MINING THE FUTURE

Mark my word: A combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.
—Henry Ford, 1940

I ENVY ’70S KIDS, pressing their faces to the screen as John Williams’s Star Wars theme plays loudly, yellow text moving obliquely toward the edge of the galaxy. I envy ’70s kids, trying to get closer to fantasy, attempting to pull the future into the present. America was full of hope, tottering hastily toward a technological age filled with grand expectations for the future. At the same time, Star Wars reflected its era’s conflicts and concerns: George Lucas, the series’ creator, mentioned in a 2005 interview with the Chicago Tribune that it “was really about the Vietnam War.” The small, guerrilla-style Rebel Alliance taking on a much larger, technologically advanced power is a not-so-subtle retelling of the dynamic between American and Viet Cong forces. The fear of democracies veering into dictatorships is also prominently represented in the films in the form of the main antagonist, the Galactic Empire. In spite of the series’s bleak themes, Lucas succeeds in engendering a new hope, a vision of the future in which the hegemon is deposed. When I press my face to the screen (gigantic or handheld) now, I see rehashed franchises from yesteryear, stories from the last millennium re-presented with new actors, fictions from an indelible past that just won’t budge.

Except for Avatar, the ten highest-grossing science fiction films of the past twenty years all belong to the same three twentieth-century franchises—and even Avatar’s initial treatment was written in 1994. The highest-grossing sci-fi film this year, Dune: Part Two—the sequel to 2021’s Dune—is based on a novel published in 1965 and already adapted twice, once for cinema and once for TV. When Dune’s author, Frank Herbert, imagined the future depicted in the series, in which feudal houses battle for control of the desert planet Arrakis—the sole source of a valuable consciousness-altering resource known as Spice—he was inspired by a growing concern about environmental issues and the increasing prominence of psychedelics in 1960s America. Often described as an allegory for control of oil in the Gulf, the story of Arrakis is underpinned by the Arab Cold War, the three-decade conflict in the region between Soviet-backed nationalist republics and conservative monarchies allied with the United States, as well as by mounting concerns around global pollution and resource scarcity, epitomized by Paul Erlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. Though these themes are of course still relevant today, the story is ultimately rooted in the anxieties and preoccupations of Herbert’s era. Where are the contemporary cinematic epics addressing the unique sociocultural issues that shape our own? New stories are being written, but they are not crossing over to the realm of mainstream images. The culture industry is riveted to financial targets and desired return on investment. In the wake of actor strikes, piracy, and changing consumer behaviors, it has been hemorrhaging capital and resources, with the result that it is both unable and unwilling to fund the creation and dissemination of these new images.

The stakes of this pervasive rehashing of old content extend beyond the realm of entertainment: Science fiction’s imaginary futures have long served as fodder for real-world technological innovations. Some of the children whose cheeks were warmed by the glittering glow of the cathode-ray tube as they watched VHS tapes of Star Wars and Tron went on to create companies dedicated to building the future of their youthful dreams. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash presented the world with the concept of the “metaverse,” imagined in the book as a fully immersive virtual reality in which people interact through digital avatars. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was so influenced by the novel that, in 2021, he changed the company’s name to Meta, signaling his desire to realize a version of Stephenson’s idea. The book was also an inspiration for the development of Google Earth, and was mandatory reading for all members of the Xbox team led by Microsoft executive J. Allard. These examples suggest that the role of technology is best understood not as an agent of capital, but rather as an agent of imagination. Precisely because science fiction is so generative for our technological imaginaries, we need it to be genuinely experimental, committed to an expansive reimagining of not only what technology is, but what the future can be—and, most importantly, who gets to create it. 

The undefinable 2021 science-fiction musical epic Neptune Frost—a project from American multidisciplinary artist and musician Saul Williams and Rwandan filmmaker Anisia Uzeyman—is an example of a film that does not simply rehash past visions of a future. Here, war and the extractive violence of postcolonial industry sever the link between past and present, allowing for a new future to come into focus. Set in a post-civil-war Burundi ruled by a totalitarian power known simply as “the Authority,” the film opens with the funeral of an elder whose life is celebrated by a funeral mass and inhumation on a lush grassy hill. The action cuts to a pit mine where workers using hand tools extract coltan (columbite-tantalite), a mineral used to create the tantalum capacitors that power devices like our mobile phones, personal computers, and cameras. Surveilled by armed soldiers, the workers endure brutal conditions. After a soldier overseeing the mine kills his brother Tekno, the miner Matalusa (played by Bertrand “Kaya Free” Ninteretse) is led on a journey to Digitaria, an e-waste dump site that hosts a collective of anti-Authority hackers. There he encounters the film’s other protagonist, Neptune, an intersex runaway played by two actors (Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo), who fled home following an attempted sexual assault by a priest. The pair’s supernatural psycho-technological bond causes major disruptions to global information infrastructure, alarming world leaders who try to find the source of the hack.

The picture of the future represented in Neptune Frost, dominated by the contrast between verdant landscapes and the sharp edges of the gray-and-ocher mines, is not the future of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: It is not glossy, white, and chrome, but rather woven, earthy, embodied. Braided hair encodes knowledge like a secret algorithm. The film’s plot itself is nonlinear, making frequent, abrupt jumps between past, present, and future—demonstrating an oral temporality, one rooted in a folkloric storytelling unmoored from Western linearity and Hollywood convention. Speech breaks down into song, poetry, and dance—those often overlooked technologies of memory and communication, here brought to the fore as elements of an alternative future. Neptune Frost posits that “technology” encompasses not merely the latest devices but all kinds of communicative media, from polyrhythmic drumming to braiding or poetry.

Centrally, by having a coltan miner as the protagonist, the film links futurity with materiality and labor. Coltan, crucial for much of our technological infrastructure, is mostly found in Africa, where its mining is fraught with exploitative and often illegal labor practices. This is the forgotten component of the future: The glossy aesthetics of our devices, with their clean, minimal lines, obscure the manual labor and mineral sources that enable them to exist in the first place. As Williams put it in a 2021 interview, “How is it that all of our technological advances and everything that we relate with the idea of us moving towards a future is still heavily based on analog exploitation?” This sentiment is made explicit in the film: “They use our blood and sweat to communicate with each other, but have never heard our voice,” Matalusa says to the members of his community, who adopt the slogan “Unanimous Goldmine.” In other words, Neptune Frost dares to imagine a future where the laborers who bring technology to life are the ones shaping its use, foregrounding the mineral elements that power our digital dreams.