“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system.” — Guy Debord

Alan N. Shapiro
media theory,
science fiction theory,
future design research

  • Ayesha Mubarak Ali Podcast About My Book

    This is a transcript of Ayesha Mubarki AIi’s podcast about “Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction” that was part of her “Human Reimagined” series, January 2025.

  • Reply to a Critical Review of My Book

    In his review of my book Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction: Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism in the journal Science Fiction Studies (July 2025), Miguel Sebastián-Martín makes many disparaging claims that are factually incorrect.

  • Venice in Las Vegas

    My memoir book “Venice in Las Vegas: An American and European Auto-Socio-Biography, 1960s to 1980s” will be published later this summer in the Counterpoints Studies in Criticality series, edited by Shirley Steinberg, of the Peter Lang Publishing House.

  • Two Reviews of “Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction”

    Here are short excerpts from two reviews of my book “Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction: Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Post-Humanism.”

  • Prominente: Groß und Klein

    Die Amerikaner träumen groß. Die größten Hamburger. Die größten Hot Dogs. Zum Mond und Mars. Der Football Super Bowl und die Baseball World Series. Die größten Prominenten. Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Madonna. Sie waren groß. Sie waren die Stars. Das waren die Prominente im Zeitalter der Massenmedien.

  • Donna J. Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

    Donna Haraway’s text “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was written in 1985, but it reads as if itwere written yesterday. A cyborg is a hybrid of living organism and machine. The cyborg is a person whose body has been supplemented by artificial components. The term is anacronym derived from “cybernetic organism.”

  • A New Alternative to Capitalism

    Let us reconsider two of the main arguments for the alleged superiority of capitalism over socialism. Both of these arguments were indeed valid in the past. But now we have advanced informatics and digital media technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, ubiquitous computing, blockchain, and the Brain-Computer Interface.

  • The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality

    The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.

  • The Controversy Around Baudrillard

    Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. His work has had as many detractors as it has had enthusiasts. Some of his critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs becoming increasingly autonomous and detached from the “referents” of which they were supposed to be the representations.

  • Early Baudrillard

    The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series).

  • Methodology – Thirty Minute Statement at my Ph.D. Oral Defense

    I will begin with some autobiographical remarks. I have a double educational background in the humanities and natural sciences. I studied the former at Cornell University and the latter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later in life, I worked for twenty years as a software developer. I had earlier studied literature and philosophy.

  • Blade Runner 2049: Android Liberation Between Old and New Informatic Power

    Blade Runner 2049 is a brilliant sequel to the original Blade Runner. Thirty years after the events of the first film, the police discover evidence of the secret that Rachael, who was a replicant or android, became pregnant and gave birth in a “natural” fertility process to a child. Rachael died while achieving childbirth.

  • The “Science Fiction World” of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik

    Ubik is generally regarded as Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece. In this major literary work, the struggle to occupy an “outside” relative to the “inside” of an economic-technological-virtual system is poignantly illustrated. It is a scenario where the “science fiction world” becomes everything, leaving the “safe confines” of the clearly defined literary space of the novel.

  • Brain-Computer Interface

    The digital-neurological or Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a key SF and “real” technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. BCIs can be interpreted as a “becoming cyborg” of humanity. One can distinguish between mainstream versus alternative/transformative designs and implementations of the user applications to be based on BCI – the command-and-control cyborg versus the feminist-theory cyborg.

  • Fiction, Power, and Codes in Hyper-Modernism

    The most significant facet for my perspective is that, in hyper-modernism, the power and control exercised via narratives and fictions in the media-technological society now get implemented on much more detailed micro-levels via algorithmic-informatic codes and digital, virtual, and cybernetic technologies.

Categories