Human history is marked by turning points that have radically altered humanity’s relationship with technology. The detonations of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 constituted one such point, leaving the human species with a new sense of common frailty.1 Since then, the evolution of technology has initiated many other turning points that have shaped the multiple ways in which humans relate to technology. Yet, very few of these turning points have created the kind of shared sense of frailty that was born with the detonations of the atomic bomb. The escalation of “the Anthropocene” marks a return to such frailty (Crutzen and Stoermer 17).2 Although the threats of accelerating anthropogenic global warming and collapsing ecosystems differ from the threat of nuclear war, the Anthropocene exposes the power of humanity to utterly destroy its own living conditions. It is therefore not surprising that the Anthropocene may be understood as an event poised to once again reshape humanity’s relationship with technology. In fact, from political and corporate discourses to popular culture, the Anthropocene is imagined setting the stage for a number of “Anthropocene technologies.” By Anthropocene technologies, we mean technologies capable of dealing with one or more of the multiple geophysical problems caused by humans’ destructive impact on the Earth System. Indeed, since these geophysical problems are multiple and highly complex, the technologies imagined to be capable of dealing with them are multifarious and highly complex themselves. With this in mind, this article turns to three films in which different Anthropocene technologies are imagined working on different scales and objects. More specifically, the article focuses on how three different technical solutions to the Anthropocene are presented and problematized in the films Okja, What Happened to Monday, and Geostorm—all from 2017. Okja involves the use of biotechnology through which a corporation engineers a new organism to revolutionize sustainable meat production. What Happened to Monday accentuates the use of various technologies of population control in the face of overpopulation and resource scarcity. Lastly, Geostorm depicts geoengineering as an answer to anthropogenic global warming. These three films will have our attention because they embed an inherent discrepancy between a suspicion towards “techno-fixes” and a tendency to create blatant techno-fetishistic depictions. We thus see them as contributing to a larger global discussion about the use of Anthropocene technologies. In this regard, we find it particularly productive to perceive technologies, and their representations in popular culture, as “clusters of promises” (Berlant 23). These promises “may be clear and good to us while others, not so much,” but what is particularly important is the ability of technologies to incarnate “desires and affects” (24). It is thus exactly their ability to capture desires and affects that enable technologies to become drivers of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism, a term she defines as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (24). This ability of technologies to incarnate desires and affects links their depictions in popular culture to the various arenas of present-day decision making, where such affects and desires mix with current ideologies. Contemporary political debates about the use of technologies may of course incorporate specialized technical perspectives, but they are also born out of desires and affects belonging to competing ideological visions of the appropriate way to meet the future. As David Harvey argues, people fetishize technology by “endowing [it] with self-contained, mysterious, and even magical powers to move and shape the world in distinctive ways” (3). For this reason, Anthropocene technologies are not neutral but from their very inception invested with ideological perspectives, just as popular culture is not innocent in its production of images and narratives but a developer of desires and affects. Based on this context, Okja, What Happened to Monday, and Geostorm offer different answers to different variants of the question: “What happens if?” They are speculative narratives about how potential future scenarios may involve the utilization of different Anthropocene technologies and how the trust in these technologies risks representing attachments to significantly problematic objects. In this, the three films create storyworlds in which cruel optimism does not just materialize as the disappointment of the desires invested in specific technologies; they also depict how cruel optimism may foster and nourish very literal forms of cruelty. Bong Joon-Ho’s film Okja (2017) follows a girl, Mija, who lives in an idyllic mountain region of South Korea together with her elderly grandfather and their giant “super-pig,” Okja. The family was given the task to raise Okja by the agrochemical Mirando Corporation as part of a project to sell the new super-pig species as the solution to world hunger. When the corporation decides to take back Okja for the big unveiling in New York, Mija decides to rescue her friend. She thereby becomes entangled with both corporate marketing plots and animal rights activists. The chase takes Mija from Korea to New York and eventually to the hellish slaughterhouses of the Mirando Corporation. In the end, Mija buys back Okja with her dowry—a golden pig given to her by her grandfather. She rescues Okja and a super-piglet, bringing them back to the idyllic mountainside in Korea. While on the face of it, the film can be seen as a lighthearted romp, it also at several instances conveys the cruel optimism of the technofix. The film opens with a corporate presentation made by CEO Lucy Mirando, unveiling her company’s new core values: Environment and Life. Already, the parody of corporate greenwashing is evident in values that are so broad and unspecific. In the presentation that follows, the audience is given the core arguments for biotechnology as a solution to the escalation of resource scarcity. “The world is running out of food, and we are not talking about it,” Lucy states. The solution is the super-pig, presented here as a new species first “discovered” in Chile and bred on a Mirando farm in Arizona. (In reality, they are the product of bioengineering experiments in a lab in Paramus, New Jersey.) Indeed, Lucy almost tips her hand in exclaiming that “they are like nothing on Earth” because they are not—they are a human creation. The genetic manipulation and manufacturing of a new organism (the super-pig) is thus presented by the film as a solution to a global environmental problem. However, it also implicitly promises to revolutionize an entire industry when scaled up from the genetics lab to the mass production of super-pigs and large-scale slaughterhouses. The language used to describe the super-pigs not only presents the corporate brand narrative but also implicitly allows us to glean the internalized fascination with the newly created species. Lucy uses positively laden words such as “beautiful,” “special,” “miraculous,” and “precious.” Behind her the words “eco-friendly” and “natural” are animated on a screen. Together these words frame the attitudes towards the bioengineered organism both in relation to consumers and to its very creators. Indeed, the super-pig species is clearly presented to the audience as a cluster of promises. In a telling moment later in the film, Lucy announces, “I took nature … and science, and I synthesized. And everyone loved it!” She thereby confirms that the initial presentation can be seen as more than just a sales pitch. It is indicative of an internalized attitude towards the super-pigs and the larger promises of biotechnology. As a cluster of promises the new species is cast as the solution for what Berlant would call “systemic crisis” (food scarcity and environmental degradation), dispelling the notion that people would be “forced … to adapt” in the face of trauma brought on by such crises (10). In many ways, Okja is constantly reduced by both scientific and capitalist logic. While Okja is presented as natural to the public, the film still portrays the fascination and obsession with novelty and technology (which can be extended to biotech organisms) as a key behavioral pattern in capitalist logic. This is seen in several shots of super-pig merchandise as well as the constant impulse in people to take pictures of or with Okja. Another key way of reduction is through the lens of science. The program that left Okja with Mija and her grandfather is more interested in Okja as a product than as a being. When a Mirando representative comes to visit the family early in the film, he very naturally connects his computer to a black box behind Okja’s ear. The audience is briefly shown the graphics, numbers, and graphs that depict the vitals that the corporation is actually interested in. Similarly, Dr. Johnny (the face of Mirando’s corporate branding) later exclaims that he has only known her through representation such as numbers, graphs, and pictures. The discourse that Okja is placed within reflects how a scientific gaze may reduce beings into units in ways that are similar to how consumerism reduces them into commodities. While this points to how the super-pigs are framed as a specific cluster of promises, the film seems uneasy with the reduction of Okja to a mere unit in a corporate-scientific scheme. It therefore goes out of its way to depict Okja as not only an autonomous being but also as intelligent, reflexive, and unselfish. The camera, for instance, repeatedly focuses on Okja’s eyes to create a sense of identification. It thereby resists not only the reduction of Okja but also questions her position as an object of desire. This questioning exposes how the optimism presented earlier by Lucy Mirando turns cruel. A scene in which Okja is assaulted by a male super-pig in a Mirando lab is thus clearly presented as a rape scene (rather than insemination, experimentation, or animal husbandry). Because of the intended identification with Okja, it works as a rape scene just as if it had been a human victim. The film thus creates an ambiguity in that audiences see Okja as she “really” is: an autonomous being. However, because she is also a bioengineered organism, this raises a host of ethical dilemmas regarding biotechnology and consumption. This is made explicit in the final scenes of the film that take place at the Mirando slaughterhouse outside New York. Initially, the setting creates connotations to prisons with its fences and pathways. However, as the scenes inside and outside of the facility play out, these connotations shift to something more sinister. While the plot focuses on Mija’s attempt to rescue Okja, the slaughterhouse itself signifies something deeper about both the scheme of the Mirando Corporation and the larger storyworld of the film. The massive pens around the facility are filled with super-pigs who are forced onto a ramp into the slaughterhouse. Inside, Mija finds Okja in a large mechanical contraption, which turns out to be a machine for restraining a super-pig before it is killed by a man with a bolt gun. What these different scenes implicitly make clear is that while the designed organisms of the super-pig species are themselves commodities, an entire sub-infrastructure is needed to process them for consumption. This is, of course, analogous to the existing meat industry, but it is worth noticing that the large facility here is made purely for the sake of processing the new organisms. The facility is linked by connotations to actual slaughterhouses but at the same time removed as it is also a necessary infrastructure put in place to achieve the end goal of the super-pigs as biotechnological creations. Furthermore, the originally noble project of ending world hunger has been replaced by a status quo logic of capitalism, exemplified by the fact that the Mirando facility is operated almost exclusively by Hispanic workers without any safety gear. As previously mentioned, the humanizing shots of Okja makes her a problematic object of desire. It is made clear by the film that the audience should value and identify with Okja as an autonomous being. If this is so, then this ascribed value could naturally be extended to the other super-pigs in the facility. As Mija leaves the facility with Okja, the prison connotations of the pens transform to a clearer visual metaphor, evoking the Holocaust. The efficient infrastructure that is the slaughterhouse has been set up for the single purpose to kill and dismember the many super-pigs—who have been established as having humanly recognizable intellect and emotions. The fantasy of super-pigs as a desirable solution to human problems is cemented as cruel when a male and female super-pig notice Okja and Mija leaving the facility. In an act of parental sacrifice, the two super-pigs charge the electric fence to push out their piglet. As Mija and Okja leave with the piglet hidden in Okja’s mouth, we see a last shot of the parents in which the female briefly rests its head on its mate—mirroring a very human gesture of mourning.3 The super-pigs are thus a technological creation that were made to alleviate specific problems of hunger and agricultural environmental impacts. In relation to their human-given telos of ending up as jerky and sausages, the film poses the question whether we can truly see the super-pigs as a detached technological product instead of beings in their own right. The answer here is that we cannot, thus dispelling the promise presented at the beginning of the film. However, inside the storyworld of the film the larger cruel optimism is not so easily overcome. In spite of having saved Okja and the little piglet, Mija and her environmentalist allies are unable to save any of the other super-pigs at the Mirando facility. Indeed, the operation set in motion implies that the many hundreds of super-pigs present in the final scenes will be dead and dismembered before Mija’s return to Korea the next day. From the rape of Okja to referencing the Holocaust, the film illustrates how fast the promises of biotech as an Anthropocene technology can turn cruel. A key point of the film is thus the inherent antithesis of the bond between Okja and Mija and the rest of society’s problematic relationship to the super-pig organism based on consumerism and science fetishization. In Tommy Wirkola’s thriller What Happened to Monday (2017), we encounter another vision of how the Anthropocene may prompt problematic technological interventions. The film begins with a montage of nonfictive clips displaying dense human crowds, car queues, and calving icebergs voiced over by an unidentified narrator, stating that “in the last fifty years we have doubled our population, tripled the amount of food and water we use, and we have quadrupled the use of fossils fuels.” The montage then morphs into a fictitious narrative describing a future in which “extreme droughts and massive dust storms have shut down the Earth’s entire agricultural system.” In an attempt to combat the food shortage caused by this shutdown, a coalition called the European Federation has sponsored the development of “more resilient, high yield, genetically modified crops.” However, these crops result in “a spike in multiple births and genetic defects,” causing a return to a situation where the global population lacks food and water. Consequently, the European Federation implements the “Child Allocation Act,” which subjects the population of the Federation to a brutally enforced one child policy. Children, who are not born as only children, are taken from their families by the “Child Allocation Bureau.” Officially the Bureau puts these children into “bureau-enforced cryosleep,” but, in reality, the Bureau burns them to death in high-tech machines hidden from the public eye. The primary part of the film takes place in 2073, thirty years after the Child Allocation Act was first implemented. The seven siblings, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, live in hiding, having been taught how to evade the Child Allocation Bureau by their grandfather, Terrence Settman. Each of the siblings can only leave the apartment on the weekday that has their name—that is, until Monday informs the Bureau of her sisters’ existence and whereabouts. This enables the Child Allocation Bureau to hunt down and kill most of her sisters leaving only Thursday and Tuesday alive to disclose Monday’s betrayal and to revolt against the Bureau and its charismatic leader, Dr. Nicolette Cayman. Cayman is running for Parliament to ensure that the Child Allocation Act continues to decrease the population of the Federation. However, when Thursday and Tuesday manage to publicly display a video of a child being burned to death in one of the Child Allocation Bureau’s facilities, this spells the end of Cayman’s power. The release of the video leads to large-scale riots and the repeal of the Child Allocation Act. An interesting point about the film is the initial role played by gene-modification as first the solution and then the amplifier of ecological problems. We could, in fact, rather call them “Anthropocene problems,” since they represent an aggregate of negative ecological effects caused by humanity. With this in mind, the film opens by presenting the audience to a situation in which an Anthropocene technology—namely gene modification—has been applied as a consequence of increasingly disastrous Anthropocene problems. Gene-modification is thereby instantly positioned as a carrier of promises by the plot. However, the film only assigns this role for a few seconds before it exposes that the technology cannot live up to its promises. The narrator describes how its use results in “multiple births,” effectively amplifying the Anthropocene problems that it was designed to solve. In other words, the promises attached to gene-modification quickly turn out to be cruel optimism. Nevertheless, the failed utilization of gene modification sets the stage for the introduction of another Anthropocene technology, namely the development of a surveillance apparatus that closely maps and monitors the movements and behavior of all citizens within the Federation. In other words, the film presents surveillance technology as an Anthropocene technology, depicting it as a means to manage the negative ecological effects that have worsened in tandem with the growth in human population. What is particularly interesting here is how the total failure of gene modification does not shake human faith in technology. Instead, it prompts the usage of yet another Anthropocene technology. Berlant writes that “an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (2). What Happened to Monday brings something similar to light, as it depicts a storyworld in which the failure of technology does not strip it of its allure. Despite the disastrous attempt of tackling overpopulation and food scarcity with gene modification, technology maintains its grip on human fascination and fantasy, continuing to generate optimism instead of caution. The film indirectly provides an explanation for this, as it depicts surveillance technology as both smart and beautiful despite its brutal usage. There is a clearly aesthetic dimension to the depicted technology, when the camera continuously dwells on shiny computers, high-tech weapons, and sleek lab facilities deployed by the Child Allocation Bureau. Put differently, the film links the grip that technology has of human fascination and fantasy to aesthetics and connects technological optimism to the visual pull of sophisticated technology. The technological optimism of the Federation can be treated as cruel optimism, as it becomes clear that the surveillance technology applied by the Federation cannot be separated from the more deadly technology of the Child Allocation Bureau’s “cryo-sleep” facilities. Surveillance is not just employed with the aim of monitoring movements and mapping behavior; the technology also becomes a means of what Michel Foucault calls “thanatopolitics,” as it enables the Federation to selectively kill some of its inhabitants, while safeguarding the best possible living conditions for others (“Political Technologies” 160). It is relevant here to introduce Foucault’s terminology, because he provides a grid for understanding the dynamic between killing and safeguarding that defines the Federation’s governance in the film. According to Foucault, the opposite of thanatopolitics is “biopolitics,” which “endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply life, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (History of Sexuality 137). Indeed, since biopolitics aims “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life,” its true objective becomes “to achieve overall states of equilibration” (History of Sexuality 138; “Society Must” 246). Simply put, biopolitics strives to regulate and create a balance that optimizes the conditions for life within a population. However, Foucault also makes it clear that biopolitics can essentially become an exclusionary mechanism. Biopolitics will not optimize the lives of all members of a population, as there will always be humans, who in the eyes of the administrators, put the balance at risk. Consequently, biopolitics will go to its dark twin, thanatopolitics, which either indirectly or directly prompts the death of those who would stand in the way of the biopolitical objectives. For three decades the Child Allocation Bureau has combated the most serious crisis the world has ever faced: Catastrophic overpopulation … . In a perfect world every child has the right to live. That is why I am running for office. So, I can reform the law. Anyone who wants to bring a child into this world must be able to prove financial stability and be able to guarantee the emotional and physical well-being of that child. There may even be room for siblings, if the data measures up. Cayman’s reference to “the data,” which must “measure up” for the Federation to allow the birth of siblings, is particularly revealing. It explicates how she and the Child Allocation Bureau equate governance with keeping the right balance between the size of the population and the resources available for their consumption. In other words, Cayman equates the management of the population within the Federation with the keeping of a budget, which must perpetually strike a balance between the number of consumers and the resources consumed. Imbalance in this budget would in Cayman’s view be disastrous for the living conditions of everyone. It would, to use Foucault’s term, basically ruin the basis for biopolitics, as it would make it impossible to ensure, sustain, and multiply life within the Federation. Firstly, this shows how biopolitics tends to turn to thanatopolitics, whenever the general living conditions of a population are believed to be threatened. Secondly, it points to how this tendency lurks within technological optimism, as it activates fantasies of “the good life” that may ultimately give way to cruel policies, when the realization of these fantasies meets persistent obstacles (Berlant 2). The cruelties depicted in the film are first and foremost a consequence of the Federation’s decision to pursue its idea of ecological equilibrium by way of thanatopolitical governance. But it should also be clear by now that this decision cannot be isolated from the optimism, which the Federation invests in its high-tech apparatus of population control. In the end, it is therefore also evident that the cruelties committed by the Federation expose the true face of its technological optimism. Following the failed attempt with gene-manipulation, the many killings carried out by the Child Allocation Bureau represents another terrible disappointment. Indeed, the Federation’s burning of children signifies a regression in civility that far overshadows the civilizational progress it has made in technological sophistication. Dean Devlin’s Geostorm (2017) portrays perhaps the most ubiquitous type of Anthropocene technology: geoengineering. Opening with images of natural disasters, the film narrates a near future, in which extreme weather events (with fatalities in the millions) force the nations of Earth to come together. The solution is an internationally constructed and operated grid of satellites that can interfere with and control regional weather patterns across the globe. The plot begins as the United States prepares to cede authority of Dutch Boy, as the system is called, to the United Nations. During this process, chief engineer and director, Jack Lawson, is fired from his position. Three years later freak weather events in Afghanistan and Hong Kong prompt the US government to rehire a reluctant Jack to go into space and assess malfunctions in Dutch Boy’s systems. It quickly becomes clear that someone is using the system as a weapon to trigger a large-scale geostorm. The culprit turns out to be the sharp but affable secretary of state, Leonard Dekkom, who seeks to reestablish American geopolitical dominance. The plot against Earth is foiled but not in time to save the international space station above Dutch Boy from self-destructing. The film closes with yet another narration about how the Earth once more unites to rebuild the satellite system, making it both “safer” and “stronger.” Geostorm is in many ways standard fare for Hollywood disaster flicks. However, the film spends a fair amount of time in trying to establish a storyworld with large scale problems that require not only large-scale human mobilization but also massive feats of engineering and technological development. As the opening narration plays it is accompanied by images of huge waves, heat shimmers, falling ice sheets, floods, and large cyclones. As these images intensify, the narrator declares that “in that moment, facing our own extinction, it became clear that no single nation could solve this problem alone. The world came together as one. And we fought back.” The occurrences related to a climactic shift is thus portrayed not only as an extinction event, but in terms of warfare. Humanity fights back against the devastation of climate change with the most potent “weapon” available: scientific rationalism. In the turn to geoengineering as a large-scale technological solution, humanity relies on environmental design by technological means rather than having to adapt societies to planetary boundaries. The film thus continues a long line of popular representations of what Brent Yergensen has called “scientific piety” (153). Framing the disaster scenario by deploying a language of war directly calls for mobilization. The connotation here is the World War II mobilization of industry and technological development into the war effort. The worldbuilding narration in Geostorm establishes the same pattern. The scientific piety is expressed by the internal logic that the natural step is to encase the planet in a high-tech grid of satellites. As Yergensen explains, scientific rationality has become so dominant as to throw “a shadow of distrust on other schools of thought” (154). Tietge similarly points out that “we often overlook just how a scientifically oriented society uses science and technology as the basis for a system of values that frames our experiences in pseudo-rationalistic terms” (34). This points to how Dutch Boy is inherently imbued with a particular kind of optimism: Salvation in the face of crisis is available through technology, brought to us by scientists and engineers. Moreover, Dutch Boy is not just a solution to a specific problem but rather a larger system of control, set to “neutralize the storms” and “designed to impact the basic elements of weather.” In short, Dutch Boy not only brings salvation but also ushers in an age wherein planetary mastery is a new given. The narrative drive of Geostorm is to take the Anthropocene notion of humans as a planetary force to its full potential.4 The character of Jack Lawson is a human embodiment of such attitudes toward technology as a cluster of promises. He takes on not only the classic rugged masculine traits of the action hero but also the role of the scientist protagonist portrayed as both a promethean savior (designing and overseeing construction of Dutch Boy) and as the arrogant and possessive father (Jack criticizes the current crew for not taking proper care of his “girl”). The last role cements a personal affective attachment to the Dutch Boy system, even as the optimism invested in it turns not only cruel but deadly. The larger perspective of Anthropocene technology—here the Dutch Boy system—as both a means for mobilization and a cluster of promises, is also accompanied by the different visual representations of technology throughout the film. The flight and landing sequence, as Jack is sent back up to the space station, goes on for over a minute, presenting both stunning images of the satellite grid and the minute details of the landing mechanics of the station. Similarly, other scenes present viewers with several panoramic views of the satellite grid, an automated space factory for satellites, a massive launch site for space shuttles in Florida, as well as different mission control rooms. This is accompanied by shots of server farms, hologram screens, and a myriad of handheld devices. Almost every single environment that the main characters inhabit or act within are either wholly technological or at least connected to technology through some sort of data-processing on screen