Yesterday I watched the Aral Sea disappear. It had been disappearing for a while. In 1960, Soviet agricultural projects began diverting water from its inflowing rivers, and what was then the fourth-largest lake in the world is now little more than a desert. Yesterday I watched Dubai burst forth from the desert and its artificial palms emerge from the sea. I watched Bolivian forests recede into soybean farms. I watched Greenland melt and glaciers retreat. I read Watch as mining operations move across the landscape as the North Antelope Rochelle Mine crept across Wyoming in tendrils and trenches.
I watched it all on Google Earth, which on Thursday launched Timelapse, a feature that allows users to watch 37 years of satellite footage blink past in a matter of seconds. The tool, which is remarkable in its accessibility and its sheer amount of data (over 4.4 million megapixels), explicitly shows the effects of human development and climate change. The landing page features tours of various landscapes—under headings like “Changing Forests,” “Urban Expansion,” and “Warming Planet”—with accompanying write-ups for each highlighted place. The language isn’t radical by any means, but more to the point than the vague corporate-journalism I was expecting. In the forests around San Julián, Bolivia, “much of the land is being used to raise soybeans, two-thirds of which are used as animal feed for the beef and pork industries.” Protected areas in the Amazon “didn't happen by accident. Instead they are the result of dedicated activism and bold protective policy.”
In a return to corporatese, Director of Google Earth Rebecca Moore told reporters that Timelapse is “not about zooming in. It’s about zooming out. It’s about taking the big step back. We need to see how our only home is doing.” This “big step back”—five satellites’ worth of photos over almost forty years—is revelatory and important, and will hopefully serve as education and a call to action. Seeing the planet from space can change our sense of scale and stakes: the famous 1972 photo of Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew became a symbol of the environmental movement, representative of the planet’s fragility and unique beauty. Seeing it in time-lapse form, however, feels different. Made of too much data to wrangle easily into narratives or stand-alone images, it has the overwhelming dread of patterns and trends. Such a remove also makes Timelapse almost alluringly abstract: rivers and roads spreading out with the same eerie silence. It looks like catastrophe; it looks like SimCity.
It also looks like a GIF, ticking along from 1984 to the present, pausing, and then beginning again. GIFs have long been a favorite filetype of mine: as little looping memories, they are both ceaseless and finite. There is a joy to them, an insistence, even as their subjects seem doomed to repetition. On this large of a scale, though, the looping is trancelike and foreboding, a record of the past that looks alarmingly like a simulation of the future. Watching Google Timelapse is like watching a long-fulfilled prophecy bump against the present. It is like watching history happen already, again and again. It is like watching a world of deep greens and blues turn brown and yellow and gray.
When the GIF file format was introduced in 1987, the Aral Sea had split into two separate bodies of water. Now it is the color of sand, passed over by enormous clouds of dust.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
I have been listening incessantly to Duff Thompson’ 2020 LP Haywire, a lo-fi blend of folk/pop, soul, and country that sounds like the soundtrack for a cigar lounge of self-hatred or a dive bar collapsing in on itself. Similar to the late, great Richard Swift or Dougie Poole’s half-joking psych-country, Thompson takes his musical influences less out of nostalgia than a sort of warped and poorly-lit sense of the past.
on the screen
Last week my friend Lucas and I watched Possessor (2020). I asked him if he would write a blurb about it since I figured he’d be more articulate than I would. And—no surprise—he was:
Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) is an ice-cold horror-thriller about an assassin who inhabits the body of someone close to her target, turning every hit into a bloody murder-suicide. A film about the near future that takes place in a weirdly analog recent past—2008, some time between the founding of Airbnb and the founding of Uber—Possessor is also a dark satire about work-life balance, like the first half of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). In both films, a piggish father figure does his best to ruin a new marriage that’s already fated for disaster, but in Cronenberg’s version Sean Bean gets his face fucked up with a fire poker, while in von Trier’s version Stellan Skarsgård breaks his dinner plate and fires an intern.
It’s hard to imagine Possessor existing outside the twin contexts of (1) the gig economy and (2) the films of David Cronenberg, father of writer-director Brandon. The elder Cronenberg made a lot of his early projects—low-budget horror jaunts like Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1979)—in the lead-up to the Reagan/Thatcher era, an economic and political order that eventually birthed his most enduring films: Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988). These films gave (literal) flesh-and-blood reality to 1980s cultural anxieties: the slow blurring between technologies of control and technologies of pleasure; the excesses of unaccountable corporations; the dissolution of the social order itself, best summed up by Thatcher’s infamous dictum, “there is no such thing as society.” They were also profoundly libidinal films, even when virtually sexless, and their violence was hysterical and maniacal and nasty.
Possessor makes clear the extent to which the Thatcherite/Reaganite project was global and successful. The violence is sociopathic, the sex is abstract; Sheila O’Malley calls it “humorless, start to finish [...] ponderous and glum.” When a main character works an all-day shift for an app that spies on people through their webcams, he has to ignore a graphic sexual encounter on screen so he can tell the tech overlord on his headset that the drapes in the background are pleated.
It’s a perfect movie for the present, and may have even replaced Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) as the most prescient sci-fi dystopia of the twenty-first century. If you thought sterility was bleak, how about actual filicide?
—Lucas Weals