2073, the new film from director Asif Kapadia, opens with a shot of a wildfire blazing through the trees of a hilltop. Its directionless destruction becomes hypnotic, especially as it melds with the images of recent memory: Los Angeles transforming into an inferno. The movie has a relationship with reality like few others, acting, with simultaneous force, as a dramatic depiction of a plausible reality that awaits the world in its titular year, and a gut wrenching, interpretive analysis of the reality that citizens of countries all over the world, from the United States to India, the United Kingdom to China, are living.
It is difficult to describe 2073. Evidently, even Kapadia, whose previous work includes the Academy Award winning documentary on Amy Winehouse, Amy, also struggles to neatly define his current, genre-evading movie. When he invited a British journalist to an advanced screening, she asked, “What is it?” He replied, “I don’t know, but it is about everything that’s happening right now.”
It is a work of essayistic art that occupies two worlds – documentary and cyberpunk cinema. After opening with a collage of environmental catastrophe – wildfires, blown out cities covered in dust, bodies of water cresting with garbage on the surface – it becomes clear that Kapadia has transported us into the future. San Francisco is the “capital of the Americas,” Chairman Ivanka Trump is celebrating “30 years in power,” and police brutality is a daily occurrence on the open streets. Speaking a foreign language is illegal, as is the promotion of democracy. The most priceless works of classical art, from Michelangelo’s statue of David to Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, decorate the hallways and conference rooms of corporate offices. Average citizens search through dumpsters and the aisles of abandoned markets for food, clothing, and other basic necessities.
Our docent for the dystopia is Ghost, a young woman played by Samantha Morton. She has vowed to no longer speak, but we can hear her voice as she writes a record of her lost age and troubled times. Her mission is simple: To avoid detention at the hands of the police or the marauding street militias who persecute anyone suspected of dissent, while leaving a testimony that can act against the erasure of history and memory. Her grandmother also attempted to document and warn against the mutation of democratic societies into fascist oligarchies, but one day her grandmother disappeared without a trace, leaving behind nothing but grief.
A series of “time capsules,” playing out in Ghost’s recollections, transport us back into her grandmother’s days – The days of the 1990s, the 2010s, and the 2020s; The days that we are currently experiencing and witnessing. It is those time capsules that serve as the documentary portions of 2073. Real journalists, activists, surveillance technology experts, and philosophers describe what is happening in our world, while archival footage plays of state-sponsored oppression, police assaults against people all over the world, ecological disaster, warfare, and the growing power of despots. The film sends a chill throughout the bones of the viewer with the realization that Ghost’s memories, captured by the archival footage, are all real world events. Kapadia has invented nothing of the present or recent past. Instead, with the help of expert testimony, he presents a plausible picture of where recent and ongoing developments and trends, if unabated and uncontested, could lead. History offers no guarantees, making the prediction game tough to win. The techno-authoritarian hellscape that Kapadia sketches is not inevitable, but as his film makes painfully clear, it is also not far fetched. No optimistic futurist could easily dismiss the warning of 2073. It is a warning that comes with greatest urgency and eloquence from Silkie Carlo, a British civil liberties advocate and technology expert, who is also a voice of one of the time capsules. “The totalitarian architecture is here,” she says over real footage of facial recognition tools, “You only need a change of government, and then it’s too late.”
Carlo’s alarm sounds immediately after a summary of how the Chinese government oppresses and detains the Uyghur Muslims. Classifying every Uyghur Muslim as “normal,” “suspicious,” or “untrustworthy,” the Chinese government employs facial recognition technology and algorithmic, predictive formulas on the internet and social media to maintain the categories. Anyone who falls into the “suspicious” group is forcibly taken to a concentration camp for interrogation and reeducation. Those who are “untrustworthy” are rarely, if ever able to escape. There are currently over one million Uyghur Muslims in Chinese concentration camps.
Fascist governments in India, Uganda, and Turkey have resorted to similar measures against those it deems inferior and/or unfit for participation in open society.
The blueprint is waiting for eager hands to begin construction elsewhere, and 2073 amplifies the voice of historian Anne Applebaum during a time capsule to forecast potential darkness. Applebaum describes a “democratic recession” transpiring around the globe, the consequence of which is that 72 percent of the world now lives under authoritarian rule. The authoritarians have formed an alliance of convenience and cooperation against democracy’s forces of the West. Russia’s Putin, North Korea’s Kim John Un, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, and the Ayatollah of Iran, using subtle means of propaganda and overt methods of military aid, work hand in glove to strike blows against an international order of peace and human rights.
Meanwhile, tech-oligarchs exert worldwide influence, partnering with autocratic regimes to enhance their own power, while reducing the agency of free people. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen use their billions, and perhaps even more importantly, the thunderous megaphone of their platforms to advance an agenda that goes well beyond greed. Musk and Andreessen have openly declared their hostility toward democratic governance, longing for, what a commentator in 2073, calls a “techno-monarchy.” A clip of Thiel speaking at a policy conference that plays in the middle of the film captures his worldview. “Think of the homeless as a feature to raise real estate prices,” the tech-billionaire tells his audience after explaining that in San Francisco the mere presence of homeless people in lower and middle class neighborhoods increases demand, and therefore cost, of housing in wealthy precincts. Peter Thiel’s protégé is none other than the current vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance.
There are several references to Donald Trump in 2073, but he is not the focus. He is merely a member of a large cast of anti-democratic demagogues, despots, and plutocrats who understand, as Anne Applebaum tells viewers in a time capsule, that “Putin hacked the system” with his own power and influence overseas, and in the words of an executive of Cambridge Analytica, a big data political lobby, politics is now an enterprise of “no facts, all emotion.”
These men control the systems of information. With the push of a button or pull of a lever, they can help to determine the outcome of elections, the future of social movements, and the news that their millions of consumers can access. Maria Essa, a 2073 time capsule journalist who became a free press icon after courageously opposing a former president of the Philippines’s violent and oppressive war against drug addicts, offers the rhetorical question: “Isn’t this a science fiction movie?”
The dramatic, futuristic segments of 2073 answer with troubling affirmation. Ghost, our fictional guide into the second half of the 21st Century, describes the nightly curfew. Anyone who violates it is subject to rough, street justice. She recalls the days when libraries still existed, but were “secret places” for rebels, dissidents, and free thinkers meeting undercover. Her movements and home underneath a long closed shopping mall make it obvious that there is no escape from facial recognition technology and the techno-fascist clutch of modernity. A friend that she made, living off the grid, a former history professor who remained steadfast in her subversive politics, vanished one day without a trace. Ghost knows that she will never see her again.
The only solace Ghost finds is in the bottom of a dumpster – a badly damaged, nearly burnt copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography. His words cannot inspire activism – any act of protest is too dangerous to even contemplate – but they can remind her of a time when the truth was able to live in the discourse and in the minds of those who would accept it. We hear her read the following passage, as it offers an assessment of the world she inhabited before the dystopian decline into the techno-monarchy: “I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation.”
We also hear Ghost’s internal monologue recite Malcolm X’s conclusion, “The world goes on. It’s us that will end.”
And she does meet her end.
2073 ends with a masked law enforcement officer manhandling Ghost, and placing her in a detention center where a robotic voice emanating from an electronic device hanging from the wall asks her a series of questions about her relationships, beliefs, and reading habits. “It was too late for me,” appears on the screen, “It is not too late for you.”
The world in which Ghost lives, hides, and dies is the world that we are witnessing being born. In 2073, the complete transformation occurs after “The Event” – an unexplained cataclysm. It could be climate catastrophe, a world war, a global pandemic, anything, but the point is, anything that is easy to imagine. The world that takes form is one that prescient writers and filmmakers have predicted, all working under the subgenre of cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk borrows from science fiction and crime noir to present a futuristic world of dystopian dimensions. Familiar to most people through the movie, Blade Runner, based on a novel of Philip K. Dick, a cyberpunk pioneer, the genre depicts profoundly unequal societies where human beings wrestle against dominant technology and the tyrants and moguls who engineer and control it. Jared Shurin offers an accurate and workable definition of the term in the introduction to his essential anthology, The Big Book of Cyberpunk: “Cyberpunk fiction is therefore an attempt, through literature, to make sense of the unprecedented scale and pace of contemporary technology, and also of the brutal and realistic acknowledgement that there may be no sense to it at all. As a working definition, cyberpunk is speculative fiction about the influence of technology on the scale, the pace, or the pattern of human affairs (emphasis his). Technology may accelerate, promote, delay, or even oppose these affairs, but humanity remains ultimately, unchangeably, human. It is the fiction of irrationality. Science fiction looks to the stars; cyberpunk stares into a mirror.”
The image in the mirror cannot differ too radically from the present. Cyberpunk is not set in space or fantastical, faraway worlds, but instead a world that is a plausible iteration of our own. William Gibson, another cyberpunk founder, was prescient in his novels, particularly Neuromancer, about the influence of computers on human life, and the creation of the internet, just as lesser known authors of the genre can give insight into a near future, such as Isabel Fall, whose massively controversial story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” explores gender, and George Effinger, who forecasted the isolation that social media would encourage. More recently, pop star Janelle Monáe created a cyberpunk audio-textual classic with her record, Dirty Computer, and the companion collection of short stories focusing on how technology could create a “neofascist” regime of homophobia and racism, due to its enablement of extreme and thorough classification, the likes of which are already operative in China.
2073 depicts a future that, like the best of cyberpunk, is not alien to our own conception of the present. It also demonstrates that, as Shurin would surely observe, humans are inalterably human. Those with power use whatever tools at their disposal to enhance and enshrine their authority against all potential enemies and dissidents. The tools certainly differ, but the methodology of tyranny is traceable to the ancient world. Those who occupy the bottom strata struggle to survive physically by subsisting on whatever nutrition and shelter they can find, but also psychically, by reading old, discarded books, and forming underground friendships. The words of Malcolm X ring true in 2073, just as they did at time of publication in 1965.
There is quick, but brilliant allusion to the genius of the cyberpunk storytelling promise when a montage of Ghost’s memories slowly advances as she takes her final walk to the detention center. We see a quick scene of her looking frightened in the backseat of a vehicle. It is a scene, with the same actress, from the Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report. Also based on a Philip K. Dick novel, that revolves around predictive technology, available to law enforcement agencies, that allows for the arrest of a person before he commits a crime. Algorithms, invasive surveillance, the creation, to borrow another Shurin phrase, of “techno-capitalism on steroids” – it all might seem like the exclusive property of imaginative novels and films, but it is now becoming a reality that everyone, from candidates for the presidency to the average, unknown voter, must navigate.
James Cameron, referring to his 1984 movie, The Terminator, recently told an interviewer, when asked about artificial intelligence, “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.”
It appears that critics are again refusing to listen. 2073 is on the receiving end of various barbs – “pretentious,” “doomsday,” “cliched.” On its artistic and aesthetic merit, Kapadia’s movie is a clever and daring merger of two genres and mediums. Politically, it is as urgent and important as any film of the past ten years, offering, to name one example, a much more salient and global perspective on Donald Trump’s conquest of American politics than the typical partisan and parochial reaction.
Other critics have lamented that it is a “barrage of despair” and that it is “overly pessimistic.” As Ghost’s final words make clear, the movie is only pessimistic if an apathetic public determines that its trajectory is inevitable.
The next era does not have to resemble the world of 2073, but to act as if it can’t calls to mind the lyrics of a Bruce Springsteen song about civilizational decline and the delusions that could invite it. The music is joyous, and the chorus is infectious: “Don’t worry, darlin’ / Now, baby don’t you fret / We’re living in the future / And none of this has happened yet.”
