by Tyler Thier

So comrades, come rally/And the last fight let us face/The Internationale unites the human race. —The First International, 1871

Indeed, comrades, it is time to rise up once more. On this occasion, in the year of our beloved Marx 2025, cinema’s nadir has invaded our sacred communes. A Minecraft Movie charges our ranks, the “A” implying many, many more to come, troops en masse, pixelations which lob sharp, blood-letting slashes at the fabric of imagination, of wonder and creativity and art’s capacity for transformation. Regression is the violence ushered in by the director of Napoleon Dynamite, who takes the side of the enemy.

Fellow humanist Mark Kermode once belted the above lyrics when reviewing Sex and the City 2, particularly its orgy of wealth and materiality. Yet the arrival of our latest foe truly, once and for all, spells destruction; it traces the outline of film’s demise. In fact, A Minecraft Movie opens the gates wide for the Algorithm’s onslaught in all areas of culture. There’s no stopping it now: a soulless husk of capital-C Content released into a world plagued by genocide, reactionary politics, ignorant cruelty, corporate domination, and staggering inequity. In a reality such as this, Jared Hess’s vehicle for apathy isn’t just an anesthetic, but an accelerant.

I am not here to demand that all artistic production embed within itself a generative message, or moral, or ideology, or critique. But when something like this barrels its way into public consciousness, something so culturally bankrupt, so cannibalistic of existing intellectual property without further thought, so taxidermied and flush with AI-sounding dialogue upon an aesthetically blank canvas, it’s difficult not to take to the barricades and sound the bugle for rebellion.

The entire team behind A Minecraft Movie could stand before me this instant and offer concrete proof that this product was made with their very own hands, and I would refuse to believe it. The result is neither a narrative, nor a tableau, nor a stylistic exercise, nor a success, nor a folly – not even a spectacle. It’s a string of prompts, extracted from mediated and memeified language, fed to AI (or a flesh-and-blood human executive trapped in a hyper-digital torpor) then air-dropped into a server buried deep within Jack Black and Jason Momoa’s shared cortex. As I’ve explored in a previous essay, this form of “creative” output is steeped in nefarious enterprise, driven by monetization of the highest order. And yet, this particular case proves more alarming still, mutating itself beyond a corporate vessel and into a techno-accelerationist weapon.

Virulent tech mogul Marc Andreessen, pillaging some concerning tenets from the Futurist Manifesto, declares in his own screed:

We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.

We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.

To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology – both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors.

Andreessen’s tiresome polemic is aptly, albeit deviously, titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” and it aligns with the Big Tech-driven future that falls upon us quickly and heavily. He and his allies form a new-age billionaire class of accelerationists who, in the sole interest of magnifying profit and influence, seek to catalyze cultural decay by doubling down on ubiquity of artificial intelligence, and in turn the distance between laborers and the benefits of their own toil. Andreessen has no familiarity with victimhood because he is, and always will be, a conqueror. Unblemished, algorithmic, feature-length memes or crypto-adjacent images like A Minecraft Movie are what he’d like to see envelop our cultural landscape. Endless lucre is all that remains when every last bit of content we consume is easy, smooth-edged, pre-generated for optimal nostalgia and recognition, already victorious in its conquests before its release date…this is the future for which Hess et al. have at last completed the bridge.

So what happens now? What are we to do as the paramilitaries of megacorps march forth unobstructed, A Minecraft Movie playing propagandically on a giant screen to cheer them on? Are we hopeless? In a way, yes, unless we obstruct – by producing creative works of the most incendiary and emotion-inducing nature. Think about it, comrades: even alt-right filth and unthinkable snuff footage hold a more valuable place in our culture because they make us feel something, even when that feeling is utter dread or disgust.

The Minecraft simulacrum does what, exactly? A viewer might feign a chuckle at Jack Black prescriptively breaking into his exaggerated heavy-metal singing voice; they might raise their brow in recognition when he says “Chicken Jockey” (I know what that means after looking it up, but I refuse to retain such knowledge); they might point indifferently at the screen, to signal “hey, I know this reference” when they see a Villager™ for the first time; they might request a refund from Amazon for having paid $20.00 for literal slop at home, like my friend did after we watched it together on his dime (thank goodness); or they may just erupt into a popcorn battle in the theater, which has nothing to do with the cultural product on display and is sparked merely by a mass of Minecraft (the video game) enthusiasts all gathered in one place out of obligation to an IP that is now numbingly rendered for them in “live-action” form.

The time for revolution is ripe. Necessary, in fact. The techno-optimists of the world barge through our public spheres of ideation, empathy, collaboration, play. Meet them in the streets, stop them in their tracks, dismantle their eco-destroying AI server farms, pull a Mangione on them if need be. A Minecraft Movie has, after all, officially dissolved the function of art in our society.

Anything goes, comrades. Keep the spirit of resistance alive. I shall join your ranks when I am finished watching Predator: Badlands in 4DX, discounted of course thanks to my Regal Pass Unlimited.

Author bio: Tyler Thier works in the Honors College at Pace University (NYC). He is also a cultural critic who traffics in maligned, “poor-taste,” dangerous, and otherwise controversial media.