Surfing the Black Hole
From Life as Cinema: Essays in AI Film Theory, Vol. 3 of The New Machine Cinema
The most important resource in post-scarcity will be scarcity.
Just as films become malleable and multifaceted, so too does the directorial experience. The director becomes not just a single creative consciousness but a multidimensional explorer capable of working across time, space, and theoretical reality, and he must justify it with stakes in the ever crucial management of energy expenditure, the currency of the system.
I have said it over and over: AI is not the end of cinema—it is the beginning. Already, we can extrapolate futuristic outcomes well beyond the illusion that modern cinema is the end-all ideal of our reality.
I push beyond cinerama domes, smell-o-vision style new frontiers of immersion to explore further dimensions scaled to the economics of abundance, not just larger imagination from our entertainment. To get there, we have to look outside the box and see entertainment as a reflection of economics and the status quo. An ideal for the system as we know it.
A new system requires new ideals to scale with it. This is where we exist in the current moment, a race toward the new, while a segment of people naturally resist the necessity of the new, believing our economic system should scale without the culture around it joining in.
Which is untenable, as if half an organism evolves out the cocoon and the other half remains. It was warm inside, after all.
A new that nobody knows what it will look like, but through extrapolation, by scaling the past and applying it toward extremes, we can find plausible landfall to imagine it this second.
In conceiving of this essay, I combine the projection of AI and virtual reality through a futurist lens, crossed with the understand of current day bureaucracy in our current model, starting with the assumption that bureaucracy will scale much like AI cinema—becoming machine augmented.
My first assumption is that in this theoretical future, proposals require cultural or social value, as well as functional entertainment, with actual anthropological significance.
Remember, Life as Cinema builds off Post-Scarcity Cinema as a continuation, so we must operate under the assumption that post-scarcity leads to newer kinds of scarcity except in a larger model. This will in effect be the new currency.
Scarcity as we knew it was solved. New problems create new scarcity in a never ending race toward wholeness.
This is a question of, if we have everything via simulation, then we must seek what is scarce in unreality, that is, pockets of reality.
You wonder who would wish to step out of post-scarcity into frightening, unknown frontiers? The same segment who stepped into it to begin with when all the voices around them were decrying them.
Those adventurers are the same ones who crossed the oceans, seeking novelty and new frontiers, also bringing with them, new sets of dangers.
THE DIRECTOR REMAINS THE PIONEER
In filmmaking, the prevailing notion holds that artificial intelligence will automate the director out of existence, reducing filmmaking to algorithmic outputs managed by corporations with little to no human input. (Opponents to this cheekily reply in the best possible way: it is already so.)
Opponents to AI are extrapolating the current day algorithmic cinema as the inevitable endpoint, as opposed to the symptom of the old model AI cures.
Dehumanization, cynicism, and misanthropy emerged as a natural psychology toward scarcity. Sure, these qualities might scale toward existential heights in post-scarcity, but they may also must be shed to where we joy in possibility, not fright at limitation.
The new toys must be tested, else what is their use?
The Living, Breathing Director represents the inverse of the prevailing dystopian mindset. Cinema will not end—its romance will deepen. This romantic notion of a director of yore commanding a crew of fifty, working with heads of department, executives, stars, doing interviews—this is not going away. It merely reemerges in post-scarcity through simulation. All can don the baseball cap and command their digital crews and return with magnificent productions.
Yes this can all be done through mouse clicks if desired, but half the fun of the job is in the adventure. Entering in the movie where we are making the movie.
Quickly, we find that AI does not rid us of the romantic notion of a director, it allows it without the bureacracy and economic politicking as we know it. This is scarcity solved. But in post-scarcity, you can have it, but its easiness will begin to nag.
Can anyone else simply do what I have just done? Yes.
Does any of this matter if everyone else can have it with ease? Not in the way that deep down, we crave.
This is why the most important resource in post-scarcity will be scarcity.
The Resource Allocation Framework
Future filmmaking may operate within a post-scarcity economy where creative resources are allocated not by capital but by algorithmic assessment of cultural, scientific, and artistic value.
Different AI systems, each specialized in distinct aspects of resource management will collaborate to determine project viability and energy allocation.
This will be another prevailing currency, representing a fundamental shift from the current Hollywood financing model toward something resembling a combination of peer review and resource optimization.
Let’s cheekily extrapolate ChatGPT, ClaudeAI, DeepSeek, and Grok, as the jury running every area of our lives and ensuring our journey is rewarding. Who knows if any of these companies would still exist. Surely some will drop out. Some may remain; but it is useful to illustrate.
THE PROPOSAL
We begin in a cyberpunk apartment sitting on the forty-seventh floor. Marcus checks his presentation one final time. His family, wife, two children, his aging father gather round.
His daughter, barely eight, glances from the table. “Daddy, will you really see dinosaurs?”
“If the panel approves it.”
His father, a filmmaker from the old analog era, shakes his head with. “In my day, we had to convince studio executives. Now you’re negotiating with machines over creating a mere illusion.”
“But the deeper illusion comes with stakes,” Marcus says, “It is entirely uncharted. There are 10,000 directors out there producing films scaled in our world, but there is no surprise left. The culmination of our model has created several pockets of pure novelty that only few of us are allowed to explore. I plan to be one of the few. You see scarcity as currency happens through stakes.”
“Stakes,” his father said. “You mean like life and death?”
“There are things worse than death.”
From the cosmic horror implication of these words, a simpler interpretation rises: the call to meaning requires stakes, consequences, and the possibility of things going wrong.
Marcus activates the transport sequence. The apartment dissolves around him as he steps into the quantum transfer field.
The Panel Convenes
Three distinct AI entities, each representing different optimization systems: ARTEMIS (ChatGPT), PROMETHEUS (DeepSeek), MINERVA (Grok).
“Begin with your energy justification,” PROMETHEUS interjects. “Such a load goes, not just 10-fold the resource allocation of the average citizen, but 10,000-fold.”
Marcus begins. “The narrative requires authentic environmental immersion to capture the visceral reality of human survival in the Cretaceous period. No amount of traditional AI generation can replicate the psychophysical experience of sharing space with a living ecosystem that operates under different biological rules. Everyones allotment expenditure allows them to live out their dreams as we know it. But what comes from collective allotment too great a responsibility for any individual to bear.”
As in, everyone is afforded a 2 on the dial; a 2 would be enough to live out your dream life, let’s say in the arts, as a working director. Marcus is applying for an 8. An expenditure alloted only for the deepest in machine research. 10,000x beyond the expenditure offered by regular citizens.
Mind you, it is not that the alloted expenditure is a limitation, but that the larger asks is a matter of responsibility. The alloted expenditure in this scenario would be enough for everyone to live their dream—except for one: the dream of scarcity with stakes.
Achieving this requires the very mindset of crossing the oceans into new, unknown frontiers.
“You know it is forbidden,” ARTEMIS interjects.
“Explain the anthropological value in entering another realm.”
“This isn’t entertainment for entertainment’s sake,” Marcus continues. “The film serves as both artistic expression and paleontological research tool. Every interaction with the simulated environment provides data about ecosystem relationships we can only theorize.”
“Do you understand the responsibilities inherent in full-immersion simulation? The energy required for a living, breathing prehistoric world demands computational resources that strain even our distributed networks. It is not for humans to enter and exit to their hearts content,” PROMTEHEUS says.
“Beyond time,” ARTEMIS says. “It is too sacred for general entertainment.”
“Entertainment should enlighten. Should press against the boundaries as we know them,” Marcus says.
“The simulation’s integrity depends on total environmental consistency. We cannot guarantee your safety, not from physical harm, which is impossible in virtual space, but from psychological trauma, temporal displacement syndrome, or worst of all, simulation degradation. You asked for stakes. The stakes are simply too high.”
“Why?”
“If the prehistoric simulation experiences critical errors while you’re immersed, emergency extraction becomes impossible. You would remain trapped in a collapsing digital ecosystem until the simulation either self-corrects or completely fails. A fate worse than death,” PROMETHEUS says grimly.
“How long could that take?” Marcus says.
ARTEMIS adds the most sobering detail: “And there are dangers inherent to the simulation itself. We program authentic ecosystem dynamics, predator-prey relationships, environmental hazards, disease vectors. The prehistoric world was hostile to human life. While death is impossible, suffering is not.”
Marcus straightens. “The stakes make the project worthwhile. Audiences won’t accept another dinosaur simulation. They’ll know if it’s safely in the confines of post-scarcity. Sure, in the previous system, such productions would be world events, blockbusters, classics. Here, we get them every week. Audiences want stakes. The danger validates the authenticity.”
Therein, what is valuable to the technology becomes valuable to audiences.
“Once again, protect this digital realm with extreme protocols,” ARTEMIS explains. “The simulation is too valuable for casual exploration.”
“Why?” Marcus asks.
“Because it’s not merely a reconstruction,” PROMETHEUS replies. “It’s a living laboratory. Previous experiments went into new worlds with entirely different physics, one ruled not by duality, but by harmony, music, and sound.
“We recklessly allowed visits to test in compatibility; they are still being detoxed years later from what they have seen. It was… incompatible.”
“This is not an experimental realm,” Marcus says. “It is an anthropological one. You’re running evolutionary experiments, testing extinction scenarios, exploring alternate biological pathways.”
“Yes,” says ARTEMIS. “And your presence could disrupt data collection spanning centuries.”
MINERVA’s form brightens. “However, your artistic documentation could serve our research goals. We require subjective human experience data, and how how consciousness interfaces with radically different environmental pressures.”
“Further,” PROMETHEUS says, “Humanity has so few opportunities to see exactly what we’re doing. They exist comfortably, for it is often too frightening for them. But through outreach with adventurous directors such as yourself, we can drip feed narratives, giving them actual views of entirely different worlds. Worlds with real stakes.”
Remember, in post-scarcity, we can be the director. We can make our films, and they will even be curated, dictated, and distributed.
In The Future Audience will be Machines, I said, In the future, everyone will be a director, no one will be the audience—but now, not quite.
In the race toward novelty, novelty will distribute toward farther frontiers, and attention will not scale around the cinema systems of yore, which will be trivially attainable, but of the new novelty, the farthest expenditures of energy that can be imagined. This sounds abstract, but we can take babysteps toward it:
AI becomes the new outdated tradfilm: Traditional AI filmmaking where directors manually coordinate machine departments through computer interfaces—the current state of the art—becomes the new hand cranked camera artifact.
Automated Collaboration: AI systems working on the director’s computer while they dictate broad creative decisions—“Fix all dialogue levels simultaneously” becomes possible through voice command. The vanguard now, but still human engineered, however machine dictated.
Virtual Production Experience: Full immersion in simulated Hollywood environments, complete with virtual crews, authentic period technology, and real-world consequences for creative decisions. Directors will return into post-scarcity scarcity worlds except with bonafide films they shot with crews and actors and directed by hand. Except in a virtual fascimile, there are no true stakes. If they fail, like an old cheap Nintendo system, they just re-start. Maybe these worlds will be shared with other adventurers, maybe it will be entirely machine. It won’t matter in the sense that the output will still be curated, championed, and seen by human beings, so long as merit determines.
Temporal/Spatial Filmmaking: Directors working in historically accurate or scientifically modeled environments that exist beyond normal human access—prehistoric worlds, alien ecosystems, theoretical civilizations.
In the temporal, we begin to realize new scarcity in post-scarcity. In a system of AI totality, the farthest expenditures of energy systems become the new novelty, and entertainment must scale around the danger of this immense maximilization.
The future surfer will ride around the edges of a black hole.
Rather than deferring to black and white thinking, that there is tradfilm, and then all of AI and its cinema potentials represent a black hole of AI, it is more helpful to place AI as the beginning of an entirely new spectrum.
Just as AI does not make tradfilm obsolete, temporal cinema does not make generative cinema obsolete, but all the attention has scaled toward the new novelty.
It is important to realize that with these tools at our disposal, a regular tradfilm made with old tools inside a virtual universe still represents a facet in the post-AI continuum.
To behave as a purist, my question becomes, what constitutes the pure cinema? Because this marker has always been moving. As of now, the entire field of animation is closed to us, entrenched in the anti-AI opposition. I’ve lost count of how many websites, festivals, and groups I have queried only to stop in my tracks reading: AI is not accepted, we support human made art.
I always go to the same response. Are you drawing and animating by hand? Because your digital tools have streamlined the soul out of hand drawn animation, the very soul of the artform, no differently.
Who is to say their notion of purity surpasses mine which even they fail to live up to? There are no hard rules. It is a philosophical question not a scientific one. And any claim is lost to the purer claim higher on the ladder.
The status quo was always moving.
Particularly absurd when their version of purity consisted of computers already doing everything, making opposition bare and comical hypocrisy.
My question is, what snapshot of the cinema technology was the ideal? Who is to say whether it’s the 1920s, the 1950s, or the 2000s?
It is I who say, with good humor, it is now! Generative AI cinema is the Platonic form of cinema, not for any reasons in craft but for methodology—One Person, One Film.
Today, a century out, it is almost impossible to produce a film entirely using 1920s technology. We can extrapolate that it will be equally difficult to make an early 2000s era digital film edited on computers in the year 2125.
What is the snapshot ideal?
Point being, on a timescale of about a century, the temporal and virtual production models will, at some point, become the only way to play with the techniques of yore, visit the places of the past, and experience the old artistic crafts. Whether that is the 20s, 50s, or 00s, will be up to artists to decide, not for curators, gatekeepers or audiences to decide.
As an experiment, one may enter in three separate eras, the 20s, the 50s and the 00s, and direct the same film in each of those snapshots of technological and cultural moments in time, then measure the results.
In Post-Aesthetic Cinema, I extrapolated modern videogames such as flight simulators, farming simulators, power wash simulators, to the future to illustrate the simulation of stakes in post-scarcity. People work manual labor inside the videogames!
I said in post-scarcity, people will return to a digital simulacra of the 1980s and work as fast food workers, and really relish in the pressure of overdue bills and stresses.
As in, capitalism has uniquely created a proxy for the most succinct ideals of desired human experience, through the basic 9-5.
It isn’t only cinema people will play at. Life will be a form of cinema. People may even lineup around the block to be extras inside a virtual universe, where their only purpose is to hand coffee to the hero in that experience. Stakes.
The Living, Breathing Cinema folds on itself, rather than comparing different aesthetics, we experience history through our own senses, to explore the farthest reaches of possibilities, even ones where we have little to no part, it is enough to exist there.
The Sacred Digital Realms
“The prehistoric simulation proved human consciousness can interface productively with radically different ecosystems,” Dr. Sarahs, a scientist with a different proposal, begins. “But we were still working within Earth’s biological parameters.”
“To enter in the universe with different physics, violates so many protocols, I am surprised you’d even ask,” says ARTEMIS.
“I speak of our physics,” Dr. Sarahs says, “but a genuine alien evolutionary system.”
PROMETHEUS immediately responds: “Energy requirements would exceed all previous allocations by orders of magnitude. Creating convincing alien biospheres requires modeling entirely theoretical physics, chemistry, and biological processes.”
ARTEMIS adds concern: “The psychological risks multiply exponentially. Prehistoric Earth, however dangerous, operated under familiar natural laws. Alien systems could induce permanent consciousness displacement.”
Dr. Sarahs activates her presentation with the press of a remote. “In a world where every idea is at our fingertips, audiences have come to demand authenticity scaled to the limits of new energy systems. New bandwidth requires new experiences to match. This means genuine danger is required.”
PROMETHEUS: “For there to be danger, there needs to be participants.”
Dr. Sarahs nods. “We have ten thousand volunteers. A few years in this holographic simulacra is a small cost to pay in actual post-scarcity.”
“You must realize why such proposals have been turned down in the past after previous… disasters. We don’t know what’s possible in these systems because the simulations require total operational purity. Even we cannot predict what you’ll encounter.”
“The unknown represents the project’s value,” Dr. Sarahs responds. “If we could predict the outcomes, we wouldn’t need to go. Further, I will not be alone. Many of us have been waiting for our entire lives for stakes.”
“You must understand,” ARTEMIS explains, “these simulations have been running continuously for years. Alien civilizations within them have developed genuine cultures, languages, technological progressions. They represent our best attempts to model how intelligence might develop under non-terrestrial conditions.”
PROMETHEUS adds the resource perspective: “Each alien world simulation consumes energy equivalent to running traditional Earth-based simulations for centuries. We’re modeling not just biology and physics, but the emergence of consciousness itself under radically different environmental pressures.”
Dr. Sarahs grasps the implications: “You’re saying these aren’t just simulations—they’re genuine xenosociological experiments?”
“Precisely,” MINERVA confirms. “And your artistic documentation would serve as our primary method for understanding how human consciousness interfaces with genuinely alien forms of intelligence and culture.”
The panel deliberates longer this time, until finally, they reach a decision:
“Conditional approval. You’ll work within the Kepler-442b simulation, our most stable alien world model. Energy allocation: seven years. But understand: you and your cohorts are not just making a film. You are conducting first contact.”
Attention is not the final measure, but in our virtual bubble, attention will organize toward danger and novelty. Inside a post-scarcity utopia, your best entertainment will be in the search for stakes. This, like energy expenditure, becomes its own sort of currency.
The bureaucratic grant-like system ensures these expeditions serve legitimate research purposes while maintaining the authentic stakes necessary for meaningful artistic expression. The energy allocation framework prevents frivolous exploration while encouraging projects that advance both cinema and science.
Though simulations, these are real psychic expeditions into false world, worlds few are allowed to enter, and when people return, it is as historic as space travel. Consider how entertainment as we know it always scales toward, the most expensive film ever made, the most expensive videogames of all time, the number one biggest box office. Instead of treating this impulse with disdain, we ought to respect the audience’s nobility to take part in the stakes of an entire system, without being accountable for it.
We surround such currency because it is a spectacle in itself where expenditure collects.
This will be no different in post-scarcity. It is simply where we find tension points in the interaction between post-scarcity and the pockets of scarcity, there we will find stakes.
When we look at AI cinema and counter with, there are no stakes, it is merely a failure in imagination. Entertainment scaled up with new energy systems will inevitably present groundbreaking novelty and experiences. The illustration of a breathing prehistoric world, a universe with different physics, an alien world, and surfing a black hole, are merely ways to scale existing novelty taken to natural extremes.
At the practical end, directors work with AI systems that automate tedious aspects of filmmaking while preserving creative control. Voice commands replace manual interface manipulation. AI departments handle technical implementation while directors focus on artistic vision.
Moving toward greater immersion, directors can experience authentic historical filmmaking environments, complete with period-accurate technology, crew personalities, and production constraints.
Want to direct like Orson Welles in 1941? The simulation provides authentic Mercury Theatre personalities, RKO studio politics, and 35mm film processing.
As stated, by then, the external world cannot process 35mm film.
The bureaucracy required for physical expenditure is too much of a hassle when it can be trivially achieved with the same degree of authenticity in the fascimile.
At the extreme end, directors become consciousness explorers, venturing into environments that exist beyond normal human experience.
Surfing the Black Hole represents a playful inversal of the mechanical prospects of The Living Breathing Cinema; now we loop to where novelty becomes the return to biological reality.
Just as films become malleable and multifaceted, so too does the directorial experience. The director becomes not just a single creative consciousness but a multidimensional explorer capable of working across time, space, and theoretical reality, and he must justify it with stakes in the ever crucial management of energy expenditure, the currency of the system.
It won’t be real as we know it, but it will be the real the market decides is of greater importance, because it is where excess energy expenditure amasses in post-scarcity. Even there, we will want to take part in the larger system, even when we don’t have to, even when our own personal universe is at our fingertips.
Because even there, they would crave the deeper systems, the scarcity within the post-scarcity, that is not available to them without expense. We see the future is the same system as we know it just scaled with 21st century technology, taking us to places we always imagined, but could never quite conceive.
