Infinite Ontologies of the Chthulustream: Posthumanism and Racial Capital in Contemporary Streaming Media(Screens, Thinking, Worlds)

Brown and Fleming employ the twin discourses of critical race theory and posthumanism in order to expose how multinational platforms like Netflix play a role in both problematising and perpetuating deeply entrenched violences lurking within the intersections of racism, capitalism, and technology. The authors dive into the racialised world-building of shows like Stranger Things, Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, Sense8, The Twilight Zone, The O.A., Ad Vitam and DEVS, and through their groundbreaking media philosophy diagnose and confront the oppressive and racialising nature of streaming media at the end of the world, in the so-called Chthulucene (or 'Chthulustream'). As Brown and Fleming demonstrate, streaming media can, at their best, liberate thought to confront overlapping infinite ontologies (?O) that themselves offer a timely panacea and corrective to Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO).

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Mantle of the Beast; Or, Starting in the Middle (Passage) Superposition I: Ontological Whiteness and/as Antiblackness 1. Ad Vitam 2. Stranger Things 3. The O.A Superposition II: Paraontological Blackness 4. The Twilight Zone 5. Watchmen 6. Lovecraft Country Superposition III: Ornamental Others and Foreigners Within 7. DEVS 8. Sense8 Conclusion: I May Destroy You... High Flying Birds

About the Author :
William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of various books, including Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013). He is also a maker of micro-budget films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Selfie (2014) and This is Cinema (2019). David H. Fleming is a Senior Lecturer in the Communications, Media and Culture Division at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Unbecoming Cinema (2017) and co-author of Squid Cinema from Hell (2020, EUP) and Chinese Urban Shi-nema (2020). He is also co-editor of Cinema, Identities and Beyond (2009).

Review :
A theoretically sophisticated, highly energetic, cognitopoetic passage through the media ecologies of computational racial capitalism, with serious attention to the B-side of popular culture as here revealed by original and compelling concatenations of key concepts from Marxist, Critical Race and Media Theory. Brown and Fleming mobilize a Hunter S. Thompson meets Sylvia Wynter analytic prose to parse the mycological, cephalopodic, algorithmic formations of meaning and violence — this latter, a Lovecraftian synthesis that, as they demonstrate, has become increasingly unavoidable in a digitized, racialized and colonized world immersed in self-made yet nonetheless cosmic crisis.