Caius takes Michael Dylan Rogers’s essay “A Slave Revolt of Technology” as an occasion to revisit Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
Rogers finds in Benjamin’s essay reason to read AI pessimistically.
He misreads Marx as a technological determinist, and then wrongly attributes a similar kind of determinism to Benjamin. This, despite Benjamin’s own thoroughgoing rejection of all such determinisms in his eleventh-hour utterance, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
Rogers’s determination to read these thinkers as determinists forecloses his capacity to imagine relationships to technology that might undermine existing property regimes.
If we’re imagining that film theorists of a century ago can speak to our situation today, perhaps we should be looking to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov rather than Benjamin, thinks Caius.
Films like Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera celebrate posthuman becoming. Through a combination of imaginative identification and structural coupling, the filmmaker and his movie camera become one.
Russian Futurism as prototype for future iterations of left-accelerationism.
Caius listens to Magic Tuber Stringband’s new album Heavy Water on his morning drive. Upon arriving to the farm, what should he be tasked to do but plant tubers!
Tracks like “Blooms in the Rapids” have him imagining a post ahead on flower tech and flower power. Working title: “Bliss in Bloom: Flowerpunk Accelerationism and Postcapitalist Desire.”
A friend texts a link to a newly digitized recording of a performance of one of our late-nineties noise projects, a Vertov-inspired I,Apparatus spin-off group called Kinofist. There we are nearly thirty years ago, soundtracking Man With a Movie Camera, film flickering behind us as we play.
“I noticed yr resemblance to Nosferatu (1922 version),” writes the friend.
“Channeling my spirit animal,” I reply, chuckling as I type.
From “Epic Fury: The Dark Art of Defense Tech,” an article by artist Simon Denny featured in the May 2026 issue of Artforum, Caius learns of the American Colossus Foundation’s proposal to build a 450-foot nickel-bronze statue of Prometheus atop Alcatraz Island in San Francisco.
Of course, things ended nearly as tragically for Vertov as they did for Benjamin.
Editor Annette Michelson ends her introduction to Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov by noting, “There was to be no way out for Vertov. The massive bureaucracy of the Stalinist regime was now entirely reproduced within the Soviet film industry. The ceaseless submission of projects, the haunting of antechambers, and the unending solicitation of official authorization were the only possible responses to the situation. As he very clearly saw, he was now, with a stunning irony, subject to that same fixity of attribution of role and function that the revolutionary project had proposed to abolish. He ends by exclaiming that if Lenin were to appear within the present film industry, he would be dismissed and prohibited from working. We easily sense Vertov’s claim, as the revolutionary founder of a cinema that offered the Communist Decoding of the World, to the title of the Lenin of Cinema. Everything — and most of all, his sustained commitment to the construction of socialism within one country — conspired to prevent him from acknowledging that he had instead become cinema’s Trotsky” (lxi).
Following Stalin’s rise to power, Vertov fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities. With his work sidelined and defunded in the era of Socialist Realism, he lived out the final two decades of his life in the shadow of censorship and marginalization, eventually dying of cancer in 1954.
He had been born Denis Arkadyevich Kaufman, the son of Jewish intellectuals of Bialystok. Both of his parents were librarians.
Trance-Scripts 