Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033

Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033

02 October 2018

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA | Website

Inspired by Derek Jarman’s 1978 queer punk film Jubilee, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 follows author Ayn Rand and members of her Collective, including economist Alan Greenspan, on an acid trip in 1955. Casting queer icon Susanne Sachsse as Ayn Rand, Zach Blas stages a psychedelic fever dream that sees the philosopher and her hangers-on transported to a dystopian future Silicon Valley. As Apple, Facebook, and Google campuses burn, their guide—artificial intelligence Azuma—reveals that Rand has become a celebrity philosopher to tech executives, as her writings foster their entrepreneurial spirit. Amidst the wreckage, Rand and The Collective are introduced to the Internet, observe techies being captured by anti-campus groupies, and bear witness to the death of Silicon Valley elite. Inside an occupied office of Palantir Technologies, the group encounters Nootropix, a contra-sexual, contra-internet prophet played by Cassils, who lectures on the end of the internet as we know it.