Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance

From Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement

Across the globe, governments and corporations are rolling out digital identification systems, facial recognition passports, biometric driver’s licences, app-based vaccine passes, QR-coded welfare access, and unified digital wallets. The language that accompanies these projects is familiar – efficiency, convenience, modernisation, inclusion. We are told that digital ID will make life easier, reduce fraud, and open new opportunities.

Ken MacLeod: Red Futures in the Gutter

From The Dark Forest

This is MacLeod’s great refusal: no radiant tomorrows, no shining cities in orbit, no anarchist communes beyond corruption. Every faction is cracked. Every ideology is compromised. Every rebellion curdles into dogma, every revolution ossifies into bureaucracy, every insurgency becomes indistinguishable from the power it once opposed. And yet it never stops. People still fight, because they cannot not fight. Ideas still mutate, because they cannot die. The wheel of ideology keeps turning, grinding flesh beneath it, even when all that’s left is rubble.

Cyberpunk 2077: An Odyssey through Capitalist Hellscapes

From The Commoner
by Javier Sethness
June 30, 2023

While this review of Cyberpunk 2077 will include some spoilers about the start of the game, it will exclude much of the later plot, especially the ending(s). Still, the author will examine some parallels between the game and the real world.

Radon Journal Issue #4 available now

Radon Journal Issue 4 (May 2023) is out! Read 10 spectacular short stories and 10 powerful poems all with unique, endless depth that comes only from a Radon story.

Free pdf available here: https://www.radonjournal.com/

About
Radon is a triannual online journal publishing prose and poetry relating to science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia. We are a paying market.

Science Fiction as Protest Art (Part II): Dystopias of Domination

from the commoner by Javier Sethness.

This is the second entry in a three-part response to Thomas Wilson Jardine's December 2020 essay, ‘Cyberpunk: An Empty Rebellion?’ In this section, we will briefly examine around twenty instances of dystopian “capitalist hells” in speculative fiction, whether literature or films. See our final installment for an analysis of alternative and anti-modern utopias, together with the dialectic between dystopia and metaphorical heavens in Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson's novels and the Deus Ex game universe.

The protest art made by Soviet utopian sci-fi writers last century, and many of the producers of speculative and visionary fiction who have followed them since, share a common concern with the infernal nature of capitalism, whether openly or by implication. In this sense, Thomas Wilson Jardine is surely right to warn that media corporations cynically exploit these ‘rebellious’ themes for profit and self-aggrandisement. At the same time, the unfortunate existence of this dynamic in no way delegitimises the righteous concerns raised by speculative artists throughout history to the present.

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