ABSTRACT
Taking as a point of departure the montage film Dreams Rewired (Luksch, Reinhart, Tode, 2015) and its archival source material, ranging from newsreels and scientific recordings to early dramatic films, this illustrated chapter offers a historical perspective on urgent issues in current network and information politics. Dominant modes of the contemporary – such as the striving for simultaneity and ubiquity; the enclosure of the media commons; the pursuit of efficiency in personal, domestic, corporate and public spheres; and the whitewashing of the material, energy and labour costs of technological advance – were all prefigured in the Electric Age, in the decades around 1900. Early cinema mediated and amplified the radical transformations and utopian promise of the times. This text employs visions from the Electric Age to illuminate specific present-day concerns, including the battle over ‘net neutrality’, the extension of state and corporate control to synthetic space via ‘smart’ homes and cities and the ‘internet of things’, aerial dominance through autonomous weapon systems, and the establishment of a regime of surveillance capitalism based on behavioural nudging.
