Hey aestheticaste, I am Sublim3, one of the contributors to our digital aesthetics blog. This week, I’d like to talk about an aesthetic I call Technofuturism. I went to a museum IRL this week, and it wasn’t half as boring as I expected. It’s an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery at UWO called “Memories of the Future,” whose oxymoronic name lends itself well to the seemingly disjunct themes it encompasses. Laura Moore, the artist behind the art, did a study of the relation between culture, nature, and tech that I found very intuitive. Some pieces highlighted the natural and biological nomenclature of much of our tech, like “thumbdrives,” or usb “sticks.” Other, more speculative pieces, were meant to get us to reflect on the ecological impact of our tech, whose waste will far outlast us mere mortals. My favorite was called “The Future from Above” and it gave me the idea to write about the technofuturist aesthetic. It shows typical medieval hillfort villages with stone buildings that have the topography of microchips. The same way an archeologist might find artefacts of a hillfort today, people in the future will be digging up technological waste in hundreds of years. Unlike its nominal inspiration from the natural world, there is nothing BIOdegradable about tech. This brings me to the Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger lol): we are often led to believe that technology will fix all of the world’s problems, and that any problems it itself might cause are just bugs. I am more cynical. When you look at various technologies, they are definitely useful in doing things more easily than before, but those who benefit from the efficiency gains brought about by it are made up almost entirely by the 1%. A company like Tesla is a perfect example. Elon Nazi has amassed a net worth of over 300 billion by hijacking a company that makes eco-friendlier cars for people in the west, while the children mining the lithium in places like the Congo don’t gain anything from this advancement. Human rights violations aside, we should be asking ourselves just how much more cars can help us reduce our carbon and ecological footprints. Just like with tesla, the internet, while useful to many billions of people, sees success concentrated in a small number of people, with barriers to entry set up along racial, gender, class, and geographic lines. In his article, “a feature not a bug,” Marie Hicks debunks the neoliberal myth of meritocracy in silicon valley, the birthplace of the internet, whose greatest innovators have often been more endowed with privilege than genius. While Marie Hicks aptly criticizes the intentional exclusion of minorities in big silicon valley corporations, I feel like the downsides of technology more generally are features rather than bugs or glitches. In a capitalist economy, innovation is seen as a mere means to profit instead of solving problems faced by our society. Technofuturism exemplifies this phenomenon: While you sometimes see aspirational concept art of a high-tech, green cities, where technology ends up saving us from the problems it creates, its most common use on the internet is in ironic memes: