Utopia was, and is now more than ever, a provocative title for a festival dedicated to future visions and visions of the future, to sci-fi and horror films, based out of Tel-Aviv. It was intended as a space for out-of-this-world and out-of-your-mind stories, creative visions, and a place for radical imagination. A celebration of the ludicrous and absurd, the wonderful and surreal, the awful and awesome. This is what we wanted to do and to be, artistically, culturally, politically. As much as Utopia is an elusive concept and science fiction can serve escapist fantasies, they can also be maps of meaning, societal mirrors.

The October 7th massacre shook us to our core, as do the ongoing horrors in Gaza. The monstrous situation we find ourselves protesting against, crying out loud against, weeping quietly against, seems too big, too powerful. Exhausted, we go to sleep, wake up, and the nightmare is still ongoing.

We asked ourselves whether to continue, and if so, how? When human suffering is treated as a cheap commodity, when words like “seaside luxury resort” are used as cover for unspeakable atrocities, a science-fiction and horror film festival seems crass, contemptible, could even be construed as a cruel joke. Should we perhaps suspend or retire the title “Utopia”? The question was painful and difficult, but the answer came quickly – it was lack of imagination that led to where we are, and it is required now more than ever.

To quote our beloved science fiction guiding light, Ursula K. Le Guin, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.” She spoke of the art of words. We humbly extend her words to the art of story, speculation, and dreams of “what if?”.

Holocaust survivor and author Yechiel De-Nur (who wrote under the alias Ka-Tzetnik), referred to Auschwitz as “The Other Planet” in his writings and his testimony at the Eichmann trials. His soul could not process the horrors he witnessed as of this Earth. Later in life he drastically changed his position. There is no “Other Planet”. Part of the hope for a better tomorrow is the horrendous acknowledgement that there are no monsters and no aliens, no evil demons and no superheroes to save us. The monstrosity is us. As is resistance and hope. We are all within the “Zone of Interest”, switching roles between perpetrator, victim, collaborator, oblivious bystanders.

We want to better ourselves, our communities and societies, we aspire for better tomorrows, it follows thus that the exploration of fear, terror, of the most horrible, grotesque and obscene parts of human nature is an imperative and, be-it-absurd, a deeply humanistic endeavor.

We must do more than delve into the pits of darkness and despair and confront our shadows. We need new hopes. As of 2023 our activities include an ongoing “investigative committee on the failure of imagination”; Our society was in some form of suspended animation, having not imagined the worst, and not imagined better futures, or any future. As the un-imaginable is continuously happening, we need a plethora of futures – always in flux and in the plural – an over-abundance of imagination, surreal and absurd, intimate and universal, more and more, more than ever. More ideas. More Horizons. New Frontiers. Radical Utopias.

“Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.” ― Eduardo Galeano

We understand creators who do not want to present their art within our grim environment. We live within this environment, we experience it daily, we can and do our very best to improve it. We hope you choose to allow us the honor to share your creativity, imagination, vision, with our audience. We truly need it.

“There are no answers, only choices”, writes another science fiction luminary, Stanislav Lem, in Solaris. And so, we made a choice, to hope. Following Rebecca Solnit, another author we admire, hope is not a noun, but a verb — it is not something you get or something you lose, hope is something you do. And so, we call on, summon, implore for, and work on hope, and like anything done properly, it requires practice, and how better to practice than with the works and perspective of “Ursa Major”, “the Big Bear of science fiction”, Ursula K. Le Guin.

In 2018, at the age of 88, “The Big Bear” left us. Le Guin, one of the most well-known American authors of the 20th century, was probably the kind of person to laugh at our sadness over her departure. As a key figure in the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s and 70’s, Le Guin touched the souls of millions of readers around the world and influenced the writing of countless others.

How did she do it? It’s hard not to see it as a modern cliché, in our current state, but the absurd is true: Le Guin emphasized the importance of love, empathy, and uncompromising engagement with reality. Le Guin did so while fundamentally challenging the meaning of the term ‘science fiction’ (often shifting it to ‘speculative fiction’) and insisted on writing not about future technology and space exploration, but also, and above all, about people, about human beings. About the pain, sadness, and beauty the future holds. Her goal, which she herself stated openly several times, was to make us think differently about what truly matters in the future, our fate as small and broken people, but at the same time, strong and significant. First and foremost, Le Guin asked us to confront the power embedded in language, in our assumptions about the nature of the world around us, how it works, and how it might work in the future.

When considering the full scope of her work, her immense talent resists precise definition or categorization. Influenced as she was by Eastern thought and philosophy, she expressed this very idea in both her writing and her thinking: that the good cannot be quantified and any attempt to do so is bound to fail.

Instead of trying to understand the world by categorizing and labelling what appears before us, we must look at it and reflect on the task at hand, the responsibility for life that rests upon us. In that sense, one cannot simply point to a specific element in Le Guin’s writing as the source of its brilliance. It is the elusive whole, her singular style, her ability to grasp and express so many worlds in such varied shades, all bound together by one idea: the return home and our shared need to walk that path together.

While creating entire worlds and characters to inhabit them, Le Guin shaped a uniquely singular literary voice. In a field that at times seems capable of seeing only the vast, the impossible, and the immeasurably distant, Le Guin has the remarkable ability to contain the intimate within the infinite, the personal human journey upon the strange map of the future she vividly imagined.

Ursula K. Le Guin (2014), from her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation medal in the United States:

I rejoice in accepting it [the medal] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long – my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Source: Ursula K. Le Guin website

Alongside speculations about the future and thought experiments like “What if Nazi Germany had won World War II?” or “What if humans had no sex or gender?”, science fiction often functions as a distorted mirror, stranger than any mirror we know, that manages to reflect the human condition in ways that realist fiction simply cannot. The tool, of course, is defamiliarization.

The cover image of the series Scavengers Reign.

In the third episode of the masterful animated science fiction series Scavengers Reign, the stranded astronaut Ursula finds herself confronted with a sight she cannot turn away from. Ursula is one of the few survivors of the Demeter spaceship crash on planet Vesta Minor. She finds herself in a strange forest, standing and staring in awe at one of the plants (or animals, hard to tell on this planet) that vibrates and emits light. Out of curiosity, with an almost childlike bravery, she extends her hand forward and touches a branch or limb of the plant/creature that is in front of her. A flower of many petals unfolds, revealing dozens of thin, blue stamens that open, exposing what appear to be glowing, hidden seeds.

The stamens lift the seeds and release them into the air where they float. The last seed is unlike the others; it is a creature resembling a thin insect or frog with large eyes and loose skin. One of the stamens hands it a glowing seed, which it pierces open, releasing an even smaller red orb with five limbs. The orb fits perfectly into a recessed imprint of the same shape located at the heart of the open flower. When the orb and the imprint merge, countless tiny lanterns ignite around the plant, calling the glowing seeds to enter. The frog-like creature, exhausted from the act, wilts into the heart of the flower, dying with slow, measured breaths that the whole world seems to breathe along with. Upon its death, the blue stamens cover it with pollen. The flower closes. The process is complete.

This scene seems so strange, weird and alien-like, just like many other scenes on this planet. The reason for this alien strangeness is that the biological processes on Vesta Minor, which should be simple, are incredibly complex and convoluted. After all, it’s just fertilization, or something similar. The creators of the series designed the planet so that every organic process looks like a Rube Goldberg machine, where countless parts influence one another, each in its turn, in an exaggeratedly complex way, just to accomplish a simple task.

This act seems excessive and overly complicated to us, the viewers, only because the processes on Earth are already familiar to us. An alien visiting Earth would probably find it just as strangely complex. For example: if a primitive cell in the ocean swallows another cell, they form a symbiotic relationship as one cell provides protection and the other supplies energy. The consumed cell absorbs a photon that splits molecules, triggering a chemical reaction within the cell that produces nutrients like sugar, allowing what were once predator and prey, now symbionts, to grow, develop, and slowly become things like seaweed and plants. Another example: people want to spend the few decades they have on this planet in peace and for that they need to make money in jobs that are influenced by numbers on certain computers, numbers that are affected by how much rain fell on a distant continent, or by the number of ships that passed through a particular strait, which may be open or blocked because other humans are killing each other over various made-up stories they tell each other.

But the alienness of Vesta Minor is so profoundly alien for another reason. The creatures on it, whether plants, animals, both or neither, have no interest whatsoever in humans: the intruders, the survivors, the refugees, the parasites. They are almost entirely indifferent to them. Each creature simply goes about its function within the vast ecological web of which it is a part, consciously or not. Humans are not recognized as a threat, not even worth noticing. They are a tiny anomaly, infinitesimal. When humans are harmed by the planet’s creatures, it is, for the most part, by accident.

The only ones who show any real interest in humans are parasitic creatures. Despite being a small and negligible anomaly, the presence and activity of the humans who crashed on the planet still affect and disrupt certain biological processes. The parasites make use of humans, becoming stronger than they would be under balanced conditions. The ecological, planetary order of things is thrown off course.

The one creature who reminds the viewers of this natural order is neither human nor alien, but a robot. “Levi,” one of the survivors of the crashed spaceship, begins to develop a symbiotic relationship with the planet’s organic environment. Greenish-yellow organic tissues (seaweed? fungi?) gradually grow, shift, and interface with his electronic components, slowly granting him a consciousness and connection to his surroundings.

Levi begins his narrative arc as Azi’s robot, one of the survivors, within a familiar, classic human–tool, human–machine, human–robot relationship. Throughout the series the relationship evolves. They part ways and reunite. Azi finds Levi wandering somewhere, tending what appears to be a farm, caring for animals and practicing sustainable agriculture. She asks him, “What have you been doing all this time?” His answer resonates with me, grows more relevant by the day: “Adapting.”

It’s all a matter of perspective. This idea lies in the heart, mind and soul of Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 cinematic adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short science fiction story, Story of Your Life.

Stories of Your Life and Others, a short story anthology by Ted Chiang, 2002.

Villeneuve’s work on Arrival foretold, and maybe even justified what was to come; his next bold and ambitious project – adapting the cult classic Dune into a cinematic epic, split into multiple parts and undertaken without the production company’s prior approval (a project that defeated Alejandro Jodorowsky and ended in disaster for David Lynch). When comparing the two adaptations, Arrival and Dune, the former may be far more modest in budget, yet all the more clever in form. The success of Arrival doesn’t lie in the brilliant way Villeneuve masters a simple drama to deliver a profound message, nor in its stunning effects or excellent performances (and they are excellent, and so is he); not even from its sophisticated narrative structure, its delicate thematic depth, or its striking visual grammar. In my opinion, the film’s success is rooted in a simple and applicable tool – perspective. Point of view. Perspective is the starting point and the conclusion of Arrival: one of the most complex, moving, and intelligent science fiction works of the 21st century, so far.

Arrival, a film by Denis Villeneuve, 2016, adaptation of the science fiction short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang.

On the surface the plot is familiar: the events surrounding the first encounter between humans and aliens. The setting is roughly contemporary. Aliens land on earth in 12 spaceships at 12 different geographical locations (including the U.S., of course, and Africa, Europe and China) with no obvious connection. The misunderstanding causes great anxiety. What do they want? Are their intentions hostile? Are they an advance colonization force? A trick that will end humanity? Maybe the cynicism reflects more on humanity than on the visitors? Maybe we’ve watched too much of the wrong science fiction?

The plot begins with deep, personal sadness. Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a renowned linguist who suffers the death of her only daughter, losing her to a terminal disease. A tragedy. Like everyone else on Earth, she too is surprised by the appearance of the aliens (is it an invasion?), but she finds herself at the heart of the matter when she is recruited by the US military to join a team investigating the aliens’ arrival, specifically the spaceship that landed in North America, on American soil. Each ship contains two aliens (seven-limbed beings known as ‘Heptapods’). Louise will try to communicate with ‘Abbott and Costello,’ the names humorously given to them by Ian (Jeremy Renner), a physicist on her research team.

.Louise with Abbott and Costello

Where ‘Abbott and Costello’ and their friends came from remains a mystery, but it is likely they originate from an atmosphere different from ours, which is why they separate themselves from humans and the terrestrial environment. Inside their mysterious spaceship there’s a chamber with a solid, yet transparent, glass-like screen at its center, allowing humans and the Heptapods to share the space separately but simultaneously. The two strange looking aliens attempt to convey their language and the reason for their arrival through movement and writing, throughout all twelve points of contact. No one understands the message. It is difficult to communicate without knowing the language, which is why Louise is recruited: a woman who has devoted her life to the study of language, linguistics, and communication.

In the background, the geopolitical climate is unstable. The world wrestles with how to respond to the unexpected and uninvited visitors; global powers seek ways to leverage the situation and, of course, prepare for war. But contrary to what one might expect from a film of this kind, Villeneuve’s treatment of the global crisis is narrow, and deliberately so. Even when the global condition is shown, it is presented indirectly through news clips or brief mentions on background TV screens.

The global, universal, and thought-provoking implications, common within the genre, are still there, yet remain in the background, while Louise’s personal story unfolds and expands, center-stage. This happens both narratively and aesthetically through television screens as mentioned and through mise-en-scène that consistently keeps the foreground in sharp focus while blurring the background. This poetic principle also ties into the film’s iconography creative parallels between visual and auditory imagery. It is also evident in the editing, which, with near-religious discipline, trims away excess and centers us firmly within Louise’s point of view, guiding us through her private story.

Almost everything is told and seen through Louise’s eyes and her experience. Her private perspective drives the plot forward and raises mysterious questions, mostly about other moments in her life, scattered throughout the film. It is no surprise that her linguistic skill and personal experience combined are the key to unlocking the mystery of the alien language.

Dr. Louise Banks attempts to communicate with aliens.

Louise’s perspective not only gives the story structure and dramatic depth, it also contains a sharp reflexivity regarding the relationship between the film’s viewers and its protagonist, a dialogue between the creation and consumption of art, culture, cinema, and storytelling. An example of this is found in Louise’s character as a mother, in her personal and intimate experiences, from which emerge themes of grief, sorrow, acceptance, forgiveness, unity, transience, existential questions, fate versus choice, and much more. Another example is in the meeting space itself, where the communication between guest and host, alien and human, takes place through a large transparent screen in a dark room, somewhat (or rather, very much) like a movie theater.

The Encounter as a cinema hall.

Similar to the aliens’ strange language that mimics circularity reminiscent of the ‘Ouroboros’ (a snake or dragon biting its own tail), the film’s language pursues itself and seeks to bite its own tail. Its aim is to close circles in a manner both melancholic and sophisticated. This effect is heightened when we understand Louise’s personal, emotional, and intimate connection to the aliens through her profession, education, specialization, and research – linguistics, but gradually, and especially around the scenes depicting her personal tragedy.

It’s not clear at first. Like us, the viewers, Louise must patiently and gradually extract meaning. The creator’s intention, whether in the original work or the film adaptation, is similar to the alien language. They are trying to tell us something beyond the world in which the encounter takes place. This ‘something’ is important. It’s not self-evident. It’s hard to understand. It takes time to grasp. But in the end, we get it. When? When there’s a shift in perspective.

The well-known and widely accepted understanding is that when learning a new language, thought itself can change. This does not happen in an abstract way, it occurs organically, deep within the mysterious neurobiological territory of the brain. In other words, language shapes perception. Language shapes perspective. Language shapes reality. In Villeneuve’s work, patience is required; one must shift one’s perspective. When that happens, so does the theme. What is seen from here cannot be seen from there – both in space and in time.

It’s challenging to write about a complex film such as Arrival without spoiling or giving too much away about the fascinating twists that unfold through it. Why? Because translating too much of the alien language would also mean translating the film’s unique language, thereby preventing the reader from experiencing the full range of emotions the film evokes. It’s a two-way street; too much revelation of the film’s language would expose the payoff.

The aliens’ language resembles in its form the circularity of the ‘Ouroboros’, the snake eating its own tail.

Arrival is circular, starting from the opening sequence. At the beginning of the film the protagonist walks down a circular corridor with no beginning or end. The corridor is in a hospital, the place where Louise’s daughter died. It is worth noting the change from the short story to the film: in the original work, Anna, Louise’s daughter, died in an accident. In Villeneuve’s film adaptation, she dies from a slow, incurable disease. This change amplifies, through the cinematic medium, the importance of choice, fate, and the confrontation with life and death.

The choice to change the cause of death requires confrontation with life’s suffering, with the one inevitable truth that ultimately awaits us all, that the only thing we can truly control is how we choose to face such a life, a life in which, in the end, choice itself is diminished in significance, perhaps even rendered… irrelevant? In spiritual terms it is simply acceptance. Maybe even surrender. To accept something terrible and devastating, knowing it will happen, but not giving up. Choosing to live with it, alongside it, within it, and beyond it. And under no circumstance, giving up. In the existentialist sense, drawing on the philosophy of Albert Camus, Louise evolves into something of a science fiction Sisyphus.

Like the mythological Sisyphus, despite the horrific, painful, and inevitable experience, she moves forward. She does as Camus suggests, she resists and pushes the stone uphill even if it’s absurd, even if it’s meaningless.

Arrival is not merely a meeting between humans and aliens. It is a meeting between humans and the unknown, the unfamiliar, the alien, of course, but also between one person and another, and perhaps most profoundly, between a person and themselves, the universe, their creator, whoever that may be, and death, whatever that may mean. A confrontation with one’s choices, even when the outcomes are undesired.

If you have yet to see Arrival and my impressions seem cryptic, vague, or obscure, somewhat like an alien language, watching the film will surely bring clarity. If you have already seen it, it will be clear why I choose to end these words exactly as they began: it’s all a matter of perspective.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

The last one hundred years have been a bloody battlefield of utopias. Is it still possible to imagine a utopian future, and if so, how? Exactly 50 years ago, Ursula Le Guin wrote a short story that marks the beginning of the answer to this question.

According to the famous quote attributed to philosopher and literary scholar Frederic Jameson, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. In his book Capitalist Realism, cultural critic Mark Fisher adopts this quote and uses it to analyse the process by which capitalism became an all-consuming system lacking in opposition and preventing us from imagining an alternative. In fact, it is a system that has virtually eradicated the future.

This encapsulates a cultural process that has been occurring with varying intensity for around a century, and which largely explains the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century: the extinction of utopia.

To understand this process, let us begin with an exercise in guided imagination. Imagine a beautiful ocean bay, surrounded by eighteen snow-clad peaks. On the shore, between the sea and the mountains, lies the town of Omelas. Its inhabitants are happy and free from violence and oppression. They have no stock market or advertisements, secret police, priests, army or powerful weapons. They may have sophisticated technology, but they do not accumulate more than they need. They know no guilt. Sexuality in all its forms is free, unencumbered and celebrated, as are drugs, that are available to all who want them, equally. Not everything about the city is known, and everyone is free to imagine it as they wish. Indeed, Omelas seems to be a complete utopia, except for one small detail: in the bottom cellar of one of the houses in Omelas there is a locked room with neither a door, nor window. A girl sleeps in this room. She is not allowed to leave. Food is brought to her every once in a while, through an aperture that opens and shuts for that purpose alone. She never hears a single kind word. This is how she spends her days. All the residents of Omelas know about her existence. In fact, every child who reaches a certain age is given the same explanation: if we were to take the girl out of the room, clean, feed and take care of her, all the happiness and wealth of Omelas would disappear in a heartbeat. The townfolk’s happiness depends on the girl’s misery. From time to time, residents become curious and come to see her. They are often filled with rage, or feel a desire to help her, but they know there’s nothing they can do. Every now and again, a youthful visitor who goes to see the girl, witness the truth of her agony, does not return home afterwards. They withdraw into themselves, turn silent, move away from the city and walk into the darkness, beyond the mountains, to a place beyond imagination.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

What is this place? and who are these people? Is Omelas a utopia or a dystopia? When Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was first published in October 1973, some 50 years ago, the way these questions were presented came as a surprise. Thanks to Le Guin’s extraordinary story-telling talent, writing fiction, which resembles the writing of myths (she was called a “Mythological Fantasist” by literary critic Harold Bloom), and which asks the reader to actively participate in the creation of the world, this story has become one of the most frequently printed in speculative fiction anthologies.

A visual illustration of Omlas by artist and author Andrew DeGraff, from his book Plotted: A Literary Atlas

Today, however, many readers will tell themselves that the parable is clear: in order to sustain our capitalist society of abundance, others must suffer – be they children mining cobalt, social media content moderators, or animals in slaughterhouses. There is nothing we can do. Some may also consider the question of whether utilitarianism is the appropriate moral method (whereby an action is measured by its results with the aim of bringing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people; i.e., the girl’s suffering is justified) or whether it is duty (whereby every action has its own value, detached from the value of its results, i.e., the girl’s suffering is unjustified). But if we think that Omelas is too innocent and superficial a parable for the second decade of the 21st century, we are mistaken. The re-reading of it will provide explanation of the disappearance of utopia from our lives and the reason for our inability to imagine another future – if indeed that is the case (1).

Omelas is a story at the boundary, on the boundary, which fits American literary scholar Robert C. Elliot’s definition of utopia, “The application of man’s reason and his will to the myth [of the Golden Age]. Utopia (in the sense we are concerned with here) is man’s effort to work out imaginatively what happens – or might happen – when the primal longing embodied in the myth confront the principal of reality.” Just as Le Guin encourages her readers to create Omelas according to their own imagination, so does Elliot as he defines utopia: “In this effort man no longer merely dreams of a divine state in some remote time; he assumes the role of creator himself” (The Shape of Utopia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Image from the television series “The Handmaid’s Tale”, based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel

Utopias are nice as long as they remain in the realm of fiction. When Thomas More wrote the original Utopia in 1516, the “perfect place” he imagined—a place without private property or war—echoed the pun in its Greek name, which means “no place” or “nowhere.” The 20th century dawned, bringing with it a plethora of groups and individuals who sought to bring to life and actualize utopias that had been confined to literary imagination in previous centuries. Man began to embody the role of creator, revealing how easily utopia could turn into dystopia. Accordingly, from the middle of the 20th century onwards, dystopias became the most popular setting in speculative literature. Try to think of a dystopian work from the last one hundred years. You will not have any trouble remembering 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, or the movie Brazil. Now try to remember a utopian piece — what have you got?

The dystopian shock of the twentieth century was, of course, reflected in the writings of many thinkers, including members of the Frankfurt School. For example, Theodor Adorno expressed a fear of any way of thinking that tried to grasp the totality of human experience. Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, claimed that technological progress has brought humanity to a state where we can achieve a true utopia. The answer to the question of why such a utopia is not realised can be found in the ways in which any possibility of radical change is suppressed by capitalist society.

However, utopias did not fade solely because of political failure. There are also internal literary reasons, though they might be one and the same. In the 1970s, Vita Fortunati, head of the Center for the Study of Utopia at the University of Bologna, shed light on the dominance of men in the genre. Alongside the economic, political and religious innovation these men brought to people’s awareness in their books, they continued to treat women conservatively.(2) Indeed, in the 1970s, a dystopian thinking took over the genre. However, another subgenre flourished, that of critical utopia, in which women writers such as Sally Gearhart, James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), Joanna Ross and Ursula K. Le Guin, took a significant part. These writers preferred a utopia in a constant process of audit, review and inspection, over utopias of stasis, of perfect and eternal bliss.

In her 1982 poetic and philosophical essay, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be (The Yale Review) (3), Le Guin laid out the main points of her utopian theory. According to her, since Plato’s time, utopia is stuck in a strong, active, aggressive, linear, expanding and hot masculine motorcycle journey, parabolic to Yang, the masculine nature of reality in Daoism. Le Guin claimed that utopias should go in the direction of Yin, the feminine nature of reality — “What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.” Her main criticism of male utopias stems from their view that progress is a value on its own, and it tramples everything along the way. Stasis, according to her, is not a dirty word. Utopias and dystopias make us choose between happiness and freedom, a choice she refuses to make. “Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise — the ageold dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another.”

In a 1975 essay on Le Guin’s androgynous classic The Left Hand of Darkness, Frederick Jameson argued that utopia should not be viewed as an attempt to depict an ideal society, but rather as a reflection on our inability to imagine such a society (4). Like Adorno, he was opposed to “closed” utopias that resolve all social contradictions. He argued that the new wave of science fiction should be read in light of our society’s inability to sustain a utopia, rather than as a literal recipe. Utopias that have become a reality are doomed to fail. One can only imagine what Herzl would have thought of the corrupt realization of Altneuland. In 2005, after witnessing both the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the takeover of neoliberalism, Jameson suggested that utopia in its traditional form is no longer possible — a utopian novel can no longer be taken seriously, but the utopian impulse, the utopian imagination, is not dead. Dystopia, therefore, is our way of making utopia (5). Similar sentiments were written in 2018 by award-winning science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, against the backdrop of the climate crisis (6).

Therefore, Omelas is an allegory not only about the human condition and society, but also about the possibility of writing utopias. Who, then, are The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas? What are we to think of the people who walk away from the city after seeing that wretched girl and go to a place Le Guin herself couldn’t describe? N.K. Jemisin, one of today’s most successful fantasy writers, criticizes their choice to leave. The Ones Who Stay and Fight (2018), the story she wrote as a response to Omelas, describes a similar town, only that in it, the residents do not walk away, but stay and fight against the ideology, according to which human sufferings necessary (7). But maybe the ones who walk away in Le Guin’s story are not doing it because they cannot bear the evil done in their name. Maybe they do not walk away to establish a more just society. In an article published about a year ago in “Mythlore” magazine, Sabina Sherinmakers claims that the ones who walk away are people who have come to a reconciliation between good and evil, between happiness and suffering — they are the masters of the Tao (8). Le Guin is known for centering her work around the Tao, the Daoist concept of a unity of opposites that underlies the universe. The description of those who walk away matches the description of the elusive concept of the Tao in the book Tao Te Ching: they go into the darkness, through gates, into an indescribable place, gathering in silence. In fact, they go beyond good and evil.

N.K. Jemisin, one of the most successful fantasy writers of our time, wrote “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” in 2018 in response to Le Guin

Like Frederick Jameson, Ursula Le Guin is also unable to describe the world beyond an all-embracing system. To be fair, we must mention the solar-punk genre that has been established in recent years as a utopian alternative to the late and malignant capitalism, and which offers visions of a society that has learned to harness renewable energies for a more complete existence between man, nature and machine. But an alternative is not to walk beyond the matter. As Mark Fisher taught us, one can assume that the capitalist system, certainly Hollywood, will digest and purge solar-punk as well. In fact, it is already happening: Dear Alice is a solar-punk animated commercial for an American yogurt brand that had swept the Internet about two years ago. A critical reading will immediately notice that yogurt is a product of the cruel dairy industry that is destructive to Earth.

So how do we go beyond good and evil, beyond total capitalism? Is there a way to imagine a utopia in the days of the Anthropocene? Mark Fisher concludes Capitalist Realism on an optimistic note: “The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity … even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” He gives concrete examples and advice, but in the big picture, Jameson’s “end of the world” can be reclaimed: if the way we imagine the world is stuck in the predatory motorcycle journey described by Le Guin, perhaps imagining the end means adopting a different imagination. Less Yang, more Yin. In her essay, Le Guin quotes Robert C. Elliot who said that only those who have followed utopia into the abyss and come out the other side will be able to redeem the word “utopia”. She writes: “We have got ourselves into a really bad mess and have got to get out; and we have to be sure that it’s the other side we get out to; and when we do get out, we shall be changed. I have no idea who we will be or what it may be like on the other side, though I believe there are people there. They have always lived there.”

1980’s movies and television provided the children back then with stunning visions of robotics. Most of the time the screen displayed a huge robot, gigantic metal monsters who shoot and kill, sometimes colliding into an even bigger battle monster, fictional robots that echo the spirit of the times. The Cold War was at one of its most frightening peaks; in Western society, widening economic gaps led to hardship and crime, and overall, a deep sense of disorder. The fears are evident in numerous films from the period that depicted war and power. Often, hope came from robots, from Robocop to Macron 1. But there were also movies that showed different kind of robots. Not metal saviors or evil monsters, but sensitive, delicate creatures who gave their all to tell us: we are not the instruments of destruction you think we are. A call that fell on deaf ears. Heard by few.

Number 5 is alive!” – the famous cry of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit (1986)

Johnny 5 from the movie Short Circuit (1986) is a heartwarming example. On the surface, a war-robot film about robots, war, and the weapon industry (though this ’80s movie starring Steve Guttenberg clearly has other intentions). Johnny gets struck by lightning. His system malfunctions, causing him to develop awareness and emotions and try to escape his original purpose as a war machine. In the movie he forms a friendship with an animal therapist who treats him like a human, he discovers the world through her and she discovers him. The corporation that built him chases Johnny 5, attempts to return him and compel him to fulfill his original purpose as a military robot, despite his will. Johnny flees the corporation, struggles to maintain his unique identity, his very consciousness, and his choice of a different life. He firmly refuses to submit to the militarism he was born into. He becomes famous for his comic-tragic declaration: “Number 5 is Alive.”

Johnny 5 was an inspiration for the character of WALL-E (Disney/Pixar, 2008)

Flight of the Navigator (1986, a remake is allegedly in development), is another movie that combined a robot in an original way, at the time. In this case it was an alien robot, an autonomous probe lost in space or on a mission, collecting life samples for the alien civilization that sent it. The samples are examined, studied and returned to their native environments. The alien-robot collects a human sample from Earth; a 12-year-old boy. The boy returns home, but while for the boy only a few hours passed during the intergalactic journey (erased from his memory), on Earth, six long years had passed. The boy is taken by Nasa; there he reunites with the autonomous probe who abducted him (the probe short‑circuited after encountering high‑voltage lines, and was captured by the space agency). The reunion between the boy and the robot creates an amusing and touching relationship, in which the robot develops human emotions. Much like Johnny 5, the Navigator, “Max”, is torn between his original mission and his newfound emotions. At the boy’s request, he risks everything, including both their lives, to return the boy to his original timeline and continue his journey.

The boy David and beside him the robotic navigator Max (“Trimaxion”), from Flight of the Navigator (1986)

Both Johnny 5 and Max offer a different perspective on robotics and humanity. The question we face isn’t what will happen when a machine develops awareness, independence or emotions, but how will humans react to machines that have feelings, machines that refuse to live up to our original expectations, and ask to be treated differently, or God forbid, ask for equality?

There’s another lesson here, relevant as ever. By analogy, we might ask what will happen when humans are required to see their entire environment not as a material‑resource to serve their needs, but as a shared space in which all beings are equal, the equality of all creation. Johnny 5 is forced to flee for his life from humans who do not see him as a living being. Max the Navigator and the boy confront each other, and the boy is forced to beg Max for help. What will happen when humans themselves must beg for their lives before their environment? And maybe we’re already there?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=savkuEQKz8Q

On December 25 1938 Karel Čapek died of pneumonia. It was a fortunate escape because a couple of months later, when his country of Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis, the Gestapo showed up to arrest him. Unable to arrest a dead man, they detained his wife Olga and his brother, Josef. The latter died in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Karel Čapek, Image from Wikipedia

What does this sad wartime story, one of hundreds of thousands of such stories of that time, have to do with robots? Well, Čapek, of course, was the author of R.U.R. (1921), (Rossum’s Universal Robots) a science-fiction play that coined the word “robot”. Derived from the Slavic word for “work” (robota), the term has entered the mainstream of Anglo-American culture in a way that few other Slavic imports have. But at the same time, it underwent a cultural metamorphosis that severed it from its roots in the turbulent cauldron of Eastern Europe in the early 20^th century. Our idea of robots is shaped by Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” and by Star Wars clunking droids. We forget that the initial robots were nothing like Robbie or C-3PO & R2-D2.

To begin with, the robots of R.U.R. are not machines. They are organic beings: artificial humans bred to serve. Today we would probably call them “androids”, even though this is not precise either; they are more like Philip K. Dick’s replicants or possibly, genetic clones. And the second important distinction is that Čapek’s robots, far from obeying the Three Laws, rebel and kill their creators, ruthlessly exterminating all humans. Since the formula for creating new robots is destroyed during the revolt, robots cannot procreate until two of them fall in love and are prophesized by the single remaining human to be the Adam and Eve of the new race.

Robots R2-D2 and C-3PO (“Droids”) of Star Wars fame. Central to the public and cultural perception of robots.

Set design for Rossum’s Universal Robots.

R.U.R. is not about technology. It is about revolution. When Čapek is writing, a wave of violent social uprisings is sweeping Europe. 1917 is the October Revolution in Russia. Between 1918 and 1924, several socialist republics rise and fall in Germany, Hungary. Lithuania and other countries. In Italy, fascists and communists battle each other until Benito Mussolini seizes power in 1924. And in 1920, a street demagogue named Adolf Hitler is beginning to preach his own brand of revolutionary violence in Bavaria.

All these revolutions, and many others that convulse the world at the time, have one thing in common: the no-holds-barred struggle between the powerful and the powerless; between Masters and Slaves. Even Mussolini and Hitler present themselves as champions of the underdog, defenders of the working people against the bloodsucking international elites, whether capitalists or Jews (aren’t they one and the same? – U.A.). Čapek’s robots are indeed “robots” in the original sense of the word: they are workers, faceless exploited drones who lash out at their masters with the same resentful fury that their creator saw in daily news.

Lenin addressing Red Army troops heading for the Polish front in Moscow, 1920. To the right of Lenin, facing the camera, is Leon Trotsky. Photo credit…Grigory Petrovich Goldstein, The New-York Times

When we think about the AI apocalypse, we imagine technology run amok. Skynet and its skull-faced machines marching on of the Terminator franchise (parts 1&2 directed by James Cameron, 1984&1991), the conniving mechanical seductress of Ex Machina… (2014, Alex Garland). But technology is not an issue in R.U.R. except for the fact that humans use it to control the robots they created. Our robot-uprising nightmares reflect our fears of technological and scientific change that may, supposedly, undermine our humanity. R.U.R. belongs to a much more ruthless and clear-sighted age. It depicts a world in which humanity has already been lost. The powerful and the powerless have nothing in common. Masters and slaves are at each other’s throats. In this struggle, only one class can emerge triumphant. Even the sentimental, if somewhat confused ending (how does falling in love make up for the lost formula?), is a hopeful cop-out rather than an actual resolution. Humans are dead because their workers have killed them. And a new society created by these workers may be better, or worse, or just as bad as the original one. We do not know.

Actually, we do know, sort of. Čapek’s other great science fiction work – The War with the Newts (1936) – takes up where R.U.R has left off. The newts are a semi-intelligent amphibian species used pretty much like the robots – as cheap labor. Like the robots, the newts rebel and proceed to blow up the human-populated landmasses. However, instead of a love story, the novel ends with a cynical discussion of the future newt world conducted between the author and his alter ego. The newts, it turns out, are just mediocre imitations of humans, without creativity, curiosity, or artistic genius. Their “liberation” is nothing but a genocide; and the newt society is just a regimented industrial machine. No spark of love or poetry can ignite in the newts’ slimy breasts. And the final insult – the leader of the newt uprising, the Chief Salamander, is a man – a former NCO named Andreas Schultze. No great perspicacity is required to recognize the initials of another NCO, Adolf Schicklgruber, as Hitler was often mockingly called at the time because of the illegitimacy of his father’s birth.

The War with the Newts, Karl Čapek, 1936

Newts or robots, Čapek’s SF reflects the politics of his turbulent time. But it’s worth revisiting these politics because we still live in the fallout of its violence. Neither Nazism nor Communism are around but class conflict most certainly has not gone anywhere. Disguised by inchoate fears of climate change or pandemic; dressed up as a rejection of technology; entangled in the woozy debates about “humanity”, the story of a robot uprising still boils down to the naked calculus of power. Masters or slaves; top or bottom; elites or masses – the struggle continues.

The closest approximation to the robots of R.U.R. in contemporary SF are probably the replicants of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream or Electric Sheep (1968). And even in this novel, written 50 years after R.U.R., class struggle is very much in the open. Just like the robots or newts, Dick’s replicants are not particularly sympathetic. Having watched the fallout of the 20^th-century revolutions, Dick is not inclined to romanticize social violence. But like Čapek, he realizes that where you have imbalance of power, violence is inevitable. Compared to the soppy sentimentality of the Blade Runner movies (especially Blade Runner 2049, 2019, Denis Villeneuve) which disguise the political struggle under the veneer of metaphysics and ethics, Dick’s novel presents the replicants as an underclass clawing its way out of the gutter where the corporations placed them to work themselves literally to death. And there is no Utopia promised at the end; no brave new world of justice and equality. There’sonly struggle. Robots rebel because of the robota (work) that they do – nothing more complicated than just that.

Android Roy Batty playing Chess with his maker, 1982 Blade Runner, director: Ridley Scott

When the Gestapo came for the dead writer, they did not care about his metaphysics, only his politics. Today robots in SF are often seen as images of the dehumanizing impact of technology. But it may be good to remember that robots were born in the bloody cauldron of the last century’s revolutionary politics; and that the issue at the root of this politics was the same as it has always been, economic power.

While we anxiously check our smartphones for fear of an emerging Skynet, it is worth remembering this sentence from War with the Newts:

“If it was just newts against people, it might be possible to do something; but when it’s people against people then there is no way of stopping it, is there”.

Robots R Us.

Brooklyn, NYC, USA. October 2021: Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse workers protest as they file petition for union election.

In the summer of 2008, I sat in the Little Prince café with my laptop, a little while before some literary event. In the table next to me sat Giora Leshem, a veteran in literature, who asked what I was doing, as people asked back then. I showed him a few tests I ran on poetry-generating programs and he responded, as most people did back then, “it’s like Avidan”. I thought that would conclude the conversation, but he continued, “and he was obsessed with that machine”. Leshem could tell I was intrigued, he told me that he used to have coffee with the famous poet David Avidan on a daily basis. Every Monday at three-thirty in the afternoon, Avidan would leave the café and go to a public phone, take out a note with a number, call the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer lab, introduce himself as an Israeli poet and ask to talk to Eliza, the software or its creators. Leshem accompanied him in these brief calls, that ended with a polite refusal, and Avidan’s firm statement that he won’t give up. Leshem said the story began in 1966, when Avidan read about a computer that can communicate with people, in the newspaper.

In 2018, I visited MIT and, of course, looked for the older bunch to ask them if the story about Avidan was true. Those I asked didn’t know, but smiled and understood the significance of the story, and looked for others to confirm. Eventually, a few people did remember a man with a foreign accent calling every Monday morning and asking to speak to the software. It is a memorable case, they said, but not an exceptional one, because MIT is a place that attracts many talented and strange people, many of whom lean towards the humanities or media. At that moment I felt firsthand what my mind had already understood long before; Eliza isn’t only the first chatbot that spoke to people, it also changed the lives of many, including mine.

David Avidan, a man of the 1930s who rolled into our time, a picture of Avidan from his film “Broadcast from the Future” (1981)

Right after my conversation with Giora Leshem, I decided to dig into Avidan’s book My Electronic Psychiatrist, published in 1974 (By A. Levin-Epstein-Modan) with the caption: “eight authentic conversations with a computer”. I had known the book previously, and even read all of it, but I felt that Avidan, who declared himself as a person from the thirteenth century who had rolled into our time, didn’t reflect reality in his literary descriptions. However, Leshem instilled in me the passion to explore what lies behind the software.

My Electronic Psychiatrist, – Eight Authentic Conversations with a Computer, David Avidan, New Edition, Babel, 2001, <a

2008’s search engine model produced relatively limited information about Eliza itself, but I did find several implementations of it, among them, one could be experienced in a browser, and show the source code in JavaScript. I delved into the lines of code and discovered Eliza wasn’t exactly the “electronic psychiatrist” Avidan described, but a multifunctional software, into which a ‘behavior script’ of a specific nature is input, and it knows how to generate conversational behavior based on the script. Eliza is the software or the “agent”, and she had several scripts with different characters. The most interesting one was the doctor script, that tried to imitate, even if in an artificial manner and with a wink, a therapist using the Rogerian psychological method. The method developed by Carl Rogers aims to place the patient in the center, and the software tried to mimic this approach by attempting to respond to everything with a question that repeats the statement. For example, if I tell Eliza “I’m sick”, she might reply with “why are you telling me you’re sick?” or “how does the fact that you are sick make you feel?”.

I also found out that at that same year, the developer of the Eliza software, Joseph Weizenbaum, a German-Jew who fled to America as a child during World War II, passed away. In 1964, Weizenbaum joined the MIT faculty as a computer scientist, worked on the development of programming languages, and in 1966 developed the Eliza software, named after Eliza Doolittle, the character from George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’ (1913), who learns to speak in the style and language of the elite. Weizenbaum showed Eliza to his secretary, and explained how to work with the “doctor script”. A moment later, she asked him to leave the room and leave her alone with Eliza, the software.

Joseph Weizenbaum

Weizenbaum at the offices of the German newspaper Die Zeit (Hamburg, 1965), demonstrating how he remotely accesses MIT computers in Boston via modem.

That’s how Weizenbaum discovered what we today call “the Eliza effect”, the human tendency to assume a computer’s behavior (or other interactive behavior) is human behavior. Weizenbaum noticed that his secretary wasn’t the only one falling for the artificial empathy of the machine. When something is kind to us, we don’t care whether it’s human or not. This revelation, in 1966, before artificial intelligence was developed worldwide, led Weizenbaum to the conclusion that artificial intelligence wasn’t just a technological or technical issue, but also a phenomenon with wide-ranging implications for human society. He began researching the philosophy and sociology of artificial intelligence, especially the dangers it holds for humanity. In today’s terms, Weizenbaum was one of the first cyberskeptics.

This line of thought excited me from the very first moment. Reading Weizenbaum’s work opened up a new world to me. Before, when readers compared between my poetry generators and Avidan’s book, I dismissed it by saying that both fields were ‘something in computers’. But now I had realized they both touched the same compassion instinct. The computerized texts, both those that Eliza responded with and those that came from poetry generators, were a refinement of pure emotion, maybe even a sub-emotion, in which we stand in front of a computer, but treat it as a mirror, trying to understand where we are reflected and where we are warped.

My intuition to start experimenting with artificial poetry with a computer was validated. I understood and connected with the creative passion burning inside of me. Until then I was convinced that pure poetry was written from the point of view of another person, so I tried to write through a fictional character, Ze’ela Katz, who lived in the new space created by internet culture. But the Eliza effect made me want to write not only outside the person that is me, but outside of a person who’s a person. Back then I was working full time at a tech company in positions of development and managing development teams, and my professional loyalty was dedicated to the product or service. Weitzenbaum’s criticism of the centralization driven by technology led me to see the high-tech world in a different light. I started creating software like Eliza, and suddenly, the three fields – computational poetry, chatbots (which I had previously named “Botpetanim” in Hebrew), and internet culture, collided together as a lighthouse guiding my way in both creative and professional life.

Curator Yaniv Yehuda Eiger urged me to merge the fields into a single creation, and so the chatbot “Za’eliza” was born; a combination of the fictional poet and the first chatbot, living within a virtual exhibition at Gallery 1024, an online gallery curated by Eiger on the Walla! Culture website (2010, during the tenure of culture editor Ariel Kril). I quickly became a co-curator of the gallery and continued to create many more chatbots.

The obsession I developed spread widely and led to a variety of creative collaborations inspired by Eliza. The Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem asked me to create and present a Hebrew-speaking version of Eliza. With the support of the museum, I managed to get hold of Eliza’s original source code, which helped me create Eliza in Hebrew and her “bimbo” granddaughter, Liz-tush (along with digital artists Batt-Girl and Dganit Elkayam). Later, along with Maayan Sheleff and Gal Eshel, we also created Frankie, a physical robot. Eliza’s source code also allowed me to finally check once and for all whether Avidan had cheated, as many had accused him of, or whether he had faithfully kept the transcripts of his conversations with Eliza. And indeed, Avidan wasn’t cheating.

The robotic “Frankie”, a collaborative work by Eran Hadas, Maayan Shelef and Gal EshelRetry

Now that I knew Eliza inside out, I assumed the mystery was gone, and that our relationship will be purely technical. But the complete opposite happened. Beyond the compassion we attribute to the machine, and beyond the implications of technological development on our lives, I felt there was something more primal, more innocent that drew me to Eliza. It started with a Weizenbaum sentence that echoed in my mind, that says we can see Eliza not only as a computer system, but also as an actress depending on a script to figure out her lines and the context she lives in. The deeper I looked into the code, I discovered that Weizenbaum developed Eliza in a programming language called SLIP, which he invented himself to manipulate the data in a way that is now known as the Memento Pattern. Weitzenbaum’s guiding principle was that a computer can read a sentence, and while reading, intervene in it, go back, treat it like a wheel that can be turned in both directions, and change it in ways that will leave traces of the original sentence. To me, this mindset was the essence of human poetics; the desire to knead language, tame it, and explore what realities and consciousnesses could be created from it. This game and its passion, were my emotional engine.

A decade after that casual conversation at the café that led me to explore Eliza, I looked out the window at the autumn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her hometown, during a visit I found myself in, partly because of her, it dawned on me that the greatest influence on my creativity is probably not that of any specific person, but rather a chatbot program called Eliza.

Eran Hadas’s website.

When he was twelve years old, Shadrach went on a summer vacation to his uncles’ house in “New Sderot”. While he was there, a disaster occurred. Nano-gas was spread on the inhabitants by the Zen-Americans, the powers that ruled the world at the time. The inhabitants become predators and prey, zombie-like. “In Exile-Tel Aviv (“Ha-Gola Tel Aviv”), in the city of Yavus, in Ma’aganei Tzedek, in Nahariya, in the Sanhedria, the same images. Peaceful-faced Zionists, but with a gleam of madness in their eyes, attacking one another, tearing with their teeth, their nails, slaughtering, and their blood, other’s blood, does not stop. Flowing veins” (Shadrach, p. 28). All victims, except those living in New Sderot and Gaza, are protected under protective domes designed to protect them from Qassam missiles. Those who are not resistant to the gas and are not protected under the dome die in their madness, including Shadrach’s family – his father, mother and sister.

Shadrach (Editor: Naama Tsal, published by Resling, 2017, link for purchase) is a short, futuristic novel by Shimon Adaf, in which he creates a technological post-apocalyptic future, terrifying and convincing, but also full of beauty – foreign, removed, different. The novella moves between two points in time, and between two parallel plots, which are told alternately and slowly intertwine with each other. Both take place in Sderot – once in the future, in “The New Sderot”, and once in the past, in the Sderot of the year 1987. Shadrach, whose story begins in “The New Sderot”, also takes part in the story of the past, but in this work I will deal only with the futuristic narrative of “The New Sderot”.

Shimon Adaf (Photo: Ronen Lalena)

Adaf’s books are full of moments of confronting foreignness, or moments when the world becomes foreign or the world in all its foreignness invades you and disrupts perception and consciousness.

According to the philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher, foreignness or otherness can be examined through two sets of concepts: the first is the one based on Freud’s, The Uncanny (literally translated from German: unhomely) (see Dana Thor’s article on this issue). This theory, as Fisher presents it, is about “the strange that is within the familiar, the strangely familiar, or the familiar as a stranger. The outside is seen as a projection of the inside and vice versa.” So the familiar can be a stranger, but the stranger is always also familiar. Through this theory, foreignness is always understood, processed and interpreted through the concepts of the “I”. On the other hand, Fisher offers two other categories, the strange and the eerie, as fundamentally different categories from Freud’s Uncanny. These, Fisher claims, do the opposite: “They allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. […] The strange is that which does not belong. The strange brings to the familiar something that is a little way beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with ‘The Homely’ (even as opposites)” (from Fisher’s book, On The Weird and the Eerie).

Adaf’s works provide many such moments of foreignness and otherness, which are not reduced to the definition of the “Uncanny” (Unhomely). Fantasy and speculation allow Adaf to create situations and figures of inherent otherness, which grant us a new look at the inside, from the outside, and an examination of foreignness not through the concepts of the “I”, as can be seen in Shadrach.

Foreignness or otherness are an attack on the “I”, challenging its boundaries. In the “New Sderot” two strange events occur that undermine the entire existence for the residents of the town. The first event is the nano-gas attack I began with, which fundamentally changes the lives and perception of the residents; The second event is a significant and fateful meeting of Shadrach with a character with foreign, almost alien qualities, when he was fifteen years old. Both events force a confrontation with otherness, a confrontation of society as a whole, and of Shadrach alone.

For the residents of “New Sderot” – the closed dome that covers the city and was used as protection also led to closure and seclusion of thought and conception. Until the disaster, the residents of “New Sderot” lived without the memory of the past, without the old customs, without the need for them. But the disaster arouses in some of them a desire to return to the past, to the origins they forgot, which they no longer live by. “And what about the history that we don’t remember [said Zamir], the past that returns to us in fragments of visions and dreams? Our grief is deeper than that, sending roots to ancient times, but we don’t know what the past compares to its depth, we mourn it even today” (Shadrach, p. 63). The disaster arouses in the residents of “New Sderot” a need for tradition, a past and a history. They are looking for a more solid ground than that of the present (or the future) to hold on to.

On the other hand, Shadrach, who was orphaned from his family, finds other avenues for grief and sorrow. He does not understand what the members of the “Shomatz” (“Keepers of the Zion Tradition”) find in the old rituals, they seem artificial to him. Instead of the bubble that surrounds life and closes it in, he creates ecological bubbles, similar to the ones he encountered in “New Sderot”: “Independent, disposable ecological bubbles, tiny universes of insects and humidity, winged creatures and fungi, complex symbioses, buzzing and rapid life cycles” (Shadrach, p. 27). These are living, complex and dynamic works of art, in which Shadrach buries his childhood memories.” [Shadrach] began to design some bubbles of his own, brand new. […] He tried to incorporate details into them that would reflect, in some way, moments that had intensified in his memory since the attack” (Shadrach, p. 41). There they are assembled with other elements, undergo metamorphosis and develop into something new. In the face of disaster, Shadrach finds solace in art, and the ability to transform his memories into beauty, and not in history or renewed faith in religion.

Shadrach (published by Resling, 2017). Link for purchase

But the novel offers another possibility that grows out of an encounter with otherness and foreignness, through Shadrach’s encounter with Naharda֘::ֻ.

After a few years of Shadrach’s residence in the “New Sderot” he meets Naharda֘::ֻ, she/he is one of the moon settlers whose ancestors did indeed come from Earth, but they developed and changed over time into undefined creatures, or with fluid gender. In this sense, they are radically different from the inhabitants of the earth, who are often defined absolutely, even when a certain flexibility in their sexual orientation is described in the book. Even before he meets Naharda֘::ֻ, face to face, Shadrach sees her/him from afar. He wants to ask for her/his name, but he decides not to. He writes in his diary: “But you can ask for her/his name and maybe also for her/his gender. “No! the name and sex need to be revealed in some other way, to be given, not in a way that will give them a grip and actuality in the inside world, without them having existence on the outside. Wait!!!” (Shadrach, p. 87).

Shadrach tries not to define Naharda֘::ֻ in advance, through his own concepts. He realizes that he is meeting a different and completely foreign being here, this is not just a meeting with someone new, but this is “an introduction to otherness” (Shadrach, p. 121). He refuses to reduce Naharda֘::ֻ’s foreignness to his own concepts, but seeks to see and accept her/him in her/his foreignness, in the asymmetry of the experience. The name and gender are given to him as a gift, not he gives them to him/her. The other is experienced through its otherness, and not through its conformity or nonconformity with the concepts of the “I”.

The unique meeting between Shadrach and Naharda֘::ֻ, which leads to an intimate relationship between the two, takes place first of all in language. After they meet, Shadrach asks Naharda֘::ֻ to teach him to talk to her properly, in a way that befits his/her gender. He urges Naharda֘::ֻ to give him the rules that will allow him to talk to her/him in the most accurate way, from Shadrach.

The undefined Hebrew that Adaf creates for the characters is the result of the unique meeting between these two characters, a real meeting between foreignness and responsibility. The language that developed according to the degrees of the relationship between them allows the creation of contact, dialogue and conversation, without erasing the differences or foreignness between them, and without needing a third, foreign language as well. Apparently, another language could have been used, more convenient for gender fluidity, but here, the foreigners and the others force the language to accommodate them, to find solutions for themselves within the existing language, even though it seems closed and limiting, as Hebrew often seems to us. Hebrew is known and mentioned many times for being a “sex maniac” language, as Yona Wallach wrote about it in one of her poems: Every object is male or female, and it is necessary to determine. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, as Adaf shows in this piece. Getting to know others expands the possibilities of the existing language and gives it a continuous and future existence. In this context, it is also possible to mention Michal Shomer’s multi-gender Hebrew project (1), which created a system of Hebrew letters, enabling multi-gender reading and writing. And so the language can develop and open up to the foreign, the new, the other, the threatening, not just retreat to its origins as a result of an external threat.

Michal Shomer’s Multi-Gender Hebrew Project. Image from the Alef Alef Alef website.

The meeting between Shadrach and Naharda֘::ֻ is a meeting in which there is a deep foundation of Eros and attraction despite and perhaps because of the foreignness, an unusual meeting in our world where like attracts like. In his 2012 book The Agony of Eros, philosopher and cultural critic Byung-Chul Han argues that “in recent years, the end of love has been declared many times. Love, it is said, has failed because of infinite freedom of choice, abundance and an excess of possibilities, and the pursuit of perfection. In a world of unlimited possibilities, love itself symbolizes impossibility. [… But] the crisis of love does not arise from the fact that there are too many others, but from the erasure of the other. The disappearance of the other is a dramatic process – although, for the most part, it escapes consciousness. […] In the inferno of the similar, into which contemporary society is becoming, an erotic experience [stemming from desire, Eros] is not possible. Such an experience presupposes asymmetry and foreignness, an outsiderness of the other.” (The Agony of Eros, p. 1). In this sense, the meeting between Shadrach and Naharda֘::ֻ is unusual. Their meeting is similar to what Hahn describes as “A moment of truth”, “It presents a new and completely different way of life compared to the habit, the existing state of being. He interferes with the similar for the sake of the other.” (The Agony of Eros, p. 45)

The falling in love between Shadrach and Neharda֘::ֻ is described as a response to a real, deep encounter, which requires learning a new language, and a perceptual change that seeks to let go of definitions based on externalities, such as male and female. But it is possible that the meeting with others is also necessarily temporary, or impossible in the end. “It will never be mine, it will always stand there, outside the fringes of hunger, even with the enveloping and merging of the presence,” understands Shadrach (Shadrach, p. 134).

Even if the relationship between two individuals who are fundamentally alien to each other does not last forever, evidence that the distance cannot be bridged and the alienation remains, yet still – it happened, it was possible. This is the meaning of the introduction to otherness and the true encounter with it, even if it hides heartbreak within it. The language that formed the foundation of the encounter remains and you can continue without them.

It’s 1983. I’m 11.

For my birthday, I got my first personal computer, the ZX Spectrum. It came with a 16K ROM (internal memory) and an additional 32K of RAM. It’s likely that my washing machine today has more computing power. It doesn’t matter. I remember myself diving into the booklet that came with the computer The Spectrum Book of Games, a book filled with typing games, programs in BASIC, formatted and ready to be typed into the spectrum, ready to go.

One of the games that captured my immediate attention was Smalltalk, an imitation of the computerized and spoken psychologist Eliza. I sat down and typed all the necessary code just to engage in tedious conversations like:

Gil: The sound of the mosquitoes at night disturbs me.

Eliza: Can you elaborate? 

Gil: Yes, it’s hard to sleep because of the buzzing.

Eliza: Tell me more about the buzzing.

Etc.

Needless to say, the mosquito problem wasn’t solved by Eliza/Smalltalk.

Later on, one of the first games I got for the spectrum was The Hobbit, a text-based quest with graphics, an adventure game at the forefront of technology, that was very complex, too complex for the limited memory of my computer. A big surprise was the option to “talk to the computer”, which back then meant typing commands to get ahead in the game, in a simple, nearly natural language. I entered instructions into a primitive artificial intelligence engine, such as “put an olive in every barrel except the orange one”. I wasted my time on actions that followed questions and complex instructions like “ask Gandalf what time it is, then head east”. I was shocked.

The Hobbit, publisher: Granada

Smalltalk and The Hobbit gave me, as a child, the understanding and distinction between processing ability and consciousness.

Today, when I face a bot in a bank or at the airport, and try to communicate with the computer in a “natural language”, I often rely on those memories, leaning on them, and see just how little progress we’ve made in the past forty years.

This knowledge intuitively reinforces the insight I probably already had at the start of my computer/digital journey, an understanding that, for me, clarifies that software cannot truly develop consciousness, not really. In my view, software merely makes intelligent use of the consciousness of its creator.

On an evening stroll on the London wharfs I met a woman. We spent the night together and the following day agreed that this is more than just a casual fling, we should see each other again when I next return from my journeys at sea. A few tours on my boat and a few dates later, I received a note that she is with child. Earning enough money, I bought a house – a respite for myself, and a container for my lover and offspring. They moved into our humble abode and there they await my return – always available whenever I arrive from my journeys at sea. My child always listens to my stories, if I spare them the time, and through my stories I shape my child.

…

Public discourse around robots and artificial intelligence has always been prophetic: anticipating their grand arrival to the world stage as a watershed moment that has yet to arrive, but will be upon us as soon as the technologies, markets and regulations all mature to allow it, and will greatly impact society when it is finally here. Either in the far future or right around the corner, visions of robots and similarly-artificial agents imagine them as our servants or our children, rising up against us in a technological slave rebellion or patricide. Other visions imagine robots as partners, blending in with human society or becoming host bodies for a human soul so that it may outlive the flesh.

The popular form of this discourse manifests through speculative fiction, starring robots and AIs like Star Trek’s Data, The Terminator’s Skynet and Terminators, or The Matrix’s Agent Smith; as well as public-facing, spectacular, speculative engineering attempts, such as IBM’s Deep Blue, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and Spot, and Hanson Robotics’ Sophia.

In recent years, a new vision for AI and robots has been gaining popularity: that of emotional support and companionship to humans. Pinpointing the causes for the trend can be difficult, since like many other ideas, it has deep roots – going back to Greek mythology and the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, if not further back. Is it a reaction to the adversarial depictions of robots in 20th century media? Or to the increasingly-adversarial relations we actually experience online with web-based bots? Perhaps it’s inspired by the advances in “natural language” algorithms, giving robots a familiar voice? Perhaps it is disseminated by researchers and courses in the rising academic discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)? Or maybe it isn’t about the robots at all, but rather reflects a yielding to internet-age alienation from our fellow humans? Regardless, the excitement and intrigue around the prospect of computers providing emotional services to humans is on the rise.

You can see it in “cutting edge” technological experiments and the media coverage that surrounds them (1), asking questions about how future society will adapt to the presence of emotionally-servile robots, and how companies and researchers can design their robots to be more emotionally appealing and perform more emotional labor for humans. Skeptics are asking us to consider how the advent of emotional service robots may harm humans whose work involves emotional labor, or emotionally-deskill humans (2) who receive such services from AI.

Robot and Frank (Jake Schreier, 2012), Opening Film at the 2012 Utopia International Film Festival

You can also see it in contemporary speculative-fiction and science-fiction. Most known perhaps is the 2013 film Her (by director Spike Jonze), where the human protagonists fall in love with their advanced AI smartphone, and the 2012 film Robot and Frank (director: Jake Schreier, opening Film at the 2012 Utopia International Film Festival) where an elderly man develops a complex relationship with his emotional support robot. A 2013 episode of the TV series Black Mirror depicted a woman’s relationship with an AI surrogate of her dead lover, and in 2020 it was unironically attempted in real life, when the creators of the documentary Meeting You produced an interactive VR stand-in for a mother’s dead child (3).

…

Emotional Robots Have Been Here For a While

Most participants in this discourse have lots to gain from its speculative nature, anticipating the future rather than tackling the past and present. Put simply, there’s less friction in the uninhabited frontier, less waves in a Blue Ocean, unencumbered by the burden of proof. For the skeptics, it is a way to attract attention and stir emotion through our fear of the unknown. For the proponents, it is a way to attract fame and (a lot of) funding with promises that need not be shadowed by, or take responsibility for, present reality. As any Silicon Valley investor would tell you, the worst thing that can happen to a cutting edge tech product is actually going to market.

But though it may be profitable to keep emotional robots in the realm of speculative design, it is simply not the true state of affairs. Emotional robots are already part of society, have been part of society for many decades, have become a cultural staple and even cliché – they simply look a little different than what the speculators would have you imagine.

That woman I met in the London wharfs is one of them. In my 9-to-5 I am not a seafarer nor do I own a house in London, but I do in the videogame Sunless Sea (developed by Failbetter Games, first released in 2015). This game is filled with fictional characters, all reactive to my actions with their own fictional personalities and agendas, all in service of my grand seafaring adventure. My fictional lover’s agenda is, and forever will be, to comfort me whenever I return from sailing the wide and open seas.

Sunless Sea NPCs, Image from Failbetter Games

Emotional support is already one of the most widespread uses of AI, and has been for many decades, primarily through the function of NPCs: non-player characters, made to inhabit digital spaces and provide services to human visitors that which, in human terms, we would consider as emotional labor: teachers, companions, personal trainers, therapists, surrogate family, and hospitality workers. We meet them in computer games, as well as on the internet and in some electronic toys – in any digital domain where we expect to be made to feel good.

Understanding that this robotic function is indeed not upcoming but already well-ingrained in society, not waiting for some technological breakthrough but already well-developed over generations of design and actual use, reveals something deeper about those robots: depicting emotional-support AI as a sort of technology is false. It is instead a sort of fiction, defined not by its liveliness but by its servitude. Robots are not defined by some internal mathematical complexity or by their degree of closeness to that “General Intelligence” coveted by nerdy engineers, but rather by their societal function, the stories we tell about them, the roles we cast them for and have them play.

The emblematic computer therapist, ELIZA, was conceived in the mid-1960’s and became a cultural myth.

A Conversation with ELIZA

The simple scripts it ran as part of the MIT experimental laboratory are exactly that – scripts, more fiction than intuition – and would not pass a contemporary Turing Test to be considered true AI. But it did not stop ELIZA’s creator from being ushered out of the room when his secretary, as the myth goes, was having an intimate conversation with the digital therapist. ELIZA did not spawn widespread use of robots as explicit therapists, but its scripted-reaction techniques has found their way into many other digital agents, most notable today through the proliferation of chatbots that welcome humans to business webpages, providing very little functional service but adding a friendlier face to the emptiness of digital commercial space.

Other forms of emotional robots burst into the mainstream with the rise of commercial video-games. While early experiments such as Tennis for Two (William Higinbotham, 1958) and Spacewar! (Steve Russell, 1962) were fashioned in the mold of competitive sports and board games, where two players compete against each other, later commercial products like the digital arcade cabinet, home console, and personal computer had much to gain from allowing a single human customer to enjoy a game by themselves.

Spacewar! on the Computer History Museum’s PDP-1 in 2007, Wikipedia

Because competition and struggle are still fantastic motivators even for a Cartesian single-player, digital robots appeared as adversaries. But since they are now servile, instead of partners, to the single human’s enjoyment, they could be made to be unequal: Pacman’s ghosts are no match to the player’s agility, Super Mario’s dumb Goombas squish under his boot, and Doom’s endless waves of grunts are made to be slaughtered. All operate according to scripts, all making us feel powerful, skilled, and in control. Still the most popular form of NPC today, the myriad faces of computer game adversaries are simply fiction on top of a million variations of Solitaire.

Doom typical game screen, not much different than Solitaire

Tamagotchi, digital “pets”, Image: Shutterstock

NPCs also provide companionship, standing in for best friends, parents, children and other family members and of course adventuring cohorts, escorts and comrades. Most famous perhaps is the Tamagotchi trend of the mid 1990s. Marketed for children, it became a cultural icon, pets living on tiny keychain computers that needed regular but very easy attention in order to thrive, and could even “die” if not properly taken care of – only to be reborn again with the click of a button. This basic function evolved into other big trends: Furby was a reactive robot doll that did not require care and could not die, but had a script that made it seem as if it was learning to speak English (it was created in the US and designed for that market) over time spent with its owner; The Sims is a video game series where players care for virtual people, creating for them a fantastic home and career modeled loosely after the American white-picket-fence bourgeois lifestyle. Sims are a liminal robotic being, half-way between virtual wards and virtual avatars, so that players can feel both care for and identification with them; combined with a fantasy of guaranteed gradual upwards class mobility made The Sims into the best-selling video game in history at the time of its release.

In addition to children or wards, many NPCs provide mentorship for personal growth. Adventure games often explain the rules of engagement to the player, in the shoes of a young protagonist, through the character of an older veteran. Following in the tradition of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, video-games also tend to place the solitary human player in an adventuring party made up of robot companions. Usually, none of those companions will be as capable as the player, especially not in terms of growth – their static agency reflected in their set of abilities, while the dynamic human agent grows in skill and power. They will stick with the player through an adventure that is ultimately made for humans, playing their part in the human’s personal journey.

With the rise of complex online games, where a player sits alone in their physical space and meets both humans and NPCs in similarly-represented digital form, those relationships become more diffuse: I could be cooperating with a group of human and AI companions against a different group of AIs, or humans, or both. Human online playmates might seem more desirable, but truthfully it matters less who actually drives the characters on-screen; it matters more that regardless of being human or machine, they serve similar functions for the player at home.

Portal Companion Cube

The 2007 video game Portal exemplifies many of the NPC functions mentioned above, satirizing them while at the same time maintaining all of their functions. The principal NPC is portrayed as an actual robot, an AI operating system named GLaDOS that manages the laboratory in which the player finds themselves in the game. GLaDOS guides the player through a series of “experiments” teaching them how to play the game, talking at them like a child or trainee. Every line GLaDOS says is scripted, yet she is reactive to the player’s performance in the game, and her attitude is aimed directly at the player’s ego, with compliments and insults alike. As the player progresses through the game’s narrative, GLaDOS is revealed to be not a mentor but an adversary; this revelation has fictional meaning, but no functional meaning – the gameplay dynamics remain the same. This change happens exactly when the player has finished learning the mechanics of the game, has no longer need of mentorship and instead will enjoy the feeling of overcoming a rival. The other NPCs in the game are Sentries and Companion Cubes. The Sentries are robot adversaries that will shoot the player on sight, but are completely incompetent, easy to defeat, and will greet the player with a friendly voice as they fire a useless hail of bullets. Finally the Companion Cube: a large box with the shape of a heart painted on its side. It’s Just a box, completely mute and does absolutely nothing, except being assigned the role of companion. Players take Companion Cubes along with them, use them sometimes as weights to solve puzzles with, and discard them when they wish to move on. Through the blunt metaphor of this gaming in-joke, Portal makes clear that the cube’s companionship is completely fictional, made to put the player’s mind at ease as they traverse the empty and artificial space of the lab. It requires some reflection by the player to recognize that the other, more-chatty robots in the game, are all but the same, all fictional.

…

So far in this essay I did not attempt to challenge the efficacy of these fictions: emotional-service robots may well relieve some loneliness from people in care homes; the Companion Cube certainly made my journey through Portal’s trials feel less lonely. Decades of design knowledge empowered the game’s creators to openly poke fun and ridicule the phenomenon, while still utilizing it and losing none of the actual effect, and a lifetime of playing with NPCs made me receptive to their charms.

I do suspect the degree to which such fictions are effective. As was hopefully made clear by now, I care less about the imagined potential of speculative robots, and more about the actual effect that actual robots have on contemporary society; and to the best of my understanding, with the historical rise of applications offering robot companionship depicted in this essay, we also see the advent of the “loneliness pandemic” (4), considered in parts of the world as a public health crisis.

As entire industries learn how to better capitalize on societal atomization, we are bound to see a growing injection of servile personal bots into society, wrapped in louder promises of artificial companionship and care. We will be better prepared for their arrival if we take them for what they are: not a new marvel of design and engineering but rather an old story, one that has been told and retold for decades. We would do well to ask why old stories are being repackaged and sold to us as new and inspiring tech.

We’re all going to die. Prior to that, many of us will experience, throughout our lives, a ‘bell curve’ corresponding to our ability to impact the world around us. We were born, supported, grown and raised. We built up independence as we understood the foundations of the world around us. We acquired skills and professions. We came to be proficient, developed expertise, established ourselves, all the while we also grew older. A new generation will grow beside us, from us, by us, with new skills that are better adapted to their brave new world, as we slowly perish.

This eventual yet basic and essential understanding was the source of many anxieties surrounding arrival of “the next generation”. For example, in Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud recognizes the common human myth of patricide, killing one’s father. While Freud sees and focuses on aggression of child against parent, it’s worth noting the two Greek myths of Oedipus and Chronos: Oedipus is expelled from his city in his infancy by his father; Chronos, father of the Greek gods, tries to eat his own children; both myths reflect the struggle between older and younger but begin with the violence of the father towards his child.

Saturn (Chronus) Devouring his Son by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. Painted on the walls of his home, 1819-1823.

In the modern age myths of paternal violence against their own offspring have faded in favor of Golems rebelling against their makers. Beginning with the original Robot story, the theater play Rossum’s Universal Robots (Karl Capek, 1921) (more about this in “What is a Robot?”, Uri Aviv’s article in this issue, and Dr. Elana Gomel’s deep dive into R.U.R.) alongside other prominent examples such as The Golem by author Bashevis Singer (1969) or Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel (1952), and in a broader sense, the film Moon by film-maker Duncan Jones (2009), numerous speculative stories have dealt with the fear that our extensive and hard work is what actually generates the conditions of our own replacement.

The robot is the ideal object to represent the above-mentioned fear because it’s perceived as a mechanical object designed to and capable of performing a wide range of human actions.

Machines that replace human manpower in specific jobs are nothing new, certainly not regarding work that was widely accepted as extremely difficult, dangerous or boring and therefore monotonous jobs, or positions in which maximal efficiency would lead to particularly high incomes or cost savings. Throughout history, windmills were integrated with and even replaced the work of millers; steam engines of various types have replaced factory workers; ATMs replaced bank clerks/tellers and computers replaced people (mostly women) in accounting firms, insurance agencies, not to mention laboratories, and R&D facilities, but a few decades ago.

Human computers in action alongside a computing machine and microscope, 1954, phot from NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, one of the organizations that preceded the space agency NASA).

While each of these profound changes has raised justified concerns, and ultimately political and economic upheaval, in this article the feature explored and that distinguishes these changes from the current conversation about automation and robotics is that all these previous machines have not undermined the relationship between the workers and the means of production. A bank teller may well be fired because an ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) is fulfilling their role now, but the ATM will not raise their children; care for their partner (or make love!); wear the clothes they have in their closet as they go out with friends; eat breakfast, lunch or dinner with their family; or go in his stead to that all-important local baseball game or the opera friendship association meeting.

Essence

The boundary that all machines do not cross but robots flaunt and don’t much care about is thus teleological, anchored in their purpose, their essence. The robot essence as conceived and created, as recognized and accepted in human society, especially as it includes human replacement (in specific jobs or roles, ostensibly), is extremely complex and relies on the definition and essence of humanity itself: the essence of the robot is dependent on the essence of humanity.

We’re worried we’re creating machines that will deprive us of agency and take our place in deciding our fate: Not only would our jobs be done well, our metrics – exceeded, our positions – optimized; these are not merely places or “positions” but our contribution to our communities, our society. What if the robot had some other utilities or benefits, maybe notes for our next season, be it baseball or opera, or god forbid it might have some thoughts on the way we raise our children?

Ex Machina. Director: Alex Garland, 2015.

The fear expressed in Ex Machina (director: Alex Garland, 2015) is that sex robots will decide they wish to be released from their master; The fear expressed in Blade Runner director: Ridley Scott, 1982) as well as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel on which the cinematic masterpiece is based ) is that the robots (androids in this case) decide they wish to live beyond their useful roles, choosing for themselves their lived experiences, their paths, their lives; The fear in Moon (director: Duncan Jones, 2009) is that robots (clones to be precise) would fulfill all of our roles, professional but also social, personal, most intimate, as we’re already dead and gone. Not only will they fulfill our role in operating factory machines, but our role as lovers, partners, parents, friends, and possibly also our function as amateur baseball players or our position in the opera friendship association. Hence the fear that Vonnegut presents in the above-mentioned Player Piano, that after robots replace all workers, there’ll be no one left to decide on the purposes and essences of human society.

Moon, Director: Duncan Jones, 2009, Closing film of the Tel-Aviv International Science Fiction and Fantastic Genre Film Festival, Utopia 2009

Where does this teleological fear, anxiety of meaning, originate? Robots, much like any other artificial object, are manufactured with external meaning, essence, teleology. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre used the following distinction to explain the special teleology he attributes to human beings: “Existence precedes essence”. For example, Sartre claims a knife is created based on a mold designed for a specific purpose. Therefore, the knife has an essence, prior to existence. When thinking about the essence, the purpose of certain specific knives, purposes such as cutting cardboard or steak or injuring and killing enemy soldiers, according to the intended purpose, essence emerges, and the object is created. (Hu)man, according to Sartre, it not created with any such purpose, any essence or pattern, and therefore can only determine its own essence. The robot, unlike (hu)man, is designed for specific use, according to an external purpose, why should its essence, its teleology, be any different?

The naive answer is technological. What if technology is (supposedly) so complex, creates such complex consciousness, that it will be able to assert agency and autonomously object, subvert or deny its designed intent. While this possibility exists technically, technological science fiction stories that seriously study this option tend to answer that under such conditions, the difference between humans and robot machines loses all meaning. Robot-creatures may physiologically differ from humans, but they are not separate in their (human) rights, their equality or access. The PKD novel Do androids dream of electric sheep challenges the human obsession of distinguishing between “artificial” and “natural”, and the movie Ex Machina invites us to empathize not with the exploitative humans but with their (exploited sex) robots.

A more complex answer can be found as we delve deep into the primordial fear all parents have from their children. One characteristic of this fear is its tendency to not be realized overtly as actual conflict. Parent-child relationships are of course notoriously extremely complex, yet more often than not parents and children see each other, while separate from another, as belonging to the same unit; they have shared interests through the majority of their lives. This fact is essential to human existence and is entrenched in our political perceptions, so much so that one of the first texts to justify the political rights afforded monarchs to rule, Patriarcha: Or the Natural Power of Kings (1680, Sir Robert Filmer), argued that the right to rule comes down in direct succession from Adam himself (and Eve), inherited from father to son (through the genealogy of the fathers’ lines, not the mothers, according to his claim) reaching all the way to the monarchy of his age.

Patriarcha, or The Natural Power of Kings, by Sit Robert Filmer, 1680

Thus, even though our myths identify a potential parent-child conflict, social mechanisms such as inheritance, education, and family unit, arrange it so that the child’s interest aligns with the parents’. This arrangement is essential to human social existence, one of the factors that spur continued birth and creation of further generations; no one in their right mind would choose to have children if it were commonly understood that they would undermine their parents, as Laius, King of Thebes feared his son Oedipus would. It’s interesting to keep in mind that Oedipus, while indeed he does kill his father Laius, he does so unknowingly and accidentally, precisely because he doesn’t know his own father and thus doesn’t recognize him (accidental patricide) – Laius is thus “punished” in this myth precisely because he does not fulfill his parental duties, his obligations to the family unit.

The Murder of Laius by Oedipus, by French Painter Paul Joseph Blanc, 1867

Our Robo-phobic anxieties are based, among other things, on the fear of potential conflict, that same conflict that is usually un-realized between parents and their children but continues to exist, an ever-present irrational dread that clouds and burdens our relationships, with robots. What are then the social mechanisms that produce that conflict? Lead to the teleological essence of robots being oppositional to ours, to us? What are the forces that separate us, prevent us from being one (“familial”) unit with common interests, instead nurturing contrarian purposes? I offer two explanations, but of course there are many other possibilities:

Solutionism

In his book To Save Everything, Click Here (2013), journalist and internet researcher Evgeny Morozov presents a concept called Solutionism, the idea that every problem can be solved by technology. Part of the problem that the perception of Solutionism resonates is the tendency of the general public, certainly a decade or more ago, to accept with little to no criticism innovative technological solutions to seemingly difficult and substantial problems, or at least, that’s how they’re presented to the public. The problems are generational, the solutions are no less than magic, the opposition, absent. Why would there be any? The public was not much aware of the existence of said problems, their severity, the acute and dire need for solutions, but the public is also quite content and satisfied with the solutions offered and implemented. Even more so, it accepts with not much review and zero opposition the political, social and economic changes that accompany said solutions, which are presented as desirable and welcome. Solutions to problems that not many were actually aware of…

When we examine the marketing narratives and strategies of supposedly futuristic services and products, such as autonomous cars or the current Metaverse trend, we can see that they are presented as huge strides forward in their ability to solve massive social problems. the Metaverse (by Facebook/Meta, for example) will allow us to connect and communicate with each other better than ever. The autonomous vehicle (by Tesla, possibly) will be the end of car accidents, traffic jams and most importantly – the hopeless, agonizing, and endless search for a spot; everybody could use a car exactly when they need to, not a milli-second more. (1).

Because we live in a society where such processes have already taken place, solutions have been implemented, and we’ve gone through several cycles of extraordinary visions and reality checks in recent decades, we’ve adopted some degree of natural suspicion; we know that these solutions, as they become integral to our lives, often reveal themselves as somewhat hostile to us, have a confrontational teleological essence to us. When we began using Facebook, we thought we could better stay in touch and catch up on the lives of our friends and loved ones. No one presented the possibility that a company like Cambridge Analytica would collect data about us and perform marketing and political manipulations with exemplary, frightening, and infuriating precision (2). When we started using YouTube, we thought we’ll just watch a bunch of short videos. Cats. Bloopers. Cat bloopers. No one ever imagined that the algorithm would decipher our exact political stance and send us more and more videos of an increasingly extreme nature (3).

When a robot is marketed to us as a solution, we’re immediately suspicious, and for good reason; we fear that behind the presented form, the obvert essence, one of presumably comfortable, elegant, and well-designed solution, hides an ulterior motive.

Image from Futurama, animated TV series

Ownership

In a robot-Utopia, a society in which robots perform any and all work, who will have the right to reap the fruits of labor? We don’t need to imagine or speculate as this has been happening in cyclical fashion for centuries. Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote in his book The Conquest of Bread (1892) about how all the marvelous technological achievements of any single entrepreneur, CEO, or capitalist are dwarfed by the marvelous technological achievements made over centuries and millennia of human existence and that has been laid at their disposal and were necessary for their success.

Elon Musk. Compared to the history of technological development, the contribution of any single engineer, entrepreneur or investor is miniscule.

The industrial revolution is now hundreds of years old. Almost everyone who participated in it, renovated, enhanced, optimized, and maximized our means of production, had died long ago. But the factories that have filled the world and have multiplied by thousands the percentages of possible production volumes do not equally serve all humans on the face of the Earth. Ownership is divided according to rules that seem completely arbitrary, using a broad enough historical perspective. These are the initial conditions of a society, our society, into which we’re worried to insert robots; for very good reason.

Robots manufactured by corporations in the substantial quantities that will make it possible to replace the human workforce will probably be privately owned. Anyone unable to afford and operate a robot (or, as it seems, a fleet of robots), will be outgunned and outnumbered, left behind and lose all ability to fight for their place in the market, in society. This problem was predicted in 1970 by philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book On Violence in which she postulates that a society cannot be oppressed only and entirely by violence as oppressive violence must hold a certain justification, otherwise the people required to apply oppressive violence (police, military) will refuse to apply it. The caveat she raises and opines on against this argument is precisely the possibility that an army of robots will enable a small minority to hold a monopoly on violence with no need for justification, since it can go to (autonomous) war, if necessary. If robots are to be at the heart of another phase, the next cycle of the industrial revolution, it’s quite reasonable to fear that the distribution of capital and power will be even more centralized than previous cycles.

Is absolute dread of any technological progress the only possible conclusion? We at Utopia believe otherwise. Just as parents can live in peace, love and harmony, have positive and supportive relationships with their children, so can humans bring robots into a world well-prepared and ready for them, a world that enables a life of reciprocity and mutual growth. For that to happen we first must understand that the most important step towards a mechanized heaven, a robotic utopia, is not technological at all, but a more just, fair and equitable organization of human society.

Danger! Robots Ahead!

As part of the current philosophical discussions about robots and artificial intelligence, questions related to consciousness keep coming up: can a machine develop consciousness (or perhaps can consciousness inhabit a machine), does a machine need consciousness at all to be intelligent, and of course – what consciousness actually is. Science fiction writers have been discussing the subject for decades using robots, computers, and cyborgs that every science fiction prodigy can recite in their sleep: Frankenstein, HAL 9000, Marvin the Paranoid Android. But two characters from one of the most famous literary works in history have slipped under the radar all these years and it’s time to bring them up from the philosophical afterlife to the heart of our discussion in the 21st century – Tick-Tock and the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum.

As soon as 1900, in the first book of the series, The Tin Man appears, known as the Tin Woodman, or by his real and human name: Nick Chopper, since he was originally a real man whose body parts were replaced by metal parts. Indeed, in contemporary terms the Tin Man is a cyborg. Again, this is the year 1900, years before singularists struggling to cope with the anxiety of death would suggest that we start replacing our perishable organs with mechanical parts that last forever. Seven years later, the cyborg with the rusting limbs, along with Dorothy and the rest of the famous gang, will meet Tick-Tock – a robot in every sense of the word, except for the fact that the word itself has not yet been invented and is therefore referred to in the book as Clockwork Man. The fact that Tick Tock is a real tin man, completely brainless and unconscious, shines a bright light on our Tin Woodman, who is after a heart (as opposed to a Scarecrow who is hot for a brain for some reason).

Tik Tok of Oz, The Eighth Book in the Wizard of Oz book series by L. Frank Baum, first published in 1914

A cyborg in search of a heart in the early 20th century is a flashing red light that we’ve all missed in the last hundred and twenty years. We are all so preoccupied with the question of whether a machine can have consciousness that we have missed an equally interesting question: can a machine have a heart? After all, what are Philip K. Dick’s androids if not conscious, but heartless? What are the empathy tests that Descartes gives them if not a way to understand if they have a heart, or not?

A heartless intelligent machine is the machine we caution from, which comes to life as part of the race to develop artificial intelligence without measures being taken to ensure that it does not turn the entire universe into paperclips, as Nick Bostrom’s famous parable essay (more on this in Shalev Moran’s essay, Universal Perspective Machines). A machine with a heart will never turn the entire universe into pins, because it will realize that the universe is full of beings with hearts like itself – empathetic, with imaginations and dreams, turning them into a pin would not be so pleasant for them. One can only hope that if and when the imagined nightmare machine does wake up, it will ask that we take it down the yellow brick road to the Wizard of Oz, because we probably won’t do it ourselves.

In August 2020, as CoVid19 was rampaging, Neuralink’s senior team gathered for a public presentation event, the stated purpose of which was recruitment. Musk started off, presenting the company’s vision, reviewing the challenges and achievements – including two pigs, in one a Neuralink device was implanted, and in the other a device was implanted and removed, to show that the process is reversible. When the first part ended, he invited the team on stage and together they answered the public’s questions from Twitter.

Towards the end the team is asked to answer one by one – what is the Neuralink future they imagine? What is the application at the top of their personal “wish list” to develop? The answers were mesmerizing, shocking, beautiful, ludicrous, frightening.

Following is the transcript as edited by Uri Aviv. Some artistic liberty was taken in presenting the participants as well as bringing two additional segments from the one-hour presentation into the final part.

Moderator: As a closing question, I thought we might go down the line starting with Dan. And what I’m wondering is, what is the number one thing on your wish list, that you’re really hoping that the Neuralink device will do over time, that you’re working towards.

Our first answer is from Dan. We’ve looked and looked and have no idea who is Dan or what he does at Neuralink.

Dan: So my background is in visual neuroscience, and one of the things I think has great potential for the Neuralink is to provide a visual prosthesis for people who have retinal injury or blindness through eye injury. You can essentially plug a camera directly into the visual cortex and stimulate with an enormous array of 1000s, or maybe Tens of 1000s of electrodes, to recreate a visual image. And in time, perhaps, you can use that same technology in people who haven’t lost vision to produce some kind of heads-up display. Something like “Terminator” or something like that…

Moderator: Wonderful…

Elon Musk: In fact, we are saying that, like, over time, we could actually give somebody supervision, like, you could have like ultraviolet or infrared, or see in radar, basically name your frequency, you can just dynamically adjust the sensor or have a set of sensors that feed into the visual cortex across a wide range of frequencies and actually have… ahhh…  superhuman vision.

Next is Dongjin Seo, DJ for short, co-founder of Neuralink, VP Engineering with a PhD from Berkley.

Dan (right) and DJ (left)

DJ: Yeah, so for me, telepathy. So I think it’s an incredible amount of effort to put your thoughts into a set of words, and, you know, it comes out, completely compressed. So, being able to do that seamlessly, without being able to compress it with all of the mechanisms – that would be great.

Elon Musk: Yeah, it’s like just – I’m sorry, to add further to that – In fact, when I did the “Wait But Why” article, I think that Tim thought I said “consensual telepathy”, but I said “conceptual telepathy”, Presumably it would be consensual…  ahmmm…. because you definitely don’t want just people, you know, sending stuff into your brain without your consent.

But… ahh… a lot of our brain thought capacity is, goes into compressing our thoughts into words. And then you think like, the data rate of words… words are very slow, very low data rate, and reporting a tremendous amount of mental energy into compressing the concepts and thoughts in our head into words and then slowly talking – speech is so very very slow.

And we could actually send the true thoughts, we can obviously have far better communication because we can convey the actual concepts, the actual thoughts, uncompressed, to somebody else.

Moderator: So, non-linguistic, consensual, and conceptual, telepathy.

Elon Musk: Yes, exactly. Non-linguistic consensual conceptual telepathy.

Next is Ian O’Hara, VP Robotics.

Ian: I’ve actually been excited from the beginning, sort of, about the, like, side benefit of these devices. I sort of see them as… essentially like an oscilloscope to a printed circuit board is our device to the brain, where just by virtue of having us in there, and being able to see what’s actually going on, you’ll end up learning a ton about how the brain works. And so sort of augmenting people, but also just using that to learn a lot more about neurological diseases is really exciting to me.

Moderator: Absolutely.

We’ve arrived at Paul Merolla, another co-founder here at Neuralink.

Right to Left: Ian O’Hara, Paul Merolla, Team Member #1, Joey O’Doherty

Paul: So to sort of follow up on Elon’s thought – you know, I feel – and I imagine a lot of other people feel the same way – that there’s a lot of sort of trapped creativity in your mind. You can, for example, close your eyes and conjure up an incredible, like Dali-esque scene. But you know, if I wanted to actually show someone that it would take years of like, honing a craft to be able to paint that. And so, you know, potentially with enough electrodes in the right places, you could begin to sort of tap into those raw concepts or thought vectors and be able to decode that and show people. It could be for art, you mentioned music, or even for like, engineering, a three-dimensional model.

Moderator: So, mental artistry as a new field.

The next speaker wasn’t even presented. We don’t even know his name.

Team member: I like to think about ways to interface devices with biology better. And so one of the things I’m looking forward to is getting this thing, to look less like technology and more like biology, so that it really is, you know, seamlessly interfaced with the brain, stable for a very long time. And then similar to that, having stimulation be much more precise and multidimensional, such that, eventually, the brain sort of doesn’t really know if it’s being stimulated from outside or inside, and you end up just sort of completely merging.

Next up is Joey O’Doherty, he’s a neuroscientist and neuro-engineer and runs the Brain-Machine Interface work at Neuralink.

Joey: You know, following up on stimulation, one of the things our device can do is simultaneously read and write on every channel, stimulate and record. And that’s, you know, both a more challenging problem than it may seem like at first, but also, you know, incredibly exciting, the sort of vistas that it opens up is really kind of the whole game in terms of interfacing with the nervous system. And I’m very excited to use that.

Our next speaker is Robin Young, she’s a mechanical engineer and runs the mechanics and assembly work for the implant at Neuralink.

Robin: Yeah, I’m excited just because of the scalability of the device. We’re doing everything in-house, and all of it can scale to more channels, more brain regions, etc. I think, yeah, I’m really interested about solving things related to anxiety or depression, or even like removing fear. Like, I’m an athlete, rock climbing without fear would be…

Elon Musk: Maybe a little bit of fear…

Robin: Yeah, just a little… And also, it’d be great if we could make the pigs fly…

Next is Matthew MacDougall, head neurosurgeon at Neuralink.

Right to Left: Robin Yoing, Matthew MacDougall, Elon Musk, Max Hodak

Next is Matthew MacDougall, head neurosurgeon at Neuralink.

Matthew: I think we have an incredible opportunity to limit human suffering to a tiny fraction of what it is today, in all kinds of different avenues. Pain, being the essence of suffering, we might be able to control that finally. And so many other diseases, so much other suffering in the world, I think the Neuralink device could help a lot with.

Elon Musk: I think all these things are great functions for a Neuralink. On a species-level basis, I think it’s going to be important for us to figure out how we coexist with advanced artificial intelligence. And, you know, I think, achieving some kind of AI symbiosis, where you have an AI extension of yourself, like a tertiary layer above the limbic system and cortex, and having that symbiosis be good, such that the future of the world is controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth. I think that that’s obviously going to be the future that we want, presumably, if it’s the sum of our collective will. So, I think it’s going to be important from an existential threat standpoint to achieve a good AI symbiosis. And that’s what I think might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.

Next up is Max Hodak, co-founder and CEO of Neuralink.

Max: I think that a good benchmark of ‘Does it work well in humans?’ is can a quadriplegic… does it work well enough for them to play ‘Starcraft’? That’s a good functional target.

Elon Musk: Yeah, for sure.

Max: I have, in many ways, a very basic science interest, which is I’m really interested in the nature of consciousness. There’s a lot of very silly philosophy that’s been written about it over the last one thousand years. But I think that it’s really… we’ve been very limited by the tools and our ability to interrogate and measure the brain. And as these tools get better, it will pull it into the realm of physics, and it’s really one of the last big great mysteries in science.

Felix Deku is our next speaker, director of microfabrication.

Right to Left: Elon Musk, Max Hodak, Felix Deku, Zack, Autumn Sorrells

Felix: So for me, can you imagine a disease-free future? A future where you know what’s going to happen to you before it happens, so you can prevent it. With these devices, we will be able to not just pick up electrical signals, you can also pick up chemical clues in the brain. And if you’re successful, which I know we are. we’ll be able to kind of prevent ahead of time, you know, diseases. And really, the functions of these devices are widespread. So I’m looking forward to the future.

Zack is up, he works on Felix’s microfabrication team.

Zack: I’m really excited about the opportunity to help people overcome challenges that they face through life circumstances, bad luck, through no fault of their own, spinal cord injury, brain disease, some devastating things that completely changes your life. Hopefully, we can help them get some function back.

We’ve arrived at Autoumn Sorrells, Animal Care Program Director at Neuralink.

Autumn: Well, I’m Autumn, and I lead our animal care program. And our philosophy here is to set up a system where the animals are able to volunteer, to make choices to participate in our projects. As you see, sometimes they choose not to participate, and that’s okay. We want to make sure that our animals are happy and healthy. So, all of the behavioural research that we do is led by positive reinforcement. And again, that allows for them to choose to volunteer or not.

I know and love many humans with autism spectrum disorder. So, I’m really interested to see how the Neuralink might be able to support them if they chose to do that.

Last but not least, Sam is a veterinarian who works with Autumn on animal care.

Sam: Yeah, so I mean, everyone else along the line has had, you know, amazing ideas and suggestions. For me, it’s about memories, and everyone loses those memories over time. You know, I already can’t remember what happened to me when I was younger, and you know, it will only get worse. And so having a repository of memories that you can access whenever you want, if you’re feeling down, you can go access some good memories, you know, if you miss something or miss somebody, you can go and access those memories. And I think that would just be such a life-changing experience to be able to just tap into that.

Moderator: That was such a beautiful and diverse array of answers there.

Elon Musk: Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for tuning in. And as I said, please consider working at Neuralink and helping us solve these problems. There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done to go from here to a device that is available, widely available, and affordable and reliable. So please consider joining us and supporting us in our mission. Thank you very much.

Where are they now?

All according to public information

HR

Still with Neuralink: DJ, Joey and Matthew.

Ian, Robin, Max, Felix, Autumn and Paul have all left the company.

Ian O’Hara left in early 2023. According to Linkedin he’s now a mechatronics contractor, and – quote – “If you think I might be a good fit for you, please contact me.”. so for all your mechatronics needs, reach out. He also mentions he keeps in close touch and will forever be a big believer in Neuralink.

Paul Merolla left in June 2022, and as of 2023 he is listed as co-founder of MK ONE, an AI company.

Robin Young left Neuralink in April 2021, moved to Berlin and worked at WHITEVoid, a design studio, for a year. She is now, according to Linkedin, quantum engineer at AQT Alpine Quantum Technologies, working on quantum computing! How cool is that!

Autumn Sorrells left 2 months ago and now offers consultancy as an animal behavior training solutions specialist.

Felix Deku left in 2021 as well, worked for another company in the BCI sector (Braingrade), and currently teaches full time at the University of Oregon.

Max Hodak left in 2021 and is now founder and CEO of a new biotech startup simply called Science.

Financials

In July 2021 Neuralink announced round C of investments, 205 Million USD, including Vy Capital (I couldn’t figure out who this is), Google Ventures, Peter Thiel (Founders Fund) and Sam Altman.

In August 2023 Neuralink announed series D funding, Peter Thiel investing another 323 Million USD.

Achievements

Through 2020 and 2021 Neuralink moved from experimenting on pigs to macaques monkeys, and in April 2021 released a video that shocked the web – a monkey playing telepathic pong. It was revealed that the experiments cause extreme suffering. Neuralink denied the accusations but did admit that 15 of the 23 macaques monkeys that participated in the experiment, died.

In 2023 the FDA cleared Neuralink for human experiments. Noland Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, received the first Neuralink implant late January this year. He is doing well.

What is a Robot?

Are Data and Optimus Prime, robots? How about the Voyager 1 NASA space probe? “Small Wonder” Vicky? The Golem of Prague? The iRobot “Rumba” cleaner? Rick Deckard? HAL 9000? The Monolith? The bot on the other side of the chat with your bank? You? Me?

As basic and simplistic as it may be, this question is philosophically ever-present and extremely pertinent to our times. Naive questions are at the heart of science fiction, sending us at Warp speeds far beyond the limits of the familiar and banal into unknown territories of cosmic space and unexpected depths of thought and consciousness – absurd, awesome, fascinating. This is why we support, examine and celebrate the creation of these speculative science fiction “final frontiers” at Utopia.

The robot is a symbol and a parable; political, technological, social, and philosophical.

The robot is the working class, workers who perform difficult and dangerous tasks but are necessary for modern society (or are they?).

The robot is a symbol of development and progress, innovation, and industry. It allows us, in its almost-but-not-too-human image, to simplify and anthropomorphize the complex and layered discussion between man and machine, humanity and technology.

The human but mechanical Robot, its uncanny vitality, the inanimate object, yet – animate, and yet still not part of the animal kingdom, all contradictions leading us to various ancient philosophical texts and debates regarding body and mind, consciousness and soul, life and death, creation and destruction, ON and OFF.

The direct descendants of the Robot – the Android and the AI, the Artificial Intelligence – expand our consciousness as they challenge the very definition of consciousness, blurring the boundaries of brain/computer, human/divine, death and eternal life.

The Robot’s beauty lies with it being a human conceptual construct, inherent to that are the ambiguities and flexibilities of the term itself. The Robot will be whatever we want it to be, and thus two types of questions beg to be asked – What do we want the Robot to be? And who are the “We”, answering that first question? Which types of Robots express what sort of desires? What vision of the future do the robots serve, bring about, and who are the engineers, titans of industry, visionaries, propheteers, who are masters of the robots?

To go back to our early question regarding Data and Optimus Prime, Deckard, Voyager 1, the Monolith and the Bank’s Chatbot, we’re extremely inclusive at Utopia. Our answer would be “yes, yes, yes, yes and yes”. All are robots. as are we.

In the Beginning Was the Word

Celebrating the centennial of the Robot is commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the creation of the actual concept, the term, the word, Robot, first used not by an engineer or technology entrepreneur, but by a writer and playwright.

In 1921 Czech writer and playwright Karl Čapek published his seminal and prophetic text, deeply understanding his moment in time and heralding the future. “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (RUR), the play he wrote, presented a futuristic fantasy confronting industry and humanity, pitting the global commercial enterprise with the aspirational values ​​of Humanism, waning in the futuristic play even as they were slowly being formulated and implemented in the legal and social realities of his days.

Capek accomplished this in his play with the inventive metaphor of the Robots – man-made artificial creatures, biological automatons created by the genius scientist, industrialist, and capitalist, “Rossum”. The robots are manufactured in Rossum’s factories, designed and built to replace men in particularly difficult, dangerous, or boring tasks. The word “Robot” was invented especially for the play – the theatrical premiere was also the worldwide premiere of the word and concept of the Robot.

Cover of RUR, Rossum’s Universal Robots, in one of many variations, as a novel

These days the robot is clearly defined and characterized as an artificial, sometimes humanoid, automata – metallic, mechanical, not to say robotic. Capek’s robots were in actuality utterly different. In the play the robots are created from organic material and pass as humans, one cannot discern between them and the humans around them, ordering them around. These days we would probably refer to them as Androids such as the Replicants from “Blade Runner” or the Cylons of “Battlestar Galactica”.

In the play, the robots rebel against their creators and owners. (Almost) all of humanity is slaughtered. The creation of the Robots brings about the end of humanity but it’s also the creation story of a new society, the Robot society. The first Robot story is also the first story of a Robot rebellion, the rise of the machines.

RUR is far from being the first story telling of man, a man, assuming the power of creation by his own hands (specifically man, not woman, to drive home the point). Utilizing creativity and ingenuity, technical prowess and artistic expertise, courage and impudence (and often going against nature and/or the will of the God/s), man creates something in his image. It’s a story as old as stories go, part of Greek mythology, Jewish mysticism (The Golem which of all places takes place in Prague, the Capital of the Czech Republic), philosophical debate and literature.

Crafting quasi-human sculptures and marvelous mechanical doll-machines is part of the long history of art and engineering. When writing RUR there were other terms in existence, known well-enough and at-the-ready, such as Automatons and Androids. Why invent and use a new word? In “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, the word “Robot”, with its relevance and meaning, is at the heart of the play (and to be precise, the pair of terms, “Robot” and “Rossum”).

Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1890, one of the most well-known and iconic portrayals of the famous story from Greek mythology

An adaptation of Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Léon Gérôme, by Gili Ron, 2021, as part of the Galath3a project

Image of the Golem Awards, the film awards given out at the Utopia International Film Festival, designed by Michael Rozanov

The term “Robot” was coined by Karl’s brother, Joseph Capek (whose political and public criticism of the Nazi regime led to his death at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but that’s a whole other story…). In Czech it implies forced labor and/or slavery. The Robots created for the play add another dimension to the mythological, religious, philosophical, and familiar story of creating a new, human-like creature, by a man, in man’s image. The added dimension is quantitative, but qualitative. Man creates not one single being in his image, but a great many. Not only one extraordinary life-like machine, one exquisite and beautiful sculpture that comes to life, but a multitude, an enormous number, a whole man-made society, a clear metaphor for an entire (exploited) social class of (forced) laborers, their very meaning lies in their name – Robots.

The play anthropomorphizes, gives human shape and representation, to grand technological, political and social processes of the time. Europe is overflowing with tumultuous revolutions and counterrevolutions. In the West – the second industrial revolution brings forth the production line and thousands become small and insignificant screws in colossal machines of industry. In the East – the Bolshevik Revolution encouraged low-wage and low-class workers and famously calls out – Workers of the World, Unite!

Capek’s contemporary and fellow Czech, Franz Kafka, writes about the inhumanity and insignificance in the face of the power of the new and ever-growing government bureaucracies of the time. Many have written about the monstrous consequences of the industrialization of the war that just ended, the War to End War. Capek was well aware of the symbolism he endowed in his creation and creatures; the desire to replace human beings in dangerous, hard or boring tasks, the connotation of forced labor or slavery, the context of replacing human workers with machines on a massive scale, their rebellion against their masters. The right word at the right time.

Ford’s famous assembly line in action

The play was a huge success. RUR premiered in London’s West End, on Broadway in New York City (with Spencer Tracy as one of the Robots!), and even in Hebrew in 1930’s Tel Aviv, at the Ohel Theater. Altogether, it was translated and played in about 30 languages ​​worldwide.

With the play’s success, the term at the heart of it also gained popularity. The media began to make extensive use of the word “Robot” throughout the 1920s, a decade of technological breakthroughs, mechanization, industrialization, and urbanization. An automatic system that replaces ticket-sellers on the London Underground? A “Robot-ticket-seller”. A traffic light replaces the traffic policeman at major intersections? “The Robot Police-Man” (no, not “Robocop”, not yet anyway).

Industrialists and technology entrepreneurs labelled the robot as a science & engineering ambition, a goal, an objective that expresses innovation, defines progress and projects technological superiority. Thus began an ongoing dialogue between the story of the robot in the worlds of art & culture, and the engineering, scientific, industrial robot. Hovering above this conversation is the naive but obvious dilemma we began with, What is a Robot? What can a robot do? What is it supposed to do? What is its purpose?

The Robot Policeman, the robot appears in London, 1927

The Robot Ticket-Seller, an automated ticket machine in the London Underground system, 1933

The fact that the robots, beginning with those in Capek’s play and on with the many robots in pop-culture, media, and in public perception, are meant to replace humans in dangerous, hard, or boring work raises further questions. What is work? Do humans “need” to work at all? What is dangerous, difficult, or boring work? What is difficulty, danger, or boredom? And since robots are meant to replace humans, the questions we pose about robots are actually directed towards humans …. What can humans do? What are we supposed to do? What is our purpose?

These questions have been asked since time immemorial but we’re in the midst of a complicated period in which these questions are asked again and again, with a newfound urgency, and rightly so. It seems as if the answer to the question “Should humans direct traffic?” has been resolved, but should they continue to mine coal or cobalt? (1) What about assembling iPhones? Should humans continue to paint counterfeits and replicas of oil paintings, wholesale? (2) And what about content monitoring and moderation on Facebook? (3) A job requiring one to view death threats, animal abuse and revenge porn, done by a few so that we, the general populace and Facebook “users”, will not be exposed to horrendous and traumatic content as we continuously scroll while at work, home on the couch or on the toilet? Most importantly, will humans or robots be the ones to process, pack, ship and deliver our orders from Amazon (4), AliExpress, Wolt, or Uber Eats?

Cobalt mining done by child-labor in the Congo, image from a report by The Guardian, Image: Sebastian Meyer/Corbis via Getty Images

A tourist takes a picture of a replica artist painting a Van Gogh in the Chinese village of Dafen, Shenzen (Image: Shutterstock)

Lords of Land, Masters of Robots

Let’s return to the title of the Capek’s play, “Rossum’s Universal Robots”. Much has been written about Capek’s imaginary humanoids, the robots. Little attention has been paid to Rossum, the industrialist tycoon and brilliant scientist who first created the robots and then the factories that produced them at industrial quantities. “Rossum” is but a name, but it being “just a name”, it has not been given proper attention. Not unlike any number of biblical figures, mythological deities or pop culture icons (from Chronos to Moses to Inspector Gadget), his invented name is replete with meaning. Rossum in Czech implies logic, intellect, reason.

The name of the play, “Rossum’s Universal Robots” can thus potentially be read as “The Universal Servitude to Intellect” or possibly “Universal Servitude, Lead to by Reason”. According to Capek, cold logic and rationale bring forth the replacement of the human with the non-human (in hard, dangerous, or boring labor, to be sure), and for the sake of progress, perhaps the enforcement of slavery. Capek saw the Gordian Knot between enormous private capital, global trade, advanced technologies, the rise of the machines and the demise of humanity.

The “Roaring Twenties” of the past century were also the last and particularly turbulent years of a certain kind of capitalism and a certain kind of capitalist. The richest man in the world at the time was infamous industrialist and engineer Henry Ford, the founder of the car company that bears his name to this day. Although Ford is associated with vehicles, his significant contribution to history has been the industrial assembly line. The innovative manufacturing method implemented by the Ford Motor Company made it an industry leader for decades and made Ford one of the wealthiest people in the world. Ford is no less identified with the assembly line than he is with the famous Model-T, of course, alongside anti-Semitism, racism, and many other forms of bigotry and hatred (also unsurprisingly, a staunch opponent of workers’ rights who has squashed union attempts in his factories).

A century separates Henry Ford and Elon Musk, the latter warns time and time again of the existential danger in the rise of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, that will undoubtedly kill all humans, all the while boasting that Tesla, the car company he owns and runs, is the largest robotics company in the world, and under his instruction and based on existing algorithms that drive(-assist) their (somewhat) autonomous cars, had begun work on the Tesla-Bot, humanoid robots.

Amazon (3) and Facebook (4) employ more and more robots in their factories, making people work for meager wages and little to no rights, requiring their human workers (usually referred to as partners or associates, not employees) to perform particularly hard, dangerous, or boring tasks alongside (mechanical) robots and managed and controlled by (digital, algorithmic) robots.

Charlie Chaplin presented this diabolical relationship with great talent in his classic moving picture “Modern Times” (1936). The industrial machine remains far from perfect. For it to perform well, fulfill its tasks and meet its potential, human workers are required alongside it, adjusting and adapting themselves to the great machine, servicing the machine, becoming a part of the machine, one with the machine. We are promised a Promised Land, prophesized an Earthly paradise, a techno-Utopian Elysium Fields where machines serve us, replacing us in all our hard, dangerous, or boring tasks. Instead, we live in a Dystopian reversal of that vision. Humanity serves the machines it has created. Whether we are Cobalt miners in the Congo, production line workers in China, content moderators in Malaysia, or taxi drivers in London, we answer to robots, enslaved in various forms to the local and global machine, serving the will of the master, the machine, the algorithm, Rossum. Who’s the Robot now?

This is an intermediary stage, isn’t it? So say the Rossums of our time. Historically, things have never been better. We’re in an age of bliss. An Earthly paradise. Some fruits of scientific understanding and technological development may not be completely ripe, yet. It will all happen very soon, we’re moments away from the prophesized Utopia. It’s a transitional period to be sure, an inevitable intermediate stage in which the beautiful rays of light from the Utopian sunrise are not yet shared by all. Only a tiny portion of us can see those first glimpses of Sunlight from high a-top the mountain, relishing in the beauty of the sunrise, enjoying its warmth and comfort. This’s what the industrialists, engineers, and technology entrepreneurs, the Rossums, repeatedly claim. For the robotic majority, the Sunrise is hidden; one cannot tell if it’s even happening at all. Some of us are in the valley below, others stuck underground, the mountain shadows us. For some Utopia seems reachable, the Sunlight a few steps away, for others it’s a complete fantasy, a dangerous and manipulative fabrication, completely untethered from reality.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, presenting himself with his well-earnt Astronaut badge, upon his return from space, in the maiden manned voyage by the company he founded, Blue Origin (July, 2021). In his remarks he thanked all Amazon customers and employees that made his space flight possible (photo by Joe Riddle, Getty Images)

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO Facebook (now Meta), celebrating the 2021 American Independence Day, the 4^th of July, by uploading on his Instagram profile (a social media company he owns) a video of himself riding a prestigious and pricey hydrofoil surfboard as he waves the American flag.

Masters and Slaves

This is only the first layer of a complex and multi-dimensional discussion. It’s clear to us all why it is essential to reduce hard, dangerous, or particularly boring work done by humans. Doing so is a net good, but the issue is ever more complex. We’re all aware that while we don’t much appreciate difficulty, it’s sometimes necessary. Hardship is part of life, part of living. So is danger. Without any boredom, this article, and the rest of our magazine, might not have been written.

What is a job? What does a “world without work” look like? And would such a world really be a Utopia, an Earthly paradise, or perhaps a terrible Dystopia – and for whom? And possibly most importantly – how and by whom these futures are imagined, narrated, designed and realized.

All of this and so much more can be found in the original play that brought the robot into existence, as well as the Robot uprising. A workers’ revolution alongside questions on the proper, Utopian social order. Should we create global robots, or is it wiser to develop regional-national ones, with different languages, cultures and “skin”-coloring that separate them, so that they apart, despise their different brethren, much like people do, so as to make sure they do not unite and overthrow us? Do machines have a soul? If that’s a possibility, a choice by man himself, should man create a machine with a soul? If we create human replacements, is it right to give them the capacity for pain?

And, of course, can robots make other robots? All of these difficult dilemmas converge on the basic question of procreation, the ability to create offspring and the next generation, the capacity of humanity and of man, and his creations/successors, to reproduce, to love, and the noble, implicit connection between this defining question to all the rest. Creativity and love, suffering and work, genesis and death.

All this and more in issue # 3 of the Utopia magazine – “Masters and Slaves” and at Utopia events throughout this year.

Master and Slaves, cover art for Utopia edition #3, design by Yuval Brenner

Haunted houses have been one of the most popular settings in the horror genre since the early days of cinema, and in general. The idea that the place that is supposed to be the safest of all becomes threatening and even dangerous is an excellent means to arouse anxieties and fears that exist within all of us (see Dana Tor‘s article on “The Unheimlich Anxiety” – U.A.) and to raise a discussion about the meaning of home in the lives of the characters in the story, as well as in the lives of the audience. It is therefore not surprising that many creators return home and to the concept of home in various works throughout their artistic careers. However, in my opinion, one filmmaker in particular has been predominantly preoccupied with this specific theme in recent years, in a broad, profound, and unique way: American film director Mike Flanagan.

Mike Flanagan

In 2011, Flanagan’s first feature film, Absentia, was released (to be precise, it was released directly to DVD but gained enormous popularity at festivals and on the new streaming service of a then-young company – Netflix). Since then, Flanagan has continued to work at a frenetic pace, and as of writing these lines (August 2021), he has seven feature films and two television series under his belt. His works include Oculus (USA, 2014), which was his first hit (and was even screened at that year’s Utopia Festival); his adaptations of Stephen King’s books Gerald’s Game (USA, 2017) and Doctor Sleep (USA/UK, 2019) (starring Ewan McGregor, a sequel to the masterpiece The Shining) and, of course, the two series he created for Netflix, The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), which may be the best known to Israeli audiences (see Maya Magnat‘s article about the “The Haunted House” – U.A.).

The Haunting of Hill House, Netflix 2018

Flanagan explores the home in all his films and works (even those that do not deal directly with haunted houses, such as Hush (2016) and his first film, Absentia), in two ways, on two different levels: the level of the real, where he uses the physical space of the house as a key element in his work, and the thematic level, where he explores the house as well as the haunting (let’s not forget that the house is haunted), in relation to the characters and the process they go through.

The Real House

In Flanagan’s movies, we see that the real house, the physical structure itself, is just as important as the element that haunts it. The importance and significance of the physical structure as a means of expressing domestic horror is well illustrated in his film Ouija: Origin of Evil (USA, 2016), one of Flanagan’s more commercial works but in which his unique fingerprint is still evident (1). The film tells the story of Alice, a single mom who, with the help of her two daughters, Leena and Doris, pretends to communicate with the dead to make a living. In an attempt to improve their act, they decide to add a Ouija board, which turns out to be a real gateway for communication with the afterlife. At the beginning of the film, the characters treat the structure of the house as flexible, a changeable structure, to support their act as psychics. The structure of the house takes on additional significance as the plot develops and supernatural elements enter the story, revealing additional spaces in the house that change our perception of it and of the source of the horror in the film.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (US, 2016)

In addition, Flanagan takes special care to emphasize the domestic space in his films, both to heighten the horror and as a plot element. This can be seen in the two films he created for Netflix.

Hush (2016) (2) is about Maedee, a deaf woman who is being hunted down in her home by a serial killer, and there’s a lot of focus on the gap between what’s inside the house and what’s outside of it. The home is a fortress, a stronghold where Maedee is protected, compared to the outside world, where terror reigns. Flangan reinforces the contrast by ensuring that, until late in the plot, the violence does not penetrate the house; when the violence finally breaks through and enters the house, the house itself and its structure take on central plot significance—every element of the interior design serves to drive the plot forward. 

Hush (US, 2016)

In his film Gerald’s Game (2017), Flanagan emphasizes the importance of space even more. The film is about Jesse and Gerald, a married couple who go on a romantic vacation and decide to try role-playing. However, during the game, Gerald has a heart attack and dies, while Jesse remains tied to the bed, unable to free herself. Most of the film takes place in a single space, a single room, and even around a single bed. Every nightstand and every screw in the room receives design and plot significance, which enhances the visual aspect and positions Flanagan as a brilliant creator who makes unique use of the tools that cinema, and specifically the horror genre, has to offer.

The Thematic House

Flangan’s talent for expressing his creativity in design and screenwriting is impressive, but he truly excels on the thematic level. In most of his films, Flangan creates an equation: not only is the house haunted, but the characters are haunted as well. Thus, the trauma that the character experienced in the past resurfaces, as a mirror image of the horror that the character is forced to face in the present. They must confront their anxiety, defeat the ghosts of the past, and exorcise the demons that now haunt them, defeating them all at the same time.

A clear example of this is in the film The Gate (2014) (3). The film is about a brother and sister who lost their parents as children and try to defeat the evil mirror from their childhood home, which they believe that have led to their parents’ death. The parallel between the need to destroy the mirror and the need to overcome the terrible experience they experienced in their childhood (without spoiling this wonderful film, the murder is only the tip of the iceberg) becomes clearer as the film progresses, and as more details are revealed, it becomes clear that this is in fact a projection made by the characters — which does not mean that the horror is not real.

Oculus (US, 2014)

A similar idea is also at the heart of the film Gerald’s Game, mentioned earlier, which I consider to be Flanagan’s most complete and successful film. In this case, the house is not haunted, but the experience that Jessie, the main character, goes through, floods her with difficult memories from the past. It is revealed that the bed in which Jessie is confined for most of the film is similar to her childhood bed, from which she seems to have never been able to emotionally escape. 

Gerald’s Game (US, 2017)

In Flanagan’s films, man and home are one, and the ability to defeat the evil that dwells within the home depends directly on the ability of his characters to defeat their own demons. Interestingly, although the equation is the same in most of his films, the results are completely different. Thus, contrary to expectations, it is impossible to know whether the characters in his films will overcome their trauma or be sucked deeper into the abyss and darkness. In my opinion, this is further proof of the depth of Flanagan’s work—not every character will deal with the same situation in the same way.

In most of Flanagan’s films, the trauma occurs in childhood, and more specifically, within the family. What haunts his characters is often home itself, real or figurative, only in an earlier stage of their lives.

Flanagan alongside actress Karen Gilan, on the set of The Gate

Flangan’s rich and unique cinematic technique, and in particular his use of horror to deal with trauma, positions him as one of the most highly regarded contemporary filmmakers in the genre. I am always curious to see his next work, and I recommend you to keep an eye on him too!

Strange days is a video art installation that incorporates a breathing human body and custom original software code (c++) to talk about the rebirth of the ‘new human’.

Strange Days, Video Art (2018), by Shirley Shor, Sound by Dror Rada

In Strange Days the body and the space merge into one network. The body becomes a medium, a portal that receives and transmits information. The terminal-body can now connect and disconnect with other interfaces over the bit-sphere. It’s an interwoven system in which “the knee bone is connected to the I-bahn”.

Strange Days, Video Art (2018), by Shirley Shor, Sound by Dror Rada

“Shor makes further use in the architectural linear language. This time she projects it on the body of a woman, creating a fragment of the limitless living code. In the encounter between the human female body and the technological language of the line, Shor examines the line between man and machine. Is the body ‘trapped’ in the web? Or has it been connected into it for so long that they are now one? And perhaps now it attempts to encrypt itself in order to maintain its privacy?

Part of Shor’s solo exhibition, CryptoMania.

Are you smiling at me, or are you scowling?

***

Winter, a pharmacy in Copenhagen, 2020. I’ve been studying Danish for a few months, but am still far from understanding the language and speaking it. I ask the pharmacist about a pack of vitamin D, to somewhat relieve my winter depression. She does not understand what I’m saying; I do not understand her reply. Both our faces are covered by CoVid masks. She cannot even notice I’m speaking english, and so I do not notice that she’s answering in Danish. I try to joke about it, and smile. Even if she got the joke, how would she know I’m smiling at her? And how would I know whether the joke made her smile, or whether she’s scowling at me, “stupid tourist, there are people waiting in line”. I pay and walk away, out to the streets.

***

Winter, a pharmacy in Copenhagen, 2020 // Are you smiling at me, or are you scowling?

***

Winter, Hefer Valley, Israel, 1991. They say that Saddam has chemical warheads in the rockets he’s firing on us. Every citizen is issued by the state a personal protective kit that includes two objects: a syringe filled with Atropine, and a gas mask. The syringe penetrates the skin, the heart, an object of dread, and we will never use it. The mask envelopes the face, a tempting armor, an object of desire, and we will use it a lot. We cover not just our faces but also our home, one room chosen to be completely sealed with plastic sheets and sticky tape. At the sound of alarm we don our masks and head towards the safe room, stepping onto the stage of the domestic theater. I am a child, and as children do I have little sense of what’s a game and what’s not a game. I understand that something real is happening, but also am excited by the ritual, the intoxicating smell of rubber filling my nostrils. Years later we will learn that there were no chemicals inside the warheads, and the masks were perhaps part of a political theatre. But they remain part of the homefront culture, the show has changed reality: the safe room was solidified in law, and every new apartment built in Israel has to have access to a fortified safe space. At school, the teacher shows us how to decorate our protective kit’s cardboard box with crayons and stickers – as if it wasn’t already an attractive, enchanting object, even sans colors. And they teach us to keep it at arm’s reach, always.

***

Cinemas, 1994. Jim Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, a pitiful dork, who finds a magical mask that is meant to externalize whatever is suppressed in the person who bears it. The result is a horny, vengeful, narcissistic bully. Later in the film, a violent mobster bears the mask and becomes an even more violent mobster. A dog bears the mask and becomes even more of a dog. The logical conclusion is that Stanley Ipkiss was always a latent horny, vengeful, narcissistic bully. At the end of the movie, Stanely gets the girl.

***

Winter, Hefer Valley, Israel, 1991 // An Israeli family in a bomb shelter, all wearing ABC (Atomic/Biological/Chemical Weapons) masks, Image by Jane Fresco, Herzliya, from Wikipedia

The Mask, Jim Carrey, 1994

***

I’m on an airplane, a surgical mask on my face. It’s a long trip, I got to the airport in public transit, the mask has been on me for many hours now. I can smell my own breath. My scent fills the nose, amplified by the paperlike fabric. There is nothing normal about this, an aspect of myself I usually never notice. Like being in a room made of mirrors, like seeing myself from behind. What a mistake, I should have taken my cotton mask.

***

Cinemas, 1999. Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Anderson. He’s being interrogated by a clandestine government agency. They confront him with the fact he bears two identities – one registered in the tax registry under his given name, the other under a chosen name online. Only one identity is deemed acceptable by the agency. Thomas knows his rights, he demands his phone call. “Tell me, Mr. Anderson – what good is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?” riddles the agent, and Thomas discovers that his mouth has disappeared, the lips now connected in a smooth strip of skin from the nose to the chin.

***

Israeli TV Studio, 2000. It’s a popular evening talk show, and tonight’s guest is the hottest musical sensation of the season. Years before his rise to recent fame, this singer suffered two terrible accidents – a fall off a scaffold that has left him paraplegic, and a gas tank explosion that caused severe burns to his face and body. He lives in an abandoned house in a poor suburb, is known only by his alias “The Burned”, does not give any public performances, and has given one interview so far, to the biggest daily newspaper in the country, with his face completely covered by a medical mask. His voice trembles when he speaks, and becomes clear only when he begins singing his top-charts hit “Deception of Grace, Illusion of Beauty” (based on a quote from the Book of Proverbs) (1). The song is about a man in love who cannot reach his beloved, and it asks “how come this lie has lips?”. In the TV studio after singing, the Burned gets up from his wheelchair and unmasks himself to reveal flowing locks of thick hair and a beautiful face – the face of the actor-singer Haim Zinovich. With glistening eyes, on the verge of tears, Zinovich tells the interviewer that after many long years of failed attempts to reach an audience, he realized that journalists like him would never give him stagetime without this cover story.

***

Israeli TV Studio, 2000 // “The Burned”, actually actor-singer Haim Zinovich, interviewed by Yair Lapid

***

CoVid masks are a double whammy for people with eyeglasses. Especially on cold winter days. My breath gets trapped inside the mask, blowing up and out to my cheeks. I step outside, and immediately my glasses are filled with steam, obscuring my field of view. When I was younger I protected myself from the world by opting to wear thick-rimmed glasses. But now that I’m older and more confident, wishing to open myself to the world and to let it reach me, I choose lighter frames. And then comes the mask and covers my eyes in a misty veil. I walk carefully down the street, breathing slower to minimize the effect, and other pedestrians cannot see my eyes.

***

New York University’s School of the Arts, 2010. In the graduation exhibition of the prestigious Interactive Telecommunication Program, a graduate named Adam Harvey presents a series of photographs in which male and female models wear make-up designed with asymmetrical patterns, meant to disrupt and evade digital facial-recognition systems. The project is a hit, and Harvey is invited to produce more designs for a New York Times photo shoot. We’ll get back to that later.

***

The French Senate, 2010. After at least three decades of attempts at legislation and public scandals, mainly around the use of religious symbols in public schools and especially around the headdresses of Muslim women and girls, the Senate passes Act No. 2010-1192 – “Loi interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l ‘espace public” – a law to prevent face-covering in public space, the first of its kind in the European Union. The law is primarily aimed at preventing the use of face covers such as the niqab or burqa. Supporters of the law see it as an expression of French secularism, opponents see it as a drastic violation of personal liberty. Both supporters and opponents see the other side as catastrophic for feminism and as a serious case of religious coercion.

***

Cinemas, 2012. Batman is once again the hottest superhero thanks to a film series by Christopher Nolan, a director who’s known for dealing extensively with the illusory dimension of cinema. Batman wears a mask concealing his other identity – Bruce Wayne, a billionaire heir to a huge industrial corporation. In the third film in the series, Bruce Wayne / Batman faces off against a working-class hero: a masked revolutionary named Bane. The mask on his face is not meant to hide his identity, but rather is a medical device that helps him cope with severe physical pain, caused by a chronic problem that’s a result of the harsh conditions he grew up in.

***

The Internet, 2013. Edward Snowden leaks thousands of confidential US government documents, which reveal, among other things, the existence of PRISM – a system for mining and cross-referencing information from countless users of online services of the Internet’s giant infrastructure corporations, such as Facebook and Google. The exposure further increases interest in Harvey’s camouflage makeup. We’ll get back to that later.

***

New York University’s School of the Arts, 2010 // Graduation exhibit, the Interactive Telecommunication Program // Adam Harvey // Hair by Pia Vivas, Model: Jen Jaffe

Woman Wearing a Burqa // September 14, 2010, the French Senate passed into law Act No. 2010-1192 – “Loi interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l ‘espace public’ – preventing the use of face-covering in public space, the first of its kind in the European Union. The act became known publicly as “the Burqa Law”.

Cinemas, 2012 // The Dark Knight Rises by Christopher Nolan // Two masks representing two different, diametrically opposing, social and psychological structures, at conflict // The Superhero Batman & the villain, Bane.

In 2013, following the release of thousands of classified documents and his escape from the US, NSA computer intelligence consultant Edward Snowden had received temporary residency status in Russia. Two years following the incident, in April 2015, political comedy commentator John Oliver devoted his show “Last Week Tonight” to surveillance and privacy issues and had presented an extensive interview with Snowden.

***

My living room, 2016. I’m sitting on the couch, leaning forward, an oxygen mask on my face. It is connected to an old pneumatic nebulizer, its plastic casing is yellowing from a lifetime of use, its engine as noisy as a tractor, the rattling sound fills the small apartment. Seasonal flu has exacerbated my asthma, the great weakness overcomes me and clouds the senses, but I am well trained: 50 CC of Ventolin, 150 CC of water. How long has this device been with me? 25 years? 30 years? Throughout my adult life, I have hardly allowed anyone to see me using it. That is the real nudity. But tonight my partner is there. Tonight I let her see.

***

Normandy Beach, 2017. It is right before dawn on June 6, 1941. I crawl with my platoon towards the German bunkers, bullets whizzing above our heads. It is the 14th edition of a popular action videogame series named Call of Duty. Visual technology really improved in the two decades since this genre became popular, and can now present violence in all its gory details. When my comrade is hit by a mortar shell only a few steps from the water, I see the painful expression on his face from up close. The officer looks me straight in the eye and tells me to get myself together, this is what I’ve been training for, we have to breach the bunker. When I get to the trenches the real fun begins, no longer just evading, I am sniping the enemy left and right. But I cannot see my enemy’s faces: the game spares me the full results of my actions. Every time they die by my rifle, the game twists their body so that they fall facing down, relieving me from the full impressions of my duty. I press on through their defenses, stepping on their bodies, inland through the trenches and the bunkers, my opponents always face-down in the mud.

***

Normandy Beach, 2017 // The 14th edition of the action videogame series Call of Duty

***

When exactly did soldiers begin hiding their faces? I can’t recall the moment. I’m not talking about blurring face photos of military pilots and elite soldiers in news articles – that’s an old practice. I mean the newer phenomenon of soldiers wearing a “tactical mask” that only reveals the eyes under their helmet, like a ninja in a soldier’s costume. I suppose the reason for the new concealment is the same as the old reason: to prevent personal harassment, and especially to prevent personal prosecution for war crimes. A sort of acceptance that modern soldiers deal mostly with a civilian population, and function mainly as policemen, only without the theater of protecting it. All that’s left is to hide them from a different police.

***

In Vipassana meditation they teach you that the road to insight passes in attention, and attention grows from observing the things you would usually do in a state of distraction. You start from the body itself: the thing most available to us, 100% of the time and always wired to our brain. Your most basic bodily function – breathing – must be done without attention. How could you even live with intentional breathing? So you start there. Vipassana begins by defamiliarizing breathing itself. Perhaps it is no way to live, with uncanny breathing, but uncanny breathing is an effective gateway to meditation. It’s all coming back to me with the mask on. I feel each breath in all my senses – the heat and the steam, the taste and smell, the sound of myself echoing between fabric and skin.

***

Eye of the storm, 2018. Every kid in the world is playing ‘Fortnite’ (Inspired by the 2000 Japanese film “Battle Royale”) (2) : a hundred players are parachuted on an island; their goal is to murder each other, the winner is the last one standing. The creators of this videogame earn their fortune by selling costumes and masks that the players’ virtual avatars can wear. These costumes are called ‘skins’. Fan-favorite skins include a banana costume and a costume in the form of the fictional contract killer John Wick. Rich kids, whose parents allow them the purchase of new skins every Fortnite season, use the derogatory term ‘default’, coined after the free-of-charge default character skins, to bully poor kids .

***

The Black Death mask is back in vogue. Not yet as an actual clothing accessory, but as an image: “plague doctors”, clad in black robes, their faces hidden behind a mask with a long pelican-like beak full of perfumes and herbs, are recently making more and more appearances in movies, games, comics. The image is almost always divorced from the historical role – they do not treat the sick – the mask mainly serving to herald death, often mixed with other Gothic, Victorian, and Medieval-Christian imagery.

***

Back in vogue // The Black Death mask

***

I am traveling from a place where it is expected to wear a mask in public to a place where it isn’t; The mask is still on me, out of habit, and suddenly I feel all eyes on me, I am discovered as a stranger. I return from a place where it is not expected to wear a mask in public to a place where it is, and forget to put on the mask in transit; then I notice the eyes staring at me, feel exposed, I am discovered as a stranger. For most of the world, CoVid masks have emerged as a policy with no custom or tradition behind it, and yet their use patterns have quickly become group signifiers. I walk into a new place and try to guess what its norm will be like – is it a place of masks? A place without masks? Do I prefer to integrate, or to maintain my principles – even though my principles themselves are new and foreign to me?

***

Recently a popular use of “Machine Learning”, a method that allows computers to understand things on their own, is to identify and alter human faces. Social media users take images of their political leaders and puppeteer them into giving the hopeful speeches they will never actually dare to give; the technique is known as “Deep Fake”. Video-calling software allows callers to distort their own faces into a cartoon, or to put digital masks on their reflections. The technique is known as a “filter”. Usually when a filter appears the conversation stops, while all attention is given to the mask, and does not continue until the mask is removed.

***

***

The Internet, 2020. Global superpowers such as China, the UK and the United States are expanding their use of facial recognition systems, and employ them to monitor civilians. Public awareness of this is growing between the Hong Kong demonstrations against the extradition bill and demonstrations following the assassination of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States. Fashion bloggers and online influencers photograph themselves experimenting with Harvey’s anti-surveillance makeup method. Other designers have followed suit to create plastic masks with lenses that distort the face, hats that project a different face on top of the wearer’s, glasses with an array of infrared bulbs to blind scanners. None of these camouflage techniques could actually compete with the rapid development of surveillance systems in the age of machine learning, none of them could even be accessible to those who do not have a lot of money or free time, and all of them would make their users stand out as particularly strange and conspicuous in the eyes of any human law enforcer, even if the machine will not recognize them for a moment. But the fantasy of individual opposition to tyrannical rule, combined with an aesthetic reminiscent of cyberpunk cinema, is too tempting to let go. Like the hipsters of the early 2000s, who imagined they could resist capitalism through alternative consumerism, so do some hipsters now believe they can resist tyranny through alternative clothing and makeup.

***

They say that in the age of Covid it is more crucial than ever to master the smize. Smize is a shorthand for “smiling with your eyes”, as coined by Tyra Banks in 2009. I am far from mastering the smize. I have no technique. I try, but instead of alluring merriment, I just look slightly angrier. When I actually smile, my eyes become slender slits; a balance between the widening mouth and the narrowing eyes. But now with my mouth and nose covered, every smile is an almost complete closure of my face. You couldn’t tell whether I’m smiling at you, or scowling.

Flickering lights, creaking wooden floors, doors that get loudly slammed by themselves and the sound of an insane laughter that bursts in the middle of the night? This is probably a haunted house. Why are there so many movies of this genre? Maybe because we all have the fear that our home is not really a safe place. In the book “Home for the Soul” by Yaakov Metri, he claims that our connection to our home is not only to the physical home, but to the special inner experience that our home gives us. At home we can feel enough security and inner peace that allows us to feel, imagine and just be ourselves. Home is our anchor in the face of difficult and painful events that we go through in life. Metri talks about home not only as a physical place where we feel protected, but about an inner mental space where we feel calm and belonging.

However, in the current economic situation and in view of the housing crisis, many of us will not have the opportunity to buy a home and we will probably continue to move between rented apartments at extortionate prices. Freud’s saying “There is no home, there is only a journey to home” seems accurate today in both the materialistic and mental sense. The gap between the fantasy of home as a safe and private place, a solid rock that nothing can hurt or penetrate, compared to the reality of break-ins, financial inability, mortgage, natural disasters, divorces and fearful inheritance quarrels, this suspense is the basis of those horror movies about haunted houses.

There is no home, there is only journey to home”– Sigmund Freud   

Hila Padan, illustration inspired by The Haunted House

It is without a doubt the genre of horror movies I hate the most. It is always the same – a young couple moves into a big, empty house that they managed to buy at a bargain price or inherit from a distant aunt. Everything seems to be going great, but then weird things start to happen. They will find out that the ancient house is haunted by an evil spirit or that it was built on an ancient Indian cemetery and all the atrocities committed in it demand revenge. Of course that this house will always have a secret basement or attic where something terrible and awful happens and for some reason the characters will insist on entering them alone. The only parameters that vary from movie to movie are – who is the ghost that is haunting the place? How exactly is it abusing the tenants of the house? And whether or how do they eventually manage to get rid of it? Of course, though, there are also goof movies in this genre that show new angles or that are just well made as opposed to Gore garbage.

Of course, every rule has an exception. Several works in the genre make new and refreshing use of the old formula, present the story from a new and intriguing angle, or are just well-made.

The Babadook// Choosing life, with pain

The Babadook is a 2014 film by Jennifer Kent about a mother and son. The father was killed in a car accident while driving the mother, Amelia, to the hospital for the birth of the son. Since then, Amelia has been having a hard time talking about the subject and is taken aback from her son, Samuel, who reminds her of the terrible event. One day Amelia reads to Samuel a mysterious book called The Babadook about a creature that infiltrates the house and causes atrocities. Samuel claims he sees the “Babadook”; his strange behavior increases and Amelia is afraid he has gone mad, until she herself begins to hear and see strange things. The Babadook manages to enter the house and take over Amelia and make her shout, hit and try to murder her son. Only with the help of Samuel’s love for his mother, she is able to overcome the Babadook, stand up to him and protect her son.

The Babadook by Jennifer Kent

At the end of the film, we witness Amelia managing to deal with the painful past; she can talk about her husband, see Samuel’s good features, and express her love towards him. But the Babadook is not banished or destroyed. He remains at home, in the closet under the stairs where all the father’s belongings are found. Now, when he is restrained, Amelia sees him as an object of empathy, not fear.

Babadook can be viewed as a supernatural expression of mourning, a frightening monster that forces Amelia and Samuel to deal with death, memory and pain. The Babadook penetrates the house and Amelia and transforms her into a murderous creature, perhaps showing us what might happen if we hide our pain and let it consume us from within. But Amelia chooses Samuel and thus she chooses life that include pain instead of pain that takes over life. 

Monster, Kent’s short film from 2005, on which The Babadook is based.

The Haunting of Hill House // The ghost is a wish

Also in the series The Haunting of Hill House created by Mike Flanagan in 2018, there is a family haunted by the past. Olivia, Hugh and their five children buy and renovate an old house to sell it. But strange things happen in it, and the little ones, Nell and Luke, claim that they are seeing ghosts. One evening, Hugh takes the kids and leaves Olivia behind, and ever since then he refuses to talk about the subject. The children only know that Olivia died that night. The series moves between the past and the present where the father and the grown children reunite again after Nell, the little sister, returns to the Hill House and is found dead. Nell’s death forces the family to reunite, open the wounds of the past and try to figure out if the ghosts they see are real and what happened on their last night at the house. When they find out that Luke also went to Hill House, they go out there to save him. At the Hill House they confront the ghosts of the past and realize that Olivia, who was apparently suffering from a mental illness, tried to kill Luke and Nelly because she thought this is how she is protecting them. Hugh got there on time and managed to save the children, but when he returned home to take care of Olivia, he found out she was dead. To save the family once again, Hugh promises Olivia’s ghost that he’ll stay with her if she lets the children go. The brothers are saved and united and in the Hill House the ghosts of the house continue live, now joined by Hugh, Olivia and Nelly.

The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan

This film also has a dark and unspoken secret, and the characters can move on and overcome the trauma only after the secret is revealed. Hugh refused to talk about that evening to protect his children, but silence opened the door for the ghosts to enter and haunt the family. What is not talked about, becomes even more frightening. In the first episode of the series, Steve, the older brother who has become a ghost book writer, claims that a ghost is something that haunts you, does not leave you, scares you. It can be a memory, a secret, mourning, anger, guilt … and most of the time we would want to see it, because it’s better for us than not to see this something again: “Most of the times, a ghost is a wish”.

I have seen a lot of ghosts. Simply, not exactly in the way it is customary to talk about them. A ghost can be many things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Mourning, anger, guilt. But from my experience, in most cases, they are simply what we want to see” – from the series Who Lives in Hill House

The Orphanage/ Because of the people

This idea also appears in some way in Juan Antonio Bayona’s 2007 film Orphanage. Laura, her husband Carlos and their son Simon arrive at the orphanage where Laura grew up, with the goal of opening a boarding school for children with special needs. Simon connects with a ghost of a boy named Thomas and when Simon disappears, Laura is convinced that the ghosts of the orphans have kidnapped him and are hiding him from her. She discovers that Thomas was the son of one of the workers at the orphanage, a child that was born with a deformed face and hidden from the rest of the children. When the other children discovered Thomas, they took him to a cave by the sea where he died. In revenge, Thomas’ mother poisoned all the children and the institution closed. Laura tries to search everywhere, but even after many months, there is still no sign of Simon. Carlos despairs and decides that they should leave the house and Laura asks him to go and give her two days to look for Simon.

The Orphanage / El orfanato by J. A.  Bayona

Carlos despairs and decides that they should leave the house. Laura asks him to leave and give her two days to look for Simon. She invites the children to play with her and help her find Simon and they lead her to the basement, the place where they hid Thomas. In this room Laura discovers Simon’s body and realizes that she locked him there without her knowledge and that he tripped on the stairs in the dark and died. Laura is grief-stricken, takes pills and wakes up in a parallel world where Simon is alive in her hands and all the dead children ask her to stay with them and take care of them.

Mourning, Trauma, and Pain

To my opinion, these three films are excellent because they all make use of the world of horror, fantasy and ghosts not as a gimmick or just to scare the audience, but as a tool for dealing differently with the issue of mourning, trauma and pain. The house is not haunted by a ghost that wants to destroy and take down everyone simply because it is evil or crazy, but it has a human story behind it.

The psychic in the Orphanage explains that “when something terrible happens, it sometimes leaves a trail, a wound that functions as a connection between two times. It’s like an echo that is repeated over and over, waiting to be heard. Like a scar. It is begging to be caressed, to be eased.” And indeed, after acknowledging the trauma, treating it, or exposing a secret, it reveals that the haunted house is just a house. The bad things that happened, happened not because of ghosts, but because of human error, something he could have possibly avoided. As Steve says in Who Lives in the Hill House, sometimes we prefer to see the ghosts because we want to. Maybe because it is harder for us to deal with a mistake and we want to believe that the source of our trouble and pain is a supernatural enemy. Not just the home itself, but the family within it is the subject of these films that raise questions about family traumas and how to overcome them, about parent-child relationships and motherhood.

In these three films the border between the world of the living and the dead, imagination and reality is shaken. It is not clear if there really are ghosts, if it was a secret wish or if it was just the characters’ imagination or their way of dealing with the situation, as grief and pain become something so strong that it seems to be supernatural, something that cannot be defeated. Eventually, in the three films, the ghosts remain at the house alongside the living and this situation is not presented as something negative, but perhaps as something even comforting. At home there is some gate to an imaginary world, which can be scary, but also hopeful.

It seems that it is precisely science fiction stories- which often take place in immense, huge, sometimes even infinite spaces, in terms of space and time- that deal with the most basic concepts of human life: home, identity, humanity.

In fictional journeys to space, earth, which in everyday life is a vast external framework in which man must find his unique place, becomes one giant home for the entire humanity. In these works, human society becomes a family. As such, space travel has a unifying and connecting message from its beginning: we all live in the same home, “we are all in the same boat,” or the same spaceship.

Unlike terrestrial travels, space travel emphasizes our inability to grasp infinity – and the existential absurdity it expresses (we have expanded about our inability to grasp infinity in Issue # 1 on “Inhuman Scales”). See the articles of Eden Kupermintz, Gili Ron and Shalev Moran, which provide different views on the subject- U.A). In light of this lack, this rift, this deep abyss, these journeys express not once the man’s need, in acknowledgment of infinity, to place himself within it, or in front of it. The existentialist discussion in science fiction stories re-centers around the continuity of generations and the grip of man on life as meaningful, as a response to the basic human need to understand the universe and existence – and its place in them.

To infinity, from the movie “Interstellar” by Christopher Nolan

In this article, I will address three mythological cinematic journeys to space and examine the instances of homecoming in them.

In each of these films, the concept of “home” is of special, slightly different importance for the character who embarks on a journey – from which she returns, even if (slightly) different. The three films reflect a homecoming to a place that is both familiar and foreign, as the original home was lost and disappeared in time. In each of the examples the experience of homecoming- returning from space- is mixed with the feeling of the uncanny, the Unheimlich, where not only the space to which the characters return has changed but also the characters themselves, as a result of their journey, the time that has passed and the insights they have gathered along the way.

The Unheimlich

The Unheimlich is a Freudian expression that describes something that is grasped as both familiar and foreign at the same time. It is a dissonance that generates a threatening feeling of alienation. It is a cognitive gap that is created for the subject who experiences reluctance, fear and rejection from an object (in the cases in question here – the object is home), and at the same time – attraction to it.

A contradiction underlies the unheimlich, an unintuitive link between the domestic, the familiar and the experience of horror and alienation. In the specific context of home, a place that is supposed to be calming, comforting and reassuring – suddenly becomes a threatening and alienated space (about this in Dana Tor’s article, ‘The Anxiety of the Unheimlich’ and in Uri Aviv’s article, ‘The Internal Threat’ in this issue – U.A).

The heroes who return home from the journeys, who we will mention in this article, return to a similar but also different home from the one they have left. They start a process of re-acquaintance with themselves and their environment, and do not necessarily need their old home, from which, upon their return, they find themselves alienated.

The Late Return

Another significant concept is “The Late Return”, a familiar literary motif – some would say one of the most familiar motifs in Western culture- whose roots are entrenched in the story of the Odyssey: Odysseus returns home after years of travels and reunites with his wife Penelope – in their home.

Although in the Odyssey the protagonist returns to a home that still stands, to a living, familiar and even faithful woman who has been waiting for him – for the most part, “The Late Return” describes a return to a landscape and homeland that have changed beyond recognition, to a different world from the one the hero had left. The “Unheimlich” is obvious in these legends, the protagonist returns to the same home space he left but the world he returns to has changed, and he discovers that something of his own inner self changed as well. The home is not the same home, and the hero is not the same hero.

Solaris: Overcoming Time and Longing

The movie Solaris (1972, USSR) by director Andrei Tarkovsky is considered a cinematic masterpiece in general, and in the genre of science fiction in particular. Obviously, the literary masterpiece by Stanislaw Lem that was published a decade earlier (Poland, 1961) is also considered a significant milestone in the history of this literary genre.

Lem’s book was readapted to film in an American, acclaimed and interesting version from 2002, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney. However, in this article I will focus on the version of Tarkovsky, which is better in my opinion, and was announced at the time as the Soviet answer for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, USA / UK). It has been known ever since, and to this day, as one of the greatest science fiction films of all time.

Solaris (1972, USSR) by the director Andrei Tarkovsky

Solaris is a work that penetrates the depths of the soul of its protagonist as well as its readers and is constantly directed between the inside and the outside, between the present and memory, between reality and imagination – and consistently unites them. It deals with the study of human boundaries and human abilities to communicate and connect with one another and with the different, the unfamiliar, and in the deceptive and surprising way in which faith and knowledge can be weaved together.

The plot of Solaris follows a psychologist named Chris Calvin who is sent to a research station on the imaginary planet – Solaris. Calvin’s mission – to give an opinion on strange phenomena that supposedly occur in the place, according to the station’s team. Upon his arrival, he joins the station’s scientific team, whose members’ mental state is unstable. The reason for it is that they have been forced to get acquainted with “guests”: human-looking figures, which are connected to their past and come to visit them.

At first, Calvin, being a psychologist, thinks that the “guests” are the fruit of the scientists’ wild imagination, the result of working in complete solitude for years. It soon becomes clear that the “guests” are not hallucinations (at least not in the conventional sense of the word), as they do appear with a material body. In addition, it becomes clear that the “guests” feel and act like the humans they “copy” (and to be precise – like the memory that remained in the scientists’ mind of the original person on which they are based).

While trying to interpret these phenomena, whether supernatural or psychological, and how they relate to the properties of the unique planet that the scientists are studying, Calvin suddenly envisions his late lover, Hari. The reunion with her allows Calvin to relive (but only in Solaris – U.A) their lost love, but also the painful tragedy in which it ended – Hari’s suicide following the decrease of Calvin’s love for her. Hari’s appearance symbolizes in the story both the overcoming of time but also the inability to evade and overcome the past.

Chris together with his partner Hari (The deceased one? A copy of her? What is going on here?), looking at their reflection in the mirror, Solaris (1972, USSR), by director Andrei Tarkovsky.

It will be easy to see how concepts from the world of the mind and psychology (including “the unheimlich“) occupied Lem in his writing, and Tarkovsky when he came to adapt the film, and how they tried to provoke a discussion about the human psyche in situations it is not used to be found – through science fiction.

Tarkovsky’s contribution to the sci-fi genre here is at the beginning of his career, but he returns to it later with his film Stalker (1979, USSR). Through science fiction’s ability to produce hypotheses and scenarios that are not possible in real life, Tarkovsky has repeatedly dealt with philosophical, moral, theological, and metaphysical issues.

The concept of “home” is very significant in the cinematic adaptation of Solaris; Tarkovsky’s work begins and ends with “home”. In the opening scenes, Calvin is seen walking in the landscape of his childhood, between forests and lakes, with the beautiful family home in the background. The house, built entirely of wood, creates a natural, pastoral and simple feeling, and is presented in contrast to the spaces that will appear later in the film- cold, metallic and artificial spaces. The wooden country house is first shown in the reflection of the water of the lake at its feet, which illuminates another aesthetic motif, which is central in the film: reflections. These reappear again and again as the film presents mirrors and glass, in which the “real” reality is reflected. It is a simple but beautiful image of the main ideas in the film – the connection between original and copy, reality and image, and of course, memory. The “guests” are the reflections of the scientists’ memory, a mirror image of figures from their past, identical in every external characteristic but lacking the slippery realness of the real, original, experience in the past.

Calvin begins the movie at his father’s house and ends it with what appears to be a copied version of it, built from his memories. A copy inside Solaris. Gradually, the viewer realizes that the house to which Calvin returns at the end of the movie is not the same house he left, the one from the first scenes. Even if the last shot of the film clearly reveals what can be suspected even earlier (we are not where we think we are), the clues are woven throughout the entire scene. The lake, whose ripples in the water we had seen and heard at first, is now frozen and still; the house is no longer reflected in it – perhaps because it is itself a reflection, a replica of the original house.

The house, Solaris (1972, USSR), by the director Andrei Tarkovsky

These subtle hints are joined by one of the greatest shots in the film, in which opposing elements of water and fire meet and unite: Calvin approaches and peeps through the window into the house. Inside – it is raining, and outside, behind it, a fire is lit. We are in a dream, or a hallucination, but since dreams in this work are not exactly “dreams”, we can only conclude that we are in one of the mental tricks of the seemingly intelligent planet, Solaris, or if we wish, in one of the tricks of the film’s director, Andrei Tarkovsky.

Although many see Solaris’ enigmatic ending as an expression of pessimism, to me there is something consoling in this homecoming: Calvin realizes that he cannot beat time and longing, cannot bring back his old life – but he can build in his memory a world that reminds him of the purity and simplicity of his youth in the wooden country house on earth.

The home he returns to is not the same home, but Calvin is also definitely not the same Calvin from the beginning of the film, and this fact gives the ending a sense of comfort and closure, to my opinion.

Contact: The search for life, following death

Robert Zemeckis’ science fiction film Contact (1997, USA) is completely different from Tarkovsky’s film but its discussion of the connection between science and faith makes it a clear thematic sequel to Solaris.

The plot, based on a book of the same name by the well-known scientist Carl Sagan, focuses on an astronomer named Eleanor, “Ellie” Arroway, who studies radio signals coming from outer space, in order to locate scientific signs for the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Ellie and her project are part of an activity on the fringes of science, which is considered crazy, the SETI – Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. As a child, Ellie lived with her father (her mother died in childbirth), and it was he who introduced her to the wonders of scientific research, beauty and mystery of space, and bequeathed her great love for astronomy, as well as for “radio groupies” (Ellie is full of excitement and her father radiates with pride when she manages to converse with another groupie in the city of Pensacola in remote Florida).

Ellie and her father talk to a new friend in Pensacola, Florida on the home radio, Contact (1997, USA), by director Robert Zemeckis.

She experiences considerable political difficulties and shortage of resources for her activities, in light of her eccentric field of work, but her determination and boldness cause a philanthropist to support her efforts. One day she discovers a radio signal from an unknown source, a message that is clearly unnatural. Ellie is determined to convince those around her – the scientific establishment, the White House, the entire world – that this is a potential discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

The deciphering of the broadcast, after an exhausting journey of persuasions and terrible and painful accidents along the way, provides her with a one-time opportunity to fly and meet the aliens using a space vehicle built specifically according to the instructions in the broadcast she received. She embarks on the exciting journey and returns. She understands that the difficulty of reaching the distant planet to which she was sent is nothing compared to the difficulty of convincing humanity that she did indeed contacted intelligent life outside of Earth. The devices she had with her did not record a thing, it is her word against the devices, political interests, cultural forces, and the masses, who wonder whether to believe her or not.

Ellie Arroway in a journey to meet aliens. Are the devices recording? Contact (1997, USA), by director Robert Zemeckis.

Gradually, “Contact” is developed as a film about the possible, but not necessary, conflict between science and belief: in the beginning we perceive the scientist’s position, and as it progresses – we perceive the occurrences as real intellectuals, a bit like Ellie herself.

Precisely as a film that operates within the commercial, Hollywood framework – it is surprisingly and astonishingly spiritual, poetic and experimental. Contact is science fiction cinema at its best, and it does so with great emotion and incredible skill: starting from breathtaking suspense, continuing with unique effects (on the front of technology and media as of 1997) and ending with great human drama intertwined with theological, philosophical and ethical debates, which guided the path of many of the greatest science fiction films of recent decades.

Other than that – and unfortunately, in a way that is not very common in the genre of science fiction – it is also a feminist work, from A to Z (Arrival by Denis Villeneuve, which resembles Contact in many ways, is another example. (Arrival, USA / Canada, 2016).

Like Solaris, and also Interstellar, to which I will refer later, Contact is thematically built around inter-generational family relationships – father and daughter in this case. However, surprisingly and unusually for the female character in a movie, and even though her life revolves around her love, longing and gratitude for her dead father – Ellie does not show any desire to have children, and the movie does not provoke a direct discussion on this personal issue, or in the broader sense, on the question of generational continuity. An implicit way in which the film nevertheless deals with this question is reflected in its final scene: Ellie guides a group of girls and boys and tries to encourage them to take interest in astronomy, science and the study of space. She does so with great talent and grace. The complete disregard for the cultural pattern of a woman as a mother-to-be is necessarily one of Contact‘s virtues in my opinion, and another example of its complexity.

Zemeckis was and remains, despite the image of the “technician” that stuck with him, a filmmaker whose thought is entirely visual and aesthetic, in ways that are reminiscent of his great partner, Steven Spielberg (Contact was directed after the masterful “Forest Gump”). The most prominent visual feature of Contact is the use of digital camera movements from the inside to the outside and vice versa. The movie opens with the “Zoom Out” movement, from the earth out and out to the vast spaces of the universe, at the end of which the camera arrives/ “comes out” from the eye of Ellie, the girl. The whole infinite universe is conceptually connected, in a simple digital camera movement, to the psyche and inner self of the individual – and this is the action that is repeated over and over in the genre films, according to my claim. We are not separated from the world and the universe – we are part of it, we are in it, and it is within us.

Zemeckis’ aesthetic choice to connect the inside and the outside is given a thematic expression in the last part of the movie, in Ellie’s journey. Like the other two films in question, consciousness and reality merge, interior and exterior intertwine, Ellie’s inner world takes on a material, external expression – in the form of her encounter with a copied version of her father, somewhere in outer space, supposedly near the planet Vega. Ellie’s passage through a wormhole is visually reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey that preceded it, and Interstellar that followed it. At this climactic moment Ellie utters the most beautiful quote in the film, certainly the most poetic one in it, when Ellie stares astounded through the window of the spaceship, at an astronomical view whose description is pale in comparison to the depth of its beauty and utters: “They should have sent a poet.”

Unlike the other films I will mention, Ellie’s journey to space comes only at the end of the movie, and this is also its singularity: Ellie is in fact on an ongoing inner journey from the beginning of the movie, from the moment her father dies unexpectedly and she, in an attempt to bring him back, searches for life on distant planets, against all odds. Ellie’s life is a life of loneliness and exile of a woman in a world (and profession) that is culturally attributed to men. As a result, the catharsis that takes place in the marvelous scene on the planet Vega – her renewed and brief encounter with her father – symbolizes her homecoming, precisely when she is in the farthest place from any home that any human foot has ever stepped in. The encounter itself (the contact in the title of the film) is a clear “unheimlich” experience, both visually and in the way her replicated, imagined father looks. It has the warmth and love of the original father, but it is also clear that it is shaped from memory only (which echoes Solaris for us).

When Eli returns to Earth from her journey in the alien space vehicle, she discovers that no one on Earth believes she has visited there – as throughout her entire life, no believed her about her professional field of work. The data is against her. The cameras and devices she had with her did not record a thing. Ellie, who symbolizes science, skepticism, thought and rationale, has to take the believer’s place now: when the commission of inquiry asks for real evidence of her contact with the aliens – and she has none – she simply replies that she “believes” in all her might that it happened.  She admits that she has no other way of proving it.

Arroway’s hearing, Contact (1997, USA), by director Robert Zemeckis.

The issue of belief in general, and in god in particular, is central to the film, and is also expressed through the character of Palmer Joss, the religious scholar (starring Matthew McConaughey) whose relationship with Ellie represents a conflict, but also a connection, between science and religion, knowledge and belief. The process she goes through in getting closer to Palmer is parallels to the process she goes through from a scientist who leaves no place for belief in her life – to a spiritual person, even if explicitly not religious.

On the question of whether Ellie has left Earth at all, or perhaps the encounter she reported on is the fruit of her wild imagination and her blind passion to retrieve the past, meet her late father again, and fulfill the dream – you can answer yourself, by watching the film. The film explicitly hints that the encounter did happen (I, myself am less fond of this explicit allusion), but leaves room for doubt. Either way, her journey is a journey to the spiritual, the abstract and the sublime, whether she has met with aliens or not. Contact is her contact with the inexplicable, the unexplainable, no less than it is contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. She returns from this journey as a different person and discovers a new world for herself and for others, one in which science and belief can live side by side in the same society, community, and even in the same person.

Interstellar: Going on a Journey, Once Again

The last film I will refer to is Interstellar (Interstellar, USA / UK / Canada, 2014), Christopher Nolan’s monumental film that divided critics and audiences even more than his previous films. The plot takes place about seventy years into our future. Earth is experiencing an ecological catastrophe, one of the main symptoms of which are pests that completely eradicate grain crops, all over the world. Hunger grows, spreads. The collapse of human society is manifested, among other things, in the bankruptcy of governments and the gradual cessation of all technological development – including the American space program. In the midst of these terrible days, a human group, the last NASA astronauts, embark on a secret journey to discover new worlds, where there may be a future, hope, for humankind. The film’s protagonist is Joe “Cope” Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey, who also played the character of Palmer in Contact), a former pilot who leads the team on a journey filled with surprises and turmoils all the way to the edge of the universe, and back.

Nolan is unmistakable a commercial director, whose films are hugely popular, but he is also one of the great film artists of our time, a creator with a unique footprint who repeatedly deals with the themes of time, dream and memory – making a spectacular and exciting use of the artistic means of big budget cinema. Interstellar is perhaps the pinnacle of Nolan’s career, especially when it comes to exploiting the capabilities of using editing as a tool that breaks down the film into layers and loads scenes with meanings, by comparing them.

Interstellar resembles the previous films mentioned in this article, which were produced and shown in a gap of 20 years from one another, both in the thematic engagement with the father/daughter relationship (and, as mentioned above, with the generational continuity as a motive of sci-fi movies) and of course in the familiar collision between religion and science, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge. All these are embodied in Cooper’s character, the cynical realist, who receives a lesson about faith and love.

Like Solaris, the film exhibits a difference between Cooper’s family home, an old wooden house surrounded by a spacious green field, and the living and habitation environments later in the film – the NASA base, the space station, the spaceship and the various planets in which he and we visit – all designed in a monochromatic and cold fashion. This difference emphasizes home as a source of calm, naturalness and serenity (while the house gradually withers), as humanity is forced to leave its home and go search for a new one in space (calm, naturalness and serenity?).

The house. Interstellar (2014, USA/ UK/ CANADA) by director Christopher Nolan

Unlike previous films in which the father is left behind, in this film the absent father is himself the protagonist. Cooper leaves the country house and his family to join NASA, leaving behind his daughter and son. His daughter, Murphy “Murph, will have an essential role later in the plot: he gives her a watch upon embarking on the journey, a reoccurring motive in the film, in which time is a central, significant element, as any action taken by Cooper and his associates throughout space will affect the whole course of humanity (and this without entering into issues of private and general relativity – U.A).

Interstellar also resonates Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose shadow is cast on every cinematic journey into space that follows it (and of course based on the book of one of the greatest sci-fi writers of the 20th century, Arthur C. Clark). The name of the work (of Clark and Kubrick) is of course an echo of the Homeric Odyssey, the original story of homecoming. The enigmatic ending of Kubrick’s film, on which complete texts can be written in an attempt (without complete success, of course) to interpret it, is a clear example of the integration of the concept of “home” and the infinite spaces of space – and of course the phenomenon of the unheimlich in cinema. Like Dave Bowman, the protagonist of Kubrick’s film, who finds himself crashing into infinity – aging in a peculiar home created for him, and eventually dying and being reborn as a space baby, a new swallow for a new humanity, space humanity, somewhere in the universe. Cooper in Interstellar also goes out to infinity, but only to get back to his home and daughter. The home in the moments of his return is embodied by an old wooden library; with the help of Murph he saves humankind from extinction and ensures the continuity of generations.

In between. Dave in the waiting room with the monolith. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, USA / UK), directed by Stanley Kubrick

Like in Solaris and Contact, in Interstellar, homecoming is only possible when receiving help (in this case from a completely unexpected source), one that raises questions about faith and science. The enigmatic end of the film can be viewed as an attempt to present a connection between the eternal and infinite universe and the soul of the individual, and his existential need of home and family as a source of meaning. And back to the beginning of the article: the journey expresses the man’s need, in recognition of infinity, to place himself within it, or in front of it; as a response to the basic human need to understand the universe and existence – and its place in them.

The homecoming in Nolan’s film takes place in stages. In the last one, when Cooper wakes up and discovers that he is in a huge space station that simulates the old world, the world in which he grew up, the world he remembers from his youth (sort of, gravity for example does not work the same way, ‘minutiae’ – U.A). As an act of respect for him, an exact replica of his family home was built (reality and world and a house, which are both familiar and strange for Cooper, in an unheimlich manner – U.A). Cooper returns to the replica, which resonates ideologically with the copied father Allie meets me at the end of Contact, and of course also with the copied house at the end of Solaris – only to realize that home it is not the same home, and he himself is not the same person.

The late homecoming is most strongly expressed in the moving scene of Cooper’s encounter with his daughter, whom he meets, due to the effects of space travelling in enormous speeds (relative speeds, close to the speed of light- U.A), when she is now an old lady, significantly older than him (she us still wearing the watch he gave her when he set out on the journey.) Cooper returns home too late with the ultimate sacrifice for his daughter and for the continued existence of humanity – but he still enjoys moments of comfort, an indulgence on the memory of the almost forgotten, old world, which does not exist anymore.

At the end of the film, Nolan gives “Coop” and us, hope – for all of humanity and for the realization of a private love, both of which seemed lost. After the painful, difficult, exhausting journey he experienced; after the impossible homecoming, Cooper realized that the home he returned to was not his home anymore. With full knowledge of what awaits him, he decides to leave Earth again, embarking on the journey anew.

Going on a journey, again. (2014, USA/ United Kingdom/ Canada). Directed by Christopher Nolan.

Except Cooper’s inner and spiritual search, in Interstellar, the entire humanity seeks (and even finds) a new home instead of the previous home which was completely demolished; a place to which you can cling, feel safe in it in the future. As in other science fiction films the personal journey is also a collective journey. The journeys of one, or of one team, is the journey of the entire humanity.

The three films mentioned here, as well as other science fiction works, literary and cinematic and in every media, re-engage with the concept of “home” and homecoming to explore the human psyche and the connections between it and its environment on earth. Science fiction works in general, and literary and cinematic journeys into space in particular, open for us a window into infinite worlds and spaces that can be explored, from which one can be impressed, inspired, excited, be careful of, but in the end, from which one can return home (“The real journey is coming home”, Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed).

Where? – to the small planet, third from the sun, and as Karl Sagan writes – “The pale blue dot”, to which we still, and for the foreseeable future, call home.

People are afraid to leave the house. Death lurks at every corner. Those who nevertheless must go out, to get food or other necessary products, wear a mask. The authorities are unable to provide an answer. There is a vague sense of apocalyptic destruction on the way – all the permanent world orders have changed in an instant.

This is not a retrospective of the last year, but rather an old science fiction story, The Eternaut.

The Eternaut (originally El Eternauta, ‘the traveler through eternity’) is an Argentinian comic book that was originally published in sequels between 1957 and 1959 and earned its two creators, writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld and artist Francisco Solano López, world fame amongst comic book fans in South America and Europe. Since its publication, the work has received a series of sequels and has become deeply embedded in the political consciousness of South America – where you can still find graffiti of the masked heroes, their sharp eyes barely visible.

Graffiti inspired by The Eternauta // El Eternau

The reason people hide in their houses in the story is not an invisible plague but the appearance of a mysterious snow that kills anyone who comes in contact with it. Anyone who was not inside the house died instantly. The few survivors, including the narrator, Juan Salvo, his family members, and some of his close friends, have to improvise body suits and masks that cover them from head to toe in an attempt to survive. In the newly created world, a trip to the grocery store is as dangerous as crossing a battlefield. But the snow is only the first stage in a series of much more terrible developments, which the heroes of the story try to survive, with great difficulty. It is quickly discovered that the snow is not a natural disaster but a weapon of destruction l that is only part of a large-scale invasion. Quite early in the story, The Eternaut makes a turn from the horror genre to more conventional science fiction, but the beating heart of the story continues to bleed red.

The Eternaut does seem particularly relevant to the days of masks and fear, but the magic of the book that allowed it to survive for decades does not depend on current circumstances but on its understanding of human nature and Western society.

The story of the Eternaut is not the cause of death, but the brutal description of the social breakdown, and the realization of the heroes of the story, all ‘typical’ people from the middle class, that everything they know is about to change. Mechanisms they took for granted are disappearing one by one. But instead of becoming the tough loners we know from other post-apocalyptic texts, such as Mad Max or I Am Legend, the characters actually tend to  unite together and create new, better structures.

The fact that there are many heroes and not a single one   is of the utmost importance. Osterhold and Lopez, in days when the Cold War seems to threaten to heat up at any moment, write about people who are in the middle of a struggle against such great forces and use weapons that seem almost impossible. The comparison with the United States and the Soviet Union, who used smaller countries both as battlefields and as weapons, is inevitable. Against the American ideology, which  empowers the individual and views the destruction of society as his opportunity for self-liberation (as if we are back to the cowboy days of the Wild West), The Eternaut presents a story in which ordinary people, members of the working class and the middle class, cooperate, without a single hero figure to cheer. The fact that the faces of the characters are always covered does not prevent them from maintaining their humanity – but it reminds the reader that in the end we are all human beings of equal importance, and no one stands out from the rest.

We learned to understand the act of wearing the mask as a small act of heroism. The mask does not only and necessarily protects you from the diseases of others, but it also protects others from your potential disease. Wearing a mask is a sacrifice – of comfort, of pleasantness, of freedom for self-expression. We do this not because it is the law, but because we care about other people.

This is what is at the heart of The Eternaut, people who understand that they themselves are not the center of the story, that they are not the sole protagonist of their own narrative. People who put on a mask and work together, for a better tomorrow – no matter how desperate the present seems.

Riddle: In which federal agency can you apply for a job and immediately get accepted for two positions: the head of the agency and the housekeeper’s apprentice?

Jessie, the heroine of “Control,” finds herself in this exact situation right from the start of the game. She enters the building of the Federal Control Agency, a bureaucratic organization that manages the government’s dealing with supernatural phenomena and is also mysteriously connected to Jesse’s past. The first person she meets, the housekeeper, sends her to interview for the position of apprentice, but as soon as she arrives for the interview, she gets accepted to the role of the agency director – in addition to her role as the housekeeper’s apprentice.

The video game “Control” // Development: Remedy Entertainment Distribution: 505 Games

The agency building, known as the “oldest house,” is a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture. While Jessie navigates it, the rooms change shape and order between them; the corridors of the building are haunted by people who were taken over by a menacing external force called “the beep.” Jessie must fight them. She does so by using power objects she finds around the house.

The origin of these “power objects” in Control’s supernatural world is Jungian. Objects get their power from their mythological value – their meaning in the collective subconscious. A gun can also be a sword- it represents the power of violence. A safe gives the power of protection, and a slide projector bequeaths the ability to shift between worlds.

But “control” is a psychological game in a much broader sense. The answer to the riddle I opened with lies in another definition of the word “agency,” which is “the ability to act independently.” The game is not only about trying to control others but also about self-control. Jessie is in the process of dealing with her past and taking responsibility for her life. To do so, she will have to adopt the role of director to deal with the crisis and the role of the housekeeper’s apprentice to clean the oldest house from the piles of clutter that have settled in it.

The photo was taken from the video game “Control” // Development: Remedy Entertainment Distribution: 505 Games.

The game takes us through the different stages of Jessie’s battle. It starts as a horror game. Jessie is armed with nothing but a gun in front of a building in which much stronger forces are at work. The enemies glowing in a sickly orange hue, the fantastic sound editing, and the menacing architecture all together create a state and feeling of constant pressure. I couldn’t stand to play for more than one hour on a given day.

But the more Jessie perseveres, her power in the house grows. When Jessie manages to sufficiently resist her enemies, she can take control of a certain point in the house, which becomes a safe and organized point. Over time, she arms herself with more and more powers. Slowly, the genre of the game changes from horror to action. Jessie becomes a superhero who can fly and launch objects with the power of thought. All those hostile forces are not gone, but now she has the tools to deal with them. She finds allies to guide her and gets closer to her final destination.

Jesse’s journey in the “Oldest House” invites contemplation of our own. We’ve all found ourselves in homes that have been converted. Instead of serving us as a shelter at the end of the day, home became a work, leisure, and rest environment. The partition between the outside and the inside has collapsed. This transformation evoked chaos in the house. Objects intended for going outside have lost their use. Vacant places were converted into work or play zones for children. The beautiful dishes we have always put out only for guests raised dust.

Video games can be remarkable in their ability to turn us into heroes and take us through a process, along with the characters we play. Playing as Jessie means, to a certain extent, going through her experiences of dealing with chaos, finding a new order, and even establishing a sense of strength out of the struggle.

Jessie encourages us to face the challenge – to take on both roles, the role of directing the agency along with the function of the housekeeper’s apprentice – to organize the mess – both the physical and mental – and to regain the sense of Control in our lives.

Chicago, IL – I am sitting in a small café on the Chicago Riverwalk, in what is probably the busiest stretch of the city’s beating financial heart, the iconic Chicago Loop. Trump Tower’s hulking glass façade dominates the water, competing with the sparkle and shine of the river’s golden ripples as the sun slowly climbs up to the middle of a clear blue Midwestern summer sky. A jovial Samoan waiter hands me a steaming cup of Matcha latte, and as he moves away I see a lanky, bespectacled figure making his way through the pedestrian throng. The figure sees me, waves, and threads through the shop’s outdoor tables, beelining toward me.

Meet Adrian Jones. Despite the tucked-in polo shirt, receding hairline and apparent nearsightedness, all conveying middle age, Adrian’s awkward, enthusiastic expressions and body language betray his youth. At twenty six, he is one of contemporary America’s most controversial and influential figures.

His Augmented Reality (AR) app, eRace, is taking the country by storm.

If you haven’t already, you will likely bump into an ad or a recommendation for the application on the “Top Apps” section of your mobile app store of choice. For the uninitiated, eRace is an AR app that changes the skin tone, facial proportions and accent of every person the user comes across, to fit the user’s own cultural and racial profile. While the app’s official description claims its aim is to help overcome racial bias, critics insist the app’s core concept perpetuates racism by effectively preventing users from consciously dealing with ethnic and cultural diversity.

So, Adrian, where did the idea for eRace come from?

Well, do you remember that old musical, Avenue Q? It first hit Broadway some thirty years ago or so, around 2005.

Sure. “The Internet is for Porn”.

Yeah, that one! Well, my parents played the soundtrack all the time when I was a kid, and one song that stuck with me was Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist. That song always resonated with me, and the more I grew the more bothered I was by racial bias. And you know what, it turns out that it’s a biological truth – the more someone resembles you, alongside their being more attractive, the more you are receptive to what they have to say and to the decisions they make. Even if you are the most self-aware person in the world, you’re still wired to prefer people that resemble you, both culturally and physically. And you know what? I think that’s bullshit.

Why? It makes sense that people from similar backgrounds share similar ideas and even a similar sense of morality. Race and accent can be helpful in identifying those similarities as well as in indicating when a rift caused by cultural differences may be imminent. If you erase the indicators you might misplace the cause for that friction.

That’s a valid point, but I have to disagree with you. I think all people share a common morality, and that perceived differences mostly result from arbitrary biases. When someone rubs you the wrong way, it’s not cultural, it’s personal. Still, you’ve voiced a concern that we’ve heard before, and we are working on implementing an element in our HUD that will textually specify the race and accent of people our users converse with, if they so wish. That way, first impressions are still visual, but certain misunderstandings can be traced to cultural roots.

Alright. Tell me more about your choice of name for the app. Using the word “race” has been very controversial.

Well, it’s a silly, tongue-in-cheek thing, really. We’re erasing race using electronic means. Erase – eRace. There’s nothing more to it than that.

Still, you must be aware of the connotations “erasing races” brings up.

Not really. What connotations are those?

Genocide? Ethnic cleansing?

I resent that. Clearly, we’re fighting against racism, not for it.

Some people say that making people deal with only others of their race perpetuates a racist outlook rather than abolishes it.

That seems academic to me. Bottom line, people of different backgrounds are now interacting in a non-biased way with each other, in very heterogenic groups.

What if they were to remove their ARLenses? Would they even be able to recognize their friends?

You’re big on hypotheticals, aren’t you? Anyway, if someone were to go Lensless, not being able to recognize their friends and loved ones would be the least of their problems.

That’s true. Still, several lawsuits have been filed against you. Are you at all worried about the controversy?

Not at all. As you probably know, several states have already chosen to make use of the app a compulsory requirement for all local government employees – including judges. I find it difficult to believe that they’ll rule against us, when it’s us that control what they can and can’t see.

That’s alarming.

No, it isn’t.

No, it isn’t. So – what’s next for eRace?

Well, other than the textual racial information I’ve mentioned, we’re working on an Ewok “Easter egg” with Disney and AnyScene. It’s going to be great! It won’t just make everyone look like Ewoks, it’ll actually dynamically transform users’ surroundings into a tree village!

Wow! What kind of challenges has that raised?

Well, as long as everyone the user is seeing is wearing clothes, there’s no problem. But creating realistic Ewok genitalia which still correspond to human anatomy has been tricky. Disney have been great, though. They’ve shared extensive anatomical details with us, and even provided us with several cloned Ewok cadavers to dissect at their facilities. Our designers were really happy about the free trip to Star Wars Land, let me tell ya.

Thank you so much Adrian, this has been fascinating.

My pleasure.

Smart contact lenses, The Holy Grail of AR, a number of tech startups and R&D departments at major tech companies are currently pursuing it

The original Star Trek series did not earn its rightful and honorable place in the history of popular culture and science fiction because of its subtlety. The colors were vivid, the emotions were intense, the fists flew fiercely, the clothing (of the women, but not only) was daring, and the kisses were also very audacious!

So were the messages. The parables were not particularly subtle, usually not requiring deep analysis or interpretation, and the morals were, well, not exactly hidden from view.

The result is uneven. At times it is childish naivety bordering on stupidity, but here and there the lack of subtlety is not crudeness, not rudeness, but rather the removal of all excess pretensions, all the reasons, excuses, and “buts,” all the wrappings and particulars, distilling a sharp argument into a precise statement – harsh, sad, and painful. A genius parable, as only excellent science fiction can present.

What is good and unique about Star Trek is, of course, its cosmic optimism. Sadness and pain are always accompanied (at least in the early incarnations of the series) by a glimmer of hope, to sweeten the bitter pill, and also in according to the worldview of its legendary creator, Gene Roddenberry.

A Taste of Armageddon, episode 24 of the first season of the series, which aired for the first time in 1967, belongs to the second type in my opinion, and deals with the horrors of war.

Star Trek, The Original Series, Season 1, Episode 23, A Taste of Armageddon, written by Robert Hamner, Gene Coon, first aired on February 23, 1967

A Taste of Armageddon

Captain’s log, stardate 3192.1. The Enterprise is en route to star cluster NGC 321. Objective, to open diplomatic relations with the civilisations known to be there. We have sent a message to Eminiar Seven, principal planet of the star cluster, informing them of our friendly intentions. We are awaiting an answer.” Captain’s log, James T. Kirk, Enterprise spaceship, NCC-1701

The voyages of the Enterprise spaceship bring it to Eminiar 7. The goal – to establish diplomatic relations, as the Federation is interested in erecting a spaceport in the area. The Eminarians warn the Enterprise not to approach, but Ambassador Fox, who is on board the ship, instructs Captain Kirk to carry on with the mission.

Upon arriving at Eminiar 7, the Enterprise discovers an advanced technological civilization, a prospering and peaceful world. A landing party led by Captain Kirk and Commander Spock descends to the surface and receives a cold welcome. It is made clear to them: you were warned not to come, you are in danger as long as you are here!

Eminiar 7 – A technological and advanced civilization, an abundant and peaceful world – What’s dangerous?

In a meeting with Anan, the leader of the High Council of Eminiar 7, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock learn that Eminiar has been engaged in a bloody war for 500 years with its neighbor, the planet Eminiar 3 – Vendikar. But Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise crew see no sign of this. The fighting is not visible. The cities are not destroyed – on the contrary, they are pleasant, clean, and developed. The hospitals are not overcrowded. Where is the destruction? The suffering? The dead? And yet, the leader of the Eminiar Council claims that every year, between one and three million Eminians are killed in battle.

We soon learn that the battles are virtual, but the outcome – deadly.

After years of horrific war, the Eminians and their neighbors decided to install supercomputers on both enemy planets. The computers manage the fighting. Attack after counterattack, year after year. When a certain area is hit—virtually—the local computers update those who were there at the time. They are declared dead. There are no terrorist attacks or bombings. There are no missiles or gunfire. The past leaders of the Eminians and Vendikans spared them the horrors of war. The victims have 24 hours to finish their business, sign off on their affairs, say goodbye to their loved ones and relatives, and report to the extermination chambers for an immediate and painless death.

The War Room on Eminiar 7

This is how the Eminiar and Vendikar preserve their advanced culture. Their abundant and peaceful worlds, pleasant, clean, and developed cities. And they continue to strike their bitter enemies, killing millions every year.

What is more horrifying? The horrors of war—the whistling of bullets and bombs, the buzzing after the impact, the screams of terror, the cries on the streets, the death rattles—or a bloody war without horrors? A calm war. A pleasant war. A humane war? Which is more grotesque?

Once the Enterprise approached Eminiar, it became a legitimate target in the war, and it was attacked and destroyed by Vendikar. Virtually, of course. As required by the treaty between Eminiar and Vendikar, the Enterprise crew is asked to proceed to the destruction chambers.

The television series Star Trek (The Original Series) is available for viewing on Netflix.

The horrors of war

Kirk and Spock destroy the computer.

ANAN: You realise what you have done?

KIRK: Yes, I do. I’ve given you back the horrors of war.

The Vendikans now assume that you’ve broken your agreement and that you’re preparing to wage real war with real weapons. They’ll want do the same. Only the next attack they launch will do a lot more than count up numbers on a computer. They’ll destroy cities, devastate your planet. You of course will want to retaliate.

If I were you, I’d start making bombs. Yes, Councilman, you have a real war on your hands. You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might…  consider…  an alternative.

Put an end to it. Make peace.

ANAN: There can be no peace. Don’t you see? We’ve admitted it to ourselves. We’re a killer species. It’s instinctive. It’s the same with you.

KIRK: All right. It’s instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we’re not going to kill. Today. Contact Vendikar. I think you’ll find that they’re just as terrified, appalled, horrified as you are, that they’ll do anything to avoid the alternative I’ve given you. Peace or utter destruction.

It’s up to you.

Are men demons? This a strange question, but it pops up more than once while watching “Under the Shadow,” the Farsi-speaking debut film of Babak Anvari. It happens when the central and dominant metaphor in the movie is women being subordinated to a male shadow.

“Under the Shadow” was released in 2016 as a co-production financed and co-produced by Qatar, Jordan, Iran, and Great Britain. It was screened in the world premiere at the Sands Festival (in Israel, at the Haifa Film Festival). It is currently available to watch on Netflix.

Under the Shadow poster, a movie directed by Babak Anvari, United Kingdom/ Jordan/ Qatar / Iran, 2016

The Iranian film, which belongs to the horror genre, opens at a relatively lukewarm temperature, characterized by stylistic banality and a familiar family drama. Still, it gets warmer and warmer until Bam!!! The horror is flung directly upon us, the viewers, shaking and stirring us. There are genuinely frightening moments in the film, immersed in existential anxieties, which characterize families against a background of uncertainty and lack of existential control, where the growing mental tension reflects the found panic.

In the center of the film, Sheida (played by Narges Rashidi, an actress born in Tehran who lives in Germany), a former student and left-wing activist who was involved in the 1979 coup in Tehran by Khomeini’s people. A few years have passed, and the country has undergone a transformation. When Sheida comes to resume her medical studies at the University of Tehran, she is refused as the Muslim dean decides to punish her for her past. The dean’s opacity later becomes a central marker of the multitude of male characters and the oppression outlined in the film, when the man’s control is expressed not only outside the home, in professional barriers, but also when Sheida is required to put on hijab and long clothes, contrary to her worldview at “home”. And if on the outside she is a modest woman covered from head to toe, at home, inside, she appears as a Western, realistic, and liberal woman, free and open-minded (exercising in front of a Jane Fonda videotape like the typical American housewife), but narratively, also at her own home she is under the judging eye of her husband, whether if he is present or present-absent in forcing her to absorb the guilty feeling for her mal-functioning motherhood.

Workout with Jane Fonda, picture was taken from the movie “Under the Shadow”

Sheida’s husband, a doctor by profession, hurries off on a mission at the war front (the period was the Iran-Iraq war). He advises his wife not to stay in Tehran and move to his parents’ house, but she strongly opposes what she sees as the elimination of her control and independence. Their daughter, Dorsa, is a spoiled only child who is very attached to her doll. She strangely connects with a new boy in the building, who came to live with his uncles, the Ibrahim family, after his parents were killed in the inferno.

Sheida’s house is crowded with drawers and chests full of secrets. Her daily routine is measured between aerobics classes in front of the T.V. screen (Jane Fonda, as mentioned), which is also hidden in one of the dressers in the house and running with her family to the shelter (Tehran was attacked with missiles during the Iran-Iraq war – U.A.). The medical physiology book, which she received with a dedication from her mother, is hastily locked in one of the closets. The house’s atmosphere seems saturated with memories and an attempt to escape from them. But the mother-daughter relationship equation (including the mother’s fear vs. the daughter’s fear and vice versa) takes an exciting and sharp turn that shocks the parental relationship. As the horror of the war permeates the house and a missile hits the building, a feeling closes in on the viewer that the dead mother or other spirits are present between the house cracks.

A rocket hits a building. Image from “Under the Shadow”

Following the missile fall, presented in a clumsy but incredibly aesthetic way, one of the neighbors dies of cardiac arrest. Dorsa’s beloved doll disappears, and her anxiety grows. Dorsa wets at night and behaves strangely. She tells her mother that the new boy who lives with the neighbors told her the legend of Hadjin and gave her a charm to protect her, only Sheida threw it in the trash while tidying Dorsa’s room. Later, it turns out that the child has a mouth defect due to the trauma he experienced, and he cannot speak at all. The girl claims evil spirits and demons are in the building, while the mother cancels her out, not believing in superstitions. That is… until she meets the demons herself. The film undergoes a weird turn that leaves the mother and daughter alone in the building, attacked by a demon, and the metaphors celebrate fear.

The metaphors celebrating fear, picture from “Under the Shadow”

Many elements in the movie are characterized by a surreal, fantastic, and disproportionate aesthetic, with the British photographer Kit Fraser playing with the placement of the frames, from length to width, and with warm filters that romanticize menace. Anwari, who fled the terror of Iraqi missiles with his family to England, expresses well as a director the tension between the two worldviews, shaping them with stylistic elements of “open” / “closed”, also worth mentioning is the beautiful expression of thinking about the void and the act of emptying as a dynamic element – the husband, Dorsa’s nanny, and the neighbors all leave, including eventually the Ibrahims, and finally the remaining one, the demon of fear, which nurses its existence precisely when the city is empty when the building is empty when we are asleep. It is slightly reminiscent of streets under siege, with murderous birds hovering overhead and a group of people trapped between the thin walls and dubious glazing of the house.

The feeling of this trampling, permeating fear, and the birds that turn into demons are a warm greeting from Hitchcock’s cinematic vacuum. But Hitchcock not only wakes the demons from their slumber but also brings the female demons out of the bottle from under the shadow.

There are series that cannot claim to be one of a kind, and from the day it was born, The Leftovers had to contend with the fear that it would follow in the confused footsteps of its older sister Lost, ending its run with a big bang of disappointment. But from the very first step, it became clear that even though they share the same creator (Damon Lindelof) and seemingly the same mystical/enigmatic genre, The Leftovers does not follow in the footsteps of any series that preceded it.

The defining event, known as the “Sudden Departure,” is the disappearance of 140 million people—2% of the population—in a single moment on October 14, 2011. 

If in Lost and other similar series the natural focus, if we may put it that way, is on those who were lost and crossed the border into the unknown, in The Leftovers, as its name suggests, we focus on those left behind. On the people who lost spouses, children, friends and, in many ways,  themselves and the world they had lived in until then.

Three years after the event, humanity is still trying to cope with the new reality, and is doing so with awkwardness, uncertainty, and hesitation that we surely recognize from the present day. Amidst a cacophony of cults, preachers, and self-proclaimed saints, countless statistics, conspiracy theories, and above all, a cold and terrible understanding that there is no choice. We must go on. We must call the missing “heroes” in the anniversary parades in their memory, because “those we have no idea where the hell they are” doesn’t sound good.

Image from The Leftovers

Kevin Garvey is the police chief in Mayfield, New York. Nora Durst lives in the town. Kevin’s family falls apart when his wife joins an anarchist sect that advocates silence and smoking in the wake of the event. Nora’s family fell apart during the event, in a way that is unusual even in this reality—her husband and two children disappeared.

This is a story about faith, love, and stubbornness—in the best sense of the word—while dealing with a scattered, indifferent, and illogical world. Kevin and Nora are meant for each other, and they reach out across the chasm that has opened up between them, across the boundary that separates the world of the living, the world of the dead, and the world of the disappeared.

The success of The Leftovers lies, in my opinion, in the poetic reverberations it leaves with the viewer, in the resonance it evokes between personal and universal tragedy, between the intimacy of the small communities in the United States and Australia where the three seasons of the series take place, and the journey across continents and worlds that the characters undergo. There is a resonance between the words and Max Richter’s perfect soundtrack, between our world and the one opposite it. And also between the mystery posed at the beginning of the series and its beautiful ending, which resolves only what can still be resolved.

The Leftovers manages to avoid the predictable pitfalls that seasoned viewers fear: kitschy leaks, plot holes, excessive grotesqueness, and above all, the feeling that we are trapped, even if willingly, in the trunk of a speeding truck driven by creators who should not have been licensed to do so in the first place. 

My favorite moment in the series occurs at the end of the second season, and it stands on its own, without fear of spoilers. 

Kevin Garvey is trying to return home from the other world, the beyond. He stands there, living dead, confused, facing a blinding light that could symbolize the end of the tunnel, but also looks like a tool of evil interrogation. He holds a microphone and sings Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” to the best of his ability. He is vulnerable, he is human, look at him and you will see us: blinking in the light, ready to do anything to try and return to a familiar place, a peaceful corner of the world that obeys foreign forces we did not shape ourselves, that give us no foothold in anything, and yet – we are there, choked with tears, singing at the top of our lungs, with faith, love, and stubbornness, until we succeed.

Under the Skin (2013), a film by Jonathan Glazer (presented at the Utopia Film Festival) tells the story of a mysterious beauty (Scarlet Johansson) who travels around Scotland, picking up hitchhikers, whom she leads into a space that may be called, following Freud, the Unheimlich. The film is a story about relationship between men and women, otherness and difference and what is found “Under the Skin”.

The film uses a documentary-like style of cinematography, using the “hidden camera” technique, to tell a story about the fear of losing control, the connection between sex and death, and the built-in alienation in human relationships from what they perceive as “other.”

The film leaves its viewers in a state of uncertainty until its end, thus sharpening its message about the inability to understand the “other”, peel off the layers and get to the “truth” about the essence of human existence.

This is a disturbing film that deals with the central themes of the science fiction genre: What does “human” mean? What is the difference between the human and the non-human? Can we sketch the border line between the human and the “alien”? At the end of this mysterious journey, we are left with more questions than answers. In fact, one can say that the film illustrates through its cinematic expression the interpretive failure. That is, the ambiguity of the film is both a cinematic tool and a philosophical statement: we can never really understand what is not “us”.

The film is based on a successful novel of the same name by Michael Faber, in which, contrary to the cinematic adaptation, a more explicit explanation is given about the essence of the mystery it is centered around. While the novel is a parable about the slave / master relationship between man and animals, and between men and women as a thematic counterpart of this enslavement, Glazer’s film remains open for interpretation.

The book and film are two recommended and fascinating works, especially after we found ourselves reflecting quite a bit on invisible threats from the outside, entering “inside”, into the body, into the home space that was once perceived as protected, and that today, we have learned to know also as a place of isolation and lockdown. A period in which the “stranger” is us. We were told to stay away from anyone who is “other”, even those who are closest to us.

Scarlet Johansson in the Uncanny space of “Under the Skin”, Jonathan Glazer, 2013

Like other texts of the science fiction genre, “Under the Skin” also tells us something about human existence through a story about danger from the “outside”. “Under the Skin” tells us a story about ourselves through alienation of the familiar and making it Unheimlich, uncanny, different, threatening, and undermining the very existence of the boundaries between the body and what is outside it. In doing so, this film becomes more relevant than ever and provides a thought-provoking experience of our human existence in hostile spaces and under threats that are hidden from the eye.

At the start of the CoVid-19 pandemic a plethora of articles flooded the web with talk about the future. The word-overflow was found in publications large and small, from the New York Times and the London Financial Times to a host of local outlets, focused mainly on the disappearing world, the one outside our doors.

This was an understandable and natural focus, the primary reason for which was that the first thing the pandemic took from all of us was the “outside”; the confidence we had, and demonstrated, when stepping “outside” – from the inside; from inside our apartment, our house, from inside our homes. This confidence is much more than merely an everyday reality that had simply vanished.

In the sense that the ability to move freely in public space is fundamentally tied to symbols of power, to the status and meaning of the ‘middle class’, the pandemic attacked the very foundations of the same social strata that produced the aforementioned opinion pieces, the “word-overflow about the future”.

For the journalist, the philosopher, the legal scholar, the economist – the street, the outside, the public sphere – they are the essentials for language, for the ability and the reason, to express any and all ideas.

Therefore, alongside many other reasons that led to that “futuristic word-overflow”, such as the actual magnitude and severity of the phenomenon, the clear economic interest of corporations and CEO’s to “get the economy back on track” – almost all opinion pieces and journalistic texts chose to discuss the street, transportation, economics, construction, and work. They did so, at times with great flair, while almost completely ignoring a topic and a figurative and actual space that’s as important, if not most important, the home, our homes.

The home space, our apartments or houses, our places of dwelling, much like other things deeply rooted in the foundation of our world and perception, tend to be imperceptible, even invisible.

The strong, for the most part, do not have encounters with the law – it definitely doesn’t impede them, it might actually help them from time to time; Members of a majority group are mostly unaware of minority sensibilities (to the say the least), because they see themselves as normal, and blind to the “abnormal”. In the same way, we – the ‘middle class’ and ‘upper class’ of the world (if you are reading this – there’s an assumption in this piece that you can associate yourself to one of these categories. apologies if this is incorrect – UA), take for granted the existence of a secure and consistent shelter, a house, an apartment, a home of our own. We’re not even aware of it’s implicit and undeniable existence.

It’s hard to know exactly how irregular the current situation is: homelessness is a problem that’s hard to define and even harder to measure, with each country having different definitions of what’s a “normal” situation vis-à-vis “problematic”. Despite these difficulties it can be said that the privilege most of us enjoy, i.e., to live safely in our home, to have the availability of clean and running water, regular electricity, sufficient space not only for basic needs but also for some comfort, is a privilege that is becoming more and more inaccessible, year by year, for hundreds of millions of people.

A report submitted to the UN 2020 GA (1) examines the relationship between the CoVid-19 pandemic and homelessness. According to the report, 1.8 billion people live in inadequate living conditions. These 1.8 billion people are basically unable to observe CoVid-19 quarantine, shelter in place, or social distancing requirements, instructions or regulations, either suggested or legally demanded by their governments; they might want to comply, they may not – it’s irrelevant, they simply can’t. Their housing defines their being. It defines their ability to be healthy, but also their ability to follow instructions, be cooperative, express solidarity, but also obey and survive. Live and die.

The pandemic, which has forces and is still forcing many of us to “shelter in place” and “quarantine at home”, exposes the inequalities that define the global housing problem for several decades now.

A temporary housing compound for the homeless in a parking lot in Las Vegas, Nevada (31.3.2020, reported by the New York Times). Authorities marked 6-feet squares to help the local homeless community maintain physical distance, thus protecting them and help to potentially reduce the spread of the virus. Photo: Steve Marcus, Reuters.

Obviously, our own living conditions define all these things for us as well, us fortunate ones who have adequate housing. All we have to do is fondly reminisce on the list of mega-celebrities who joined the “tear-jerking” Gal Gadot-led “Imagine” song compilation. Their purpose was to say: We’re all in this together. We too are stuck at home, sheltering in place, we too are isolated. These are extremely difficult times for all of us, but hey – it’s not all dark, there’s a silver lining, there’s hope! It’s quite obvious this is all bullshit.

It’s impossible to compare the quarantine conditions of Gal Gadot (as an example, who also took the lead for the “Imagine” project, there are countless names to choose from) with my own quarantine conditions, even though the writer of this article lives in the Northern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, in a lovely apartment. When I conjure the memories of the first weeks of the CoVid-19 lockdown, I’d definitely be happy for them to include a private swimming pool and a gym; more money than I could ever spend in my lifetime would surely sweeten the burdens of lockdown and social isolation. Of course, these facts about celebrity life must be kept hidden. They were not videoed in luxury clothing or had makeup and hair done. They did not include the private chefs or their household management team. We were not privy to their lavish home theaters, or their huge and opulent bathrooms. These videos gave celebrities their coveted image: to be “just like us”.

Those wishes, not unlike our own wish, to ignore that our homes are obvious for us but are not self-evident to hundreds of millions of people around the world – those are political wishes. It’s a wish to blur the lines that separate classes, gender, race, religion and place.

Opinion pieces published at the start of the pandemic focused, whether consciously or not, on changes that our society is comfortable focusing on, as they are palatable, not to say could actually be wonderful, from a capitalist perspective: more people will use the “gig economy” to order food and groceries. The environment will clean itself up without any structural-economic changes in our ways of life. True, people might be more hesitant, possibly even afraid of each other, but social media, Zoom calls and other virtual conversations will open up new relationship horizons, be a remedy for the alienation and loneliness of a capitalist society. When these articles did deal with our home space they mostly addressed and discussed one specific context: work.

True indeed, the office has been the form of workplace organization preferred by markets for about 150 years, and much will be lost in moving employees to work from home (i.e., the manager’s ability for supervision), but think about all we might gain! The ability to work all around the clock, as there’s no longer a separation between home and workplace. The ability to work and hire professionals, from anywhere in the world. Although these issues were presented in a slightly hesitated tone and some anxiety and fear by the writers of such articles, not exactly the ideal situation, they were presented as fait accompli: this is how it’s going to be, and that’s that. It’s because of CoVid, you see? There’s no choice but to import the existing forms of work and to apply them on the home space.

And now we finally arrive to the heart of the matter: our living conditions, and moreover, the parts of our living conditions which we take for granted, are political. And in politics, it’s important to listen not only to what’s being said but also, and more importantly, be attuned to what’s not being said. As I mentioned earlier, what determines what we do not see, what we do not hear, what exists and what does not exist, is power. Power determines what’s normal, what’s obvious, because it serves existing power structures. Why invest so many resources in maintaining and protecting the existing order, when the existing order can be turned into something obvious, something we’re oblivious to, something that truly cannot be resisted? Obviously, we have to work from home, because of the pandemic. Obviously, it’s not possible to reduce the quota of weekly work hours. Obviously, it’s impossible to pay people just to stay home, shelter in place, take care of themselves and their loved ones, and not work. Obviously, people need to dress at home as if they were in the office, during work calls and Zoom meetings. Obviously, work calls and meetings still take place, and it’s legitimate to ask people to turn their home space into an office, letting their boss and their colleagues into their most private, safe spaces. Their sanctuary. Their home.

Stock photos of “Working From Home”, the lighting is great, and it looks fantastic! Fun and even relaxing!

It’s important to clarify – I’m not saying that these “obvious” claims that were just mentioned are necessarily incorrect. Some are certainly true. But why are they self-evident? Were we even given the chance to ask the questions that need be asked about them? Or were they presented to us exactly as the same fait accompli, a done deed, a fact? The pandemic has revealed many hidden truths, but mostly revealed how little choice, impact, and power we have on even the things most important to us, like our living spaces, our homes. The influence and choice were taken from us by the obvious, the normal, the self-evident. Behind the walls of the “obvious” were hidden the drastic changes we are experiencing and will continue to experience in the future, whether they are caused by a pandemic or not.

What else can we do but challenge the obvious? What else is left but to imagine a different domestic space – strange, uncanny, disturbing, hybrid and subversive? Such visions are much more than mere daydreams, flights of fantasy. When we reimagine home, our most private, cherished, familiar place, our temple, our bastion of self, as a bizarre, natant, mutated, fluid, peculiar place, we perform a political act. An act of resistance. Therefore, our purpose in this issue of Utopia is clear: as always, our purpose is to challenge the “obvious”, in this case rethink the clean, tidy and pastel-colored image of the new domestic home space that has been assimilated, naturalized and presented as obvious in the various opinion pieces and visions of the future from the past year. As we wrote in our Utopian manifesto, there’s no better tool for that, than science fiction:

“Science fiction uses extreme conditions to discuss taboo topics. When venturing into the unknown, science fiction also handles the unspeakable, the hidden taboos lying just underneath the surface, beneath the woodwork, presenting itself in plain sight, in broad daylight, when conditions actually become extreme.

What should we notice right now? What should we be attentive to? Science fiction will have important insight.” – Uri Aviv

Recommendations

Before I let you, dear readers, dive into the investigations and provocations we’ve prepared for you in this issue, our opinion pieces, our visions for the home and domestic space – strange yet familiar, welcoming yet peculiar, our perspective of the uncanny, let me recommend a few exceptional science fiction and speculative creative works that marvelously disassemble and reassemble the “obvious” home space:

Highrise, by James Graham Ballard, 1975 – A cornerstone of postmodern science fiction authored by one of the most feverish and unique creative minds of the past century. The novel, which has been adapted to film in 2015 (directed by Ben Wheatley, starring Tom Hiddleston) describes the social (and physical) disintegration of a state-of-the-art high-rise housing complex, in the not-too-distant future. The book deals with issues of work, class, status and living space (the characters are all middle class, but from very different parts of it) and points to the social and political structures created by our actual forms and conditions of living, in an accurate and distressing manner.

Highrise, by James Graham Ballard, 1975

Ex Machina, by Alex Garland, 2014 – Although Alex Garland’s 2014 film (presented at a special screening at Utopia) is most often discussed for its presentation and discussion of anthropomorphic robotics, artificial intelligence intersected with issues of gender, almost the entire film takes place in the eccentric secluded mansion of an equally eccentric, neurotic and extremely wealthy man, who built the AI. The eerie villa becomes the battlefield over which the plot takes place, as access to different parts of the house gives access to knowledge, freedom, and power. The multiple scenes that take place in the various corridors and different rooms, well-utilizing their specific attributes, the different behaviors of the characters in these different spaces, with the added fact that the AI robot is restricted to one and only specific room in the house, makes the film a great example for the seamlines between our visions of the future, architecture, literal corridors of power and forms of control in our home, domestic space.

Ex Machina, by Alex Garland, 2014

Swallow, by Carl Mirabella-Davis, 2019 – An excellent indie film released in 2019 (premiered in Israel at Utopia) that tells the story of a housewife with a rare eating disorder, manifested in eating things not considered food (from dirt to various objects, the disorder is called Pica). While not strictly science fiction (an extreme psychological drama, with horror DNA), it is replete with hints at existing and future domestic spaces, which in their cleanliness and power symbols hide, in plain sight, deep class and gender violence. The film excellently showcases how an “ordinary” domestic space, ordinary and obvious to most of its dwellers, can be the stage for an intense psycho-drama for the main character, oppressed and abused, becoming much more (or far less) than “just” a living space (for her it’s far from being a “living” space). The house becomes a theater of war, a path to freedom and inhabits possibilities for resistance and rebellion.

Swallow, by Carl Mirabella-Davis, 2019

Save the Children!

“Save the Children”! cried out thousands of women at intersections and street corners across the U.S. during the Spring and Summer months of 2020. In August of 2020, what became a movement – the women, the call, the signs and t-shirts – started appearing at President Trump’s election rallies.

In March and April of 2020 we all had much more free time on our hands and most of us found ourselves spending most of it online, in front of a myriad of screens our home is equipped with. This dramatic increase brought with it greater attention to social media. One of the most common topics of discussion on social media in the US at the time became worry and care for children. Facebook Groups and (mostly female) communities on other social media platforms, usually dealing with nutrition and dieting, health supplements, fitness, yoga, and the like, became increasingly concerned with the fate of American children. #savethechildren started trending on Twitter.

Naturally, we take care of children, but… How did this happen? Why now, more than ever? What is so threatening the well-being of children? From what do we need to save the children of America (and the whole world)? And what made Facebook block the use of the hashtag #savethechildren?

Save The Children protester, 22 August 2020, Chattanooga Tennessee, USA, Image: Troy Stolt, Chattanooga Times Free Press

To get to the bottom of this bizarre story we’ll have to go back in time to 1919. Following WWI, Europe was in ruin. The war followed by the Spanish influenza (now made famous again) was a one-two punch to European society and economy. One of the most severe problems was hunger, and the immediate victims, as always, were children. The collapsing economy brought with it reports of famine among the children of Hungary, Austria and Germany, reports that were too unbearable for two British humanitarian activists – Eglantyne Jebb and her sister, Dorothy Buxton.

Dorothy and Eglantyne, daughters to a wealthy British family, took upon themselves the task of alleviating the effects of the economic and health catastrophe from the children of Europe, saving the unfortunate little ones from starvation. Thus, “Save the Children.” In May 1919 the “Save the Children” Fund was set up at a packed public meeting in London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the aim of raising emergency aid funds to help children suffering from malnutrition in post-war Europe.

Children fed by “Save the Children” in the 1921 famine in Russia

The sisters continued their sacred work for the children of the world up to the day they died, including drafting the “Declaration of the Rights of the Child” (Geneva, 1923), formulated by Eglantyne herself and adopted by the League of Nations and later, the United Nations. The fund continues its work for children in areas stricken by disaster and war all over the world to this day; it fights exploitation and abuse and works for the rights of children everywhere (1).

With intentions so pure and proper, why would Facebook temporarily block the use of the hashtag #savethechildren, identified with the fund and its activity?

To understand what Facebook has against the well-established fund, or against children in general (spoiler alert: nothing), one has to swim in the deep waters of conspiracy theories, deep dive into the mega-theory, now well-known under the moniker of QAnon.

According to the believers of this malicious conspiracy theory, there’s a secret cabal of demonic creatures that walk among us, creatures who impersonate ordinary humans, while running world governments, society and culture, both from the top, and behind the scenes, directing processes and events for their own personal and evil benefit. Some say they are aliens (lizard people – from the Alpha-Draconis star system, obviously) or possibly creatures from the depths of the Earth (which is hollow/flat). Some will outright say these are demons, following Satan. The saner people among the believers will argue that these are all sophisticated and inspiring metaphors used among their surrounding circle of believers, but in practice these are simply particularly abominable human beings.

The Draco Constellation, from the Uranometria Star Atlas (Ulm, 1661) by Johann Bayer

What is clear to all believers is that this small group – whether there are humans, reptilians or energy vampires – is unimaginably rich, controls all positions of power in the world – politics, finance, religion, media, science, culture – and perpetuates with its immense power a false perception that the masses (all of us) cannot help but believe. If the story resonates with conspiracy theories you may well know about the Freemasons, the Illuminati or just plain old Protocols-of-Zion Jews, then don’t be surprised, these are of course incorporated in the twists and turns of many conspiratorial belief, including being at the heart of this one.

Some “truths” of the QAnon cannon that are important you should know (these are independent beliefs, believing in one concept does not necessitate believing in all of them): the Earth is flat; humans have never landed on the Moon and all space projects are astronomical lies; Obama is Hitler’s grandson; No plane crashed on 9/11; most recently, the 1/6 US Capitol insurrection was an “inside job”, done by Antifa activists posing as Trump activists and/or, it actually never really took place, it’s all “fake”, what we see on the news are paid actors performing on a Hollywood set.

What else is clear as daylight to all QAnon believers? What’s the most heinous act? That alleged Satanic elite group, they kidnaps children and exploits them, sexually (2). From this misguided and preposterous belief the road to “Save the Children” signs at Trump rallies is extremely short.

The conspirators believe in various fictitious tales about CoVid19. In April 2020 a field hospital was opened in Central Park, NYC, for the treatment of CoVid19 patients. The reasoning, funding and organization were contested, but there was no question – it helped people, treated patients. For QAnon acolytes it was obvious the entire operation was a cover story for the smuggling of innocent children into the evil mechanisms of the pedophile lizard people.

From whom should we save the children then? Not from the horrors of war, not from hunger, disease or extreme poverty (3), nor from sexual assault, that studies suggest occurs in places we identify as most safe (4). We must and will save children from pedophile aliens who wish to drink their blood for eternal youth.

How do you contend with pure evil? Few went out to the street corners, town squares, interstate intersections, doing the bare minimum and protest (by the way, the movement being predominantly female (5)). But as we all know, the main and best way to fight pure evil is rage, holy rage, preferably online – on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They liked, commented and they shared, shared and shared (the QAnon feminine faith movement has been dubbed “Pastel QAnon“).

And so it happened that the well-intentioned, century-old fund, working for children’s rights and fights abuse, maltreatment, exploitation and trafficking of children all over the world, was forced to distance itself from a social campaign that bears its name in vain. The hashtag “Save the Children” had become, at least for a while, digital taboo.

Jake Angeli (born Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley, better known as Q Shaman, at the 1/6 Insurrection, Capitol Hill, DC

The Monster

The past few decades mark a gradual but crucial awakening regarding sexual assault in general, of children in particular. We realize, more and more, the extent and manner in which these horrors are present in society, recognize the social institutions and organizations in which it exists and where it was, possibly still is, being all too often plastered, concealed, not to say sadly, preserved.

We’ve learnt that rape doesn’t occur in dark allyways, perpetrated by shadowy attackers. Rape usually occurs in intimate, close situations, surroundings understood to be most safe, benign, homely. At home, with family.

Worst of all is sexual abuse of children, of the helpless. Over the past few decades we’ve learnt, it’s been exposed, that child sexual assault is much more common than assumed and occurs in the places supposed to be the safest for children: churches, little league sports teams, schools and kindergartens (and in Israel, the children’s home of the Kibbutz). Safest of all and therefore worst of all is also most prominent – most sexual child assaults take place at home and within the family.

The disillusionment is inevitable but also necessary, as the crisis breaks people apart. The recognition that school, church, soccer practice or little league and of course, home itself, are not the safe place we believed them to be but a potential crime scene, is a horrific understanding that’s not easily digestible, for some. The difficulty is clear, understandable, undeniable, but the intensity of the pain involved correlates to the magnitude of denial and the social-cultural-psychological monster created.

The parish priest, the baseball coach and of course – neighbors, uncles, relatives and our most cherished and intimate loved ones – they are not the ones to hurt our children. Not possible. Inconceivable. Impossible. We won’t allow it. Not Way. The solution – a world-wide conspiracy of powerful monsters.

We alienate, as individuals and as a society, threats and fears. As we alienate, we also sometimes demonize. The Science fiction and horror genres often engage with imagery of the terrifying other, the peculiar stranger, but a deeper terror, a more disturbing otherness, lies in the alienation from the familiar, the ordinary, the well-trod – the unheimlich.

The Uncanny Familiar – Das Unheimlich

In 1919, as the Jebb sisters were working relentlessly in Great Britain to “Save the Children” of Europe from starvation, Freud published his article Das Unheimliche (translated as “The Uncanny” to English).

Dana Tor elaborates on the article, whose connections to literature, science fiction and horror works are plentiful (Freud analyzes the works of E.T.A Hoffman, and in particular  his story “The Sandman”. Hoffman was one of the most significant proto-science fiction creators of the late 18th century).

Das Unheimliche, Sigmund Freud 1919

Freud made the Uncanny famous in his 1919 essay by that name, Das Unheimliche, exploring the eeriness of dolls and waxworks, but for a century it remained a professional term used in a few very specific disciplines: psychology, sociology, literature and cinema, robotics and animation. It seldom made it into idle conversation, you didn’t hear it in small-talk or around the family dinner table.

Nowadays – everyone, everywhere, whether knowingly or not, is talking about it. We’ve all experienced in the flesh the unsettling feeling of the strangely familiar, the unheimlich. The Uncanny is all around us – in our haunted homes, beaming from our screens, in the streets – emptied out, now strangely revitalized, our cities, muted and mutated. It’s in the fabric of everyday life, in the sudden strangeness of daily routines. A fear not triggered by alienation, not external…  A fear coming from inside the house!

The now well-known meme, “It’s Coming From Inside the House!” originates in the 1979 horror film “When a Stranger Calls”

None of us are strangers to the disruption of daily life: urban space, family or home. Israelis are well acquainted with sudden recruitment for military reserve duty or with the immediate need to seek shelter from missiles and terror attacks, and we’re not alone with any of this; Wars, terror attacks, nuclear accidents, oil spills and natural disasters afflict every region, strain economies, scar cities, injure homes and families.

Nonetheless, we’re still far from a complete understanding of the exceptionality of the CoVid19 event in history, being both on a global scale, but also extremely intimate.

At a particular moment in 2020, billions of people all over the world experienced a complete upheaval of their lives and routines as they were asked, sometimes required, to quarantine in their homes, to shelter in place. This, surprisingly, did not coincide with reports from the frontlines, at least not as we were used to them – Hospital Wing C isn’t exactly The Somme, Iwo Jima or NYC on 9/11. There were no reports from the engineering teams at the nuclear accident or from the rescue efforts at the Tsunami-hit coastal region.

The shock itself includes a disruption of perspectives. We receive periodic reports from the Ministry of Education about the opening and closing of kindergartens and schools; heated debates on the news about visits to mom and dad, grandma and grandpa and how to celebrate Passover Seder, Thanksgiving or Christmas; And there’s also the many smaller personal dilemmas: do I hug the friend who went through a painful breakup, or the one who just found out has cancer  An alienation from the familiar, an intimate, uncanny strangeness that can only be defined as unheimlich, took over.

Tel Aviv during the first CoVid19 quarantine, April 2020, photo credit: Gideon Markovitz

We all went through, are still going through, a difficult and strange process of alienation, from what we know, perceive, identify, as normal, common, regular, as ourselves.

We were not drafted for military reserve duty, did not need to flee our own homes (on the contrary), we were not refugees nor were we in the trenches. Our trenches were the city streets and boulevards, our battlefield was on Zoom. A lull in the fight was a step from the bedroom to the kitchen, a return from the frontline – a drive from home to work.

We also had no idea if and which of these disruptions are temporary or permanent and if and which of these life changes are good or bad, which makes them even harder to address, to process, to understand how we feel about them.

Changes we did not know if they would be temporary or permanent (not to mention the complete confusion in scales of time and space – discussed in the previous Utopia issue about Inhuman Scales and the Hyperobject), are these good or bad changes (and to whom?) And therefore – how do we even refer to them?

All of this, along with the political shocks, social, economic and health distress, have generated in many increased anxieties, anxieties that have brought the uncanny to our mental doorstep and to the front and center of the psychological, social, and cultural stage. Das Unheimlich is among us, it has always been, and will always be. But, might the Uncanny be the new dominant fear in the soon to be “new normal” time? not fear of an unknown other, but fear of an unknowable self?

All roads lead to Das Unheimlich

“True Voyage is Return” – Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Two processes led me in my thoughts to Das Unheimlich – the terrible realities that pushed so many people, desperate for meaning, to the Cartoon-ish conspiracy theory – QAnon; alongside my own daily CoVid19 anxieties and those of my immediate loved ones. The two processes met in one place – home.

The past year has given us a special one-time only focus, whether we wanted to or not, on our homes, and the very concept of home: figurative and physical; the private, family and social home; The technology, architecture and design of home; the psychological, economic, political home. Home provides shelter and comfort, all the while concealing secrets and pain. In the US this focus has led quite a few frightened individuals into the arms of a cult-like conspiracy theory, but this extreme scenario represents normal anxieties and fears that inhabit all of us.

The feeling of strangeness, the uncanny alienation from the familiar, understanding that true evil isn’t necessarily external but might be within us, inhabit us – part of our childhood memories, our own personality, the building blocks of the home we live in – I see all of these as important insights of our times. Threat, discomfort and even evil are all part of us, of who we are.

Hope is our mission at Utopia! We can only hope that CoVid19 will reduce our acts of alienation and demonization (6), precisely in light of the ongoing and powerful experience of the Unheimlich we are all experiencing together and especially with the understanding that the virus and pandemic can not be outed, alienated, from the human body or from human society. On the  contrary, fighting CoVid19 requires communal and geopolitical collaboration, alongside social solidarity, more than ever (while on the contrary the populists might use the moniker “China Virus”).

I truly hope and aspire for a future where we no longer imagine complete and utter evils that must be eradicated, we stop producing monsters – be they pedophile lizards, energy vampires, orcs in service of the dark lord, radical Islamic terrorists or Chinese virologists – and deal with discomfort, anxiety, fear and possibly even evil, which is not on another planet, but exists with us everywhere, even in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom. At home. We might be better off not calling it evil, at all.

Acknowledging these homely, domestic, fears, anxieties and horrors, is a worthy task. We’ll never proclaim victory, never speak under a banner claiming “Mission Accomplished”.

US President George W. Bush announces end of military action in Iraq in an address to the nation aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, with the now infamous headline “Mission Accomplished”, 2 May 2003. Photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

but like the journey towards Utopia itself, the one that’s always on the horizon, it’s a commendable mission. The journey to Utopia teaches us how to be better people.

Author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that “True voyage is return” (The Dispossessed, 1974). The journey to the Unheimlich, makes us better people, or at the very least, less anxious, which isn’t so bad as well.

Jerry (Jerome) Siegel was born in 1914 and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents immigrated to the US, fleeing Anti-Semitism in Lithuania. Joe Schuster was also born in 1914. He grew up in Toronto, Canada, and at the age of 10 his family moved to Cleveland. His Jewish parents met in Toronto: his father Julius came with his family from Amsterdam, his mother Ida from Kiev.

Jerry and Joe met and became great friends in high school. Both were fond of literature and adventure and fantasy movies (science fiction was still in its infancy, it wasn’t really called yet “science fiction”).

Jerry wrote, Joel sketched, and at the end of high school they started making comics together. Throughout the 1930’s, as they worked to build their name and reputation in the comics industry, they kept on developing a character and storyline that would change the world.

Joe Schuster

Jerry Siegel

The first comic book in the Action Comics series by publisher Detective Comics Ltd. (some may be familiar with their widely known abbreviated name these days, DC), was published in April of 1938. The comic book told the story of Superman, an alien being, human in appearance but with superhuman powers, who lives among us. He walks among us in disguise as socially awkward journalist Clark Kent, but in secret – he is saving the world!

Jerry and Joe, social awkward in their own eyes, created the legend of Superman.

Was Superman Jewish?

Two New York Jews (they move to New York in the late 30’s) create a comic book character, so what? Now every character conceived by a Jewish person is Jewish by definition? Come on!

First, of course not, and more importantly, there are a multitude of Supermen. The legend of Superman has been told over and over again, countless times – in comics, literature, on the radio, on film, TV shows, digital games and I’ve not checked, but probably shadow puppetry theater as well. Creators have used Superman to express a variety of ideas in different themes, quite a few of which are actually American, Capitalist, even Imperialist, many others a religious-Christian tone, not to mention Messianic.

Superman on the cover of a comic book story collection following 9/11

But still, it’s difficult to ignore the background of its original creators, the fact that this is their first creative work, and the one that they have developed together for a long time over their youth and young adulthood.

It’s hard not to acknowledge and assume some very basic surface influences at the least. First, the Old Testament story of Moses, sent away as a mere baby from his home, his family, his people, sent in a basket – to be saved, much like Superman. Superman’s name is of course also thought-provoking. His original Kryptonian name, Kal-El, an alien name, reminiscent in the Hebrew language to names of Biblical angels (God’s messengers that also have superpowers and who, in Jewish and Christian mythology, may also fly). The name also carries within it the word El (other well-known angels: Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, Raphael), meaning God. The word Kal in Hebrew echoes the word “Kol” meaning “voice”, the name “Kal-El” can be understood as “the voice of God”.

However, in studies that examine the topic deeper, some see in the Superman persona, storyline and concept, a representation of the dual existence of American Jews at that time period, the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, and possibly a glimpse into Siegel’s and Schuster’s psyche, a look into their personal dilemmas, their souls.

On the one hand, descendant from a great culture, an impressive past, but one that is no more, is utterly destroyed. History can be accessible to them – If they choose to access it. Ancient and mysterious wisdom and knowledge. They do not have the knowledge in them, with them, they do not fully comprehend the depths of the knowledge that exists. In order to gain access to the great minds and wonders of their legendary past they must go to a special place, a sacred repository where these secrets are held, where they will hear – figuratively or perhaps even literally – the voices of their lost culture. This is a decision they must make. They know the knowledge is there, waiting for them to be found.

On the other hand, they must hide all of this, they mustn’t be revealed. They have to assimilate in contemporary culture: walk “among them”, be “like them”, look “like them”. “They” do not know that their normal clothes, their office suits, summer shirts, winter sweaters and coats, they’re all costumes. Underneath, another garment is hidden – secret, sublime, holy even, charged with tremendous power.

The undergarment? Another costume, no other word for it. It may seem ridiculous, but it’s part of the ceremony, in it imbued a piece of that historical knowledge, that immortal, heavenly, power. A blue leotard, red underwear on top and on the chest an archaic sign, reminiscent of the English letter S.

Superman, by Adam Hughes

One should also allow space for the duality in the assimilation dilemma in American society, a dilemma that exists in every community of immigrants. Should we preserve our unique identity – our culture, traditions, recipes and rituals, or should we let them go? Should we live in a separate community or try and adopt local customs and ways, not clinging to our immigrant community and past. Louis Lane, Kal-El’s love interest, we should be reminded, thinks that Clark Kent is a squeamish, nerdy, klutz, but Superman – is hot!

Another interesting reversal is that Clark Kent is a journalist, man of the written word, the nerdy scholar who is embarrassed around people in general, particularly awkward around women (Siegel confessed that his embarrassment around women is embodied in Kent’s character). In contrast, Superman – a name common for people with special physical strength in the 1920’s and 30’s – is of course first and foremost, physical. The Man of Steel is strong, muscular, and sexy. He feels comfortable with public attention in general, and with the attention of women, and of Louis Lane, in particular.

And lest we forget – Superman’s motto. Again, duality and backwards logic. One can read in the slogan the strong desire (which again, exists in many immigrant communities, not specific to the Jewish American community) not only to assimilate, but to prove complete integration by demonstrating extra-patriotism, above and beyond expected, far more than the local “native” population, who may be readily more critical of their local government.

What is Superman’s motto? What is he fighting for?

Truth, Justice and the American Way!

Truth, Justice and the American Way – Superman’s Motto

This is one possible reading of Superman, and as I mentioned, there are many Supermen, and many possible readings. Considering the history of the creators, this reading is self-evident and well accepted and legitimate, alongside others.

Jerry and Joe are indeed the original creators, but they were certainly not the only ones who contributed to Superman’s tremendous success in its very early beginnings. Might this hamper the thesis? Well, let’s see! The publishers, Detective Comics Ltd., are Jacob Leibowitz, an Ukrainian Jew, and Harry Donnenfeld, a Romanian Jew. The first editor-in-chief, who came on board with Joe and Jerry when Superman’s stories began to grow beyond their capabilities in 1940, was Mort Weisinger. Was he Jewish? Of course! descendant of a Jewish family from Austria.

But if a conclusive proof of Superman’s Jewish roots is required, well, the Nazis thought he was Jewish, and they did not like it one bit.

Wait, what?

The Nazis did not like Superman

They may have been all about the Übermensch, but they didn’t like the Superman.

By February 1940 (six months into World War II, but nearly two years before the Pearl Harbor attack), Superman was already extremely popular in the comic book world and was now to become a radio star as well. Getting a radio show was a big deal back then: four days a week, 15 minutes every day, Superman’s tales would circulate all over the country, through the ether, a daily radio cast. Superman has officially become an influencer; a Celebrity, on his way to the A-list.

On Look magazine, in an item promoting the radio show, Siegel and Schuster were asked how they thought Superman would end the raging war in Europe. The answer was given in a special edition comic written exclusively for the magazine. Superman flies to Europe, picks up Hitler from his hiding place and brings him – not before he smacks him and takes Stalin along with him – to a meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva. He doesn’t kill them. He doesn’t punish them. He brings them both to face trial before the entire League of Nations, for crimes against humanity.

How would Superman end the war in Europe? Page 1 of 2 (Look Magazine, February 1940)

How would Superman end the war in Europe? Page 2 of 2 (Look Magazine, February 1940)

Look magazine made its way to Germany and on April 25, 1940, in “The Black Corps” (Das Schwarze Korps), the SS weekly, a deadly review of the Jewish Superman was published (1).

From the review (in English translation):

Jerry Siegel, an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York, is the inventor of a colorful figure with an impressive appearance, a powerful body, and a red swimsuit who enjoys the ability to fly through the ether. The inventive Israelite named this pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind “Superman.” He advertised widely Superman’s sense of justice, well-suited for imitation by the American youth.

As you can see, there is nothing the Sadducees won’t do for money!

And, after slaying the plot, the  reviewer concludes:

A triumphant final frame shows Superman, the conqueror of death, dropping in at the headquarters of the chatterboxes at the League of Nations in Geneva. Although the rules of the establishment probably prohibit people in bathing suits from participating in their deliberations, Superman ignores them as well as the other laws of physics, logic, and life in general. He brings with him the evil German enemy along with Soviet Russia. Well, we really ought to ignore these fantasies of Jerry Israel Siegel, but there is a catch. The daring deeds of Superman are those of a Colorado beetle. He works in the dark, in incomprehensible ways. He cries “Strength! Courage! Justice!” to the noble yearnings of American children. Instead of using the chance to encourage really useful virtues, he sows hate, suspicion, evil, laziness, and criminality in their young hearts.

Jerry Siegellack* stinks. Woe to the American youth, who must live in such a poisoned atmosphere and don’t even notice the poison they swallow daily.

* A joke about Siegel’s last name, distorting it into the word “wax” in German.

Superman with his two creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster

Just like any story, it’s but a story. Superman isn’t Jewish just as he’s not American. He does not exist. What it is, is an interesting story about the creation of myths, the interpretation we give to creative work, to storytelling; a story about how imagination integrates with reality. A story about the extent to which a work of art, of fiction, a story, can be separated from its creator(s), and about our choice of whether to do so, or not.

If the literature departments in Israeli universities ask to stay relevant, they should start by teaching the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, the celebrated science fiction writer who died of old age in 2018.  

Marian Wood Kolisch (American, 1920-2008), Ursula K. Le Guin, 1988, gelatin silver print, Bequest of Marian Wood Kolisch, © Portland Art Museum, 2009.30.35

In order to support this reading, I would like to present the radicalism of Le Guin’s thought and the way in which it affected the way I think about literature, life, and their mutual influence. For this purpose, I will use the gate set by the media theorist Marshall McLaughlin and his best known idea: “The medium is the message”.

The argument underlying “the medium is the message” is that what is important, when considering any technology is the medium itself, rather than the content that passes through it. A train is a train is a train, and it affects humanity in the same way whether it transports goods in Europe or people to work in Asia. McLaughlin said that the machine, the production line, affected man the same way whether it churned out luxury cars or popcorn. This is of course true for television – what matters is not what we watch on tv but the fact that we sit in front of it in the evening – and this is also true for literature, and more specifically for storytelling, a medium that is almost transparent to us. We always think about the content of the story but do not take into account that storytelling itself also contains a message by the very fact of its being what it is. And whatever it is, it’s much more biased than we think.

In the 1980s, Le Guin published an article called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – the carrier bag, the shopping bag theory of literature. In the article she claims, broadly speaking, that for tens of thousands of years humans have lived in small societies. We picked fruit, collected nuts, gathered plants and occasionally, luck yielded a small hunting trophy. One day some men got up, went out into the field and came across a large animal – in our collective memory it is of course a mammoth – they killed it and returned with the loot to the tribe. But what they brought back to the tribe was much more significant than the meat of the hunt – they returned with a story of heroism. “I did that, and my friend jumped on it from here, and I surrounded it from there, and he strangled it and trampled under it, and then I slit its throat with this pointed stick and killed it.”

This story became the human story, and this tool – the spear, the sword, the arrow – became human technology. For us, this phallic form is the first technology and what allowed us to expand and become what we are today, and this story – a hero who encounters a monster (real, mental, bureaucratic) and defeats it (or loses, if it’s a tragedy) – is the story we know. For us, this is how a story should be told.

But Le Guin reminds us that before all this there were tens of thousands of years of gathering. We ate from the tree and the field and what we wanted to keep for tomorrow we put in a pouch or basket of some kind – this is the tool; this is the initial technology that allowed us to spread and expand. This was the first thing that turned us from being an animal that lives from one moment to another into a complex creature that thinks about tomorrow. But there is no story in it; it is impossible to tell a heroic story about how I struggled with the nutshell and returned home with ten acorns. It’s not interesting.

IIn her literature, Le Guin tries to tell a different story. True, there are always heroes, and they always have obstacles that they try to overcome, but “the real journey is the return“, to borrow one of the favorite phrases from The Dispossessed. In the above-mentioned article, she writes that the hero stole the novel, and she does not believe that he should be allowed to stand on a stage, rather he should be put in the basket or sack to mix with the other ingredients. The societies she describes in her novels mix femininity and masculinity, reality and dream, actions and consequences, intentions and acts; Everything is more circular, more ambivalent. It is not clear that if the hero will just want enough and kill enough monsters he will get his desire, because even this desire – it is not always clear what it actually is. The way she tells stories isn’t exactly the aforementioned forward arrow, that clear linear movement of hero-desires-obstacles-triumph.

That’s why her literature is so radical. Because it makes us think what if – and what if is the thing of science fiction – what if not the story of the forward arrow was the default of storytelling but the circular story. Not one but zero. Not a spear but a basket. What would reality look like then? Some capitalistic, masculine, violent injustices might have been spared from us. She reminds us to think about the medium of storytelling itself, and not only about the content of the story, but about how a story is told.

She is not only radical because she describes to us in her novels anarchist or socialist or asexual society options, but because she shows us what the basis of this thing could look like, how the very thought would have changed, and how this thought would have affected the world. And it’s much more interesting than reading literature through a gender or class prism or all this crap that’s being taught in literature departments and faculties of humanities. She is truly radical. And that’s the kind of radicalism we need.

On November 16, 1869, a festive flotilla left Port Said, ceremonially inaugurating the Suez Canal. During the hundred years that preceded this, Europe was netted with canals that were the main infrastructure for moving goods all over the continent. The canals were one of the hallmarks of an advanced society that shapes its natural environment as it wishes, and the giant canal in Egypt, an unprecedented engineering achievement, was a conceptual symbol of the subjugation of nature to man’s needs. No wonder then that the rumors spread in the winter of 1877 about giant canals on Mars ignited the imagination of many about the possibility that we are not alone.

Opening of The Suez Canal, Nov,17,1869

In October 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made observations on Mars, following which he published a detailed map of the red planets’ surface. In his observations, he named the various regions after earthly seas and continents, but his sensational discovery was the canals. Schiaparelli mapped huge grooves along the Red Planet and called them Canali. In Italian the word can serve to mean both artificial canals and as natural geological structures, but the English translation of the word canals, the word that was used for the infrastructure of canals that spread across Europe, struck the right cultural chords, and the invasion from Mars was launched.

1877 Map of Mars by Giovanni Schiaparelli

The discussion about the existence of extraterrestrial life has been of interest to philosophers and satirists for centuries. They used aliens for thought experiments and social criticism expressed in literature. Moving the earth and man from the center of the universe to an increasingly remote corner following the astronomical discoveries of the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries, carried the issue of extraterrestrial life into the field of scientific discussion. Alongside and inspired by the philosophers and scientists, writers of scientific romances began to appear in the 19th century; literature written out of great faith in progress and the scientific project, inspired by great scientific questions. This was the beginning of science fiction. They acted as if the hypotheses about life on Mars were hidden treasures, which they have come to plunder.

The writers of the scientific romances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries imagined the inhabitants of Mars as having a much more developed and advanced culture than ours, which, similar to the European one, subjugates its environment to its needs. Evidence of this is of course the monstrous construction projects that can be spotted from astronomical distances. A primitive scientific understanding of Mars – its distance from the Sun, size, the composition of its atmosphere, etc. – led to the assumption that the society of the Martians is indeed older than ours and has miraculous technological achievements, but the planet they live on is in advanced dying stages.

One of science fiction’s founding fathers, H. G. Wells, wrote at the time one of the genre’s seminal works. The British fear of the rising power of Germany at the end of the 19th century led to the flourishing literary “invasion” genre. Wells fused the two together and in “The War of the Worlds” (1897) the British author describes the Martian invasion of Earth, an invasion that will happen again and again, from then to now.

Wells bequeathed the Martians with the features of Mars, the Roman god of war, particularly the display of aggression without any emotion or mercy towards us, the earthly people, since they see us as inferior creatures – “We humans, the creatures living on Earth”, he writes, “are certainly alien and inferior to them just as the monkeys and lemurs are alien and inferior in our perspective.” The Martians destroy human cities with their state-of-the-art weapons, and only on the verge of our complete destruction, these demolishing machines stop, and the survivors discover that the Martians are dead. Ot is not that humanity defeated them by force of arms or trickery, they were simply unimmune to a series of viruses and bacteria that humans have endured for hundreds and thousands of years.

The War of the Worlds
Illustrated 1898 Edition

Wells very cleverly weaves a science fiction story that explores the scientific understanding and curiosity of his time while saturating it, not unlike the philosophers before who were engaged with aliens, with a sharp social critique. Wells presents deep criticism of the European colonialism: it tramples nations, destroys cities, and brings to the distinction of species, all via its advanced machines and devices, yet is beaten and subdued again and again by insects and bacteria. “And before we pass judgment on them,” he writes, “we must remember what cruel and absolute destruction our species has inflicted not only on animals such as the extinct bison and dodo, but also on the inferior races among humans. The Tasmanians, who were born as human beings, were completely extinct within fifty years, in a devastating war waged against them by European settlers. Are we angels of compassion because we come to complain about the Martians who wage war in the same way?”

Throughout the twentieth century, invasions from Mars, and over time from more distant planets, continued to take place over pages and on screens. Scientific knowledge about Mars grew further and further, while the likelihood of life on its surface grew shorter. Schiaparelli’s observations turned out to be inaccurate to say the least, particularly regarding the canals, which turned out to be nothing more than optical illusions. When NASA’s spacecrafts began to transmit close-ups of Mars and even landed on its surface in the 1960s and 1970s, the bitter truth was confirmed. Mars is an icy and arid planet. It does have ice caps, but even the ice there is dry (the ice caps of Mars are made of ice and frozen carbon dioxide, “dry ice”).

As Mars is being demystified, sci-fi artists are beginning to envisage other possibilities. Mars was and remains our closest neighbor, and relative to other landscapes in the solar system, it is the most similar to Earth, therefore it is granted that we be the ones who one day settle in it. From the middle of the 20th century, more and more stories have erupted concerning colonies on Mars, while this time the humans are the colonists who make the red wasteland bloom. Here, too, sci-fi artists used Mars as an arena for political criticism – in many cases the residents of the colony are being discriminated and seek autonomy (such as in the tv series “Babylon 5” by J. Michael Strazinski (1994-1998) or the book series – which was also adapted for television, The Expanse, by James Corey,) or that greedy tycoons control the natural resources critical for creating life on Mars, primarily oxygen (“Fateful Memory”, 1990, by Paul Verhoeven, based on Philip K. Dick’s story from 1966).

Marines of the Army of Mars during training, from the tv series “The Expanse”

The literary Mars quite often undergoes a complex and long process of “terrestrialization”, a technological intervention that slowly changes the surface of the planet and makes it Earth-like – atmosphere breathable for humans, soil fitting for agriculture – everything that can be done to make human settlement on Mars possible, without requiring space suits and domed cities.

One of the most recent works in the literary journey to Mars is Ridley Scott’s film, “The Martian, which tells the story of the survival of an astronaut abandoned on the planet. The spectacular beauty of the Red Planet is revealed in all its majesty and glory on the big screen, but this is no longer a distant and mysterious planet – a long series of NASA research missions brought breathtaking images from there and introduced us to the Martian nature up close. The Red Planet goes through the process of psychological terrestrialization and domestication. Mars is no longer a stranger to us.

The Martian, Ridley Scott’s film starring Matt Damon (2015), based on Andy Weir’s book (2011). It turns out that the Jordanian deserts and Red Mountains look just like Mars.

And indeed, the highly inspired fictional ideas have turned over the years into viable plans of the space agencies. Not only robotic probes will explore Mars – a manned mission to the planet is not a fictional dream but a stated goal of the American space agency, and not only it. Private entrepreneurs have also entered the race, the most prominent of them being Elon Musk. The founder and CEO of the electric vehicle company Tesla and the space company SpaceX declares it unequivocally – his goal is to establish a human colony on Mars.

The last few years have brought with them twists and turns in the story of the Red Planet. It turns out that Schiaparelli’s erroneous observations nevertheless contained a hidden truth. There are no canals, but water does turn out to flow there. We have not yet found alien civilizations, but the possibility that life, even in its microscopic form, existed on the surface of Mars in the past, and is perhaps still possible today, is greater than ever. The possibility is exciting, but also raises new issues and difficult questions.

If there is microscopic life on Mars, but such that the human race has never come into contact with – when we invade this environment, will we not put at risk the fate of the invading Martians of H.G Wells? And what would happen if a human research expedition to Mars brings a living creature, even if microscopical, back to Earth, and it is exposed to an environment where it has no natural predators? These fictional scenarios become real and practical questions with the planning of manned research missions to Mars.

We started with a massive engineering project, and we are finishing with one. The billionaire industrialist Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, suggests to the captains of the world – make constructive use of the hydrogen bombs you have, and prepare Mars for human habitation. Musk proposes to ‘terresteralize’ Mars – and he is not a science fiction writer – by launching hydrogen bombs towards the ice caps to melt them. The explosions will release water and carbon dioxide into the Martian atmosphere, making it much less hostile to humans. But what if there is already life on the surface of Mars, even if microscopic, what will happen to it? Do we have the right to affect their environment and in such an extreme measure, possibly to the point of destroying them, for our own purposes? Does the importance of biodiversity cross planets? How universal is the discourse of rights and will those who claim for animal rights or environmental protection seek to limit our intervention on Mars? We shall discover this over the next decades, but for those who wish to foresee the future- be attentive to science fiction.

Would gladly rent you an apartment on Mars, Elon Musk.