"Supercommunity" by Nick DeMarco

Commissioned by DIS Magazine for e-flux journal on the occasion of the 56th Venice Biennale


The year is 2029. Everything is legal and nothing is taboo, so why bother? Our lives are highly automated; nearly all tasks have been outsourced to machines. We now live in a techno-communist luxury sphere, our pan-racial bodies almost completely androgynized. With freedom from want, all that's left for human beings to do is tag photos, comment on videos, and aggregate content. At night we gaze into the screens of our holophones, pushing colored squares back and forth and up and down, nullifying any hint of resistance. The benevolent overlords endlessly pipe the song 'Happy' by Sir Pharrell Williams into our dwelling units, and it works... we are happy.

But there will always be an underground. The bohemians, outsiders, renegades, dreamers. The fringe of society will all thrive. They sing and swear and make candle holders out of vintage cameras. They grill onions and brew espresso, some even shooting it directly into their veins. They live in tiny prefabricated houses on the peaks of the Landfill Mountain Range, just past the civilized world, mining its detritus for material to use in their assemblage sculptures.

Violent terrorism against the state has become a distant memory, replaced by the Underground's armies of improv comedy troupes. They attack the colonies with vicious satire, hammering at the walls of hypocrisy. Yes, their critiques are hard hitting, but they unknowingly provide Neo-America with the only resource left on Earth... raw content.