Foundation as a Renewal of Tech's Utopian Myths? A Close Viewing

Why did episode four of Foundation prompt a strong response in me? I came to this series without any prior knowledge of the source material. I didn’t have the kind of investment in it that Paul Krugman does, for instance.

But I do love a good scifi. From my perspective, Foundation represents a renewal of the techno-utopian motives that advocates of tech impart to their products. Foundation’s flaws originate from those motives, and in turn broadcast the shortcomings of tech through a genre narrative.

Before watching Foundation, like any self-respecting scholar I dug into the literature. Reading some of the reviews I noticed critics often pointed out that many of the original male characters of Asimov’s novel were played in the TV series by women of color. From an anthropological perspective this also drew me to the series. I hadn’t read the original work, so I had no investment in the fan politics of this shift, but I did have an interest in seeing a sophisticated scifi with people of color at center.

So, having watched four episodes, I can say I like a few things. I like the actors. I’m impressed with the special effects and attention to technical detail. Some of the script writing, apart from the math tutorial scenes or voice layovers, are interesting to listen to. The dialogue is inconsistent in that way; sometimes stiff in exposition, sometimes florid.

Watching episode four, though, I was struck by the incongruities between settings and actors while affect and tone of the episode remained constant. Within the episode there were several shifts in space (and time as well - I’m not sure). In one scene the plucky underdog Warden reeled off spymaster-level insights into the motives an unknown enemy captive. Scene shift and we were next watching a god-like monarch berate academic minions who cannot so much as summon a coherent refutation of fortunetelling.

Setting aside how the writers skate over the plausibility of these scenarios, my issue is a broader one concerning what these scenes don’t have in common. Its obvious to the audience that these are very different circumstances, but I’ll belabor the obvious and point out that differences in race, gender, and not least, power, make them strikingly distinct. Foundation’s creators deliberately upend traditional race and gender roles from Asimov’s source materials in which most roles belonged to men. That act of recontextualization revitalizes scenes of a young woman of color leading a rebellion (i.e. Henry Stanton’s rebellion). Her actions are given new ethical imperative through the subtext of racial and gender advancement in the contemporary moment. The ethical position of the Warden is underpinned by these reversals of race and gender, in turn lending strength to her “argument” for rebellion. No audience would then expect that the scenes featuring the Warden would share an affective register with scenes depicting Emperor’s life. The writers already subverted any such possibility of commonality through the inversion of the race and gender of the characters; it would be incongruous to use the same affective register in scenes featuring a white man in a position of supreme power as those which feature the Warden. Strangely, in episode four these scenarios are interspersed with one another, under a single musical score, creating confusion. I suppose these choices might be meant to impart that very different circumstances are all unified under the fate of Henry Stanton’s mathematical insights, but the impression is more complicated.

Ushering an audience through these situations as though share a common affective tone – a generalized sense of urgency – undermines the different poignancy of the scenes. The righteous poignancy of the warden’s budding rebellion is set on the same level as the poignancy of decline through the Emperor’s recriminations. The later is, in effect, a tantrum. Why give the Emperor’s scenes the same sense of urgency as the Wardens’ defenses of the colony? I mean, it does give Lee Pace space to flex his gift for acting out the grandiose in mid-breakdown. But this single affective register for the episode creates a syncopated effect where the action of the story seems out of step with the pitch and the emotional performance of the actors. This dissonance moves from implicit to explicit in the final moments of the episode when it wraps with a voice layover of banalities about freewill vs. fate interspersed between on-screen dialogue and action. In these final seconds I ended up as much in confusion as with a sense of the gravity of urgency/danger/chaos the protagonists faced.

What does this have to do with the tech industry? Episode four comes across as a bit of a ham-fisted handling of context. The context of power, race and gender dynamics, to say nothing of sociocultural histories, plays no part in informing the emotional impact of the scenes. When I think about it though, Foundation as a work, and tech as an industry, seem to have flattening such context as a goal. It’s a feature, not a bug, to use an overused phrase. Leaders in tech suggest their products remove extraneous socio-political obstacles and middlemen from our worlds, supposedly making us freer, more connected, removing the obstacles of politics, cultural practices, of history. Anthropologists are continually at pains to point out how many such projects have actually failed to understand human practice (a subject for another post). Perhaps this is why Asimov’s novel is compelling as a project for tech’s media ventures. Harry Stanton’s project cutting across the complexities of human action resembles their own aspirations for their products.