Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future

After Scarcity is a sci-fi-essay film that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s-1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy, an attempt that finds traction today as a way of defying financialization. If the problem of socialism was time loss—too much bureaucracy, too much conversation, too many meetings—a socialism-on-speed, counting electricity plus statistics, could move past this limit. The film recounts the history of a moment in time when, against all odds, it seemed feasible to plan for the whole system at once—collective ownership of global resources with the programmed and networked efficiency of Wal-Mart.

Maryam is an Afghan immigrant, living with her young son in Canada. After a fire breaks out in their neighborhood they both become entangled in the consequences.

A volcano spews lava that slowly crawls through the streets of Tehran. Thousands of miles away, an Iranian boy and his dad take a road trip through the American Midwest. Two seemingly unrelated journeys are juxtaposed in this rich meditation on diaspora, memory, and loss.

An operatic financial sci-fi, Free to Choose is narrated by Milton Friedman, an American economist who was the real-life evangelist of Hong Kong’s free market policies. The work reframes financial instruments as a time-travelling machine that allows the wealthy to borrow money from their future selves. It follows Philip Tose—an ex-race car driver and CEO of an insolvent company— from 1997 to 2047 as he attempts to escape the impact of the economic crash to seek a bailout from his older self. Hong Kong in 2047 is ridden with the aftereffects of Friedman’s advocacy, where economic freedom has not produced the unparalleled human freedom that he predicted but new forms of corruption. In this dystopia, preferential treatment for time-travel is given to the rich and powerful, while young “credit rating” activists demand universal access to the future.