Today is the tenth anniversary of the the Pulse Nightclub shooting that happened on June 12, 2016.
We remember the victims and honor them with action. đź’”
The result is that robots, in this story at least, become a way to consider how framing the “universal subject” of revolutionary consciousness as “workers” struggles to accommodate race and ecology. An unexpected outcome, and I didn’t expect antisemitism to become an important theme within it!
I don’t mean that robot narratives are actually representations of Jewish people (which is generally very rare), but rather that “robot takeover” stories can be read as making concrete the invisible domination of capitalism, with the conceptual slippage that inherently risks.
No way of knowing if the pot will boil unless you watch it!
This verse novelette is taking on the thorny sci fi question of drone-as-representation-of-the-other, and I’m finding the left-wing analysis of antisemitism (projecting the impersonal domination of capitalism onto a concrete group) makes things make more sense.
I never receive word from publishers on my poetry submissions the instant I check my email, Moksha, Duosuma, or Submittable. I only receive a response when I’m doing something else. The answer is clear: I need to stop doing something else so I can move frequently check my submission status.
In general robots are a grab-bag of projections and anxieties that are hard to tie together, especially without thinking how labor and automation interact. My story presumes that those projections continue even as robots come to form their own distinct, inhuman forms of sentience.
Not a video game person but as a poet who also works for years on something nobody might ever care about, I think posts like this give a definite yes answer to the question of whether video games are a form of art or literature
A first hand report from Belfast:
districtmagazine.ie/features/on-...
