Science fiction speculates on the future while reflecting the present.[1] The future in Advantageous and Sleep Dealer is just around the corner.[2] In Advantageous, inequality is rampant and unemployment stands at 45%. The social safety net has been eroded. Education is unaffordable except for a tiny elite. The population lives in constant fear of falling through the cracks. Yet the skyscrapers are feats of engineering, the city’s surfaces shine bright. Women looking for jobs are hit hardest, as in the depicted neo-traditionalist society they are supposed to stay at home. Despite a shift in location, the economic situation in Sleep Dealer is similarly dire. Mega corporations control water access and other fundamental infrastructure. Sleep Dealer and Advantageous can be seen as part of a shared cinematic universe, with one story being told from the Global North, the other from the Global South.
Top: Advantageous, Gwen Koh (played by Jacqueline Kim who co-wrote the script)
Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Memo Cruz (played by Luis Fernando Peña)
Gwen and Memo
Gwen in Advantageous and Memo in Sleep Dealer guide us through their stories. We follow them with little information and gradually glimpse at the world they inhabit. We enter coherent fictional environments deeply informed by personal life experiences made by the two directors. The reason these stories feel real is because of the directors behind the films, Jennifer Phang and Alex Rivera. Alex Rivera compares the way the viewer slowly acquires more context to the layered structure of an onion.[3]
In Advantageous, Gwen Koh (played by Jacqueline Kim) is the senior spokesperson of a cosmetics corporation, the Center for Advanced Health and Living. Her life is radically destabilized when the Center informs her that they are seeking a younger, ethnically more ‹universal› spokesperson and laying her off. Running quickly out of options in the dire job market, Gwen fears to be unable to finance a decent—that is, elite—education for her daughter Jules (played by Samantha Kim). Gwen, passive-aggressively supervised by shark-like Center director Isa Cryer (Jennifer Ehle) and co-worker/friend Fisher (James Urbaniak), is offered a procedure—the Center’s new product—that would transfer her consciousness into a younger donor body. A cornered Gwen, desperate to provide for Jules, agrees to the body transfer. After the procedure, Gwen 2.0, now played by Freya Adams, struggles to develop profound feelings for Jules. Her old maternal instinct might have been lost in the transfer. After a period of estrangement, Jules rescues Gwen from breathing sickness and they finally seem to bond again as mother and daughter. The film ends on a vaguely positive note with the Kohs picknicking with friends in a park.
Sleep Dealer begins in Santa Ana del Río, Oaxaca, Southern Mexico, where Memo Cruz works with his father growing crops. A North American corporation called Del Rio Water has dammed up the local river and charges exorbitant amounts for water. When Memo, a passionate amateur hacker, accidently tunes into a secret channel of Del Rio Water, the company suspects aqua-terror activities and immediately sends a drone operated by a Mexican immigrant to the US, Rudy Ramirez (Jacob Vargas). In the ensuing attack Memo’s father is killed. Desperate, he travels north to Tijuana to become a node worker/sleep dealer in order to provide for his family back south. Node workers connect themselves to a network with cables branching into nodes of their bodies.[4] Though they work side by side, the actual labor they do is virtual and takes place in different cities outside of Mexico. In Tijuana’s virtual factory system, a hyperreal version of the present-day maquiladora factories, node workers operate robots that care for children in Washington or toil in Midwestern slaughterhouses. Memo himself remote operates a robot on a construction site in San Diego. Memo begins a relationship with Luz (Leonor Varela), a node worker and writer he met on the bus to Tijuana. Luz provided him with the nodes in his body. Luz secretly records Memo’s migrant worker story and sells its memories on an online memory-trading platform called TruNode, where viewers pay for content. The person buying Memo’s memories turns out to be Rudy Ramirez, the guilt plagued drone pilot who in his first mission killed Memo’s father. Ramirez decides to visit Memo and, after initial hesitation, Memo, Luz and Ramirez join forces to use the node network to hijack a drone and bomb the dam in Santa Ana del Río. The film ends with Ramirez traveling south and Memo watering seeds in Tijuana, with the hope to start «a history with a past» and continue fighting against corporate and state suppression.
Memo and Gwen live in harsh economic environments. Yet there also remain moments of human connection and tenderness. It’s a dark future vision, but not as dark as The Road where a father and son walk through a barren landscape, desperate for food and shelter. Advantageous is deceptive in the way the dystopian element is present yet hidden in sight. We see a young homeless woman sleeping in a house entrance or a woman fishing for food in the city river. Economic deprivation seems to affect everyone, even the more affluent. Women are in a particularly difficult position. Fisher tells Gwen «to be frank, there is talk among recruiters about letting women stay unemployed and, well, return to the home. The perception is it’s safer than putting millions of desperate men on the street.» In Sleep Dealer, CCTV cameras are equipped with machine guns. It’s a weaponized present, not essentially different from now, just a tad more extreme. Through Memo and Gwen, we dive deep into their worlds. We learn of migration flows towards the US border. The virtual node factories hint at new labor treaties favoring virtual workers. As in every well-crafted story, characters are affected by the economical, political, and societal circumstances they live in. Alex Rivera points out: «Sometimes people ask ‹why do you do science fiction and immigration›, or ‹why do you do science fiction and globalization› and to me, when you engage in imagining the future, whether you know it or not, you’re doing economics, you’re doing political theory, you’re doing demographics. The question is ‹what do you have to say?› And is what you’re saying resonant with the reality we live in or not.»[5]
Top: Jennifer Phang director of Advantageous
Bottom: Alex Rivera, director of Sleep Dealer
Jennifer and Alex
The directors Jennifer Phang and Alex Rivera’s own immigration backgrounds shaped Memo and Gwen’s stories. From Rivera’s Papapapá (1997) which chronicles his father’s journey from Peru to the United States and parallels it with the journey of the potato, to Why Cybracero? (1997) and The Borders Trilogy (2002), Rivera has investigated «two massive and parallel realities: the globalization of information through the internet, and the globalization of families, and communities, through mass migration.»[6] Growing up in a «fairly Americanized household, immigration has always been a prominent motif in [Rivera’s] life. Throughout the 1990s Rivera noticed that as his family came north, the wall between Mexico and the U.S. grew more prominent. At the same time, technology was improving and the surge of the Internet created a rhetoric of a new global society. Borders were being sealed as the Internet facilitated their virtual crossing.»[7]
Jennifer Phang co-wrote Gwen’s character with her mother in mind: «I was also inspired to write Advantageous by my mother’s own journey as a young immigrant who came here under a scholarship during the Vietnam War. There were times when my parents had to be separated, when they had to take jobs in different countries due to visa issues. So she had to operate as a single mom in the United States and it was extremely hard for her. There were times when she was working double shifts, taking me to swim practice, sleeping in the car while I swam, driving me home, going to sleep, and going to work.»[8] Similar to Rivera’s societal conscience, Jennifer would observe the class divide while living in New York: «I would travel from Washington Heights to the Upper East Side, and just watch the population on the A train or 1 train. And you get a sense as to how your financial or racial status can affect how your child interacts with the rest of the world. I could see kids accepting that their position in the world was slightly less advantaged. And then there were other kids who had already assumed the position of, not dominance, but advantage. They were just pouncing on knowledge and opportunity, demonstrating a type of very public, active learning. And kids that were less like that seemed to have parents who were just exhausted or really worried about their children’s safety and security. So I would just watch that kind of interplay. And just observing the socio-economic differences was enough of an inspiration.»[9]
You can feel that the fictional construction of Gwen and Memo stems from a direct engagement with, and an examination of, lived life. This makes Gwen and Memo’s stories all the more compelling. Both find themselves in force fields beyond their immediate control.
Top: Advantageous, Gwen relaxes in the «Quiet Room»
Middle: D.G. Dwiggins, Aluminia made from cardstock covered with aluminum foil, 1930s
Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Memo’s father about to be killed by a drone strike
Human Dolls
Isa Cryer: There is nothing fiercer than a mother’s love
Center director Isa Cryer is Advantageous’ puppet master. She realizes that it would be best if Gwen did the consciousness transfer herself and keep the job as the Center’s spokesperson. It would lend authenticity to the new product. There is a scene where Gwen meets Cryer. Gwen’s ID to enter the building has already been revoked. She holds her coat. Cryer studies her via CCTV, telling Fisher she just found a «solution to our problem». Gwen becomes a pawn in the corporate game. Like folded coat, the laid off Gwen still holds potential. Cryer has full control not just over Gwen, but also over the future of Gwen’s daughter, Jules. Jules is Cryer’s bargaining chip, giving her the leverage to manipulate Gwen at will. When in their conversation Cryer asks Gwen ‹how is the job search going› or refers to the ‹fierceness of a mother’s love› she is calm and diabolical. She only has profits in mind. She aims to push Gwen to the edge of despair where her only remaining choice will be to undergo the procedure. Cryer’s sociopathic behavior is neoliberal exploitation at its ‹finest›. Jennifer Phang observed manipulation in her own life: «I believe that while most people feel we have control over our own thinking, it's really hard for us to stay impervious to sustained, long-term manipulation. And I know that when too much of my energy is spent trying to please others visually, my potential to help create a beautiful world where we can even coexist peacefully is weakened.»[10]
Advantageous, the conversation between CEO Isa Cryer and Gwen Koh
When Gwen tries to relax in a ‹Quiet Room›, she looks like a doll. Later in the film, Jules inspects the lifeless body of Gwen 2.0, essentially a doll to be inhabited. Jules’ tilted head expresses the strangeness of the situation. Jules looks like a doll too, hinting at her own uncertain future as a young person amidst economic instability.
In Sleep Dealer the doll theme is ever present and often becomes palpable when humans interact with technology. «Since my film has to do with the theme of labor, I said I want to put the nodes not in his brain but in his arms. So if he had five connectors in each arm, I got this kind of beautiful marionette metaphor where these cables were coming from his arm up to the system.»[11] The node workers manipulate robots in faraway places. Hooked to a machine, the workers are human robot puppets within the wider economic system. It remains ambiguous whether the worker controls the machine or the machine controls the worker. The work is physically and mentally demanding, an accident in the virtual realm can translate to severe body damage in the real world. In one such scene the injured worker is quickly transported outside the workspace. The zero contract work structure does not seem to include decent health care coverage. Like Gwen signing the legal papers before the procedure, the workers signed off with their lives. They are de-humanized, object-like entities, endlessly replaceable.
When Memo and his father buy some water, they learn that the pricing has increased drastically since last time. The telecommunication service Memo uses to talk to his family charges exorbitant fees. When Rudy travels to Tijuana to talk to Memo, he stares into a camera equipped with a machine gun. His smile is ambiguous. The human need for access to basic services is exploited. The pricing and unexplained fee increases show the total arbitrariness of a neoliberal system decoupled from regulatory oversight mechanisms. Protesting may result in the machine gun firing. In case of your injury or death, the incident would be filed under obstruction of corporate services.[12] In short, Advantageous and Sleep Dealer portray a regime that considers humans as paying entities, mere dolls to be manipulated and robbed.
Top: Sleep Dealer, an early node worker draft by Alex Rivera
Middle: Advantageous, Jules first look at Gwen’s new host body
Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Rudy leaving the US. Facing 21st century violence
One wonders whether the humanities still exist in the 2040s (a first short version of Advantageous produced for PBS’ Futurestates series is set in 2041).[13] The human subject clearly has been eroded, as if prepared for disappearance. In Advantageous and Sleep Dealer, there is hardly any time for contemplation; the character’s main preoccupation is survival.[14]
How can an exploitative scenario as depicted in these two films be avoided if current neoliberal trends are not held in check via regulatory regimes? What common human efforts are needed to build an institutional framework able to sustain meticulous and continuous regulatory regimes, independent from the persistent corporate attempts at deregulation? Is the neoliberal future scenario of the films discussed inevitable or can it be avoided? How to ‹manage the managers›?[15] How to handle a slippery system designed to corrode human decency? Are we doomed to become dolls?
Complicity
Jules: Holoprof was trying to finish the 20th and 21st centuries in one class period. All I remember is the 2033 bubble and the New York traditionalist movement, which he said is taking over now. Which I challenged. Are women really going backwards going forward? You’re not.
Gwen: Hmm… Let’s get you something to eat.
Fisher: Would you be willing to do that?
Gwen: The point is to push the product, right?
Gwen is also an intelligent, productive ‹member› of society or what remains of it. Caught in the web of freedom and dependency, Gwen faces a rigged choice. What can she choose in a corporate environment that narrowed her options, that made the choice for her? In Advantageous the middle class has evaporated and anyone can fall through the cracks. A neo-traditionalist movement rules. The presence of homeless women preoccupies Gwen. Gwen observes a girl taking off a silver mask, revealing a blank stare: a child prostitute. Of course Gwen sees Jules in these women.
You could think that, visually, this shiny city signifies progress. But within, on the human level, the opposite is taking place. This city invites exploitation. People are pushed to the edge. Phang notes the complicity, «but Gwen is playing both sides, being the victim and perpetrator of this kind of technology. This is actually the first time I’ve had to grapple with the question of her sense of accountability. It was intentional in the writing that the lack of responsibility co-exists with her complicated life. Because that reflects our own society. I feel that a number of people who are benefitting from situations that take advantage of other people’s needs or desperation feel a certain amount of desperation themselves, and use that to justify what they are doing.»[16]
In what sounds like a radio program in Advantageous, public policy professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writes about inconspicuous consumption, «according to Consumer Expenditure Survey data from 2003-2013, the price of college tuition increased 80 per cent, while the cost of women’s apparel increased by just 6 per cent over the same period. Middle-class lack of investment in education doesn’t suggest a lack of prioritizing as much as it reveals that, for those in the 40th-60th quintiles, education is so cost-prohibitive it’s almost not worth trying to save for.»[17]
Combine this data with the bifurcation of the labor market—«separating the workers lucky enough to get the high-skill jobs our economy has newly created (and be paid accordingly) from those stuck with jobs where automation has obviated the need for skills and that therefore pay very little»[18] —and imagine 2041 with technology replacing humans in the job market. You get Advantageous levels of tuition fees. In her essay on Advantageous, Olivia Cole writes, «in our fictional future-world, the class bifurcation has continued: all the stakes are raised because it’s impossible to survive in an essentially non-existent middle class. You have to reach the summit in your field or else fail to achieve any sense of security. And in Advantageous, as in our current society, the imperative that we have to work to ‹become someone great› often leads to risk-taking that endangers our own survival and the survival of our loved ones. If you have a wide safety net and come from great privilege, you can fail and you’ll be okay. If you’re more vulnerable, you may be gambling with your life. The hidden irony is that, typically, financial rewards are structured such that resources expended by the vulnerable to achieve higher status trickle ‹up› towards those who already have significant wealth.»[19] Gwen finds herself in this complicated web of complicity. She excels in her job as the spokesperson of the Center, yet the position makes her vulnerable to exploitation once her job is threatened. The system, incarnated by CEO Isa Cryer and aware of the fragile state she finds herself in, lurks to exploit her. If confronted, the system can always say ‹but you wanted it too›. The system creates perverse webs of dependencies and exploitations.
Memo: Finally I could connect my nervous system to the other system. The global economy.
Operator: This is the American Dream. We give the United States what they’ve always wanted: all the work without the workers
In Sleep Dealer, Memo implants nodes into his body in order to work in the factory. In his spare time, he can use the nodes to connect to the network for pleasure. Alex Rivera describes this double bind as «65% alienation and 35% connection and rebellion».[20]
Sleep Dealer, Memo connects to the network for the first time
Complicity is a reality. Living in a city in 2018 means you benefit from connection, virtual and real, but you are also forced to accept the dread of gentrification and rising living costs this life brings with it. You can disconnect, but it isn’t that simple anymore. Much has moved online. Soon you barely might be able to function anymore without Internet connection and a device, for example. What might have sounded like a Faustian bargain to a pre-1980 generation has become normalcy. We grew up as sometimes rebellious, but generally complicit citizens. In The Walking Dead series there is an evil character called Negan. All his underlings call themselves Negan too. When you ask one, «who are you?», they would reply «I am Negan». It’s a dumb example, but living in a city in 2018 can make you feel you are Negan, too.
Millennial Realism
Radio: The majority of people who are down on their luck are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. But you know there are these people out there that think the way to solve it is violence and destruction, bombing, and terror. Look at the success of our city. New skyscrapers going up all the time, bigger and better. These are majestic, gorgeous works of art designed by some of the top internationally renowned architects. We live in a great, great city and we are fortunate to be alive in these times.
Radio: For our next hour, we’ll be discussing the recent rise in child prostitution in our country. Its causes, symptoms, and …
Jules: One week of water left.
Radio: A report last week from the Department of…
Gwen: I should get paid tomorrow.
Radio: …found that 4% of girls and boys between the ages of 12 and 18 will have taken part in a sex work activity…
Jules mentions that there is only one week of water left, with Gwen saying «I should get paid tomorrow». In the background, the radio plays a program about the rise in child prostitution. This simultaneity between the quotidian present and a potential horrific future for Jules reinforces the pressure on Gwen to act. In a strange bind of complicity, Gwen is manipulated by the spirit of the time like a puppet. Complicity is a nuanced, often ungraspable force. It is reflected in Gwen, Memo and Luz’ intelligent, subtle acting. Both films invite multiple viewing. When Gwen doesn’t want to talk about urgent or depressing matters, she asks Jules about lunch or dinner. The face of complicity is subtle, it shuns expressive emotional outburst. It registers in barely noticeable mood shifts, hinting at the widening tension between normalcy and existential terror. When Memo learns that Luz registered and sold his memories online, he doesn’t break out in rage. He falls silent and leaves. Luz selling of memories is particularly poignant. In her Sleep Dealer analysis, Fionna Jeffries writes about the questionable emancipatory potential of connectivity: «Complicity: for the social web’s growing user base, like the Luz’s, Memos, and Rudy’s of Sleep Dealer’s future, compliant participation is a condition of virtual and social survival rather than a celebratory affirmation of democracy.»[21] Citing Jodi Dean’s work, Jeffries writes, «communicative capitalism is characterized by the merging of democracy and neoliberalism in networked communication technologies. Out of this fusion, democracy emerges as merely participation, contribution, and access.»[22]
The precision of Advantageous’ script, the way it handles the subject of complicity is remarkable. Jennifer Phang: «For most of my life, I've been exploring issues of the objectification and self-objectification of women and how that's related to power in society. I'm particularly concerned about the way that women are constantly pressured to improve themselves physically, to the point that it takes their own intellectual power and time away from them.»[23] The advanced complicity in Advantageous leads to the selling of what is yours, your body, your mind, as Arthur Chu puts it: «We live in a world where cheap and plentiful technology has made us cheap—the market for human labor is glutted. There’s too many of us out there, we’re too easily replaceable, almost none of us are specifically needed for anything. As a result, just to survive—just to avoid being irrelevant—we give away more of ourselves than we have in generations, selling our time, our privacy, our rights just for a chance not to be left behind. How much further will it go, Advantageous asks. How much less needed can people get, as the things get smarter and shinier and more efficient? How much more will you have to give away, if they ask you to—your body? Your mind? Your soul?»[24]
The described complicity has a global dimension. In the article Arrested Development, Yohann Koshy writes: «Jennifer Cole concludes that for some in the Global South, ‹youth› is a stage they cannot escape», and «in this light, the ‹freelancing› spirit of millennials around the world can be seen for what it really is: a survival mechanism. A term that we’ve started using in Congo is ‹se debrouiller›, Bwenge explains. It means doing whatever you can to sell yourself, to survive at all costs. Young Mozambicans use a similar expression, ‹desenrascar a vida›, which means ‹to eke out a living›. In Senegal they talk of ‹youthmen›, those who drift through their twenties and thirties in not-quite-adulthood, doing bits of work here and there. Behind the upbeat ‹Rising Africa› narrative that fetes economic growth on the continent, the lives of the majority of young people are still marred by frustration. The 380 million millennials in China live beneath a similar cloud of despondency. Feeling the pressure of single-child households, rising housing costs in cities, and an economic slow-down, they have turned to ironic defeatism in the form of ‹Sang›. This social media subculture uses jokes to express a quasi-nihilistic despair about the future—‹I wanted to fight for socialism today but the weather is so cold that I can only lie on my bed and play with my mobile phone›—and is named after a Chinese character associated with the word ‹funeral›.»[25]
Top: Advantageous, commonplace terrorism
Bottom: Advantageous, bombs, inside
This is millennial realism. Being faced with existential questions while cooking. The strange simultaneity of waiting and being constantly asked to be productive. The combination of economic deprivation brought on by perverse neoliberal ideology with the fabric of the quotidian real. It’s essentially the austerity version of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (one of Rivera’s favorite movies). When talking about recent terror attacks, the radio interviewee insists on the high-end aesthetics of the city’s skyscrapers. He repeats «we live in a great, great city and we are fortunate to be alive in these times» as if reciting a mantra in the echo chamber of cold data and capital. Yet the real issues such as unaffordable housing or education go unmentioned. Emotions are kept in check, there is hardly any public outburst. Mental breakdown reveals itself in blank stares or noises of crying neighbors:
Gwen: Upstairs woman or downstairs woman?
[Jules stands up on her bed, then puts her ear to the floor and listens.]
Jules: Both.
Bombs go off in private, inside barely coping individuals. Terrorism, in these two films, is what the system does to its inhabitants. But it cannot be addressed publicly, as everyone fears to lose their already fragile position. Raising your voice or shouting could threaten your job, your existence. Hence silence reigns in the city. Silent, personal suffering is the new norm. Conflict is avoided at all cost. It’s a «keep calm and carry on» zeitgeist. It transports a mixture of normalcy and constant crises. The terrorist bombs strangely correspond to the swallowed frustration. Arthur Chu writes: «You can’t blow up an entire world, an entire economic system; you can’t beg it for mercy or shout moral imprecations at it either. Break things, throw things, scream things—at the end of the day you still don’t have a job. I think on some level we’ve always understood this. I think on some level we’re silent because the damage done to us was done through silence—no one beat us up or assaulted us or stole anything from us. All that happened was the phone didn’t ring, the email never came, the poorly designed Web form spat out an automated ‹You will be contacted shortly› that was a lie.»[26] And with each new day, the mantra «we live in a great, great city» blasts all over the city’s shiny surfaces. Bombing damage is fully repaired overnight. Chu again: «The eerie Disney cleanness of Gwen’s city’s streets is a sign of a world where the things have won and the people have given up. That, for me, was the worst thing about the recession—seeing shiny storefronts and clean-swept streets and all the trappings of a thriving economy—but none of us participating in it. The recovery from our recession was a so-called ‹jobless recovery›—still plenty of stuff being made, still plenty of money, in the hands of increasingly few people, to buy things with. The economy of things is doing fine, and always has been. It’s only the economy of people that collapsed. The anger that comes from feeling oppressed, exploited, used—that’s one thing. The weary, quiet frustration from feeling ignored, forgotten, useless—that’s something different.»[27] Arthur Chu mentions Disney. The recent Star Wars: The Last Jedi, by accident or design, captured millennial realism. The film said something about the massive gap between Disney the multibillion corporation and the characters populating it. As Rob Horning put it: «The Last Jedi struck me as a movie that flamboyantly hates the conditions that made it possible, populated conspicuously by millennials, a generation accustomed to being blamed for conditions that they have inherited. They are trapped in a galaxy where they have to process all the nonsense and mouth all the incoherent lines about ‹the Force› and ‹trusting your feelings›, while all the fruits of their efforts are funneled out to a few hundred people who couldn’t care less.»[28]
In one of my favorite scenes of Advantageous, Gwen listens to non-existent or offensive job offers. Her attention glides to a homeless girl who gives a perfectly rational piece of advice:
Homeless Girl: «Take what you can get.»
Gwen: «Are you alright?»
Homeless Girl: «Are you? »
The camera then does a hilarious, neck-breaking CGI tracking shot, descending the Center’s ‹Cryer› building, a beautifully hideous, ridiculously expensive skyscraper and ending with a Monk-by-the-Sea-like composition where the gigantic entrance dwarfs Gwen.
Advantageous, the homeless girl near Gwen’s apartment
Walled Out
Level-lor world space is an anthropomorphically
scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multislotted
reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level 2?
Nick Land, Meltdown[29]
What if the city in Advantageous is an entity actively working towards the exclusion of humans? Nick Land aims to capture the shapeshifting monstrosity of neoliberal tech-capitalism when he writes: «After the T-1000 is frozen and shattered, it gradually thaws, and begins to re-combine into itself, flowing back together from its state of disintegration. Is not this convergent wave the ‹shape› of Skynet itself?»[30] The frozen state and gradual thawing hidden from public oversight is precisely what happens in countless attempts at deregulation. Consider the privatization of education in the UK: «Under the cover of a vote to extend the level of a financial cap stipulated in an existing regulation, the coalition has succeeded in launching a revolution in higher education in England whose long-term consequences are not easy to identify. The government was scarred by the scale of the student protests in 2010, and seems to have decided to avoid bringing forward new primary legislation whose progress through Parliament would provide a focus for renewed opposition. Instead, it has been changing things in a piecemeal way through budget decisions and the use of statutory instruments. After almost three years, there has still been no proper parliamentary debate about the new system of higher education that is being implemented.»[31] Like in a horror story, a government—the entity that should, ideally, represent and help the needs of citizens—started a privatization process whose capacity for destruction is immense. This is the collapse of governmental purpose; it’s neoliberal-ideological large-scale gambling with the future of citizens.[32] Yet how to act against the ‹withering away, against the encroaching power of global markets›?[33]
Advantageous, the city in the background appears as a wall excluding humans.
Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Memo and Luz relaxing near the border fence.
In an essay on management, Mark Fisher proposes the implementation of a beneficial managerial regime that ‹protects› us from overwork and gives us more ‹space to think›. Fisher writes: «The aim to allocate resources rationally, the desire to make ourselves ‹reality’s deliberate designers rather than its playthings›—the restoration of a collectively deliberated human agency—this is fundamentally a management problem, and the left must retain its confidence that only it can manage society properly.»[34] This is laudable and gives a hint on how to exit the puppet stage. Fisher writes: «Particularly in the context of culture and creative work, it is crucial that we re-imagine the role of the manager». Yet it will take political mechanisms to manage managers or even touch the issue on a larger scale.
Top: Sleep Dealer, CCTV and machine gun combined Middle: Sleep Dealer, the construction robot Memo virtually operates via the node network Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Memo and his father reflected in corporate controlled water. The dilution of the human subject
The city’s strategy is to subjugate humans, rendering them subservient, either doll or robot-like.[35] The recent rise of speculative realism or object-oriented philosophy may be somehow connected to this development. Object-centered discourse helps to conceptualize and think through our interaction with objects of diverse scales, from smartphones to global warming.[36] Yet where does the reflection or insistence on objects end and the anti-human creep begin? Michael Newman notes in a questionnaire on new materialism: «The downplaying of the human and of subjective experience, which risks the assimilation of Speculative Realism into a capitalism that seeks to squeeze and appropriate surplus value from every aspect of supposedly individual human subjectivity, may be symptomatic of the desire for relief from the burden of contemplating the present suffering of the global exploited, war victims, and stateless, and an intolerable future with no prospect of collective human action to avoid it.»[37]
Advantageous, Gwen and Fisher hug, almost disappearing in the cold urban scenery Bottom: Sleep Dealer, the Cybracero factory where Memo works (from first draft to finished version). This is an example of how science fiction imagines future developments anchored in today’s realities.[38]
Meanwhile, the world drowns in objects. There is this immense surplus of objects that capitalism produces. Yet the basic premise of capitalism has always been scarcity. «The wealth that capitalism actually produces undermines the scarcity that remains its raison d’être. For once, scarcity has been overcome, there’s nothing left to drive competition. The imperative to expand and intensify production simply becomes absurd. In the face of abundance, therefore, capitalism needs to generate an imposed scarcity, in order to keep the system going.»[39] Many governments around the globe have implemented an ideology of scarcity, backed by its political sidekick austerity.[40] Has the city successfully launched its campaign for the vanishing of humans in the near future?
Top: Advantageous, Gwen undergoing the consciousness transfer
Bottom: Advantageous, Gwen 2.0
The Vanishing
Isa Cryer: Sales are through the roof.
Gwen 2.0: Was I someone else before? Body donor.
Isa Cryer: Do you remember my last conversation with Gwen in the holding room? Can you feel that part of her reaching through you towards her little girl?
Gwen: That part is lost.
Memo: My energy was being drained, sent far away. What happened to the river is happening to me.
The vanishing takes many forms. In Advantageous, the poor and middle class vanish from the streets. The new body-transfer procedures let old people disappear. Normal-looking people disappear as well, as those who can afford a new body would probably choose fashion-model beauty standards. In Sleep Dealer, the border wall prohibits new immigrants from South to North America, except perhaps high earners. Those immigrants vanish along with their foreclosed future. What they could bring to the country shall never exist. Workers’ bodies vanish as they operate robots from other countries. In Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, an alien civilization prepares humanity to join a vast cosmic intelligence called the Overmind. The last chapter is titled «the last generation». Earth’s children join the Overmind, then earth is destroyed. Unlike Clarke’s novel, Advantageous and Sleep Dealer don’t feature alien civilizations. It’s just us preparing for our vanishing. The systems and societies we are able to build collectively may care for or dismantle the human subject.
We might not, in the near future, be aware of a lack of perspectives because we will be provided with perfectly entertaining pictures. We may wonder, though, why we watch these films and not others. Films like Advantageous and Sleep Dealer. The vanishing will be a foreclosure of stories, of other visions, alternative propositions. Once these faces, the faces of old people, of all kinds of people vanish, the people growing up will take the new reality as a given.[41] Jennifer Phang: «There have been several articles over the last week talking about how women’s stories are quickly disappearing from cinema. Lately it has felt like women’s stories in the mainstream have been limited to Sex and the City, The Hunger Games, and the Twilight series. Many of those films were directed by men. It’s a question of whether there needs to be more diversified women’s voices out in the world right now.… I would say, probably, ‹Yep.›» And she adds: «There are not enough films written by women, directed by women, or about women. We don’t have enough good role models for women in film. There are not enough role models for girls either. That’s the other part that I really loved about Advantageous is the relationship, this mother and daughter who happened to be intelligent and weren’t obsessed with pink (no offense to pink).»[42]
If the city is allowed to further exclude its citizens, the range of stories told would get narrower, as stories, images, memories, dreams vanish with people. Advantageous and Sleep Dealer, in their calm, unhurried storytelling include a quite profound message.
Top: Sleep Dealer, the Cybracero factory where Memo works.
Bottom: Interior of a Slave ship, 1843.
Entangled Geographies
The Global North and South engage in constant exchanges, on the economic and human level. The physical border in Sleep Dealer complicates human flow. Open-border advocates face reasonable criticism.[43] The path towards open borders would require a gradual process guided by economic and political cooperation. It would require countries starting to ‹vibrate› together on some common base level. The Schengen area currently comprises 26 countries. The countries don’t always vibrate in accord, but Schengen is a reality. In a discussion about NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, Daniel W. Drezner mentions an arguably positive effect: «NAFTA advocates say the economic debate misses the bigger point of the deal, which has been to ameliorate long-standing tensions across the border and turn Mexico into a more steadfast U.S. ally. By that standard, they say, the pact has been a great success, fostering more bilateral cooperation on issues from crime to the environment—and keeping Mexico from following the path of left-wing Latin American countries or drifting closer to American rivals like China. One of the knock-on effects was for Mexico to transform from a one-party state to a real democracy. The result is a country that views itself as North American.»[44] I mention these examples because neighboring countries ‹vibrating› together through treaties, policies and interpersonal exchange can be a way of eroding hard borders, especially if both sides benefit, which is of course not always the case.
Sleep Dealer is one of the first science fiction films located in the Global South.Rivera says: «To think about the future is to open up a space of possibility and it’s something that has never happened in science fiction cinema in the Global South. We’ve only seen the future in Los Angeles, in New York, London, but we’ve never seen the future of Mexico City or Bombay or Jakarta. It’s never been on film, ever. For me, the process of imagining the future from the point of view of the Global South is a radical, empowering gesture. That was one of the seminal concepts of the film: to shift that point of view; to say the future belongs to everybody, right?»[45] North and South, East and West grow ever closer. Periphery and center are in constant exchange. «In terms of human experience, the vast expanse of the planet is not urban. People live in cities, but the planet is going to be agriculture. The periphery is the centre.»[46]
Migrants seek work in the node factories. Corporate drones fly southwards to control the territory. Migrants connect to the network to transcend borders they cannot physically cross. Rivera: «The transnational space is circular, with flows in and out of the U.S., all of them disembodied and disfigured in complex and fascinating ways. In my film Sleep Dealer, the main character is a worker in Mexico who beams his labor to the U.S. over the Net and works in construction, erecting a skyscraper in California. The secondary character is a drone pilot who is physically in the U.S. but who sends his energy to the global south in the form of a military drone, expressing his telepresence in the destruction of buildings. So there are buildings being built up in the U.S. by disembodied immigrant laborers and buildings being torn down in the south by disembodied soldiers. The film is a myth of sorts, simplifying and visualizing these oddly symmetrical global flows.»[47]
There is much potential for science fiction, or any fiction really, to give shape to the interconnectedness that humanity is moving towards. Rivera’s approach reflects the complexities and intricacies of the globalized world. His focus is the US-Mexican border, but it could be India and Pakistan, China and Russia, any border area really. In his documentaries he describes energies flowing across the border in either direction. Rivera shows how these exchanges and flows behave. He factors the human element into his narratives. Rivera proposes a vision of entangled geographies, showing how nothing works or moves in isolation. His film offers a vision of collective aspects to developments. «So, I think Sleep Dealer puts forward this vision of the future that connects the dots, a vision that says that the wealth of the North comes from somewhere. It tries to look at development and futurism from this split point of view—to look at the fact that these fantasies of what the future will be in the North must always be creating a second reality, a nightmare reality somewhere in the South. That these things are tied together.»[48]
Top: Advantageous, city without humans. Geographies and humans are entangled, never isolated
Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Tijuana near the US border. Memo carries water to irrigate his plantation
Babel by Alejandro González Iñárritu and the Wachowskis' Sense8 take a similar ‹global› approach. These films focus on bridging voices, visions, and people. In the coming years, people will travel even more, form bonds, and have mixed children. Rivera states: «We need to know in our guts that we are going into a future that will be multicultural. For me, doing a science fiction set in the South and doing it in a language that was not English was fundamental. I’d love to do a science fiction in Nahuatl, or in Tagalog, or in Pashto. The language is just part of a gesture that says, the future belongs to all of us. I think the situation we’re in is very striking. It is as if you met somebody and you asked them, ‹What do you want to have in your future?› And they said, ‹I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.› In cinema, that’s what we have for the entire global South. We don’t have any cinema that reflects on the future of the so-called Third World. There’s zero. Why is it that we’ve seen comedies from the South, we’ve seen romances from the South, we’ve seen action movies from the South. We’ve seen everything but reflections on the future. To me, the first step to getting to the future that you want to live in is to imagine it.»[49]
If one watches Sleep Dealer and Advantageous together, an entangled vision emerges. Gwen and Memo, like most people all over the world, be it in the North or the South, just try to get by. Exploding housing prices are a global phenomenon and not unique to cities in the Global North.[50] As North and South grow closer, the same may happen with regard to the the relation between fiction and reality. This is why independent science fiction is important. What can be imagined can and will turn real. If we can visualize and predict technologies or corporate strategies that will enslave us, we should work towards avoiding them. Node factories and water wars already exist in some form.[51]
Sleep Dealer and Advantageous reflect on ethical issues. They raise deep questions of what systemic frameworks and political treaties between countries and economic zones we want to have in the future, in both North and South.
Top: Advantageous, Gwen2.0 and Jules finally connecting.
Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Memo and Luz connect. Both films center on the necessity of human support structures
Whose Lives? Whose Vision?
Luz: I guess it is a little weird, going there, for me, was like crossing an invisible border. But I don’t know, I had to go. I hate that there’s so much distance between people. The only thing nodes are good for is to destroy that distance. To connect us, to let us see.
There is a need for human-centered science fiction as such stories provide a sense of where we are drifting. Some of Black Mirror does this. Black Mirror is often brilliant, but it follows a clearly dystopian technological cautionary-tale pattern. Advantageous and Sleep Dealer show us fully formed and for the most part plausible worlds where pleasure and alienation coexist on a daily basis.
I want to end on a note of hope. The ending of Sleep Dealer where Memo, Luz, and Rudy bomb the dam is rather improbable. But the idea that the trio forms an alliance and reacts to the oppression is uplifting. Technology and fake connectivity make us forget how powerful actual human alliances can be. Fionna Jeffries writes: «As these archetypal characters come together—virtually and in their everyday life—despite their differences, the form of their cooperation suggests a possible vision for the re-appropriation of the earthly and communicative commons. It is a tentative and hopeful emancipatory vision whereby the violence of compelled participation and differential inclusion in the global hierarchies of the network society are subverted by unexpected acts of social cooperation and connection.»[52]Rivera notes that «we’re living in a time when I’m starting to hear tremors from the labor movement about creating cross-border unions, which will also be built over the network. So I think we’re in this moment when we don’t know who will be more empowered by this connectivity and by new technology. And that’s the battle in Sleep Dealer. It’s over the future of this connected planet and what kind of globalization we’ll be living in.»[53]
Top: Advantageous, a rare moment of calm after the storm
Bottom: Sleep Dealer, Memo and Luz in the Node Bar
Sleep Dealer addresses the powerful possibility of new solidarities and alliances of individuals and communities across divides or regions. There is a never-ending flow of goods, people, and ideas now and in the future. The idea and the fact of human co-existence and entanglement on a planetary scale needs further consideration. In today’s world, political integration cannot function within national boundaries only. Rivera has a vision of entangled subjects when he states: «If we have no compassion for those in poor working conditions, especially in other countries, we’re hurting ourselves. Without that awareness, as consumers, we create a world economy that may, basically, take away our jobs. Does that make sense? If this is going to be a globalized economy, we’ll have to care about the people making our technology, too—take care of those people outside our borders.»[54] Consider what Rivera said at Platform Summit, a conference of the non-profit organization promoting minority participation in technology and entrepreneurship:
Science fiction imagines the future of our society and reminds us that the world we live in is not the only possible world. It’s a genre that reminds us that other worlds are possible. So, as crucial as it is that we participate in building the real innovation economy, it’s equally important that we have a diverse set of voices, envisioning the future from diverse points of view that come from, and respond to, our communities. If we can’t imagine it, how are we to actually participate in it? Fiction is not an escape from reality; it’s the first draft of reality. Tomorrow’s battle over real power tomorrow begins with today’s struggle over who gets to dream.[55]
The social safety infrastructure is smaller in the US than in most of Europe. Phang said in an interview: «You look at every single family in America, and you look at where our country is going, or could go, and you realize that all we’re doing is protecting our kids individually, and not as a community, that it could actually, and it often does, lead to a place we don’t want to live in.»[56] Phang’s idea of «expanding the idea of family beyond people directly related to you»[57] is similar to Donna Haraway’s notion of kin mentioned at the end of my essay on Arrival. Haraway underscores a necessary shift in the collective and systemic conscience from a hyper-individualistic to a socially more inclusive system. Phang: «The reason I’m interested in alternative worlds and near-future settings is that it allows us to look at our own limitations in our worldviews. These settings allow me to explore how our world might evolve if we allow individualistic kinds of success to remain our primary value.»[58]
James Tully might be a candle in the dark when he writes that «institutions do not guarantee democratic freedom. The only guarantee of democratic freedom is the practice of it. Organization, mobilization and exercise give rise to democratic institutions and rights, not the other way round.»[59] Once individually locked out, you may need collective strategies to get back into the realm of coexistence.
[1] «Frederic Jameson observes that Science Fiction is about our present time, not about expectations or forecasts of the future, as usually perceived.» Alfreddo Suppia, «Remote Exploitations, Alex Rivera’s Materialist SF Cinema in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism», in Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia (Wayne State University Press, 2016).
[2] «We didn’t want to commit to a particular time. It also helps that the film has an environment that is slightly relatable to all of us. It’s kind of in the future, kind of not. What’s happening, is this an imaginary future or is it our future—or is it now? I’m happy that we’re able to leave that ambiguous, and leave that to be something to be talked about.» Using Character to Create a Future World in RED Epic Indie Sci Fi Advantageous, February 13, 2015, https://youtu.be/V4Q5LOPtPNc.
[3] «The experience of watching Sleep Dealer, I think, is more like peeling an onion. Where you start off in this little dusty village in Mexico and you see there are hi-def screens. And then you go to this dam and there’s this robot gun that’s protecting this privatized water supply. And so in Sleep Dealer you’re constantly seeing layers of what this future world is like. You will see this kind of hopefully rigorously thought-through future world, this set of predictions basically about capitalism. About the type of world we live in, the way we organize our societies. And so seeing these layers of that world reveal themselves.» Sarah Haughn, «The near future, like tomorrow: An interview with Alex Rivera, director of Sleep Dealer», in The Circle of Blue, August 22, 2008, http://www.circleofblue.org/2008/north-america/a-future-of-water-privatization.
[4] «These cybracero factories have earned themselves the nickname ‹sleep dealers› due to the fact that their workers literally look as if they are sleep walking and sometimes actually do fall asleep at the job, forcing them to head to the nearest ‹node bar› for a shot of awakening ‹tika›.» Samantha Kountz, «The Other Side of the Wall: Technology and Borders in Sleep Dealer», in International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies 1/4 4 (March 2015).
[5] «Alex Rivera, Director of Sleep Dealer», in Latino Film Festival at IU Cinema Indiana University, Bloomington, September 30, 2012, https://youtu.be/eHPsmfLdiUs.
[6] http://alexrivera.com/bio/.
[7] Madeline Townsend, «Filmmaker Alex Rivera Challenges the Borders of the Imagination», in Panoramas, October 20, 2016, http://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/art-and-culture/filmmaker-alex-rivera-challenges-borders-imagination.
[8] M. Terry Bowman, «Jennifer Phang, Co-writer and Director of Advantageous», July 5, 2013, http://mterrybowman.com/interviews/jennifer-phang-co-writer-and-director-of-advantageous/.
[9] Lesley Coffin, «The Mary Sue Interview: Advantageous», in The Mary Sue, June 23, 2015, https://www.themarysue.com/the-mary-sue-interview-advantageous-jennifer-phang/.
[10] Kylee Peña, «Advantageous: Jennifer Phang on Making Way to Sundance», in Creative Cow, https://library.creativecow.net/wall_kylee/Jennifer-Phang/1.
[11] Adam-Troy Castro, «How Sleep Dealer is less Hollywood and more outsider sci-fi», in SyFy Wire, December 14, 2012, http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/how_sleep_dealer_is_less.
[12] «Political theorist Neocleous argues that, contrary to its commonplace understanding, the term security provides the ideological justification for all manner of violence in risk-obsessed neoliberal capitalism.» Fionna Jeffries, «Cyborg Resistance on the Digital Assembly Line: Global Connectivity as a Terrain of Struggle for the Commons in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer», in Journal of Communication Inquiryl 39 (September 16, 2014).
[13] PBS Futurstates http://www.pbs.org/show/future-states/ and Advantageous the short version can be watched here: https://youtu.be/9xiJhd-soyQ.
[14] «I’m always surprised by how often you see characters in films and you have no idea how they live or what they do or who pays their rent. Our lived experience is so much about how we navigate the economy—how we pay our bills, where we work, how we get from point a to point b. At every juncture, you’re dealing with economics. All three of my characters—their drama is driven by work, labor and struggling with ethics and conundrums that are presented to them through their need to work. It seems normal to me.» Nora Murphy, «Alex Rivera Talks Sleep Dealer», in Movie Maker, September 8, 2009,https://www.moviemaker.com/articles-moviemaking/alex-rivera-sleep-dealer-jacob-vargas-20090813/.
[15] Mark Fisher, «Accelerate-Management,» in Parse 5 (2017).
[16] Lesley Coffin, ibid.
[17] Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, «Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now», in Aeon, June 7, 2017, https://aeon.co/ideas/conspicuous-consumption-is-over-its-all-about-intangibles-now.
[18] Benjamin M. Friedman, «Born to Be Free,» in The New York Review of Books, October 12, 2017, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/12/basic-income-born-to-be-free/.
[19] Olivia Cole, «Six Reasons Women (and Everyone) Should See Advantageous: A Micro-Interview», in Huffington Post, May 8, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/6-reasons-women-and-every_b_7939738.html.
[20] Alfreddo Suppia, ibid.
[21] Fionna Jeffries, ibid.
[22] Fionna Jeffries, ibid.
[23] Ada Tseng, «Present and Future: Interview with Advantageous director Jennifer Phang», in Asia Pacific Arts, July 8, 2013, http://asiapacificarts.usc.edu/w_apa/showarticle.aspx?articleID=18983&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1.
[24] Arthur Chu, «Gather around, screwed millennials: You must see this», in Salon, June 27, 2015, https://www.salon.com/2015/06/26/advantageous_the_one_movie_all_un_and_underemployed_millennials_need_to_see/.
[25] Yohann Koshy, «Arrested Development», in: New Internationalist, January 1, 2018, https://newint.org/features/2018/01/01/arrested-development#fn4.
[26] Arthur Chu, ibid.
[27] Arthur Chu, ibid.
[28] Rob Horning, «Save the World», in The New Inquiry, December 28, 2017,https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/save-the-world/.
[29] Nick Land, «Meltdown,» in Fanged Noumena (London: Urbanomic, 2012).
[30] Nick Land, Phyl-Undhu (Time-Spiral Press, 2014).
[31] Stefan Collini, «Sold Out», in London Review of Books 35/20 (October 24, 2013), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out.
[32] «Future historians will at least record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If you still think the time for criticism is over, perhaps you’d better think again.» Stefan Collini, ibid.
[33] «They need the private sector to help out—and indeed, the input of the private sector can greatly benefit educational systems. However, for these benefits to reflect broadly based interests of the communities these systems are located in, privatization needs to be democratically controlled—to be tamed in a manner that preserves education’s traditional purposes of community building and working towards social cohesion and solidarity. In achieving this goal, nation states cannot be allowed to ‹wither away› against the encroaching power of the global markets. Instead they need to develop rules and systems that ensure that the privatization of education does not end up favoring the corrupt, the already privileged and the few, rather than all.» Fazal Rizvi, «Privatization in Education: Trends and Consequences», in Unesco, Education Research and Foresight, Working Papers 18, October 2016,unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002464/246485E.pdf.
[34] Mark Fisher, ibid.
[35] «Cyber labor is not that different from the living labor of illegal immigrants in America. Undocumented, uninsured, un-unionized, these human beings are treated no better than robots. And so the future in the film reveals the present as it is.» Charles Mudede, «Beyond the Matrix,» in The Stranger, November 6, 2014,https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/beyond-the-matrix/Content?oid=1670126.
[36] «Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.» A description of Timothy Morton’s book «Hyperobjects» can be found on the University of Minnesota Press website, https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects.
[37] Michael Newman, David Joselit, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Hal Foster, «A Questionnaire on Materialisms», in October 155 (Winter 2016) dgrahamburnett.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Burnett-for-October.pdf
[38] «And it's starting off in the medical industry. I actually met one of [the entrepreneurs]. Their business plan is to build operating rooms here in the U.S. with robotic surgical arms that will be controlled by doctors in India to compete with medical tourism. Because so many people fly oversees to get cheap operations.» Stephen Lemons, «Alex Rivera, Director of Sleep Dealer, Talks Sci-Fi, Immigration, and Robot Doctors Controlled from India,» in Phoenix New Times, August 6, 2010,http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/alex-rivera-director-of-sleep-dealer-talks-sci-fi-immigration-and-robot-doctors-controlled-from-india-6502616.
[39] Steven Shaviro, «Abundance and Scarcity,» in The Pinocchio Theory, June 2005, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=418.
[40] «In addition, the cost of private education can also have a negative impact on the enjoyment of other rights, and may affect a family’s ability to meet other needs related to health, food, housing, and so forth. These related effects can more negatively affect women and girls, as research shows that women and girls inevitably suffer disproportionately when resources are scarce.» United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), «Privatization and its Impact on the Right to Education of Women and Girls», July 7, 2014.
[41] «What can account for the fact that certain bodies are hyper-exposed, brightly visible, and magnified, while others are hidden, missing, and vanished?» Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore, Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (New York: NYU Press, 2009).[42] M. Terry Bowman, ibid.
[43] «It is senseless, then, to claim, as the author of The Economist article does, that immigrants are ‹more likely than the native-born to bring new ideas and start their own businesses›. Immigrants do not come from ‹Immigrantland›. Population differences related to entrepreneurial and earning potential are real, and significant, and difficult to bridge. … We have concentric circles of empathy, which means that the less direct our connections to people the less we are invested in their wellbeing. So, we nest our loyalties; we put our families first, and then our friends, and then our neighbours; then, perhaps, our countrymen and then mankind at large. This by no means makes us indifferent to foreigners. We can care about their lives, and try to help them. But the limits of our loyalties make nations convenient units of humanity, and explain why we put the interests of our nations first. … Immigration is important. As an immigrant myself who is delighted and grateful to have been accepted by my hosts, I very much a
[44] Daniel W. Drezner, «The Missing dimension in the NAFTA debate», in The Washington Post, January 27, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/27/the-missing-dimension-in-the-nafta-debate/?utm_term=.9077d5284635.
[45] Michael Guillen, «Q&A: Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer», in SF360.org, May 14, 2008, http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=11194.
[46] «Alex Rivera, Director of Sleep Dealer», in Latino Film Festival at IU Cinema Indiana University, Bloomington, September 30, 2012, https://youtu.be/eHPsmfLdiUs.
[47] Malcolm Harris, «Border Control», in The New Inquiry, July 2, 2012, http:// thenewinquiry.com/ features/border-control/.
[48] Mark Engler, «Science Fiction from Below», in foreign Policy in Focus, May 13, 2009, http://fpif.org/science_fiction_from_below/.
[49] Mark Engler, ibid.
[50] «Median per person rent in Beijing, where most of the estimated 8 million renters are millennials, according to Ziroom.com, has risen 33 percent in the past five years to 2,748 yuan a month in June, equivalent to 58 percent of median income in the city, a survey by E-House China R&D Institute found. The costs often mean that young Chinese workers have to live on the edges of cities, with long, stressful journeys to work.» Yawen Chen, Tony Munroe, «For Chinese millennials, despondency has a brand name», in Reuters, September 5, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-congress-millennials-insight/for-chinese-millennials-despondency-has-a-brand-name-idUSKCN1BF2J7.
[51] «A lot of people are familiar with the story of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where an American company, Bechtel, privatized the water, and there literally was a water war. All of this stuff can sound like a bad Kevin Costner movie—the idea of a water war—and yet it’s one of those realities that, if you were to graph it, is only going to trend upwards in terms of its intensity in the future.» Mark Engler, ibid
[52] Fionna Jeffries, ibid.
[53] Mark Engler, ibid.
[54] Steve Macfarlane, «Jennifer Phang by Steve Macfarlane», in Bomb Magazine, July 22, 2015, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jennifer-phang/.
[55] «Alex Rivera, Director of Sleep Dealer», in Latino Film Festival at IU Cinema Indiana University, Bloomington, September 30, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHPsmfLdiUs.
[56] Keith Chow, «Hard NOC Life Episode 036: Talking Advantageous with Jennifer Phang»,, July 3, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B9ZKwA95is.
[57] Kylee Peña, ibid.
[58] Laura Berger, «Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Phang – Advantageous», in IndieWire, January 23, 2015, http://www.indiewire.com/2015/01/sundance-women-directors-meet-jennifer-phang-advantageous-204890/.
[59] James Tully, «Responses», in Freedom and democracy in an imperial context: dialogues with James Tully, edited by Robert Nichols and Jakeet Singh, Routledge, 2014.