This special issue of the journal is based around the themes of the Inhuman Screens conference, which was held last year on Friday, September 24, at the Sydney Underground Film Festival. This is the fourth special issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture to be based around the conference and explore the topic of screens—both in terms of their inhuman power, and their human likeness. Last year’s conference became the second Inhuman Screens to take place over Zoom, reinforcing key issues and questions associated with the screen and mediation. The conference has never-not featured online speakers. While the screen may seem to function as a pale imitation of life, Gorky’s “kingdom of shadows,” it may also afford a closeness and directness via the digital close-up.1 The very language so intensely and poetically wielded by Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become an everyday, often inartistic occurrence with digital communication. Since the advent of the close-up, we have become better acquainted with the pores and textures of the face, even amid pixilation and glitches.This affective dimension is accentuated by media theorist Laura U. Marks, who has written eloquently about the haptic potential of the screen. As a “multisensory” medium, the screen conjures memories of touch, as well as inducing reminiscences of taste and smell.2 In the times of COVID-19, this circumstance becomes more poignant. We see images from the past on laptops and computer screens, perhaps on social media. We must content ourselves often with this virtual touch. We are moved, comforted, or saddened by memories transmitted through the screen. In times of COVID, close embraces are sometimes socially frowned upon. Perhaps even forbidden in some places due to pandemic precautions. Even where the restrictions have eased, as they increasingly are “relaxed,” there are still those friends and relatives who may live across the seas and fear—with cause—travel and quarantine. And of course, those who catch COVID must isolate. And so often, we may still be forced to communicate with friends and loved ones through the digital interface.The screenic touch could be invaluable—even as one may mime a kiss or a hug across zoom or facetime. At the same time, loss is also, paradoxically, present. As Jacques Derrida noted in Ken McMullen’s meditative documentary Ghost Dance (1983), the screen and recording mediums are ghostly mediums, what Alan Cholodenko expounds through Derridean terminology as hauntological mediums—conflating presence and absence.3 In this hauntological way, this confounding of ontology, the screenic affect touches but also doesn’t, as the screenic touch remains an imitation, a ghost of the real thing. It is a short-lived affect. Affect designates, after all, both experience and the heightened pretense of experience. Affect can underscore bodily sensation but can also denote the evacuation or hollowing-out of sensation from gesture and signification, since “affected” and “affective” possess vastly different connotations.With this in mind, the question may arise concerning the conference’s title: Why inhuman screens? An ironic reply could also ask which screens are human. The mechanically created screen, the product of artifice and engineering, is surely not human. Yet there is a key difference between the not-human and the inhuman. The screen is not neutral or indifferent, and so the title is far from tautological. In this vein, one could risk the conjecture that screens are human, all-too human. In the case of digital screens, AI has inbuilt human prejudices. The computer scientist Joy Buolamwini notes that AI facial recognition software is better at correctly determining the gender of a male face than a woman’s face.4 Race further poses problems for facial recognition, with Buolamwini reporting that such facial recognition software often concluded that Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey were male. Olga Askelrod, writing for the ACLU website, notes that “AI is built by humans and deployed in systems and institutions that have been marked by entrenched discrimination—from the criminal legal system, to housing, to the workplace, to our financial systems.”5 AI screens may then seem unsettlingly human. Cinematic, televisual, and digital screens reflect humans on them, are designed for and by humans, and serve human ends, replete with human prejudices. The digital after all, implies touch and tactility: the digits as fingers, what Laura Marks calls “hapticity.”Dystopically or utopianly, at the height of the pandemic, technological integration seemed almost complete for those who ordered out, worked from home, and let algorithms decide what to watch. With increased anxiety, it is tempting to lose oneself in the screen, to embrace its metrics— assenting to its algorithmic moldings. It is quite easy to be enveloped by the cold glow, to surrender to endless notifications, binge streaming services, or become obsessed by games and rendered dependent on food ordered through apps. Dependence on the gig economy grew, as did the profits of the tech capitalist.But the term “inhuman screens” dialectically implies human screens too, as though humans had become screens for media, transformed through technological processes—becoming a surface to project everything from ads to ideologies, not just to, but on. The digital unfortunately bears the human fingerprint, the errors encoded from the touch of Adam to the machine. Stephen Hawking’s fear was that humans would effectively create a computer God, an artificial intelligence so powerful that it would kill off humanity.6 But such thinking itself gestures to a sort of grim narcissism, whereby, as Baudrillard pointed out, human beings over-esteem their intelligence, and so value it as ultimately useless or destructive.7 The phantasy of the killer AI supercomputer is itself an expression of this disgusted self-esteem, where human intelligence is rendered useless in the face of machinic logic and processing, while also ultimately a threat to itself. The screen then becomes a phantasy in popular culture for self-love, with shades of Narcissus, but also of self-hatred. Machines on film often bear our likeness after all. There is nothing more human than HAL, in a particularly sentimental and perhaps kitschy moment (kitschy by the cold, detached standards of a Kubrick film), pleading for its “life” before slowly being shut down as it melancholically and glitchily recites “Daisy bell.”So, the term “inhuman screens” dialectically connotes, at the level of potentiality, its opposite—namely, the human screen—in the sense of more moral, humane, and humanizing technology. Screens may not be neutral, but they are also not solely the culprit in most of the problems we collectively face. The inhuman as formulated by Karl Marx relates in part to technology extending on human capacities to inhumane degrees under exploitive modes of production. Ability without need is inhuman—a recipe for exploitation. According to Marx, in a sort of scapegoating process—but also a process that was in some sense very real—humans lost their agency and machines somehow gained agency. As Marx prophetically quipped, “all our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.”8 As such there is a danger in thinking that machines are functionally alive agents, in what I’ve elsewhere termed “technological animism.”9 To believe, as technological animists do, that machines are the savior or the villain in the human story is to believe that machines rather than humans have agency. This tendency overlooks the inequalities that are not just baked into machinic production but in society itself, and the way that social relations shape technology even as the control over technology shapes social relations. It is for this reason that machines promise liberation but all-too often deliver further avenues of exploitation. Marx scoffed at John Stuart Mill’s lament that “it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”10 Marx replied that machines were not meant to, instead observing that “like every other increase in the productiveness of labor, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening that portion of the working day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist.”11 Marx was not prophesying the iPhone or consumer electronics, though these devices sap productive energies, and redeploy them toward extracting profit from data. But Amazon factories illustrate Marx’s observation as automation is used to threaten workers with obsolescence and so extract more labor, while many commodities become ever cheaper online with near-instant delivery.This is not to deny that machines do change and shape production, including mental production and social production. Whereas mass media massified, digital media divides, through the emergence of what Gilles Deleuze called “free-floating control.”12 In Deleuzian terminology, the control society has accelerated to a point where it can no longer control.13 If media mediates, if the medium is not just the message but also the massage (a supposed typographical error of McLuhan’s publisher),14 social media functions almost as a sort of unmedia. It unmediates, de-mediates, and re-mediates our social relations, our experiences, our affective connections to each other, the world and our sense of self. Digital (un)media also defies the natural as it remains and is proudly considered to be, disruptive. Unmedia, like Freud’s uncanny, is unsettling and disturbing, as familiar technologies re-augment the world in unfamiliar and troubling ways. But just as with Freud’s concept of the uncanny (das unheimlich), where the homely is itself the threat—the home being the space of hidden transgressions and thus not a space of safe dwelling, un/media reveals how mediation undoes itself, how technology mediates in destructive ways—how the social of social media transpires to be anti-social.15 Digital unmedia is un/media, which is to say that it unsettles rather than heals—it is disruptive but doesn’t overcome old injustices (as studies on AI biases demonstrate). Rather, (anti)social un/media activates, aggravates, and aggregates these biases. Whereas mass media provided a palliative to calm the populace after competitive work, social media presents intrusions of competition in times of rest, infecting us with an oppositional sense of being—a burnout as described by Byung-Chul Han, where “prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is still governed by no. This negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.”16 Social media algorithms divide us up into groups (competing with ourselves and others) that are temporally and almost arbitrarily brought into alignment. There’s nothing in common except an abstracted and algorithmically enhanced politics, what Samir Gandesha frames as an “algorithmic populism, that divides people into Schmittian friend-foe binaries.”17If one, for instance, examines anti-vaccine protests, one can discern a lack of coherence in terms of ideology. In Australia, for instance, at vaccine protests there were neo-Nazi anti-Semites marching along with First Nations people. Similarly, looking at a movement like QAnon in the US, one finds not a uniform set of beliefs, but rather different groups of people: evangelical Christians concerned about satanism, mothers concerned about pedophilia, neo-Nazis concerned about supposed Jewish plots, hippy-anti-vaxxers and sports junkies believing in the supremacy of “ wellness.” This alignment reveals a politics of metrics rather than any approximation of a mass movement, which is why the “insurrection” in the US capitol failed to accomplish anything but replicate the noisy expression of competing ideas, amid a juvenile “frat boy” atmosphere. It dissolved like most pseudo-mass movements as the participants were merely metrically and algorithmically aligned, with no shared vision, and so their dispersion was guaranteed, as no coup would have been remotely possible. Hence, while mass media both enabled and nullified mass movements, digital “interactive movements” depend on metrics, exhibition and performative affect. There’s no demonstration of worker might, and no realization of the possibility of blocking the machinery of capital, unlike the old hopes for mass media and mass mobilization. Yet on some dialectical level, this may also be said to be the realization of mass culture and mass media. As Alenka Zupančič argues, “mass culture opened up culture to the masses. But it opened it up to the masses because the culture became part of significant market niches, and it became possible to sell it on a big scale to everybody.”18 In this respect, interactive metrics is an extension of niches, marketed to everyone, but tailored through personalized devices, apps, and algorithmic anticipations and prods. We have been effectively sold fragmentation, as our psyches are divided and subdivided into “preferences” based on our swipes and selections. We are no longer autonomous, but auto-played, as content is sifted often without us knowing, and we are profiled and prodded (“poked” in the current social media vernacular) by our devices. Our sense of self is torn apart to bleed numbers, through ongoing psychical manipulation.The digital elevates gushing streams of numbers. Digits, which remain important for mass media such as viewership numbers, take on a new role as digital technology also targets and selects in a predatory manner. Detaching our eyes and selves from the world, numbers defy touch and have sense of unreality, despite their evident utility and ability to instrumentalize: to numericize users and workers alike. No longer is the ideology of the atomized worker as cog—at once an individual item, but also part of a greater mechanism—supported by capitalist processes. Instead, we are numbers in algorithms, a process that Deleuze referred to as dividualism (in contrast to the self-negating individualism generated by disciplinary societies). This division allows for increasing personalization even as it negates a sense of the individual as in control of themselves and their lives; the personal is already impersonal: mere data to be harvested. Apps and devices know us better than we know ourselves and respond to our habits, guessing our insecurities, desires, and wants; and not just guessing and catering to, but developing and shaping our wants, desires, and insecurities. In short, we aren’t cogs in machines anymore but numbers in algorithms. And numbers can be manipulated with greater ease than cogs. Being a number is no less isolating than being a cog. A cog after all is part of something—a number can be added or subtracted with little importance and can be divided and multiplied ad infinitum. A cog has a function and a purpose, whereas a number does not—the condition of the digital is an alienated floating amid processing, reacting and being processed without the time needed to consider or reflect. As Om Prakash Dwivedi notes, “the digital world requires assemblages of information, numbers and speed for its functioning.” This, Dwivedi underscores poses a challenge to the humanities as “information without interpretation can spell doom for human civilisation.”19Yet, the digital’s speed has a mysterious but dizzying immediacy that resists understanding (which makes understanding it ever more pressing). Curiously, digital media then returns us to mystery, to a sort of numeric abyss. Situationist Raoul Vaneigem asserted that “there is no mystery, nothing obscure in its drive-belts, cogs and gears; it can all be explained perfectly.”20 We kind of know how analogue works, but even the most technological savvy programmers aren’t always certain what results addictive algorithms will generate. But of course, algorithms are mysterious for some of the same reasons that humans are; preeminent among them is that we cannot see the inside workings of the body, only their outward consequences. We therefore need to recognize the noise and materiality of the digital image as the outward registers of concealed processes; we need to recognize that all media is, as Sean Cubitt points out, “finite media,” not least because digital media gives rise to so much electricity use (think bit currencies and encryption) and e-waste.21We must not deny the merits of popular culture in the digital age. Social media presents us with new problems as we all become trapped into becoming Christian Fuchs’s audience laborers,22 and the way that “communicative capitalism” leads to the decline of “symbolic efficiency” as Jodi Dean contends, with it becoming harder for people with different political positions to have a conversation.23 But social media does provide new avenues for communication and popular culture must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Memes, after all, gesture to a shared point of reference and can recall a variety of visual art styles from agit-prop to Daumier’s grotesque cartoons to Warholian proliferations. As such, it is useful to seek out ways that digital technology can provide connection and to discern ways that the screen can transcend itself. Therefore, as Nina Power has argued, the challenge is “to think politics and technology together, then, is to rethink what we mean by organization, as well as to understand what it is that is being organised (knowledge, resources, people).”24If we understand politics in Hegelian terms, the aim of political community is freedom. To that end, the aesthetic has often been taken to be the form of freedom. For Hegel, the aesthetic could only express freedom so long as it also deferred its freedom and so was integrated into society, providing a partial healing of the virtual spirit and the material body.25 The romantics that Hegel excoriated took a different view. They saw freedom, politics, and the aesthetics as still entwined. Whether that is so remains debatable. But as Herbert Marcuse argued, the aesthetic nevertheless provides a freedom from capital, a negative dimension that cannot entirely be reduced, however much it can be co-opted through repressive de-sublimation, toward instrumentality.26 Marcuse expresses this sentiment concisely in The Aesthetic Dimension, “In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience.”27 Many of the contributions to this issue for example, draw out this aesthetic potential, whether it is Ilmar Taimre and Sean Lowry’s article about the sublime in relation to their work, Sounds of Unridden Waves, or Mira Thurner’s exploration of high art in relation to the anime The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, or even Anna Broinowski’s exploration of deep fakes.Starting with Ilmar Taimre and Sean Lowry’s article, “Sounds of Unridden Waves and the Contemporary Sublime,” they channel a romantic exploration of the concept of the sublime to understanding their artwork. In a wide-reaching analysis ranging from Longinus and his generative mistranslation by subsequent commentators, as well as the philosophers Burke, Kant, and Lyotard, Taimre and Lowry reinvent a contemporary sublime that returns to a dialogic and rhetoric dimension. The sublime as a term was once most commonly associated with rhetoric, and so Taimre and Lowry enact a reworking of the concept to designate a mediation between audience and artist. Linking them with the sublime as well as Eastern philosophical insights, Taimre and Lowry underscore the way that surfing films touch upon ideas important to both Eastern and Western aesthetics. Noting the significance of technological advances, it becomes clear that technology can engender new avenues for profundity and sublimity.Mira Thurner also explores themes of aesthetics in her article, “The painting that leapt through time: popularized high art on screen.” Rather than merely treating high art and popular cinema as dichotomous, Thurner contends that high art has a place in popular culture—that high art is often explored in popular culture. But this goes both ways as high art also draws on pop culture. Thurner highlights the way that anime draws on the work of Hokusai and thus finds ways that anime exists within, in some regards, the field of high art. In this respect, like Taimre and Lowry, Thurner navigates between Western and Eastern cultural frames. Significantly, she treats the anime The Girl Who Leapt through Time, as being metonymic and microcosmic of a museological pull back and forth across forms, styles, traditions, and times.Kate Bowen also uses film to explore fusions and hybridity, but of a different type. In her contribution, “‘Was he slow?’: The Performance of Masculinity in Edgar Wright’s Action Musical Baby Driver,” Bowen associates the way that Wright’s movie, while seemingly an action film is a type of musical, with the way that gender is performed. Bowen particularly focuses on performativity theory with respect to gender as masquerade. Bowen accentuates the playfulness of Wright’s action-musical, and so contends that “millennial masculinity” in (and through) the film is constructed through play. Bowen concludes that action cinema engages with images of masculinity from the ’80s, ’90, and noughties, but that Baby Driver is positioned within a period of uncertainty and introspection, in part following the Global Financial Crisis. Performance then masks identity, but also its absence.The idea of media being bridged is taken up by Vashanth Selvadurai, Peter Vistisen, and Daniel Binns’s article, “Bridge Complexity as a Factor in Audience Interaction in Transmedia Storytelling.” In an article that explores scholarship in transmedia, Selvadurai, Vistisen, and Binns navigate contentious terrain and critique the limits of the “tentpole” approach to transmedia narratives, where a work serves to anchor audiences in the lore, mythos, and branching out narratives of media. Instead, the authors advocate for a polycentric approach, where users of media engage across platforms and narratives via character bridges, storyworlds, and storylines. As franchises become larger and larger, so the complexity grows, which calls a polycentric mode of understanding varied forms of engagement.One form of medial change that presents as particularly threatening is the deepfake. In her provocatively titled article, “Deepfake Nightmares, Synthetic Dreams: A Review of Dystopian and Utopian Discourses Around Deepfakes, and Why the Collapse of Reality May Not Be Imminent—Yet,” Anna Broinowski provides a much needed sober analysis of the deepfake. This approach contrasts with much of the hysteria around the supposed challenge to epistemology and the crisis of the real that deepfakes and our changing media environment offer. Broinowski proposes that we treat deepfakes as a visual effect with various applications, that are very much wielded by humans. Broinowski is able to locate the deepfake in relation to a continuum of special effects, but she remains agnostic about the deepfake’s future. In many respects, Broinowski’s analysis of deepfakes has a broader implication on the nature of technological and social development as she cites Roy Amara’s claim that tend to exaggerate the near-term effects of technology but overlook their long-term implications.A different moral panic was elucidated in the interview of Nina Power, where she critiqued the moral panic around men, and the idea that all masculinity was necessarily toxic. The interview centered on issues of masculinity in crisis, discussing the virality of Jordan Peterson, male separatist movements, incels, and online dating culture. Power explores whether or not we live in a patriarchal society—and indeed, the trouble of defining what patriarchy even means—as well as the dangers of pop feminism and cancel culture. But the interview also ended up navigating the desire for family, our shared interdependence, and the nature of individuality in relation to community, all affirming a central insight from the interview, namely, that the importance of listening rather than dismissing those with whom one disagrees. Power spoke poetically and poignantly about these and other matters in our interview.The review by Winnie Pérez Martínez concerns Gabriella Lukács’ book, Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy, published by Duke University Press. A discussion of the invisibility of gendered labor in relation to the digital economy is a fitting place to conclude the issue, as it explores material and cultural exploitation. Martin’s review underscores the key themes of the book, but also key themes of the conference, namely, the inhuman exploitation behind the screen.I would like to thank the participants of last year’s Inhuman Screens and acknowledge my gratitude to the Sydney Underground Film Festival for hosting the conference. I am also grateful to other the editors of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Adam Geczy (who also participated in the conference, providing a striking keynote presentation), Vicki Karaminas, and Paul Mountfort for their support with this issue. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to all who contributed to the special issue of the journal.