No Future?/Fight the Future!: Terminator4 (Sarah Connor Chronicles) and Virtual Communities of Resistance

Curator's Note

In the clip you just saw the stakes of the future war between humans and cybernetic organisms is laid out in stark detail. Given that the current T4 or fourth generation of the “Terminator” series of works is a serialized televisual work the potential audience for this epic narrative of a existential struggle between species over the telos of the future is both global is range and micropolitical in the most intimate of relations (a theme commented on in my previous IMR piece regarding “intimate threats”), that between mother and son. This thematic of the eruption of planetary interspecies conflict (assuming of course that humans and cybernetic organisms are different species) has a fractal like form. See Jack Goldstone’s /Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World / for an interesting discussion of this fractal formation “we could describe social structure as ‘near fractal’ a structure that is ordered – by a combination of conscious intent and historical accident – on a variety of levels… largely, although problematically, self similar” (1991, p. 47). In all of the /Terminators/ this attempt to control historical accidents reaches a cosmological level of intensity. A question I would like to ask the readers of this piece is: can you envision a moment of time for an intervention in the Real that you would temporally “backstep” to prevent the apocalyptic vision of the future evident in both the /Terminator /series and a parallel fate for inevitable inter-species conflict in the /Matrix/ series? Is the violent conflict between organism and cyberorganisms avoidable? If so, are there strategies for assembling a virtual community of resistance to “fight the future”?