Civilization Noir

Folklore Confronting the Failures of the Enlightenment & Industrial Revolution

This was a project Kortina and I worked on together as a part of our yearly seminar for MIT's IAP. It's a fun time for us, hosting these, and we've had a lot of good conversations within them centered somewhere around computation, AI, work, dignity, and sociology. This year's was particularly fun for us since we're both into film, and had wanted to try to make a film essay related to things we've been thinking about.

About

The accelerating pace of technological change and global connectivity has enabled a great deal of progress, but has required increasingly complex systems for organizing modern civilization.

Neither technology itself nor the twentieth century institutions of media, finance, and government seem to offer much hope for making sense of the inscrutable structures that dictate much of our lives, so we’re left searching for a modern folklore that can provide some form of understanding and meaning.

Perhaps noir can offer us some clues as we face these dilemmas of modernity.