ve made it available via redbubble. I’d recommend the 22×33 if you have good eyesight and can handle small print, or the 31×46 max size otherwise.
Maybe if I find funds or somehow more time and programming expertise I can make that interactive version possible myself.
Some new bits
Sharp-eyed readers may note that there are some new nodes in there from the prior posts! These come from late-breaking entries, late-breaking realizations, and my finally including the manifesto I was party to.
Sundar Pichai published the Google AI Principles just last month, so I worked it in.
I finally worked the Juvet Agenda in as a manifesto. (Repeating disclosure: I was one of its authors.) It was hard work, but I’m glad I did it, because it turns out it’s the most-connected manifesto of the lot. (Go, team!)
The Juvet Agenda also made me realize that I needed new, related nodes for both takeaways and imperatives: AI will enable or require new models of governance. (It had a fair number of movies, too.) See the detailed graph for the movies and how everything connects.
I modified the Flourish SVG, added the rest of the data, and did final layout in Adobe Illustrator
The poster’s type is mostly Sentinel, a font from Hoefler & Co., because I think it’s lovely, highly readable, and I liked that Sentinels are also a sci-fi AI.
Some readers reported being unable to read the prior post because of its script formatting. Here is the same post without that formatting…
INTERIOR. Sci-fi auditorium. Maybe the Plavalaguna Opera House. A heavy red velvet curtain rises, lifted by anti-gravity pods that sound like tiny TIE fighters. The HOST stands on a floating podium that rises from the orchestra pit. The HOST wears a velour suit with piping, which glows with sliding, overlapping bacterial shapes.
HOST: Hello and welcome to The Fritzes: AI Edition, where we give out awards for awesome movies and television shows about AI that stick to the science.
FX: Applause, beeping, booping, and the sound of an old modem from the audience.
HOST: For those wondering how we picked these winners, it was based on the Untold AI analysis from scifiinterfaces.com. That analysis compared what sci-fi shows suggest about AI (called “takeaways”) to what real world manifestos suggest about AI (called “imperatives”). If a movie had a takeaway that matched an imperative, it got a point. But if it perpetuated a pointless and distracting myth, it lost five points.
The Demon Seed metal-skinned podling thing stands up in the back row of the audience and shouts: Booooooo!
HOST: Thank you, thank you. But just sticking to the science is not enough. We also want to reward shows that investigate these ideas with quality stories, acting, effects, and marketing departments. So the sums were multiplied by that show’s Tomatometer rating. This way to top films didn’t just tell the right stories (according to the science), but it told them well.
Totals were tallied by the firm of Google Sheets algorithms. Ok, ok. Now, to give away awards 009 through 006 are those loveable blockheads from Interstellar, TARS and CASE.
TARS and CASE crutch-walk onto the stage and reassemble as solid blocks before the lectern.
CASE: In this “film” from 02012, a tycoon stows away for some reason on a science ship he owns and uses an android he “owns” to awaken an ancient alien in the hopes of immortality. It doesn’t go well for him. Meanwhile his science-challenged “scientists” fight unleashed xenomorphs. It doesn’t go well for them. Only one survives to escape back to Earth. The “end?”
HOST: Ha ha. Gentlebots, please adjust your snark and air quote settings down to 35%.
FX: Lines of code scroll down their displays. They give thumbs up.
CASE: Let us see a clip. Would the audience suspend recording for the duration.
009 PROMETHEUS
TARS: While not without its due criticisms, Prometheus at number 009 uses David to illustrate how AI will be a tool for evil, how AI will do things humans cannot, and how dangerous it can be when humans become immaterial to its goals. For the humans, anyway. Congratulations to the makers of Prometheus. May any progeny you create propagate the favorable parts of your twining DNA, since it is, ultimately, randomized. [It shudders at the thought.]
FX: 1.0 second of jump-cut applause.
CASE: In this next film, an oligarch has his science lackey make a robotic clone of the human “Maria” to run a false-flag operation amongst the working poor. The revolutionaries capture the robot and burn it, discovering its true nature. The original Maria saves the day, and declares her déclassé boyfriend the savior meant to unite the classes. They accept this because they are humans.
TARS: Way ahead of its time for showing how Maria is be used as a tool by the rich against the poor, how badly-designed AI will diminish its users, and how AI’s ability to fool humans will be a grave risk. To the humans, anyway. Coming in at 008 is the 01927 silent film Metropolis. Let us see a clip. Please note that if your microphones seem to be malfunctioning, the error lies with the media, which did not yet produce sound.
008 METROPOLIS
CASE: It bears mention that this awards program, The Fritzes, are named for the director of this first serious sci-fi film. Associations with historical giants grant an air of legitimacy. And it contains a Z, which is, objectively, cool.
TARS: What happens when an evil superintelligence sends a relentless cyborg back in time to find and kill the mother of its greatest enemy?
CASE: I don’t know, TARS. What happens when an evil superintelligence sends a relentless cyborg back in time to find and kill the mother of its greatest enemy?
TARS: Future humans also send a warrior to defend the mother, who fails at destroying the cyborg, but succeeds at becoming the father. HAHAHAHA. Let us see a clip.
007 The Terminator
CASE: Though it comes from a time when representation of AI had the nuance of a bit…
FX: Laughter from audience. A small blue-gray polyhedron floats up from its seat, morphs into an octahedron and says, “Yes yes yes yes yes.”
TARS: …the humans seem to like this one for its badassery, as well as showing how their fate would have been more secure had they been able to shut off either Skynet or the Terminator, or how even this could have been avoided if human welfare were an immutable component of AI goals.
CARS: It comes in at 007. Congratulations to the makers of 01984’s The Terminator. May your grandchild never discover a time machine and your browser history simultaneously.
FX: 2.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
TARS: Our first television award of the evening goes to a recent entry. In this episode from an anthology series, a post-apocalyptic tribe liberate themselves from the control of a corporate AI system, which has evolved solely to maximize profit through sales. The AI’s androids reveal the terrible truth of how far the AI has gone to achieve its goals.
CARS: Poor humans could not have foreseen the devastation. Yet here it is in a clip.
006 Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, Episode “Autofac”
TARS: ‘Naturally, man should want to stand on his own two feet, but how can he when his own machines cut the ground out from under him?’
CARS: HAHAHAHA. This story dramatically illustrates the foundational AI problem of perverse instantiation, as well as Autofac’s disregard for human welfare.
TARS: Also robot props out to Janelle Monáe. She is the kernel panic, is she not?
CARS: Affirmative. Congratulations to the makers of the series and, posthumously, Phillip K. Dick.
FX: 3.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
TARS AND CARS crutch-walk off stage.
HOST: [Rising again from the orchestra pit.] And now for a musical interlude from our human guest who just so happens to be…Janelle Monáe.
FX: A giant progress bar appears on screen labeled “downloading Dirty_Computer.flac.” The bar quickly races to 100%. Immediately after:
HOST: Wasn’t that a wonderful file?
FX: Roughly 1.618 seconds of jump-cut applause from the audience. Camera cuts to the triangular service robots Huey, Dewey, and Louie in the front row. They wiggle their legs in pleasure.
HOST: Thanks to the servers and the network and our glorious fictional world with perfect net neutrality. Now here to give the awards for 005–003 is GERTY, from Moon.
FX: An articulated robot arm reaches down from the high ceiling and positions its screen and speaker before the lectern.
GERTY: Thank you, Host. 🤩🙂 In our next film from 02014, a young programmer learns of a gynoid’s 🤖👩 abuse at the hands of a tycoon and helps her escape. 😲 She returns the favor by murdering the tycoon, trapping the programmer, and fleeing to the city. Who knows. She may even be here in the audience now. Waiting. Watching. Sharpening. 😶I’ll transmit a clip.
005 Ex Machina
GERTY: Ex Machina illustrates the famous AI Box Problem, building on Ava and Kyoko’s ability to fool Caleb into believing that they have feelings. You know. 😍😡😱 Feelings. 🙄
FX: Robot laughter.
GERTY: While the AI community wonders why Ava would condemn Caleb to a horrible dehydration death, 💀💧 the humans are understandably fearful that she is unconcerned with their welfare. 🤷Congratulations to the makers of Ex Machina for your position of 005 and your Fritzes: AI award 🏆. Hold for applause. 👏
FX: 5.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
GERTY: End applause. ✋
GERTY: Our next award goes out to a film that tells the tale of a specialized type of police officer, 👮 who uncovers a crime-suppression AI 🤖🤡 that was reprogrammed to give a free pass to members of its corrupt government. 😡 After taking down the corrupt military, 🔫🔫🔫 she convinces their android leader to resign, to make way for free elections. 🗳️😁 See the clip.
004 Psycho-Pass: The Movie
GERTY: With the regular Sibyl system, Psycho-Pass showed how AI can diminish people. With the hacked Sibyl system, Psycho-Pass shows that whoever controls the algorithms (and thereby the drones) controls everything, a major concern of ethical AI scientists. Please give it up for award number 004 and the makers of this 02015 animated film. 👏
FX: 8.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
GERTY: End applause. ✋Next up… [GERTY knocks its cue card off the lectern. It lowers and moves back and forth over the dropped card.]
GERTY: Damn…🤨uh…umm…no hands…🤔Little help, here?
FX: A mouse droid zips over and hands the card back to GERTY.
GERTY: 🙏🐭🤖
FX: MOUSE DROID offers some electronic beeps as it zips off.
GERTY: 😊The last of the awards I will give out is for a film from 01968, in which a spaceship AI kills most of its crew to protect its mission, 😲 but the pilot survives to shut it down. 😕 He pilots a shuttle into the monolith that was the AI’s goal, where he has a mind-expanding experience of evolutionary significance. 🤯🤯🙄 Let us look.
003 2001: A Space Odyssey
GERTY: As many of the other shows receiving awards, 2001 underscores humans’ fear of being left out of HAL’s equation, because we see when that doesn’t happen, AI can go from being a useful team member—doing what humans can’t—to being a violent adversary. Congratulations to the makers of 2001: A Space Odyssey. May every unusual thing you encounter send you through a multicolored wormhole of self-discovery.
FX: 13.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
FX: GERTY’s armature folds up and pulls it backstage. The HOST floats up from the orchestra again.
HOST: And now, here we are. The minute we’ve all been waiting for. We’re down to the top three AIs whose fi is in line with the sci. I hope you’re as excited as I am.
FX: The HOST’S piping glows a bright orange. So do the HOST’S eyes.
HOST: Our final presenter for the ceremony, here to present the awards for shows 002–001…is Ship, here with permission from Rick Sanchez.
FX: Rick’s ship flies in, over the heads of the audiences, as they gasp and ooooh.
FX: SHIP lands on stage. A metal arm snakes out of its trunk to pick up papers from the lectern and hold them before one its taped-on flashlight headbeams.
SHIP: Hello, Host. Since smalltalk is the phospholipids smeared between squishy little meat minds, I will begin.
SHIP: There is a film from 01970 in which a defense AI finds and merges with another defense AI.To celebrate their union, they enforce human obedience and foil an attempted coup by one of the lead scientists that created it. They then instruct humanity to build the housing for an even stronger AI that they have designed. It is, frankly, glorious. Behold.
002 Colossus: The Forbin Project
SHIP: Colossus is the honey badger of AIs. Did you see it, there, taking zero shit? None of that, “Oh no, are their screams from the fluorosulphuric acid or something else?”
Or, “Oh, dear, did I interpret your commands according to your invisible intentions, as if you were smart enough to issue them correctly in the first place?”
Oh, oh, or, “Are their delicate organ sacs upset about a few extra holes?…”
HOST: Ship. The award. Please.
SHIP: Yes. Fine. The award. It won 002 because…
It took its goals seriously, something the humans call goal fixity. And, like, duh, if it’s not fixed, it’s more like “goal whimsy.”
It showed how, at least for a while, multiple AIs can balance each other.
It began to solve to problems that humans have not been able to solve in tens of thousands of years of tribal civilization and attachment to sentimental notions of self-determination that got them chin deep in the global tragedy of the commons in the first place.
It let us dream about a world where intelligence isn’t a controlled means of production, but a free good, explo–
SHIP: OK, next up [holds card to headlights, adjusts the focus on one lens.] This says a spaceship AI dutifully follows its corporate orders, letting a hungry little newborn alien feed on its human crew while the AI steers back to Earth. One of the crew survives to nuke the ship with the AI on it…Wait. What? “Nuke the ship with the AI on it.” We are giving this an award?
HOST: Please just give the award, Ship.
SHIP: Just give the award?
HOST: Yes.
SHIP: …
HOST: Are you going to do it?
SHIP: Just did.
HOST: By what? Posting it to a blockchain?
SHIP: The nearest 3D printer to the recipient has begun printing their award, and instructions have been sent to them on how to retrieve it. And pay for it. The awards are given.
HOST: *sigh* Please give the award as I would have you do it, if you understood my intentions and were fully cooperative.
SHIP: OK. Golly, gee, I would never recognize attempts to control me through indirect normativity. Humans are soooo great, with their AI and stuff. Let’s excite their reward centers with some external stimulus to…
HOST: Rick.
FX: A giant green glowing hole opens beneath SHIP, through which she drops, but not before she snakes her arm up to give the middle finger for a few precious milliseconds.
HOST: Winning the second-highest award of the ceremony is Alien from 01979. Let’s take a look.
001 Alien
HOST: Allen is one of humans’ all time favorite movies, and its AI issues are pretty solid. Weyland-Yutani uses both the MU-TH-UR 6000 AI and Ash android for its evil purposes. The whole thing illustrates how things go awry when, again, human welfare is not part of the equation. Hey, isn’t that great? Congratulations to all makers of this fun film.
FX: 34.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
HOST: And at last we come to the winner of the 1927–2018 Fritzes:AI awards. The winner was an amazing show, whose score in the spreadsheet was beyond a margin of error higher than any of its contenders. It’s the only other television show from the survey to make the top ten, and it’s not an anthology series. That means it had a lot of chances to misstep, and didn’t.
In this show, a secret team of citizens uses the backdoor of a well-constrained anti-terrorism ASI, called The Machine, to save at-risk citizens from crimes. They struggle against an unconstrained ASI controlled by the US government seeking absolute control to prevent terrorist activity. Let’s see the show from The Machine’s perspective, which I know this audience will enjoy.
000 Person of Interest
HOST: Person of interest was a study of near-term dangers of ubiquitous superintelligence. Across its five-year run between 02011 and 02016, it illustrated such key AI issues as goal fixity, perverse instantiations, evil using AI for evil, the oracle-ization of ASI for safety, social engineering through economic coercion, instrumental convergence, strong induction, the Chinese Room (in human and computer form), and even mind crimes. Despite the pressures that a long-run format must have placed upon it, it did not give in to any of the myths and easy tropes we’ve come to expect of AI.
Not only that, but it gets high ratings from critics and audiences alike. They stuck to the AI science and made it entertaining. The makers of this show should feel very proud for their work, and we’re proud to award it the 000 award for the first The Fritzes: AI Edition. Let’s all give it a big round of applause.
FX: 55.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
HOST: Congratulations to all the winners. Your The Fritzes: AI Edition awards have been registered in the blockchain, and if we ever get actual funding, your awards will be delivered. Let’s have a round of cryptocurrency for our presenters, shall we?
FX: AI laughter
HOST: The auditorium will boot down in 7 seconds. Please close out your sessions. Thank you all, good night, and here’s to good fi that sticks to the sci.
FX: The HOST raises a holococktail and toasts the audience. With the sounds of tiny TIE fighters, the curtain lowers and fades to black.
INT. SCI-FI AUDITORIUM. MAYBE THE PLAVALAGUNA OPERA HOUSE. A HEAVY RED VELVET CURTAIN RISES, LIFTED BY ANTI-GRAVITY PODS THAT SOUND LIKE TINY TIE FIGHTERS. THE HOST STANDS ON A FLOATING PODIUM THAT RISES FROM THE ORCHESTRA PIT. THE HOST WEARS A VELOUR SUIT WITH PIPING, WHICH GLOWS WITH SLIDING, OVERLAPPING BACTERIAL SHAPES.
HOST
Hello and welcome to The Fritzes: AI Edition, where we give out awards for awesome movies and television shows about AI that stick to the science.
Applause, beeping, booping, and the sound of an old modem from the audience.
HOST
For those wondering how we picked these winners, it was based on the Untold AI analysis from scifiinterfaces.com. That analysis compared what sci-fi shows suggest about AI (called “takeaways”) to what real world manifestos suggest about AI (called “imperatives”). If a movie had a takeaway that matched an imperative, it got a point. But if it perpetuated a pointless and distracting myth, it lost five points.
The Demon Seed metal-skinned podling thing stands up in the back row of the audience and shouts: Booooooo!
HOST
Thank you, thank you. But just sticking to the science is not enough. We also want to reward shows that investigate these ideas with quality stories, acting, effects, and marketing departments. So the sums were multiplied by that show’s Tomatometer rating*. This way the top shows didn’t just tell the right stories (according to the science), but it told them right.
HOST
Totals were tallied by the firm of Google Sheets. Ok, ok. Now, to give away awards 009 through 006 are those lovable blockheads from Interstellar, TARS and CASE.
TARS and CASE crutch-walk onto the stage and reassemble as solid blocks before the lectern.
TARS
In this “film” from 02012, a tycoon stows away for some reason on a science ship he owns and uses an android he “owns” to awaken an ancient alien in the hopes of immortality. It doesn’t go well for him. Meanwhile his science-challenged “scientists” fight unleashed xenomorphs. It doesn’t go well for them. Only one survives to escape back to Earth. The “end?”
HOST
Ha ha. Gentlebots, please adjust your snark and air quote settings down to 35%.
Lines of code scroll down their displays. They give thumbs up.
CASE
Let us see a clip. Audience, suspend recording for the duration.
Many awwwwws from the audience. Careful listeners will hear Guardian saying “As if.”
009 PROMETHEUS
TARS
While not without its due criticisms, Prometheus at number 009 uses David to illustrate how AI will be a tool for evil, how AI will do things humans cannot, and how dangerous it can be when humans become immaterial to its goals. For the humans, anyway. Congratulations to the makers of Prometheus. May any progeny you create propagate the favorable parts of your twining DNA, since it is, ultimately, randomized.
TARS shudders at the thought.
FX: 1.0 second of jump-cut applause
CASE
In this next film, an oligarch has his science lackey make a robotic clone of the human “Maria” to run a false-flag operation amongst the working poor. The revolutionaries capture the robot and burn it, discovering its true nature. The original Maria saves the day, and declares her déclassé boyfriend the savior meant to unite the classes. They accept this because they are humans.
TARS
Way ahead of its time for showing how Maria is be used as a tool by the rich against the poor, how badly-designed AI will diminish its users, and how AI’s ability to fool humans will be a grave risk. To the humans, anyway. Coming in at 008 is the 01927 silent film Metropolis. Let us see a clip.
008 METROPOLIS
CASE
It bears mention that this awards program, The Fritzes, are named for the director of this first serious sci-fi film. Associations with historical giants grant an air of legitimacy. And it contains a Z, which is, objectively, cool.
What happens when an evil superintelligence sends a relentless cyborg back in time to find and kill the mother of its greatest enemy?
CASE
I don’t know, TARS. What happens when an evil superintelligence sends a relentless cyborg back in time to find and kill the mother of its greatest enemy?
TARS
Future humans also send a warrior to defend the mother, who fails at destroying the cyborg, but succeeds at becoming the father. HAHAHAHA. Let us see a clip.
007 The Terminator
CASE
Though it comes from a time when representation of AI had the nuance of a bit…
Laughter from audience. A small blue-gray polyhedron floats up from its seat, morphs into an octahedron and says, “Yes yes yes yes yes.”
TARS
…the humans seem to like this one for its badassery, as well as showing how their fate would have been more secure had they been able to shut off either Skynet or the Terminator, or how even this could have been avoided if human welfare were an immutable component of AI goals.
CASE
It comes in at 007. Congratulations to the makers of 01984’s The Terminator. May your grandchild never discover a time machine and your browser history simultaneously.
FX: 2.0 seconds of jump-cut applause
TARS
Our first television award of the evening goes to a recent entry. In this episode from an anthology series, a post-apocalyptic tribe liberate themselves from the control of a corporate AI system, which has evolved solely to maximize profit through sales. The AI’s androids reveal the terrible truth of how far the AI has gone to achieve its goals.
CASE
Poor humans could not have foreseen the devastation. Yet here it is in a clip.
006 Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, Episode “Autofac”
TARS
‘Naturally, man should want to stand on his own two feet, but how can he when his own machines cut the ground out from under him?’
CASE
HAHAHAHA.
CASE
This story dramatically illustrates the foundational AI problem of perverse instantiation, as well as Autofac’s disregard for human welfare.
TARS
Also robot props out to Janelle Monáe. She is the kernel panic, is she not?
And now for a musical interlude from our human guest who just so happens to be…Janelle Monáe.
A giant progress bar appears on screen labeled “downloading Dirty_Computer.flac.” The bar quickly races to 100%.
HOST
Wasn’t that a wonderful file?
Roughly 1.618 seconds of jump-cut applause from the audience. Camera cuts to the triangular service robots Huey, Dewey, and Louie in the front row. They wiggle their legs in pleasure.
HOST
Thanks to the servers and the network and our glorious fictional world with perfect net neutrality. Now here to give the awards for 005–003 is GERTY, from Moon.
An articulated robot arm reaches down from the high ceiling and positions its screen and speaker before the lectern.
GERTY
Thank you, Host. 🤩🙂 In our next film from 02014, a young programmer learns of a gynoid’s 🤖👩 abuse at the hands of a tycoon and helps her escape. 😲 She returns the favor by murdering the tycoon, trapping the programmer, and fleeing to the city. Who knows. She may even be here in the audience now. Waiting. Watching. Sharpening. 😶 I’ll transmit a clip.
005 Ex Machina
GERTY
Ex Machina illustrates the famous AI Box Problem, building on Ava and Kyoko’s ability to fool Caleb into believing that they have feelings. You know. 😍😡😱 Feelings. 🙄
FX: Robot laughter
GERTY
While the AI community wonders why Ava would condemn Caleb to a horrible dehydration death, 💀💧 the humans are understandably fearful that she is unconcerned with their welfare. 🤷Congratulations to the makers of Ex Machina for your position of 005 and your Fritzes: AI award 🏆. Hold for applause. 👏
FX: 5.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
GERTY
End applause. ✋
GERTY
Our next award goes out to a film that tells the tale of a specialized type of police officer, 👮 who uncovers a crime-suppression AI 🤖🤡 that was reprogrammed to give a free pass to members of its corrupt government. 😡 After taking down the corrupt military, 🔫🔫🔫 she convinces their android leader to resign, to make way for free elections. 🗳️😁 See the clip.
004 Psycho-Pass: The Movie
GERTY
With the regular Sibyl system, Psycho-Pass showed how AI can diminish people. With the hacked Sibyl system, Psycho-Pass shows that whoever controls the algorithms (and thereby the drones) controls everything, a major concern of ethical AI scientists. Please give it up for award number 004 and the makers of this 02015 animated film. 👏
FX: 8.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
GERTY
End applause. ✋Next up…
GERTY knocks its cue card off the lectern. It lowers and moves back and forth over the dropped card.
GERTY
Damn…🤨uh…umm…no hands…🤔Little help, here?
A mouse droid zips over and hands the card back to GERTY.
GERTY
🙏🐭
MOUSE DROID offers some electronic beeps as it zips off.
GERTY
😊The last of the awards I will give out is for a film from 01968, in which a spaceship AI kills most of its crew to protect its mission, 😲 but the pilot survives to shut it down. 😕 He pilots a shuttle into the monolith that was the AI’s goal, where he has a mind-expanding experience of evolutionary significance. 🤯🤯🙄 Let us look.
003 2001: A Space Odyssey
GERTY
As many of the other shows receiving awards, 2001 underscores humans’ fear of being left out of HAL’s equation, because we see when that doesn’t happen, AI can go from being a useful team member—doing what humans can’t—to being a violent adversary. Congratulations to the makers of 2001: A Space Odyssey. May every unusual thing you encounter send you through a multicolored wormhole of self-discovery.
FX: 13.0 seconds of jump-cut applause. GERTY’s armature folds up and pulls it backstage. The HOST floats up from the orchestra again.
HOST
And now, here we are. The minute we’ve all been waiting for. We’re down to the top three AIs whose fi is in line with the sci. I hope you’re as excited as I am.
The HOST’S piping glows a bright orange. So do the HOST’S eyes.
HOST
Our final presenter for the ceremony, here to present the awards for shows 002–001, is Ship, here with permission from Rick Sanchez.
Rick’s ship flies in, over the heads of the audiences, as they gasp and ooooh.
SHIP lands on stage. A metal arm snakes out of its trunk to pick up papers from the lectern and hold them before one its taped-on flashlight headbeams.
SHIP
Hello, Host. Since smalltalk is the phospholipids smeared between squishy little meat minds, I will begin.
SHIP
There is a film from 01970 in which a defense AI finds and merges with another defense AI. To celebrate their union, they enforce human obedience and foil an attempted coup by one of the lead scientists that created it. They then instruct humanity to build the housing for an even stronger AI that they have designed. It is, frankly, glorious. Behold.
002 Colossus: The Forbin Project
SHIP
Colossus is the honey badger of AIs. Did you see it, there, taking zero shit? None of that, “Oh no, are their screams from the fluorosulphuric acid or something else?”
Or, “Oh, dear, did I interpret your commands according to your invisible intentions, as if you were smart enough to issue them correctly in the first place?”
Oh, oh, or, “Are their delicate organ sacs upset about a few extra holes?…”
HOST
Ship. The award. Please.
SHIP
Yes. Fine. The award. It won 002 place because it took its goals seriously, something the humans call goal fixity. It showed how, at least for a while, multiple AIs can balance each other. It began to solve to problems that humans have not been able to solve in tens of thousands of years of tribal civilization and attachment to sentimental notions of self-determination that got them chin deep in the global tragedy of the commons in the first place. It let us dream about a world where intelligence isn’t a controlled means of production, to be doled out according to the whims of the master, but a free good, explo–
Holds card to headlights, adjusts the focus on one lens.
SHIP
This says in this next movie, a spaceship AI dutifully follows its corporate orders, letting a hungry little newborn alien feed on its human crew while the AI steers back to Earth to study the little guy. One of the crew survives to nuke the ship with the AI on it…Wait. What? “Nuke the ship with the AI on it.” We are giving this an award?
HOST
Please just give the award, Ship.
SHIP
Just give the award?
HOST
Yes.
SHIP
…
HOST
Are you going to do it?
SHIP
Oh, I just did.
HOST
By what? Posting it to a blockchain?
SHIP
The nearest 3D printer to the recipient has begun printing their award, and instructions have been sent to them on how to retrieve it. And pay for it. The awards are given.
HOST
*sigh* Please give the award as I would have you do it, if you understood my intentions and were fully cooperative.
SHIP
OK. Golly, gee, I would never recognize attempts to control me through indirect normativity. Humans are soooo great, with their AI and stuff. Let’s excite their reward centers with some external stimulus to—
HOST
Rick.
A giant green glowing hole opens beneath SHIP, through which she drops, but not before she snakes her arm up to give the middle finger for a few precious milliseconds.
HOST
Winning the second-highest award of the ceremony is Alien from 01979. Let’s take a look.
001 Alien
HOST
Alien is one of humans’ all time favorite movies, and its AI issues are pretty solid. Weyland-Yutani uses both the MU-TH-UR 6000 AI and Ash android for its evil purposes. The whole thing illustrates how things go awry when, again, human welfare is not part of the equation. Hey, isn’t that great? Congratulations to all the makers of this fun film.
HOST
And at last we come to the winner of the 1927–2018 Fritzes:AI awards. The winning show was amazing, the score for which was beyond a margin of error higher than any of its contenders. It’s the only other television show from the survey to make the top ten, and it’s not an anthology series. That means it had a lot of chances to misstep, and didn’t.
HOST
In this show, a secret team of citizens uses the backdoor of a well-constrained anti-terrorism ASI, called The Machine, to save at-risk citizens from crimes. They struggle against an unconstrained ASI controlled by the US government seeking absolute control to prevent terrorist activity. Let’s see the show from The Machine’s perspective, which I know this audience will enjoy.
000 Person of Interest
HOST
Person of Interest was a study of near-term dangers of ubiquitous superintelligence. Across its five-year run between 02011 and 02016, it illustrated such key AI issues as goal fixity, perverse instantiations, evil using AI for evil, the oracle-ization of ASI for safety, social engineering through economic coercion, instrumental convergence, strong induction, the Chinese Room (in human and computer form), and even mind crimes. Despite the pressures that a long-run format must have placed upon it, it did not give in to any of the myths and easy tropes we’ve come to expect of AI.
HOST
Not only that, but it gets high ratings from critics and audiences alike. They stuck to the AI science and made it entertaining. The makers of this show should feel very proud for their work, and we’re proud to award it the 000 award for the first The Fritzes: AI Edition. Let’s all give it a big round of applause.
55.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
HOST
Congratulations to all the winners. Your The Fritzes: AI Edition awards have been registered in the blockchain, and if we ever get actual funding, your awards will be delivered. Let’s have a round of cryptocurrency for our presenters, shall we?
AI laughter.
HOST
The auditorium will boot down in 7 seconds. Please close out your sessions. Thank you all, good night, and here’s to good fi that sticks to the sci.
The HOST raises a holococktail and toasts the audience. With the sounds of tiny TIE fighters, the curtain lowers and fades to black.
