The Fantasy Foucault

Doktor Sleepless broadcasting on 98.3 Heaven’s Pirates

Warren Ellis’s Doktor Sleepless pushes the biopunk genre to new limits by combining its cyberpunk vision of a futuristic world that integrates technology with biology with anarchist philosophy. Situated in Heavenside, where much of Reinhardt’s is still at play and has created the “grinder” culture, which are “people [who] practise homebrewed extreme body modification” (Ellis).

The series protagonist, John Reinhardt, has turned into the maniacal Doktor Sleepless, his grinder name, after leaving Heavenside upon realizing the lie at the heart of humanistic thought. Reinhardt is a biohacker-turned-bioterrorist, or, Doktor Sleepless, and is a tech genius who has no friends or loved ones. He is particularly interested in biotechnology and biocybernetics that have allowed the transhuman grinder culture to form in Heavenside. Additionally, he is well-trained in computer programming, security and hacking, as we see when he shows Nurse Igor his control over the Apocalypse Bunker. Basically, he is the foil to Tony Stark’s techno-humanistic ideals. He is responsible for many technologies in the future city of Heavenside, such as Clatter, a wireless IM Lens instant messaging system built on soft contact lens that people put in their eyes and allows for cross platform services. Reinhardt is also the creator of Shriekyware, a technology that has manifested the “Shrieky Girl” subculture. Shriekyware is a set of networked receivers and transmitters like two fake fingernails, fake teeth or tongue-rings combined with an IM lens, like Clatter. This technology forms a motion-capture unit and haptic interface that allows the transmission of touch between users, which unifies all its users on the net with the same sensation and feeling, essentially creating a co-human existence. Another of Reinhardt’s technologies that is connected to Clatter are the I.D. Tags, electronic capsules that people ingest that identifies the person and enables one to vote, receive medical care, and make payments on bills. Earlier this semester we read an article by Maureen Meadows and Matthijs Kouw called “Future Making: Inclusive Design and Smart Cities” that hearkens to Doktor Sleepless’s futuristic Heavenside but on an individualistic level. In this article they discuss the possibilities that smart technologies hold in “enabl[ing] the efficient governance of urban public spaces, energy flows, and mobility patterns” (Kouw, Meadows). These smart technologies are various information and communication technologies (ICTs) like sensors, big data-processors, wearable technologies, and even autonomous cars that “will lead to more innovative and sustainable cities and dramatically improve urban life” (Kouw, Meadows). Meadows and Kouw argue for the consideration of different approaches in which all of society can team together in order to create a single vision for future cities. This is where Doktor Sleepless’s Heavenside deviates, as most of the technologies developed by Reinhardt are for the sole purpose of enhancing the individual, not society as a whole. In fact, Doktor Sleepless has become disgusted with how far grinder technology has evolved into creating such a deviant and solipsistic culture.

One of the comic’s prevalent themes is Doktor Sleepless’s Boemerian fatalist philosophy based on Henrik Boemer’s book The Darkening Sky (1966). Doktor Sleepless’s fatalist philosophy and plan to turn Heavenside on itself by awakening grinder culture from its own false consciousness is because he believes that Heavenside is “not the future we were promised... if we can't have that, then we shouldn't have anything at all” (Ellis). Using 98.3 Heaven’s Pirates frequency, Doktor Sleepless preaches his Boemerian philosophy to incite social anxiety and agitation at the complacency and privileged lifestyle that has enveloped Heavenside. In his first broadcast, Doktor Sleepless calls out the Heavenside residents for their obliviousness to the future they’re in, and their complacency:

“Everywhere I go I hear the same thing: ‘Where’s my fucking jet pack? Where’s my flying car?’ . . . You live in the future and you don’t know it. Half of you know where your friends are by looking inside your eyeball, for God’s sake . . . You can rebuild your own fucking bodies at home with stuff you bought from the hardware store . . . The future sneaks up on us. It leaks through the small, ordinary things. You want your jetpack, but you don’t even think about your IM lenses and your phones, were you born with them? No. You’re science fictional creatures. Each and every one of you” (Ellis)

This idea of an absent in the present—the absence of a jetpack and flying car in Heavenside’s futuristic present—reminds me of Tim Richardson’s reiteration of Warren Ellis’s “’science fiction condition,’ [which is] how ‘we can measure the contemporary day by the things that have become absent’” in his essay “The Authenticity of What’s Next.” For Richardson, we could measure change “by the removal or absence or invisibility of things . . . things [that] never even have to exist to register as absent.” The idea of opening a space of vacancy leads him to speculate that “maybe the best way to sell an authentic future is to remove something we don’t notice now, so that an authentic-seeming future wouldn’t be drawn as us with the addition of jet packs, but as us with the subtraction” of everyday tools, methods of transportation or anything else we tend to look as in the rear-view mirror (Richardson). Certainly, the Heavenside residents’s dissatisfaction with their present reality indicates a “futurity that is already upon us as the technology we take for granted, that we’re even bored with, that has fundamentally changed the way we work and live” (Richardson). For Doktor Sleepless, however, it is not so much about presenting an authentic future as much as challenging those of us sleeping on authenticity, or what we think it means to be “real.” For Doktor Sleepless, “Authenticity is bullshit. Never more so than today. We can be anyone we can imagine being. We can be someone new every day . . . ‘You should be happy with who you are.’ ‘Be yourself.’ . . . We’re not real enough. We’re not authentic to our society. Free speech does not extend to our bodies” (Ellis). Doktor Sleepless’s brash words are truly authentic, which is perhaps why it takes a comic book character whose existence is absent in our present reality to utter for them to (hopefully) register into our own individual practice. If, as Richardson speculates that “hacking seems about reuse and—more importantly—repurposing,” then Doktor Sleepless is the ultimate hack insofar as he is hacking, or repurposing, the grinders consciousness, challenging them to abandon their transhuman obsession and gain autonomy from the system of biotechnology. Doktor Sleepless pleads the grinders to “Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own ideas about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention.” In the same way, Ellis is pleading with us today to hack our own “minds and bodies” and become our “own invention[s].” Society has always told us who we should be. Michel Foucault and Judith Butler say that the moment we are born we are tossed into power relations and discourses that inscribe us with social norms and regulations in order to be heterosexual, be “manly,” be XYZ, be docile bodies. We are taught to hate others based on the color of their skin or who they love because of deep-seated ideological power structures. Heteronormative gender roles have embedded every facet of society and regulate the free-market capitalist economy that feeds off our own complacency and dissatisfaction with our present future. Cosmetic surgery and body modification offer us opportunities to modify our bodies to our liking according to what society demands of us. Social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, to name a few, offer us the possibility of creating a copy of our original selves in order to present it to the rest of the world, creating a simulacra where we all play an inauthentic role. Richardson describes an outbreak as “a localized occurrence or symptom of something already in the system more widely. To force an outbreak is to exploit a potential that’s already there.” I believe that in this era of Trumpian right-wing white supremacy, the potential for an outbreak is perhaps as visible as ever but the collective consciousness still fails to hack itself. Yet the collective relies on the individual. I guess then the question is, “What does hacking look like for you?” Perhaps it is our unconscious slumber, our deep sleep to the future’s authenticity, that prevents us from finding any semblance of an answer. Maybe that’s why Doktor Sleepless never sleeps.

Source: http://enculturation.net/authenticity

Swedish metal group Meshuggah, the fathers of the djent sub-genre of metal. Found in the sound cultures portion of The Acoustic City (2014) edited by Matthew Grundy and B.J. Nilsen, John Scanlan’s “Of Longitude, Latitude, and Zenith: Los Angeles, Van Halen, and the Aesthetics of ‘Backyardism’” traces the creation of Van Halen’s sonic image through the unconventional use of a backyard studio for a recording space. Along with this unique musical laboratory, Eddie Van Halen also hand-chose his guitar parts to create his famous “Frankenstein” guitar. Deploying his own musico-surgical procedures, Eddie Van Halen was able to birth “brown sound,” which Scanlan states that the use of “[t]he colour brown here stood for the tonal qualities he was driven to discover; it was variously ‘warm,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘fat,’ or ‘thick,’ ‘wood’-like, as well as ‘buttery’ and ‘meaty,’” a phrase that became synonymous with Los Angeles music culture. Van Halen studied instruments like saxophones and clarinets in order to learn how to build his own guitars, testing several woods for density that determined how mellow or heavy sound would travel. Just as importantly as the wood types are pickups, the wired-coils that create the amplification of the strings, which he soaked in surfboard wax in order to prevent the coils from excessively vibrating and causing unnecessary feedback. The Sunset Sound studio in Los Angeles was the chamber where these elements came together to form “brown sound.” As I recount Van Halen’s history, I realize how important this process of identity formation is for each artist, individual or collective, and how original that formation needs to be. The Swedish tech-metal group Meshuggah is a cogent example of pioneering a revolutionary split in the metal genre, today known as “djent” metal. At its core, djent it’s a style of progressive metal with heavily-distorted guitar chugs featuring high-gain and low-pitched palm-mutes. The word “djent” is an onomatopoeia of these various methods and sounds. Meshuggah rose to international metal fame with their 1995 Destroy Erase Improve, a concept album that lyrically explores evolution as the combination of organic matter with machinery, but it wasn’t until the mid-2000s with the I EP and onward that Meshuggah became famous for their seven-stringed guitars, and then eventually expanding into eight-string guitars to produce their polyrhythmic and original, highly-technical style of metal. Polyrhythms are when two or more rhythms play at the same time but don’t necessarily form from the same meter, producing a multi-layered rhythm that makes it sound as if each instrument is playing a different song, and this element is what places Meshuggah as the pinnacle of the djent genre. In order to create their sound, Meshuggah lead guitarist Fredrik Thordendal shared in an interview with Guitar World that they have to have their pick-ups dipped in wax to stop them from feeding back, exactly how Eddie Van Halen did to his when creating “brown sound.” On seven-stringed guitars their tuning from high to low is Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb. Fredrik Thordendal is technically the founder of djent the sound, but not the word, and it is important to note the difference. The sound that became signified with the signifier “djent” existed long before the term, which Meshuggah have themselves stated they did not create. “Djent” came into use through an online community of metal musicians, most notably by the guitarist of Periphery, Misha Mansoor. The success of Periphery’s self-titled 2010 album, according to Jamie Thomson in his 2011 article “Djent, the metal geek’s microgenre,” is what “dragged djent from the virtual world into the real one” but also with the repeated use of the term “djent” that spread through the online metal community, essentially an instance of the Bakhtinian transmission of speech model. Even now nearly a decade after its mainstream use in the metal community, djent as a legitimate genre is up in the air. On the one hand, elitist metalheads will claim it’s not really a genre because it doesn’t fit traditional metal. This type of defensive stance on metal as a genre portends a type of metallic melancholy, as if metal was a fixed category that was somehow lost and needs to be found again. I would argue that the fact we’re still talking about it means it’s already established itself as something and its a music genre now coming from all over the world. Following the legacy of Meshuggah, bands like Architects, Monuments, Hacktivist, and TesseracT are the major names tied to the djent label out of the UK. Animals as Leaders, Volumes, Periphery, After the Burial, Currents, Silent Planet, and Invent, Animate are several hailing from the U.S. Northlane and In Hearts Wake represent Australia proudly. And the number continues to grow. In the same way “brown sound” was attached to Van Halen, today we see “djent” tied directly to Meshuggah. Perhaps Mansoor intended to use “djent” the word as an opportunity to gain fame for himself and Periphery, but whatever djent the sound is its given a large group of bands a space to coalesce and produce continuing progressive forms of metal that all lead back to the genealogy of Meshuggah, and that’s something to raise the horns to. 

Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert (right) tested positive for the coronavirus. Gobert's test result forced the NBA to suspend the season. Donovan Mitchell, left, also tested positive for coronavirus.

In “Going Wrong,” Keller Easterling takes a glass half-empty approach to life and the economic structures that construct our daily living. He anticipates that things will always wrong, stating the people always look at these unfortunate events as “deficits rather than assets—something to be hidden, discarded, or redeemed with a solution” (Easterling). I truly wonder how he feels about our current global pandemic of COVID 19 considering he wrote this essay in 2019. But his point remains true: in the midst of a corona lockdown, we love to resist the reality of these “wrongs” and focus our energy on making these unfortunate events as our enemies “that must be defeated with a total dramatic apocalypse” (Easterling). One of his statements that caught my attention is his contention that, however unfortunate, these "problems have potent dispositions, affordances, or combinate potentials. They carry with them needs and experiences. They are information rich." When Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for coronavirus on March 11th, the sports world was stunned. Sports fans globally were shocked that such a high-profile athlete could have contracted COVID19. As the story began to spread feverously (no pun intended), the NBA’s hand was forced to suspend its season just weeks before the NBA playoffs were to have begun. That one athlete and event set off a wave of terror and allowed for serious actions to be enacted that should have happened when the CDC warned us all on February 26th that "[i]t’s not a question of if coronavirus will spread, but when. ... Now is the time for U.S. businesses, hospitals, and communities to begin preparing for the possible spread of #COVID19." And despite the horrific amount of ridicule and hate Tweets Gobert has encountered after he mocked coronavirus in a post-game conference by touching the speaker mics and then rubbing his hands all over his face, he has used his “wrong” for good. Rudy Gobert is donating more than $500,000 to support both the employee relief fund at Vivint Smart Home Arena and COVID-related social services relief in Utah, Oklahoma City and within the French health care system. He has pledged to donate $200,000 in relief efforts to part-time employees at the Utah Jazz’s arena who are not able to work due to the postponement of NBA games and other entertainment events. But the most important “potential possibility” coming from Gobert’s wrong is a rhetorically dumbfounding question: would the nation have started shutdowns had Gobert not been diagnosed? His ill-guided jokes about corona and touching the microphones were in poor taste, but how would it be now if he had not done those patronizing acts? Could there be even more confirmed cases? Easterling’s contention that “wrongs” present opportunities for better alternatives or speculations. In my case, the coronavirus problem has left me without a job or income, also affecting millions of others who rely on service industry consumer spending to make our wages. My essential hobby of exercise has also been taken from me since my gym is closed down. Being quarantined, although the wisest decision for my biological health, is beginning to take a toll on my resistance against sadness. But after reading Easterling’s essay I am encouraged to speculate on the particularly odd disposition of my social, academic and fitness life. I have more time to practice self-care, a buzz word in academia that seems void of substance since we barely have a moment to catch our breathe without receiving an e-mail in that moment. I have found more time with my dog. I get to see my family more. I can sleep in and give my body rest. And I have found new alternatives to exercise that wouldn’t have come to mind before. Oh, and I am protesting capitalism by refusing to engage in consumer spending. Perhaps this is the apocalypse that Alenka Zupančič alluded to in her essay “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing.” The coronavirus as a master signifier and “its destructive potential [perhaps has] made appear, for the first time, the idea of a whole (of the world)” (17). Zupančič would argue that if through coronavirus “‘the idea of totality arises visibly and for the first time on our horizon’ (as the idea that we could ‘lose it all’),” than rather than try to prevent this apocalypse we need to build a totality of “unity, community, freedom” in order to survive this pandemic (22). As unrealistic as the idea of a totality of human unity, sympathy, empathy and hope appears, perhaps we are finally starting to see a glimpse of a human totality banding together in unity. Stay safe, everyone.

Dave Dameshek’s counterfactual series the N‘if’L. In this video he stepped into an alternate reality where Eli Manning stayed with the Chargers instead of requesting a trade to New York. 

In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby argue for other alternatives to design that aren’t simply problem solving. They believe that other possibilities for design are to “speculating how things could be—speculative design . . . [that] thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives . . . to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely . . . [which] can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality” (2). They present several categories and methods of speculative design throughout the book, but one that caught my attention the most was Ch. 5’s “A Methodological Playground: Fictional Worlds and Thought Experiments.” Raby and Dunne describe speculative design in literature, cinema, and art. For instance, “fictional world building” like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake designs a speculative postapocalyptic world roaming with transgenic animals and a society that is desensitized to unethical capitalist practices, a fictional world that is “far more interested in the social, cultural, and ethical implications of science and technology than the technology itself” (78). Thought experiments, which “allow us to step outside reality for a moment to try something out . . . [t]hey make full use of the imagination and are often beautiful designs in themselves,” are closer to conceptual design than conventional design and allows us to step out of the factual and into the speculative and imaginative realm of possibilities (80). Two forms of thought experiments I am intrigued by are counterfactuals and what-ifs, both of which alter reality by enabling us to imagine an alternative past or future that change our present realities. A counterfactual is “[a] historical fact [that] is changed to see what might have happened, if . . .” key influences and events had turned out differently and how these alternate endings could have affected the world” (82). This made me think of Dave Dameshek, a radio personality, football analyst and writer for NFL.com, and his series called the “N‘if’L,” which is an animated series where he creates an alternate NFL landscape if notable events had gone differently than in reality. Being a Los Angeles Chargers fan, my favorite video is the one where Dameshek speculates a different NFL environment if Eli Manning had not forced a trade to the New York Giants and had stayed with the back-then San Diego Chargers in the 2004 NFL Draft. In this scenario Eli Manning would have stayed with the Chargers with the first overall pick, the Giants would have drafted Ben Roethlisberger at #4 and Philip Rivers would have fallen to the Steelers at #11. Best of all (for me), the Chargers would have won two Super Bowl rings under Eli Manning in ’06 and ’07 and altered NFL history as we know it. If only… What-ifs are similar to counterfactuals but are more future-oriented, speculating what the future could look like if certains situations unfold. They are “a simple way of excusing oneself from reality in order to entertain an . . . idea” (86). This time of year is what-if season in the NFL as the NFL draft approaches. Various NFL experts publish their “mock drafts,” an imaginative draft that attempts to predict what players NFL teams will be drafted based on the best available players, teams more urgent positional needs, the organization’s current infrastructural situation etc. These mock drafts serve as a way to create dialogue in the football community, especially in fantasy football discourse where anxious dynasty fantasy players are awaiting to see where this year’s promising class of rookies will land, thereby providing a situational context for which fantasy owners can assemble a draft strategy for their fantasy football team’s future (dynasty is a format that allows owners to keep their fantasy team each year rather than redraft format where a fantasy player drafts a new fantasy team each year, thereby delimiting the temporal limitations of fantasy football). These mock drafts change repeatedly throughout the draft season, too, like after the NFL combine and after trades or free agent signings have occurred, and analysts often give them different “version” names (X’s 2020 Mock 1.3, for instance). Mock drafts can be created by anyone, too, not just experts, which is the fun part about them. Anyone is welcome to participate in this speculative design of the NFL landscape with their own opinions.

A view of the neighborhoods surrounding Lambeau Field.

Rogério De Paula in “City spaces and spaces for design” argues that “[a] city is not just a static backdrop against which our everyday lives as city dwellers unfold. Rather it plays a critical role in shaping how its inhabitants experience their everyday lives.” Therefore, we should “consider the city . . . not just in terms of its infrastructures . . . but also in terms of its socioeconomic and aesthetic arrangement. De Paula categorizes three areas to consider when viewing the city from this perspective: Spaces of opportunity: how the environment creates intricate interactions among its elements and dwellers. Spaces of hope: how people find hope through the opportunities they are given in their environment. Spaces of vulnerability: atmospheres created through “often invisible socioeconomic-political boundaries of the city.”

All three of these categories came to my mind when I considered the urban area surrounding the Packers’ Lambeau Field. The majority of stadiums are built in downtown areas, near highways, but Lambeau Field is the only NFL stadium that is built around several neighborhoods.

De Paula mentions that in his fieldwork of São Paulo almost all the homes had a garage despite the fact that most people living there did not own cars. These garages created spaces of opportunities for these people as they used their garages as spaces for business growth, turning these garages into small businesses like bars, restaurants, mechanic shops, internet cafes, etc.

Likewise, these neighborhood Packers fans have used their homes as a space for socioeconomic growth by using their land as parking spaces for gameday. I couldn’t locate any specific rates that these owners charge for their land, but if the parking at Cowboys stadium is typically $60-80 dollars, these owners have a solid bargaining price for parking that is literally right across the street from the stadium. Not to mention the property value these homes have must be exponentially higher than other urban areas in Wisconsin. This close-knit community surrounding Lambeau Field also becomes a space of hope by engendering a strong fan community that interacts with one another as members of a collective whole supporting one of the greatest NFL franchises. It even gives visiting team fans an opportunity to experience Packer culture, which has been widely considered as one of the friendliest fanbases. However, some of these neighborhoods have also become a space of vulnerability as the Packers have purchased some of these neighborhoods to make way for additional parking, much of which is occupied for the stadium employees, media and other exclusive uses. This does not seem to be much of a growing concern though. I hope to go to Lambeau Field one day and experience this for myself.

A home located right in front of Lambeau Field.

Here’s a link to a Twitter post showing a live video of parking at a home behind the stadium:

Kings owner Vivek Ranadive is reportedly growing frustrated and impatient.  In “Future-Making, Inclusive Design and Smart Cities,” Maureen Meadows and Matthijs Kouw propose a three-step process for the successful integration of smart technologies into the urban sphere to create “smart” cities. While this article is solely focused on the building of future “smart” cities, it dawned on me how much this process can be applied to any organization, public, private, educational, etc. Their proposed process is as follows:

Visioning: An established plan chosen by an individual or groups of individuals. In order for visioning to work, the preferred path must be understood and embraced throughout these individuals and organizations. Who the stakeholders are, identification of a desired future vision (which is contingent on an analysis of the organization’s current situation), and the development of action plans are required, but these steps are not exhaustive by any means. Multiple Perspectives: This goes back to visioning, requiring identification of who should be involved in the process of developing this technology, namely stakeholders, persons or groups that affect, or are affected by the organization. Those who actively support the collective preferred path and those who want to sabotage it must be identified so as to not cause dissonance within the organization. Collective Composition: The various scenarios that can be anticipated. Visioning planning scenarios involve on the organization’s internal relations and which issues the organization has control of. Visioning scenarios are developed first by the identified stakeholders, but doesn’t have to be one way forward, rather they should be the stimulus to create information over these debates, the pros and cons. Strategic planning scenarios, in contrast, create discussions about what possible external environments are largely outside the domain of the organization’s control.

As an avid sports fan of the NFL and NBA, I specifically thought of all the failed and currently failing sports franchises whose lack of winning championships, or even just making the playoffs, is as a result of the dissonance of these three steps. Since the ultimate goal of sports franchises is to win championships, which starts by assembling the team’s infrastructure in the administration, coaching and player roster, the lack of winning inevitably leads to unrest, in all parties involved, but especially in the brass. Just yesterday a story came out by Bleacher Report about the inner frustrations currently happening in the NBA’s Sacramento Kings franchise. According to The Athletic’s Shams Charania, Sam Amick and Jason Jones, Kings owner Vivek Ranadive has voiced his grievances to general manager Vlade Divac, head coach Luke Walton, assistant general manager Peja Stojakovic and Chief Operating Officer Matina Kolokotronis during the 2020 season in a group text. To add to the fire, there are also rumors that the Kings star guard Buddy Hield could request a trade this offseason if he does not reclaim his starting spot in the lineup this season. The King’s stakeholders have been calling for a “sharp assessment” of head coach Luke Walton’s coaching which is major part of Ranadive’s complaints in the group text. This probably due to the fact that the Kings have heavily struggled in close games, losing an NBA-high eight games by three points or less this season.   It seems to me that the Kings’ poor vision planning is the cause of this dischord within their franchise. The brass has the power to control their team’s performance; they’ve assembled a young roster full of talent which has been underperforming. They also have the power to choose who is coaching their team. Right now Walton has led the Kings to a 21-33 record, a .389% winning rate. Ouch. In my opinion, the coaching is the problem. I think Luke Walton is beginning to lose the locker room’s faith. Walton coached the Los Angeles Lakers for three seasons before the Kings hired him this season, and his time in L.A. is widely considered a failure, as he went 98-148 and never got the Lakers to the playoffs. While there does not seem to be any signs that Ranadive is going to make any major changes in the team, but one thing is for sure: if the Kings don’t make the playoffs this year, heads will probably roll.

Source: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2875943-report-kings-owner-vivek-ranadives-frustration-with-execs-coaching-mounting

Milton Waddams in a comedic scene of Office Space

In 1999, 20th Century Fox released the film Office Space as a parody to the soul-sucking jobs of corporate America that have caused wide rates of burnouts among cubicle-trapped subjects. The plot features Peter Gibbons is a jaded computer-programmer and his two colleagues Samir Nagheenanajar and Milton Waddams. The three are constantly micro-managed and under the hands of the company, Initech’s, loathsome Bill Lumbergh, a representation of the labor power relations that have turned the three employees into what Michel Foucault calls “docile bodies” and what Martin Heidegger coined as “available equipment.” When two corporate consultants are invited to begin the downsizing of Initech, they actually are impressed by Peter’s intellectual insights and promote him, despite Lumbergh’s vocal resistance. However, Samir and Milton are fired. Angered by the “master’s tools” to dispose of bodies as they please, Peter, Michael, and Samir are fueled by revenge and hack Initech's accounting infrastructure with a computer virus that converts fractions of pennies into a bank account. This virus rapidly begins to coalesce into a substantially large sum of money of which the three disenfranchised employees are basically stealing from Initech.

Office Space is a cogent example of Steven Shaviro’s concept of Accelerationism, which states that “in political, aesthetical and philosophical ters . . .the only way out of capitalism is to the way through” (2). Shaviro believes that “[i]n order to overcome globalized neoliberal capitalism, we need to drain it to the dregs, push it to its most extreme point, follow it into its furthest and strangest consequences” (emphasis mine, 2). Therefore, “[t]he hope driving accelerationism is that . . . we will be able to exhaust it and thereby open access to something beyond it” (emphasis mine, 3). This something is much like the proletariat revolution Marx had always hoped for, where the poor are taking back from the rich. In Office Space these three docile bodies are accelerationists. Borrowing Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, they have actually used the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house, quite literally as we see at the end of the film when Milton burns down Initech’s offices in order to destroy evidence of Peter’s money-stealing virus. In fact, we can consider these three men as Creative Destructionist Marxist that Lee Konstantinou speaks of in his Pop Apocalypse, a radical group of Marxist-Leninist thought that believes “there’s money to be made off the destruction of the world” (1). In Hegel’s words, capitalism negates the being of workers by expropriating their labor, but “ironically creates the very conditions for, an even necessitates, its own supersession” (5). As Shaviro states, “[w]e cannot wait for capitalism to transform on its own” and Peter, Samir and Milton display this thought throughout the entire film by revolting against Initech, perfectly captured when the three men steal a dysfunctional printer out to a field and beat it to pieces with brute anger. Although this is one minor instance of going beyond capitalism, it does show some type of agency a la Fight Club. 

Docile bodies standing up against the real conditions of their existence

Firefighters work the scene of a helicopter crash where former NBA star Kobe Bryant died, Sunday, Jan. 26, 2020, in Calabasas, Calif.

Crowds gather around the Staples Center in Los Angeles to mourn the death of Kobe Bryant, Jan. 26. On Sunday I was in the frenzy of a lunch rush at work. Rarely do I have the chance to use the facilities at work, but when I do I always check my phone for text messages or Twitter updates. This time, I wish I hadn’t.  My eyes were in disbelief as I read, “Kobe Bryant has died in a helicopter crash, officials confirm” from a Twitter update. I rushed into the stall and tears began to pour as I was in complete shock. It couldn’t be. I didn’t want to believe it. Growing up in Los Angeles, Kobe Bryant was my childhood hero, idol, and one of my greatest influences. He had taught me determination and resilience in life, what has come to be known as the “Mamba Mentality.” In that moment, disconnected from the temporal dimension of reality, this tragedy began to set in my consciousness that Kobe had died in a horrible accident. He had been on his way to a basketball game where he was going to coach his 13 year-old daughter Gianna Bryant and her teammates. Later it came out that Gigi was among those that had died in the crash, along with seven other people, which made this accident even more tragic.

Just two days prior to this terrible event I was reading Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis; or, the Temporality of Networks” but I never could have foreseen how pertinent this essay would be to me in the wake of this tragedy. In this essay Chun explains how new media has changed society with its influx of information at unprecedented speeds, specifically through the Internet and television. Chun contends that crisis marks the critical difference of new media and that because of this “new media has found its value” in crisis. Television, when relaying information, has been mostly critically analyzed “In terms of liveness: a continuous flowing connection” (144). Referenced in Chun’s essay, Jane Fleuer believes that “television is promoted as essentially live, as offering a direct connection to an unfolding reality ‘out there’” (144). This “liveness” essentially breaks down the temporal nature of “old” news into moments that make the viewer a part of the ongoing phenomenon or crisis. According to Mary Ann Doane in her essay “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,”Chun explains that “this feeling of direct connection is greatly enhanced in moments of catastrophe: during them we stop simply watching the steady flow of information on television set and sit, transfixed before it” (144). For Chun, catastrophes are “immediate ‘subjectless’ events about death and the failure of technology’ and therefore “underscores television’s greatest technological power: ‘its ability to be there--both on the scene and in your living room . . . The death associated with catastrophe ensures that television is felt as an immediate collision with the real . . .” (144). Furthermore, quoted in Chun, Doane states that “Catastrophe . . . produces the illusion that the spectator is in direct connection with the anchorperson, who interrupts regular programming to demonstrate that it can indeed be done” in moments of crisis or catastrophe. It was not until later that day when I got home that I, too, sat in my living room, transfixed by this catastrophe--the passing of one of my idols--and the “unfolding” reality of this accident that was “out there” but also inside me. I wove in and out of different channels, attempting to gather as much information as possible about the accident. The images of the crash site, the scenes of firefighters putting out the flames made me feel like I was at the crash site attempting to piece together the last moments of Kobe’s life. The live coverage of the thousands of Lakers fans gathering outside the Staples Center paying honor to Kobe connected me to the mourning of all those people, all who were influenced by Kobe as well. Kobe’s death has felt like my own helicopter crash, one that flew me through the greatest heights of all the memories of being a Lakers fan down to the cold, stark reality of Life and the fact that in one moment it can end.  It has been several days now since the accident and it was not until this event and reading Chun’s essay that I truly realized the importance that the television has played in my life. Even in moments that haven’t been centered around catastrophe, the television has been responsible for constructing my reality, or at least what I perceive it to be. The television itself is what enabled me to be such a huge fan of Kobe Bryant as I watched his greatest performances live, transported from my living room or wherever I was watching into the presence of these memorable moments of history.

“[C]rises promise to move us from the banal to the crucial by offering the experience of something like responsibility, something like the consequences and joys of ‘being in touch.’”              --Wendy Hui Kyong Chun