Please read the last four chapters of The Freeze-Frame Revolution: Birnam Wood, User Friendly, Dinosaur Day, and I Found my Eight Note. That will be pages 64-116.
Potential Things to Consider
- Relationships. Defining them. What is the difference between a friend, a lover, a coworker, a comrade, a collaborator, an associate, a roommate, and an acquaintance?
- Loss. How are we affected by the loss of people? Have you ever felt unreasonably affected by the loss of someone you barely know? Or alternately, have you felt strangely numb about the loss of someone you should be devastated to lose?
- Life/Work Balance. Under capitalism, life is atomized. Or at least, in late-stage capitalism in the heart of the empire (the United States) life is supposed to be atomized. Your coworkers are not your lovers and housemates. Yet, in alternate worlds, alternate social organizations, they are. How does this (or how should this) separation affect and impact our relationships with each other? For many of us, this separation is core to our mental health. But is this possible, or even ideal, in all social organization models?
- Collaboration. What does it mean and how do we do it? How do we accept others’ different goals and relationships to our joint projects? How do we accept these differences when these differences have a high-stakes impact (i.e. potential death and dismemberment for yourself or someone you care about?)
- Agency. Who is given structural agency in a hierarchical system? Do those at the top of the system have more, as much, or less, agency at those of the bottom of the system? In a meta-phyical way, which one of these characters expresses agency? Do any of them? Does agency exist if one can only do what one is programmed to do? Is there a difference between biological programming and AI in this world? Or in our (future) world?
- WHAT WAS THE REASON??????? Why do we do what we do? Note that money never seems to be mentioned for any of these characters. What is the point of money if you have no where to spend it? Instead, each character has a different motivation, a different reason, a different commitment to their own lives, roles, relationships, and power. These differences in motivation are not minor, and the sense of alienation and isolation that comes from the mismatch of these desires and goals is a core aspect of this text (as has already been hinted at in this post). Do you experience this alienation, this disconnect, this sense of loss in your daily life? How do you reconcile it? How and why do you get up every day? How is that (and how isn’t that?) impacted, affected, direct, and defined by your politics and philosophies?
- Revolution. In this world, the questions I have posed above are not neutral. Some old white dude once said you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Regardless of that dude and his politics in real life, the train is in motion in this world, and the consequences are not theoretical (for at least some of the characters). Future consequences are a daily burden they wrestle with when making their choices. And some choose to fight until death. Are our daily struggles (against climate collapse, for example) more or less imminent than the ones these characters face? Look at the image above. What does that image have to do with this text, and with our lives in the present and future?
- Heroes, Anti Heroes, Villians, and Traitors. Which characters are True Believers versus the reluctant participants versus individualists? Are there anarchists here? Anarchs? Quiet skeptics? This questions seems deceptively simple, so putting it a different way: Can you place the characters into the categories of “Heros, Anti Hereos, Villans, and Traitors”? If so, can you identify a philosophic tendency that they represent with their actions and words? How do you feel about the character before doing this exercise and how do you feel about them after?