The scope of this kind of space opera also functions to demonstrate the limitations of ruling-class values. As the critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the traditional novel is a bourgeois literary form which is structurally dependent on a formal resolution, like the entry of one of Jane Austen’s heroines into a marriage contract, which upholds property relations and the social order. In contrast, science fiction is a genre that desires to boldly go beyond those kinds of constraints. By shifting the scale of action from the confines of modern life, defined by birth circumstances and job opportunities, to an infinite universe, it opens up an exploration of individual and social possibility without limits; once you’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, there’s no going back to passive late-capitalist life.
Capitalist systems are designed to pummel us into submission, preventing us from imagining life could be any other way, let alone allowing us to go on the offensive. But successful movements against tech elites’ further encroachment shows that the fight is not over. The resistance of the activists in Toronto is a recent example in a long tradition of Luddite action that smashed the technology that made their lives more miserable and targeted the capitalists who used it to hold power over them. Dismantling the machinery of capital is also an attempt to challenge the “form of society which utilizes those instruments,” Marx writes in the first volume of Capital. Their guerrilla tactics against one of the most powerful and richest corporations ever to exist demonstrates that even a behemoth can be stopped in its tracks and forced to re-evaluate its strategy.
I started listening to and thinking about “Alabama” a lot in the aftermath of Philando Castile’s murder in the summer of 2016, which was reminiscent of the murders of Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Walter Scott, Jamar Clark, Sandra Bland, and countless others. I’d lay down and loop the song through my bedroom speakers because the sonic landscape that Coltrane conjures on the track suggests something about the temporality in which black grief lives, the way that black people are forced to grieve our dead so often that the work of grieving never ends. You don’t even have time to grieve one new absence before the next one arrives. (We hadn’t time to grieve Ahmaud Arbery before we saw the video of Floyd’s murder.) “Alabama” gives this unceasing immersion in grief a form. It’s there in the song’s disconcerting stops and starts, its disarticulated notes, its willingness to abandon virtuosity in favor of a style of playing that is repetitive, diffuse, tentative, and dissonant.
Regardless, digitization is not the problem. It’s a potential public good, representing an important step in the development of cultural productive forces. It means that all the diverse culture of the world can be made available rather than hidden or deleted from existence because of licensing restrictions or creative differences. It means that old film or music, for example, can be eternally preserved and infinitely shared, instead of going up in smoke or rotting in vaults because it isn’t considered profitable.
In fact, in many cases the only thing keeping a piece of media alive is either a digital library or file-sharing site, while confusing copyright schemes may prevent fragile works from being digitized at all. As tech journalist Benj Edwards argued in 2012, pirates perform an important service by preserving old software, including games, programs and other copyrighted but abandoned data that many writers and researchers rely on.
With an attention-grabbing snare snap, the title track begins this blistering collection. Overall, their sound doesn’t deviate too far from the blueprints of Against’s muses, but there’s also a lot that’s distinctive about it. Bearing little resemblance to the hoarse bellow of Discharge vocalist Kelvin Morris, Jerry Clarke’s parched and gaunt-sounding voice adds an extra sense of urgency to the apocalyptic roar of “All Too Late,” “Pain Never Ends,” and “Mao.” “Burned Beyond Recognition,” meanwhile, throws in pinches of T.S.O.L., Adolescents, and others from the Southern California beach punk scene that was going on at the time. As L.A. hardcore extended into the ’80s, Final Conflict, Diatribe, and other members of SoCal’s anarchist peace-punk contingent, attest to Against’s local influence, despite the fact it would take years until they would finally be heard by the rest of us.