Staff picks
After Scarcity
Bahar Noorizadeh
2018
35 Minutes
Staff Picks
Date
February 3–March 2, 2021
WARNING: This video contains photosensitive content
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for a screening of Bahar Noorizadeh’s After Scarcity (2018), on view from Wednesday, February 3 through Tuesday, March 2, 2021. The film is presented as part of the monthly series Staff picks.
In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some technologists saw computers as machines of communism and cybernetics as an answer to the difficulties of a waning centrally planned economy. After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future.
How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias? Flying through swarms of floating dots outlining monasteries and city streets, After Scarcity flashes through decades of history to propose the ways contingent pasts can make fictive futures realer, showing us that digital socialism was inbred into the communist revolution and that computation doesn’t mean we’re condemned to today’s tyranny of total financialization.
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