Brennan, E. 2016. 'Techno-Apocalypse: Technology, Religion, and Ideology in Bryan Singer’s H+'. in Firestone, A, M.F. Pharr & L.A. Clark (eds). 'The Last Midnight: Critical Essays on Apocalyptic Narratives in Millennial Media'. Jefferson: McFarland. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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Traditiones, 2022
This article investigates apocalyptic spirituality in the contemporary globalized context of re-emerging religiousness and New Age spirituality, in which millennial calendrical anxieties, a conspiracy mentality, and crisis consciousness are bolstered up by the visual flood of old and new electronic media. Two types of religious or spiritual digital environments are presented through their characteristic imagery: the rather traditional environment of Christian millennialism and the hyper-eclectic atmosphere of New Age networks.
Thinking through High-Tech Hell: A Theory of the New Media Dystopia
Ralahine Utopian Studies Book Series, 2024
Examining a cluster of British and Anglo-American series from the 2010s, this book theorizes them — and, indirectly, the epochal reality that they represent — as «new media dystopias.» With this term, the author conceptualizes an emergent sub-genre of audio-visual SF which is thematically concerned with the worst effects of developments in media technologies under digital capitalism and is, ironically, produced for and distributed through digital-capitalist platforms. Across the book’s chapters, the new media dystopia is approached as an epochal structure of feeling, as a narratively reflexive sub-genre, as an aesthetically ambivalent form, and as a locale for a new kind of quixotism. Combining these perspectives, the book’s interest lies in gauging the ways and the extent to which these dystopias contribute to the historical hopelessness that seems to define the terms of our relationship with new media technologies — as well as our position within and towards contemporary capitalism.
On the Apocalypse that No One Noticed
ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 2018
On the Apocalypse that No One Noticed "[W]hat if they gave an apocalypse and nobody noticed?" was the question that Brooks Landon (1991, 239) proposed as the central thematic concern of the 1980s cyberpunk-a movement which today represents a landmark in the development of the science fiction genre. Diverse as they are in their focus and scope, the contributions to this issue of ELOPE, dedicated to the position and role of speculative fiction, and especially science fiction, in a world which is increasingly becoming speculative and science fictional, invariably demonstrate that an apocalypse did indeed take place and went by largely unnoticed. From the present perspective, the cyberpunk movement is revealed as the inevitable response of science fiction (SF)-and fiction in general-to the cultural realities of the early 1980s, when the processes implicit in the development of the economy, society and culture after the Second World War culminated on the level of everyday experiential reality. These processes have been part and parcel of the globalizing tendencies of post-industrial capitalism, fuelled by the rapid growth of advertising and media industries, and facilitated by exponential development of information technologies which have provided ever more effective means for the storage, manipulation and distribution of information. The ubiquity of media that disseminate information on a global scale instigated the gradual modification of the value systems of individuals, and the formation of mass identity and mass culture.
The Digital Pandemic: Imagination in Times of Isolation
2022
In dialogue with authors such as Agamben, Žižek, Latour, Byung-Chul Han and Donatella Di Cesare, The Digital Pandemic, translated from Portuguese, argues that the pandemic has not only accelerated but also illuminated the consequences of the digital revolution. Cachopo’s main thesis is that the pandemic is not in itself the event. The event, precipitated by the sudden isolation and the intensified use of digital technologies, is a “disruption of the senses”, a radical transformation, that predates and will survive the outbreak, of how we imagine proximity and distance. Tracing the controversies around mechanical reproduction and digital remediation, from Walter Benjamin to Jay David Bolter and Robert Grusin, the book examines what is ultimately a transformation of the human condition, paying special attention to the experiences of love, travel, study, community and art. Written between 2020 and 2021, this bold theoretical work does not prophesy the fall of capitalism or the end of personal freedom and relationships. Instead, it carefully investigates how advanced technology has become inextricable from our lives, using an alternative approach that avoids technophobia, while remaining alert to the risks and threats of the digital age. Finally, it raises the question as to what it means to foster global solidarity and consciousness beyond physical borders in the 21st century.
Eschatechnology: Computer Science, Religion, and Y2k
Seven years ago, information specialists around the world were working around the clock to forego the possibility of a collapse of the technical infrastructure of computing as a result of the "millennium bug." Large amounts of money and human resources were redistributed to identify and remediate the problem in computer systems across the globe. Yet, prior to the Y2k date rollover, no computer scientist could assuredly argue that their efforts were not in vain. Additionally, the major odometer click of the year 2000 inspired themes of Christian millennialism which fused with the discussion of the possibility of collapse, bringing to the foreground not only technical questions regarding computer software, but questions focused on the social, political, philosophical, and even spiritual dimensions of the risks of our contemporary reliance on computers in modern society. While scholars debated the viability of revolutionary metaphors related to the emergence of internet technologies, survivalists embraced apocalyptic scenarios related to these same revolutions. This paper represents the dialogue of computer scientists, scholars, survivalists, and religious devotees who shared a common, yet diverse perspective on the risks of computerization at the turn of the twenty-first century and it focuses on the issues of reliance, captivity and survival related to the ever increasing dominance of computer infrastructure in modern culture. * * *
The Rise of the Outbreak Genre 28 Days Later and the Digital Epidemic
ESC (English Studies in Canada) 44(3), 2018
The three short pieces assembled here emerged from the ESC Roundtable at Congress in 2019. My hope, here realized, was that the roundtable would spark some thinking about how we narrate crisis, catastrophe, and cataclysm, and how our discipline, broadly speaking, might respond to these modes of narration. Given the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, our need to think about what we, as scholars and citizens, can do to critique and to intervene in the mounting crises that afflict the planet and our politics has grown even more urgent. As the essays by Julia Wright, Leif Schenstead-Harris, and David Janzen show, interventions in catastrophe and crisis are governed both by the vicissitudes of language, by how it defines, defies, denies, and excludes, and by the institutional and discursive lures that seek to ensnare us in the plague ship of the status quo.
2018
This thesis interrogates the relationship between technocracy and the destruction of the world in two contemporary works of speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake and Cat’s Cradle. The creation of technologies within a closed society and the asymmetries of power that develop from the distribution of technology lead to observable shifts in biological, social, and environmental realms. The development of this technocracy in the twentieth century is reflected in the maturation and expansion of science fiction, as writers within the genre attempt to criticize material and cultural elements of technocracy through their work. Vonnegut and Atwood display how a technocratic society leaves crippled environments and disabled, genetically altered, and abused bodies of human and non-human animals in its wake. The last chapter will discuss the negative effects of technocracy in the social realm, specifically turning to linguistic regressions, the dissolution of familial bonds, and the denial of sub...
2013
James Cameron's films, Hollywood blockbusters though they are, may also be read in terms of a Canadian sensibility that is prone to problematizing mankind's relation to technology and communications media, as epitomized by Marshall McLuhan (see Babe 2000; Kroker 1984). The Terminator films are thus based on the idea of the nascent Internet as a nervous system becoming self-aware as the subject of technology and disposing of its human parasites. These dystopian visions have their utopian counterpart in The Abyss, the first major motion picture to use CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) for " morphing " effects. With the benefit of hindsight, the story and imagery into which the appearance of this new technology was woven in this film beg to be interpreted as metaphors for the shift in consciousness attending the transition from the rigidity of analog technology to the fluidity of digital technology, a watershed that happens to hinge on the year of the film's release: 1989, during the meltdown of Cold War blocks on the eve of the emergence of the Internet's borderless global cyberspace. McLuhan saw the creative artist as an “early warning system,” grasping and imaginatively portraying such shifts in the collective sensorium even ahead of their full unfolding in technology and culture. If we take seriously McLuhan’s assumptions, Cameron’s The Abyss can thus appear in retrospect as a mythic allegory of mutations then still around the corner. It uses Christian motifs to give narrative expression to the world-historical transformations of 1989 as kairos, as theological discourse refers to a moment of utopian opportunity for the revelation of the Kingdom of God within history —or beyond it as Apocalypse. For the end of the Cold War did, for a moment, hold the promise of a humanity freed from ideological and national divisions, to enjoy the peace dividends of unhindered free trade within a global village unified by new technologies. In the film, the political clash between the Capitalist and Communist blocks is made obsolete along with the warships lifted out of water by the emergence of the aliens’ undersea city under them, after a demonstration of force that dwarfs the build-up to World War III, stopping it in its tracks. A culture clash between military nation-state values and global free enterprise values is hinted at when the boss of the Explorer oil rig comments to his U.S. Navy counterpart: “Looks like you boys might be out of business.” The free spirit and creativity of private contractors is counterpoised to the stifling authoritarianism of the military in many confrontations between the civilian crew and designer of the oil rig’s experimental sea-floor component Deep Core and the team of Marines sent to deal with the mysterious sinking of a U.S. submarine nearby. This initial incident encapsulates the clash of technological regimes that will reach its utopian resolution in the apocalyptic ending.
The Commodification of Utopia and Apocalypse
‘Utopia’ and ‘Apocalypse’ have become secular and commodified themes in contemporary entertainment; packaged and wrapped, ready to consume. This essay will explore the ways in which utopia and apocalypse have become commodified, and argue that postmodern shifts and the modes of commodification partially deter utopia and apocalypse’s original functioning in their dynamic of terror and hope, which used to work as a catalyst for progress (Kumar, 1995). First, both terms will be defined, alongside a description of what is understood as the term commodification. It will be explained how apocalypse and utopia have been absorbed and appropriated by the popular media, art and culture and in the social everyday life, and how this poses a philosophical dilemma as it hinders contemporary individual’s imagination for a better future. Nevertheless, the continuing importance of both themes reveals their persisting significance to social and political life, and if consumers and audiences were to become conscious of this, and more active, they might discover that these commodities could be the tools that can inspire a better tomorrow.