Thinking through high-tech hella theory of the new media dystopia

Resumen

Examining a cluster of British and Anglo-American audio-visual series from the 2010s, this thesis theorises them —and, indirectly, the epochal reality that they represent— through the concept of the “new media dystopia,” a term that names an emergent sub-genre of sf which is thematically concerned with the worst effects of developments in media technologies under digital capitalism, and which is —ironically— produced, distributed and consumed through digital capitalism’s own platforms. Trying to offer a holistic definition of the sub-genre, new media dystopias are accordingly approached from four distinct but overlapping perspectives —historical, narrative, aesthetic, and characterological, respectively—, which roughly correspond to the thesis’s four chapters. In the firstof them, I begin by schematising the main reasons and the historical dynamics whereby contemporary capitalism is being re-imagined as a new media dystopia. In so doing, I essentially elaborate and expand upon Tom Moylan’s hypothesis that the present epoch is shaped by a “dystopian structure of feeling” that —sites of resistance and subversion notwithstanding— makes cynical hopelessness the reigning mood and the dominant ideology, a phenomenon that is traceable to the dynamics of postmodernism, neoliberalism, and digital capitalism. This thesis then turns towards fictional new media dystopias in the second chapter, where I begin to examine one of their essential narrative characteristics: their “new media reflexivity,” which refers to the sub-genre’s forms of reflecting (upon) the digital platforms and technologies that enable their circulation and consumption. Trying to fill in a gap in sf studies, where a reflexive turn has long been observed but is often contradictorily theorised, I build upon Pedro Javier Pardo’s notions of reflexivity across media, putting them into dialogue with definitions of the sf genre, and adapting them for the study of digitally distributed audio-visual narratives. The next and third chapter is the one that offers the most fully developed definition of the new media dystopia, considering not only its historical and narrative characteristics, but also its profoundly ambivalent visual aesthetics. Synthesising key ideas from sf studies, utopian studies, and film and television studies, I here propose that the sub-genre is structured around a “techno ambivalent gaze” whereby even the most ostensibly critical narratives are necessarily caught in between technophobia and technophilia, insofar as they partake in a dominant aesthetic sensibility that finds beauty and sublimity in new technologies. In this sense, new media dystopias are not only ambivalent because of their ironic position within the medial circuits of digital capitalism, but also because their narrative and aesthetic characteristics entrap them in the ambiguity of beautifying the objects that they simultaneously criticise. The fourth and final chapter, subsequently, theorises a typical mode of characterisation that is often found in the sub-genre: “new media quixotism.” In this last foray into new media dystopias, I analyse how several of them are structured around the themes and motifs of the “myth of Don Quixote,” as theorised by Pedro Javier Pardo, in a way that rewrites and re-interprets quixotism around the use of new media technologies, implicitly suggesting that the digital age is, for better or worse, making us all quixotic in a peculiar, new way. All throughout, my interest lies in gauging the ways and the extent to which new media dystopias contribute to the epochal hopelessness that seems to define the terms of our relationship with new technologies —and, in turn, the terms of our position within and towards digital capitalism. Assuming, like this sub-genre, that contemporary capitalism is a dystopia may be a crucial first step in the direction of critical thinking, but that common-sense analogy often leads, as this thesis tries to demonstrate, into unexpected and sometimes counterproductive directions. An imaginary descent into high-tech hell might very well be what our critical clarity needs nowadays, but a descent into high-tech hell it remains, with everything that this entails.