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This story was first published on New Frame.
style="font-weight: 400;">Upgrade, released in 2018, has gained greater popularity since reaching Netflix this year. It is set a few decades in the future in an unnamed American city where robotic technology has increasingly replaced human workers. Those with jobs travel in beautiful self-driving cars and live in automated houses while the unemployed huddle in homeless encampments.
Weathered robots replace car mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) at work. His wife, Asha Trace (Melanie Vallejo), is one of the white-collar elite who works for a tech company. Grey’s sole remaining client is the sinister inventor Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson).
One night, Grey and Asha visit Keen’s lavish underground bunker, where he unveils his newest creation, a computer chip called Stem. Keen predicts this device will positively change the world. Grey has a less lofty perspective. He tells Keen that while the tech guru may imagine the utopian horizon of unlimited potential, all he sees is “10 more guys on an unemployment line”.
As with real-world plutocrats such as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, Keen is a techno-optimist. He believes that cutting-edge technology, such as automation or artificial intelligence, will always benefit society. Techno-optimists label anyone afraid of technology’s political and economic implications a “Luddite”, neurotically afraid of remote-controlled futures.
Of course, as seen by the paranoid anti-vaxxer movement, there certainly are people who do have a reactionary fear of science and technology. But while there are many areas in which technology has made our lives easier, it is naive to believe it is always beneficial.
Techno fear
In the last century, for instance, some of the greatest scientific minds of the day used their genius to develop nuclear weapons, a technology that serves no purpose beyond creating enough destructive force to kill millions and burn cities into radioactive dust. Still hulking in underground silos and lurking in submarines, these horrific weapons could destroy human civilisation in a matter of hours.
Grey’s technological anxiety is proven correct through the course of the film. Stem, it transpires, has a mind of its own. In direct contrast to its creator’s vision, it comes to regard humans as a resource to be manipulated and exploited. Ultimately, the inventor becomes the puppet of his product. There is a poetic justice to his fate – the machine he thought would make him even wealthier forces the capitalist who got rich off the labour of others into servitude.
According to many governments and economists, humanity is in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, or 4IR, driven by advances in robotics and computing. This is depicted as the inevitable march of progress, as op-eds urge people to reskill for this new era or face being crushed under the wheels of the future.
Automation is not being praised because it will make life easier for all, but because it will reduce work forces and consolidate the power of Silicon Valley. Along with threatening mass unemployment and further entrenching social inequality, the 4IR is already making our lives less free with the rise of surveillance capitalism in which vast conglomerates such as Google and Facebook control substantial aspects of daily existence.
Frankenstein and the Luddites
In countless films, TV shows, novels and comic books, science fiction has detailed our deepest terrors and suspicions about the unintended consequences of technological progress. This tradition of techno-paranoia can be traced back to the very beginning of the industrial revolution, when, in 1818, the 20-year-old writer Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus.
The wealthy inventor Victor Frankenstein creates a living creature by reanimating corpses with electricity. The monster he creates terrifies Frankenstein. But instead of taking responsibility for his disastrous experiment, he flees from it, with tragic consequences for everyone close to him.
Shelley was far from an anti-science reactionary. Along with being an influential creator in her own right (she wrote The Last Man in 1826, often regarded as the first fictional story about a future viral apocalypse), she was conversant with the politically and artistically radical ideas of the time. The daughter of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, she was also married to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of some of the most famous revolutionary poetry in the English language.
The Romantic movement, with which she was associated, was not opposed to the pursuit of scientific technology. But it saw how the Industrial Revolution in Britain destroyed natural spaces, pushed rural people off the land into hellish industrial towns and relied on the deadly labour of slaves in America. It feared technology would be used to control and destroy, rather than to liberate. When the poet William Blake saw the first major factory built in London, he described it not as a product of the future but as a “dark satanic mill”.
Inspired by radical democratic ideas, the nascent English working class resisted technological control. One form of this was a secret organisation called the Luddites, highly skilled textile workers whose work was threatened by mechanised equipment. As acts of resistance, they destroyed machine looms and sent threatening letters to mill owners who were mistreating their employees.
In modern times, the term Luddite has come to mean an ignorant and narrow-minded person. But as Gavin Muller argues in his new book, Breaking Things At Work, the Luddites were mill workers who had traditionally enjoyed a great deal of autonomy over their work. The machines threatened their collective bargaining power and freedom. Their actions were motivated by a calculated response to an existential threat to their way of life and livelihoods.
‘Men like you built the hydrogen bomb’
Despite the technological advances made in subsequent centuries, the Frankenstein myth continues to inspire fictional critiques of technology run amok.
The visual aesthetic and synthwave soundtrack of Upgrade pays homage to subversive directors, including John Carpenter and Paul Verhoeven, who were making films in the 1980s. In a decade defined by the right-wing politics of Ronald Reagan, they featured anti-authoritarian protagonists fighting against the forces of rampant corporate greed and state militarism.
The chase sequences in Upgrade harken back to James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). In this series, Skynet, a computer designed by the military to run the US nuclear weapons fleet, attempts to eradicate humanity. Arrogant tech companies and militaries playing with dangerous technology they could neither understand nor control unleashed the Skynet apocalypse.
In Judgment Day – which celebrates its 30th anniversary in July – the main protagonist, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), confronts Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the scientist who will one day create Skynet. Hearing of the horrific future his work will create, Dyson tries to shirk responsibility, asking, “How were we supposed to know?”
With rage and pity for all the lives she knows will be lost to Skynet, Connor fires back, “Yeah, right? How are you supposed to know? Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you are so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something, to create a life, to feel it growing inside you. All you know is death and destruction.”
The dark humour of Upgrade echoes Robocop (1987), a political satire of the 1980s’ yuppie “