Not Your Timeline
Revan Oluklu on capitalism’s temporal weapon
Protagonist: ‘There’s a cold war.’
Neil: ‘Nuclear?’
Protagonist: ‘Temporal.’
—Tenet (2020, dir. Christopher Nolan)
First as tragedy, then as strategy. Trump’s return to the United States presidency is no political accident, a self-soothing fiction that liberals clung to in the wake of his 2016 campaign. Trump’s resurgence, and more broadly the shattering of western liberal governance, cannot be grasped as the product of a singular demagogue. Rather, it is the symptom of a deeper ontological shift in the social and perceptual fabric of late capitalism—an accumulation of deregulatory, technocratic and transnational capitalist manoeuvres, long in motion, which have redrawn the boundaries of the political itself. As Quinn Slobodian argues in Hayek’s Bastards, these shifts were not the result of chaos but of the deliberate elevation of market sovereignty over democratic will, giving rise to a new class of actors fluent in the anti-democratic potential of technocracy and virtually immune to consequences.
The post-Obama arrogance of the Biden regime was to portray the first Trump term as an aberration, one that the respectable stewards of neoliberalism would put to bed through lawfare and an illusory electoral dam. A fatal posture, as we can see now. What these so-called adults in the room wilfully ignored—shielded by their own ideological hubris—is that Trump’s victory represented not an anomaly, but a deepening political stratagem. This machinery operated through endless video, viral memes and algorithmically modulated affects, engineered within the dark pattern architectures of Big Tech: autoplay defaults that collapse time into frictionless consumption; infinite scroll mechanisms that exploit cognitive exhaustion; opaque algorithmic feedback loops that reward outrage and polarisation; manipulative UX flows designed to delay exit and deepen behavioural capture. These are not accidents of design, but calculated interventions: affective infrastructures that condition not just what we see, but how we think, feel, and act within the collapsing horizon of the present.
Vainglorious liberal hopes that Trumpism would fade rested on a bankrupt conventional wisdom: the belief that shame, legality and elite disapproval still had the ability to retain the power to discipline political actors in a degraded public sphere. In its aftermath, the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021 was treated as a rupture from which ‘normalcy’ would automatically reassert itself. Pure fantasy, of course. Mired in their short-lived dominance, the liberal establishment failed to grasp that its traditional tools of containment—media consensus, legal threat, reputational cost—had been rendered impotent by a platform-dominated attention economy that no longer abided by their rhythms or hierarchies, where its purpose is not to persuade explicitly, but to weaponise time and emotion themselves, reconfiguring the very ground of social perception and reality.
But this transformation—still underway and rapidly metastasising as I write, seen locally in the major parties’ ‘brainrot’ campaigning, and the direct electoral intervention of online creators from Abbie Chatfield to Purplepingers—cannot be contained within politics alone. It concerns the very structure of late modern ontology—a shift in how time, attention and subjectivity are now shaped. Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato first mapped this shifting terrain in his 1996 doctoral thesis, Videophilosophy, later published in English in 2019. While traditional media integrates time externally through narrative sequencing, editorial pacing and symbolic meaning, Lazzarato posits that video does the opposite, internalising time, directly embedding itself into the rhythms of cognition. In doing so, it not only represents events but also structures and restructures how we experience them.
Consider the now-canonical clips of Jordan Peterson weeping over the collapse of ‘the west’. These are absorbed not as argument but as ambient affect: a crystallised performance of melancholic masculinity, stripped of sequence or causality, engineered to haunt timelines in the register of pure mood. There is no real proposition here—only the aesthetic of collapse, offered to the algorithm as proof that ‘something’ is ‘wrong’. His breakdown circulates not through conviction but emotional sonority: for sympathisers, a poignant symbol of civilisational grief; for opponents, a meme to be remixed into ironic detachment. Both modes extract value not from what is said, but from the intensity of what is suggested should be felt. It is not a polemic but a pulse, modulated to persist in the platformed subconscious, where affect displaces argument and recognition replaces reason. In this vein, Ben Shapiro’s rapid-fire ‘DESTROYS’ clips and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s candid Instagram stories are a kind of affective mirror image: Where Shapiro distils the spectacle of argumentative dominance into pure performative certainty, Ocasio-Cortez crystallises vulnerability and sincerity as mood objects. In their own register, each bypasses discursive engagement—one weaponising speed and brutality, the other intimacy and relatability—yet both circulate as algorithmically potent pulses. This is the essence of what Lazzarato terms video’s ‘crystallisation’ of time: it captures and reprocesses lived temporality, placing it in machinic circulation where subjectivities are shaped not through ideological persuasion, but by modulating preconscious flows—the ‘raw material’ of late capitalist malaise: the sense of perpetual crisis, droning anger and existential drift which now defines subjects across the entire political spectrum—‘left’, ‘right’, or otherwise.
Trump’s domination of what will amount to over a decade of U.S. politics represents not an exception, but a culmination; it is the media-political surface effect of a deeper neoliberal project mapped by Slobodian and others. This is the telos of an order in which markets were insulated, publics were fragmented, and the infrastructures of attention were slowly but deliberately privatised. Democrat-adjacent intellectuals Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes propose the faultline as thus: that ‘attention is [now] the most valuable resource’, pointing to Trump’s alliance with social media billionaires—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others operating at the nexus of finance and tech—not to mention increasingly, the security state. The U.S. Army’s recent enlistment of former executives from Palantir and Google to lead ‘Detachment 201’, a so-called Innovation Corps, marks a formalisation of what has long been underway: the folding of perception infrastructure into the essential architecture of military strategy.
While the liberal commentariat senses the terrain of politics shifting toward attention and recognises ‘attention economy’ powerbrokers such as Joe Rogan, they fail to problematise video’s indispensability to this transformation as the technology uniquely able to capture, hold and put human attention to work. Few have asked what it is about video that compelled Zuckerberg to reshape Instagram in TikTok’s image. Why is it that the American state is attempting to wrestle TikTok from the hands of its imperial rivals? Because TikTok, more than any text, image, or traditional broadcast medium, offers granular control over time, perception, and affect—core ingredients in the management of mass subjectivity. This is not simply commerce—it is a continuation of the Cold War-era doctrine of ‘perception management,’ a term coined by the U.S. military in the 1950s to describe the shaping of psychological terrain as a form of warfare. Video now operates as capitalism’s primary apparatus for this: restructuring the temporal conditions of mass consciousness and, with it, the field of political possibility. To grasp the significance of video to the subjective and social realms, we need a theory of the qualities that enable it to function as capitalism’s mass subjectivity and affect generation machine.
Unlike photography, text, or traditional cinema, all of which form representation spatially or narratively, video operates by directly inscribing time onto human perception. Its fundamental innovation is not in what it shows visually (i.e. its capacity to ‘communicate’ a ‘message’), but in how it conditions the very processes of cognition and affective engagement. This is how time becomes ‘lost’ when one gets caught up within the world of internet video, where a series of fleeting Instagram reels scrolled in bed can amount to half an hour or more without us sensing such a duration. Lazzarato, following Félix Guattari, terms these precognitive percepts ‘asignifying semiotics’—the domain of affects, rhythms and flows that operate beneath the level of rational thought. Signifying semiotics, which rely on language and symbolic meaning, activate reason, but asignifying semiotics function through repetition, intensities and direct neural stimulation. In other words, internet video doesn’t just deliver information—it rewires sensation. It bypasses conscious interpretation and goes straight to the nervous system, syncing the viewer’s attention to its rhythm. That’s why a 30-second reel can feel both meaningless and compulsive, or 60 seconds can change someone’s vote or engage their curiosity such that they go deeper in the ‘rabbit hole’, so to speak, for better or for worse. It’s not about what the video ‘says’ but how it feels—how it envelops perception in a continuous, affective pulse that overrides deliberation.
While text of course employs rhythm and typography, video alone modulates these flows temporally. Trump’s rambling, off-script, sardonic and charged campaign speeches, and Joe Rogan’s marathon podcast interviews, routinely stretching toward three hours of loose laughter, conspiracy lore and ambient masculinity, draw their force not from convincing spectators of a particular political program or point of fact, but by acculturating us to their emotional-affective wavelengths. Such exposures do not merely transmit content—they condition the temporal experience of the viewer, where the body is drawn into the speaker’s pacing, their repetitions and tonal patterns gradually embedding themselves beneath conscious thought. This is not unique to politics or podcasts: binge-watching a television series, whether a prestige drama or reality show, produces a similar effect, as the editing patterns, recycled themes and sound bites, as well as the tonal atmosphere and temporal cadence of the show itself, gradually entrain the viewer’s rhythms. Have you ever found yourself thinking in the cadences of a particular television show after bingeing it? In this way, previous embodied orientations are eroded, replaced by an attunement to a new temporal regime: one that privileges the video’s emotional and political logic as a felt and lived metre. In treating video only as a means of representation, traditional media theorists overlook Lazzarato’s insight that video is a temporal technology—a machine that not only depicts reality but actively crystallises and places us in time, restructuring our perceptual consciousness.
To reiterate, the battle to command mediated time did not begin with digital video. Television, as Pierre Bourdieu recognised, functions as a machine of spectacular simplification, collapsing deliberation into consumable affect. As he writes in On Television, commercial television’s ‘policy of demagogic simplification’ is ‘absolutely and utterly contrary to the democratic goal of informing or educating people by interesting them’. Ronald Reagan, a screen-trained performer, exploited this fully, aligning with the likes of Pat Robertson to fuse political messaging with the affective manipulations of televangelism, an aesthetic designed to encourage trust and emotional identification through spectacle. His early deployment of the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan was not incidental: Reagan modelled the kind of television-native presidency of reactionary restoration that Trump would go on to epitomise and develop. Yet, compared to today’s video platforms, television operated on a more stable temporal register—broadcast schedules, appointment viewing and editorial gatekeeping imposed limits on its capacity to infiltrate the sensorium as 24/7 algorithmic video now does.
To situate video as more than imagistic representation, Lazzarato leans on twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose theories challenge the normative conception of time and consciousness. Bergsonian time is not a sequence of discrete moments, as the mechanistic and linear models of science suggest, but a continuous flow in which past, present and future interpenetrate, enabling ‘creative evolution’—the emergence of novelty and material agency. Think Matthew McConaughey inside the tesseract of time, at the climax of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. If duration is a process of continuous becoming, then video—as distinct from static images or textual representation—does not simply record or reproduce time but actively intervenes in its flow. Lazzarato identifies video’s unique embodiment of Bergsonian durée (‘video is time’) in its capacity to manipulate asignifying electromagnetic flows, or, more simply, to waveguide images. It can do so because, at bottom, ‘the video image is a contraction-modulation of flows of light’. For Lazzarato, ‘the video machine functions exactly like the human brain, translating a movement that is imperceptible to our categories of space and time into another movement that is perceptible’. This is to say that video captures and organises the matter that, for instance, makes up specific colours or movements in and as time, projecting this ‘pure perception’ of physics into human-legible form.
Video’s temporal dimension, as Lazzarato argues, grants it the power to modulate our consciousness by shaping the vibrations, contractions, extensions and flows that scaffold our affects, memory and attention. TikTok’s rapid cuts, viral sound bites, infinite scroll and memetic contagion do not communicate linguistically; they program responses. Every flicker of the screen, every automated transition—they are micro-temporal interventions, incisions into the neural substrate of attention itself. In contrast to cinema, which relies on framing devices that typically demand contemplation, video operates below the threshold of conscious interpretation, embedding itself directly into cognition through sheer rhythm and repetition. This crystallisation of time is not neutral but an ontological coup, subjecting our perception into a surface programmed by algorithmic capital. In this way, video becomes a political technology, subtly bypassing deliberation to shape mass subjectivity.
With 1.6 billion monthly active users, TikTok now rivals YouTube (where over a billion people watch podcasts monthly) and the now video-oriented Instagram. For younger users, video applications have supplanted traditional information sources: 46 per cent of Australians aged 18 to 24 now cite social media as their primary news outlet, while almost half of Australian adults demonstrate ‘no ability’ to identify misinformation online. One indicator of this shift is the growing number of Gen Z users who leverage TikTok and Instagram as primary search engines, seeking not only entertainment but news, answers and solutions to life’s frictions through algorithmic video feeds. And this is no minor trend: it signals a wholesale reorientation of epistemology around affective, scroll-native content. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, Lazzaratto views video as central to our ‘machinic enslavement’ to capitalism, providing those in power with a temporal hegemony that serves both economic and political purposes, even if activists leverage video’s affective modes to broadcast resistance or conduct political education of the public. Indeed, studies show that TikTok induces time distortion: power users significantly overestimate their daily video consumption, meaning that users not only lose track of time but also the ability to perceive its passage accurately. What’s worrying is that science is only beginning to confirm what Lazzarato foresaw: video does not merely shape what we see, but how we experience time itself, warping subjective duration in ways that tighten capitalism’s grip on consciousness.
The stakes go far beyond the individual level. Video platforms do not merely distribute content; they organise the rhythms of attention, sculpting the affective and cognitive terrain of entire populations in a fashion that traditional political propaganda simply could not. The United States’ ‘Video War’ over TikTok—oscillating in short succession between bans, mass user exoduses to XiaoHongShu, and its return upon forced corporate restructuring—reveals a crisis in (neo)liberal governance, which now finds itself outpaced by a technology that bypasses traditional ideological apparatuses such as media and education, intervening directly at the level of perception itself. The struggle over TikTok is not just, as its architects claim, about cybersecurity or data ownership; what the US seeks to capture is far more valuable. This is a contest over the levers of global time-consciousness—over who dictates the flow of attention, the tenor of emotion and the tempo of thought in the digital age. Where industrial capital once structured life through the rhythms of factory discipline, platform capitalism bypasses traditional sites of open class conflict, shifting the struggle to perception itself, such as the hysteria over online ‘misinformation and disinformation’, which is really no different from the gaslighting baked into everyday governance.
To control video is to control how time is distributed. To control video is also to determine what is seen, remembered, and forgotten, especially as it shapes experience within the parameters of economic and political domination. Here, the ultimate prize is not the control of information but the engineering of subjectivity itself—the manufacturing of affective currents, the initiation and perversion of desires, the modulation of political sensibilities. To observe video’s centrality to constructing our political consciousness, look no further than the algorithmically-driven content ecosystems via which generations of young men are being inculcated into reactionary attitudes towards women, priming them for broader right-wing assimilation. Video does not inform; it formats. The question is not whether perception will be mediated, but by whom, and to what end. If Trump has ‘defeated journalism’, then video serves to do similarly, to defeat the idea of human attention itself.
✷
Protagonist: ‘But cause has to come before effect.’
Barbara: ‘No. That’s just how we see time.’
[...]
Barbara (cont’d): ‘Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.’—Tenet (2020, dir. Christopher Nolan)
If TikTok’s algorithmic presentism enacts a violent fragmentation of time, producing an endless, depthless now severed from historical consciousness, then cinema—particularly its experimental incarnations—offers an alternative, one rooted in embodiedness rather than dissociation. Where video seamlessly integrates into asignifying semiotics and embeds itself into pre-cognitive sensation, then cinema, even at its most immersive, demands an active negotiation with time. It confronts viewers with time’s weight, movements, accumulations, and ruptures. Directors such as Jia Zhangke and Christopher Nolan construct temporal spaces that resist acceleration and compression, staging time as something to be reckoned with rather than passively absorbed. Instead of smoothing time into consumable flows, radical cinema renders it palpable again—something to be witnessed, endured, and perhaps reclaimed.
Few films resist platformal time more forcefully than Jia’s Caught by the Tides (2024), a glistening, elliptical work which does not depict the struggle between history and today but enacts their schisms in its very form. Composed of layered, splintered temporalities, the 111-minute film posits a cinema of sedimentation, countering digital hastening with a dense, stratified experience of time. You won’t catch yourself wanting to glance at your phone while watching films such as these. Where TikTok fractures duration into endless streams of algorithmically determined micro-events, Caught by the Tides does the opposite: it reconstructs time as a palimpsest, where the past is not something to be discarded but something that persists, thickens and exerts a material curvature on the present.
Since his debut, Pickpocket (1997), Jia has been one of China’s most incisive chroniclers of social transformation, documenting the dislocations and hauntings wrought by capital’s relentless remaking of the national landscape. Emerging from the Sixth Generation movement—a wave of post-Tiananmen filmmakers who rejected propagandistic aesthetics (i.e. eschewing state funding) in favour of neo-realist depictions of contemporary life—Jia has spent his career excavating the tensions between memory and modernity, as well as between the spectral remains of socialism and the isolations of a market-driven present in the PRC. Caught by the Tides develops this preoccupation into a full-fledged meditation on time itself, a cinematic durée that weaponises video’s temporal plasticity against its reduction to algorithmic dope.
Spanning two decades (2001–2022), the film follows a woman named Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), who journeys through China’s breakneck transformations, from the industrial rust of Datong City to the AI-inflected sterility of post-pandemic Zhuhai. Crucially, Qiao Qiao is a near-mute protagonist, heightening our attention to Tao’s powerfully incarnate performance. To speak of the film’s ‘plot’ risks obfuscating that it is less structured through narrative causality and more time itself, fragmentary yet insistent. Through a shifting visual grammar, Jia achieves tremendous temporal density, cycling between three distinct formats: grainy DV camcorder footage, 35mm painterly compositions, and pristine, widescreen digital imaging. These formats signal more than aesthetic change; they function as perceptual layers, compressing entire epochs into crystallised moments of time, in direct resonance with Videophilosophy. The grainy, handheld immediacy of the camcorder evokes the historical subjectivity of early-2000s China—an era of possibility, fluidity and the remnants of socialist communalism. In this sense, Jia’s use of degraded, low-resolution video recalls Hito Steyerl’s ‘poor image’, in which low resolution is not a technical failure but a political gesture where image grain foregrounds instability and circulation in its embeddedness in informal formats and memory. Jia does not simply counterpose cinema against digital video but actively interrogates the medium’s infiltration of contemporary perception through its very weaponisation. The later sequences in Caught By the Tides, then, adopt a digital sheen not simply to mark a shift in temporality, but to render explicit the colonisation of visual culture by platform aesthetics. The clarity of the image is deceptive—where earlier sequences allowed time to unfold, these later moments feel weightless, their hyper-definition flattening the textures of experience, replicating the smoothness of algorithmic visuality.
Jia does not allow this formal shift to pass without question. The film imposes the weight of history through its editing, layering moments across decades in a way that collapses linear progression. Consider the transition to 2006 about a third of the way into the film. First, we’re drawn in by long, observational shots of decaying industrial landscapes such as the Workers’ Cultural Palace—once a hub of socialist collectivity—now dilapidated and emptied of significance. This slow, meditative passage is suddenly upset by a pivotal scene, when Qiao Qiao attempts to exit a bus but is repeatedly hoisted backwards by Brother Bin (Li Zhubin), her lover and an underworld enforcer. Bin’s grip is not only possessive but a brutal attempt to curtail Qiao Qiao’s agency. This particular scene unfolds through repetition, through which Jia conveys the cyclical nature and long tail of patriarchal control. She struggles, again and again, and each time she is pushed back, her movements dictated not by her own will but by the physical force of another being. Here, Jia literalises Lazzarato’s critique of machinic subjugation: if video’s power lies in its ability to structure perception at a preconscious level, then Bin’s grip over Qiao Qiao mirrors this ontological formatting of subjectivity, where a woman stands up only to be flung back down. In both cases, autonomy is something that must be actively wrested back.
The next scene brings us forward to 2006, with Qiao Qiao alone, searching for Brother Bin in a different region of China. Jia’s editing pattern refuses the logic of immediacy, forcing disjunctions that foreground time’s material weight where it does not just flow linearly. Through Jia, time convulses and disjoints as video technology makes possible, but perceptual scars remain where platformal video would definitively ‘change stream’. This is a great example of cinema’s capacity to resist platformal time: it does not smooth over gaps but makes them jagged, exposing what TikTok’s endless scroll seeks to erase. In this way, the past does not vanish but remains materially present, sedimented into the very landscapes the characters move through. This is literalised in Jia’s depiction of the Three Gorges region: the rising water levels—which have swallowed entire villages and displaced 1.16 million people—function as an allegory for history itself, in how it is obliteration disguised as progress. Early in the film, a title card reads ‘These difficulties are only temporary’, but the film’s temporal structure betrays their perpetuity.
In Caught by the Tides, the human body, too, becomes a site where time’s passage is made visible. This is another direct counterpoint to TikTok, where on top of its dissociative endlessness is the algorithmic erasure of age through its glossy, eternally-youthful aesthetics. When the film arrives at 2022, Brother Bin, once imposing, masculine and self-assured, returns as a frail shadow of himself, needing a cane to move through the same city he once dominated. Here, Bin’s cane-levered body embodies a kind of ‘tiger’s leap into the past’, as conceived by Walter Benjamin—a corporeal inscription where socialist-era vitality clashes with its disposability in the platformal present. This isn’t metaphor but monadic historiography: the body becomes a location where the weight of time, under the dominion of capital, presses against us, enfeebling us and producing the conditions for continued enslavement. Bin’s decline is not dramatised; his weariness is merely shown—by extension, Jia confronts the audience with their own.
Yet Caught by the Tides is not impotently lamenting what has been lost; it doesn’t foreground nostalgia, so to speak. It presents cinema, and our inalienable humanity, as a machine against the logics of cybernetic enslavement. Qiao Qiao’s movement through China’s shifting urban spaces is marked by recurring moments of dance—spontaneous, physical expressions of being present in time rather than subordinated to its instrumentalisation. These sequences recall another notion from Benjamin picked up by Lazzarato, that of the dialectical image—a ‘monad’ where past and present flash into a ‘constellation’, forcing recognition of capitalism’s erasure of collective memory. If TikTok’s algorithmic cuts and sound bites recalibrate perception into machinic automatisms, the dance sequences resist this by reasserting the body’s autonomy over its rhythms. These moments are not ham-fisted nostalgic gestures; rather, they are counter-proposals for inhabiting time differently—an insistence that affect and movement need not be synchronised to capital’s metronome. In these moments, a new, different China was being made, could’ve been made. This is lived time, not extracted time—power-time, where we have the capacity for independent action, not the value-time of wage labour or doomscrolling.
This tension is made explicit by Jia in the film’s engagement with contemporary digital culture. When a young man scoffs, ‘Do you use TikTok?’ it foregrounds the ideological stakes of Caught by the Tides. Brother Bin, now searching for purpose in a world that no longer values his past, is invited to consider creating social network videos much like Brother Xing, a goofy TikTok artist with 1.25 million followers. This is presented not as a neutral career shift but as a total reconfiguration of time’s function, and not as an isolated phenomenon. Across China’s livestreaming boom, which has accelerated rapidly since the mid-2010s, gaining more traction around 2016 when e-commerce was married into the format, the pursuit of TikTok stardom has become a mass social aspiration. In unevenly developed contexts like China and India, virality offers not just fame but escape—a lottery-like promise of upward mobility for rural and marginalised populations otherwise locked out of formal opportunity structures. The fantasy here is not just of attention, but of temporal acceleration: the ability to leap across stagnant social time into a future of relevance and capital. In western contexts, the imperative remains, but the affective terrain shifts—less earnestness, more irony, hustle and self-branding, often disavowed even as it is pursued. As documentaries like The People’s Republic of Desire (2018) and Present Perfect (2019) reveal, entire subjectivities are now being re-engineered to serve the demands of livestream capital: a regime in which time is no longer inhabited but performed and monetised, in perpetual alignment with platformal imperatives. The question being posed in Caught By the Tides is not so much whether Bin can adapt to the digital economy but whether memory itself can survive within it. These sequences are filmed with abrupt pans and hyperactive zooms focusing on nothing in particular, a surveillance cam-style distortion that impresses upon the viewer the frenetic pace of contemporary perception. This is a world where time is no longer something to be felt but a system that rewards instantaneous engagement over any sustained encounter with history.
In a world saturated with ‘now,’ where internet video immerses us in a perpetual present, Qiao Qiao’s resolve, epitomised by Jia’s intertitle which reads ‘Just standing up in the land of my birth’, becomes an act of reclamation. The contradiction is stark: the constant now of video is at once a trap—endlessly repeating, capturing attention and affect, erasing sequence and memory—and a temporal site from which new forms of recognition and resistance potentially emerge. Here, we are ensnared, yet we can begin again. Qiao Qiao’s presence, then, is not passive endurance but an active stance against it, inducing the realisation that we hold the power to shape history through the present. She insists on a now that is thick with possibility and not emptied by cycles and repetition, and her subversion of male capture enables Jia’s film to reject the platformal present. As she joins a vast, procession-like ocean of community runners, turning her back, perhaps for good, on Brother Bin, Qiao Qiao carves her own path. The future does not await her—it follows her footsteps.
✷✷✷
Works Cited
✷ Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1969.
✷ Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Dover Publications, 1998. Originally published 1907.
———. Duration and Simultaneity. Translated by Leon Jacobson. Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Originally published 1922.
✷ Bourdieu, Pierre. On Television. The New Press, 1998.
✷ Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Indiana University Press, 1995.
✷ Jia, Zhangke. Caught by the Tides (风流一代). Shanghai Film Group, 2024.
✷ Lazzarato, Maurizio. Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism. Columbia University Press, 2019.
✷ Nolan, Christopher. Tenet. Warner Bros., 2020.
✷ Slobodian, Quinn. Hayek’s Bastards: The Populist Right and the Future of the Market. Allen Lane, 2024.
✷ Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux Journal, no. 10, November 2009.
✷ Wu, Hao. People’s Republic of Desire. Mud Horse Pictures, 2018.
✷ Zhu, Shengze. Present.Perfect. Burn the Film, 2019.
Revan Oluklu is a Naarm-based Turkish writer working on Boonwurrung country. His time outside of work is most judiciously spent writing film and other criticism at baklavabolshevik.com.