I arrive at Remedy Diner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’ playing in my headphones, while images of the Hollywood sign burning in LA’s recent wildfires flash on social media. An oddly fitting preamble, as I am here to talk to Jakob S. Boeskov, a Danish artist and writer based in New York for the past eighteen years, about his forthcoming dystopian novel Wild Victim Unit.
Boeskov’s work has been shown at venues like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery of Denmark, and New Museum in New York. Although he has also made comic books, directed films, and released music albums, he is probably best known for conceptual projects that extrapolate from current technology to raise issues concerning surveillance and power. Examples include ID Sniper Rifle (2002), a hoax weapon that shoots GPS chips, with which he infiltrated a Chinese arms fair, and Face Jagger (2015), a biometric identity simulator that tricks terrorists into fighting themselves.
Similar themes run through Wild Victim Unit, the artist’s first novel. The story follows filmmaker Clint Levanter who has landed a lucrative job as a screenwriter for a big budget Hollywood production. But as the film industry becomes increasingly dysfunctional due to a torrent of abuse allegations, Levanter escapes California in a broken Tesla – “driving across a nation haunted by oligarchy, gender wars, race riots and the enigmatic birth of artificial general intelligence,” to quote the back cover. Over drip coffee and a stack of pancakes, Boeskov elaborate on some of the ideas in his book.
What inspired you to write this novel?
I started writing it during Covid, when I was listening to the audiobook version of Moby-Dick [1851]. Moby-Dick is basically a novel made up of essays. There’s the hunt for the big whale, but it’s full of digressions about everything from maritimehomosexuality to rope making. My book is not about the United States but about the American empire, defined as the NATO-alliance, and the West’s transition into a neo-feudal, tech-driven oligarchy.
It feels like we’re living in dangerous times, with people taking justice into their own hands. Recently Luigi Mangione killed the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, in broad daylight, something which is eerily foreshadowed in the novel, where a terrorist organisation called Destroy All Computers, plans assassinations of tech CEOs.
I think you could sort of see that coming. A non-political terrorist act, killing a CEO rather than a politician, corporate terrorism…
When I was a kid, I took a quiz on the back of a Donald Duck magazine to win a Nesquick towel with a rabbit on it. I loved that bunny so much. And chocolate milk too, I guess. But a couple of years later, I gave a presentation at school about multinational corporations and realised that this Nestle mascot was like the devil. Your novel critiques tech companies and their control over us. Do you think the way corporate power is wielded has changed?
Now we’re no longer oppressed by capitalism. It’s more like we’re being held hostage by it, almost like we all have Stockholm syndrome. The tech companies profit from us being on Instagram. They make money on our doom scrolling. It’s not the same as when we worked in the factory and there would be an evil factory owner oppressing us, because we are actively contributing to what is controlling us. I am not making a moral judgment here. I’m on Instagram myself and also see many beautiful things there. It’s the nature of capitalism today that we’re an active part of the system that oppresses us. And we are controlled through pleasure rather than pain.
A central topic of your book is surveillance. When I lived in Berlin I noticed that people were more aware of surveillance than in other places I’ve lived. Maybe because of their history with the Nazi regime and later, the activities of the East German secret police. Some would even only communicate with encrypted messages. But then there’s also the rave culture there, where you might just not be on your phone for a few days. In other places the phone becomes an extension of the mind and body, recording almost constantly.
Gary T. Marx, scholar of surveillance theory, coined the term dossier society,where there’s a file on everybody.
The way current communication platforms store everything, it makes you feel like you have to behave as if you’re at a job interview at all times.
Corporate logic is creeping in everywhere. From academia to art institutions, everything operates on corporate logic, where people constantly fear being ratted on to Human Resources. And this is a huge, huge danger because our democracy should support a free exchange of ideas.
And we’re oversharing too…
Yes. Now everything has to be out in the open. Baudrillard talks about deregulation in his book The Agony of Power [2006]. First in the 1960s, with the birth control pill and deregulation of sexual norms. Later on we got the deregulation of financial systems. Now everything has become deregulated and turned into data.
It’s funny how we used to have this idea that machines could do the boring work so we could have more fun, learn more things, make more art, play more music, etc. Instead we keep ourselves entertained and distracted through doom scrolling on Instagram. In your book you describe this state as “being hypnotised by images of bodies and food.”
In the near future, even if we’d get basic universal income and all the time in the world, a problem could be that this new free time might just be spent on porn and computer games. It’ll be a regression for society. We live in a time where there’s a fundamental lack of understanding of the human soul.
Your hero is a screenwriter who has to give up on Hollywood. This premise seems intended to reflect on changes in the ways that visual culture is created and consumed – it is becoming more decentralised. We skip going to the movie theater to stay home glued to our phones.
Kids these days watch YouTubers, not stars. Warhol said that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. He wasn’t wrong. But the very foundation on which he built much of his art is gone. There are no real Hollywood stars or music icons anymore. The world still revolves around spectacular, scandalous events, but “stars” are rarely involved. Instead, OnlyFans models, politicians, and members of the media class have taken their place.
You describe today’s society as a kind of “techno-feudalism.” What implications do the parallels between our era and the Middle Ages have for artists?
We live in a new feudal era. It’s not free competition. The corporate conglomerates are dominating completely. So we could look to medieval art. It’s too simple to surrender to doom and gloom and say, “okay, the world is going to be horrible.” In a way, the world has always been horrible. It was not easy to be a person or a composer or a fool in medieval times. But still, they produced their art – an art that had a different function from what it has today. I think our goal is to look for the conditions for art under this new feudalism. Under techno-capitalism there can be no secrets. We submit information, thoughts, and feelings that become commodified products. We must not forget that humans need an interior life.
Wild Victim Unit will be out on 8 February, 2025.
