In this context, Brainstare's core premise has significant
dramatic impact. It depicts a corporation creating a program that lets
employers access employees' memories, the last sanctuary of privacy; the inner
life becomes corporate property. The central dramatic question is
straightforward: who gains from this technology, and why? Which
social groups would embrace it? Which would oppose it? And what contradictions
within capitalist production lead to the emergence of such a system?
These are not unknowns. The urge to deplete the worker
completely stems from the focus on profitability and management’s desire to
detect and suppress dissent. A memory scanner is the dream of every
union-busting consultancy in the U.S. It represents the natural evolution of
the modern workplace, where surveillance is embedded into the system used to
deepen exploitation and quell resistance.
Suglia’s framing, “Some welcome this technology. Others
resist.” subtly avoids the real issue.
Who exactly resists? Is it lone individuals, heroically standing apart? Or is
it the working class, whose collective interests directly oppose the
corporations using the device? This distinction is crucial. The lone rebel,
common in American pop culture, threatens nothing. In contrast, the organised
working class, acting independently of corporations and political parties, is
the only true force capable of resisting capitalist expansion.
Suglia’s broader output raises doubts about his readiness to
face this reality. His critiques of modern novelists, despite their strengths
in syntax, focus more on taste than on deeper issues. The social mechanisms
that produce poor art, such as the culture industry, literature
commodification, and intellectual decline, remain largely unaddressed. Instead,
the emphasis is on the lone genius, the solitary aesthete, or misunderstood
creator. This perspective peaks in Suglia’s self-image: he claims Brainstare as
“the greatest film ever made” and himself as “the Greatest Author in the World.”
Whether deliberate provocation or marketing, these claims conflict with a view
that requires understanding class.
The irony intensifies when examining the film’s structure.
Suglia presents Brainstorm as the first full-length feature to utilise
artificial intelligence as an artistic tool. While new technology in art isn’t
inherently reactionary, cinema itself was once revolutionary; studios now
exploit generative AI to threaten the jobs of actors, writers, animators, and
visual effects artists. These are the very workers whose 2023 strikes centred
on this peril. A film that explores corporate exploitation of workers’ inner
lives, made with technology built on artists' unpaid labour, prompts questions
its creator seems reluctant to confront.
None of this diminishes the power of the core image. Workers
punished for slow scan rates or missed quotas will see truth in the spectacle
of a boss invading their memories. Art that reflects, even in part, the growing
oppression of work life is better than the constant influx of superhero movies
and self-focused domestic stories. However, recognition does not mean
understanding. Classic dystopian works Orwell, Zamyatin, even Huxley grasped
something fundamental about the social relationships they portrayed. They knew
that surveillance supports the ruling power and that domination is a political,
not a psychological, condition.
Working people today already understand that bosses try to
influence their thoughts. They need works that explain how these conditions
develop and how to challenge them, not solely relying on individual brilliance,
but through collective action by the working class. Brainstorming hints at this
understanding. Whether Suglia recognises this is another question.
Books by Joseph Suglia available on Amazon
1. Watch Out: The Final Version (2022)
- Format:
Paperback & Kindle
- Description:
Revised and expanded third edition of Suglia’s cult novel about Jonathan
Barrows, a man who “falls in love with himselfliterally.”
- Print
length: 225 pages
2. Table 41 (2018 / 2019)
- Format:
Kindle & Paperback
- Description:
A metafictional novel in which the reader becomes the main character,
moving through the “world of words” Suglia constructs.
- Print
length: 296 pages
3. Brainstare (2024 / 2025)
- Listed
by Amazon as one of Suglia’s “most important works.”
- Appears
on his Amazon Author Page, though the search results did not show a direct
product listing.
4. Years of Rage (forthcoming complete edition)
- Not
yet available for purchase, but Amazon lists it as an upcoming release on
Suglia’s Author Page.
