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alisarae 's review for:
Dark Constellations
by Pola Oloixarac
#AlisaReadstheWorld : Argentina
I didn’t enjoy reading this book. There is next to zero dialogue and no traditional plot to speak of. The translation was heavy handed in some areas. It reads like a hallucinogenic dream sequence (I hate dream sequences as a rule across all mediums), jumping frenetically from the microscopic to the cosmic and from the 22nd century to the 18th often in the same sentence.
On top of all that, I listened to this on audio and the narrator absolutely butchers the Portuguese in the book. Like, how can someone who has a good accent in Spanish kill Portuguese so bad?? If she had read the Portuguese in a Spanish accent at least it would have been closer. Plus, there are some grammatical mistakes in the Portuguese. Ugh.
Anyways, the book is a literary experiment that attempts to show how sexual gender dynamics in the biological natural world inform our digital decisions and structures. It posits that blockchain and other digital innovations are based on desire for capital (and ultimately human capital via biological reproduction, sexual power, and political dominance), and are in fact an evolutionary step in the human species. Just like rats, orchids, cockroaches, and other biological species known for their fecundity and adaptive prowess thrive in the world’s sewage and decomposing mass, so the next step in human evolution is being conceived on the dark web, encoded in digital viruses, and being programmed by the slime that is 4- and 8-chan. The idea is that the internet and big data are not tools for human evolution—they are human evolution itself.
Unfortunately I didn’t really understand that this was the message of the book until the final 15’ of it, so I spent much of the book completely lost and frustrated at the nasty sexual references (care to guess what part of the female anatomy that “mini Jabba the Hut sitting in his throne room” refers to?). I think that the overall idea is interesting but the medium was not the correct one. Poetry, installation art, or perhaps an experimental web design project would have been better.
I didn’t enjoy reading this book. There is next to zero dialogue and no traditional plot to speak of. The translation was heavy handed in some areas. It reads like a hallucinogenic dream sequence (I hate dream sequences as a rule across all mediums), jumping frenetically from the microscopic to the cosmic and from the 22nd century to the 18th often in the same sentence.
On top of all that, I listened to this on audio and the narrator absolutely butchers the Portuguese in the book. Like, how can someone who has a good accent in Spanish kill Portuguese so bad?? If she had read the Portuguese in a Spanish accent at least it would have been closer. Plus, there are some grammatical mistakes in the Portuguese. Ugh.
Anyways, the book is a literary experiment that attempts to show how sexual gender dynamics in the biological natural world inform our digital decisions and structures. It posits that blockchain and other digital innovations are based on desire for capital (and ultimately human capital via biological reproduction, sexual power, and political dominance), and are in fact an evolutionary step in the human species. Just like rats, orchids, cockroaches, and other biological species known for their fecundity and adaptive prowess thrive in the world’s sewage and decomposing mass, so the next step in human evolution is being conceived on the dark web, encoded in digital viruses, and being programmed by the slime that is 4- and 8-chan. The idea is that the internet and big data are not tools for human evolution—they are human evolution itself.
Unfortunately I didn’t really understand that this was the message of the book until the final 15’ of it, so I spent much of the book completely lost and frustrated at the nasty sexual references (care to guess what part of the female anatomy that “mini Jabba the Hut sitting in his throne room” refers to?). I think that the overall idea is interesting but the medium was not the correct one. Poetry, installation art, or perhaps an experimental web design project would have been better.