A Review of Lapsis
The increasing precarity of economic life for many people is being reflected in a growing output of film and TV, including the work of Ken Loach (‘Sorry We Missed You’, ‘I, Daniel Blake’), Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s 2019 documentary ‘American Factory’, Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’ as well as his ‘Snowpiercer’ film and subsequent TV series, the interplanetary class divisions explored by the Syfy Channel’s ‘The Expanse’, and Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning ‘Nomadland’. The Centre for Future Work’s first film review considers a new entry in this recent canon of art imitating life.
Writer-director Noah Hutton has shrewdly crafted a science-fiction world that closely resembles our own. The premise of the film is that quantum computing has revolutionised the world’s financial markets, further exploding the dominance of the financial industry. The shabby underbelly of this quantum computing revolution is the rise of ‘cabling’ — workers managed by an algorithm, via an app, dragging cables through the woods between one quantum computing node and another.
Read Economist Dan Nahum’s review of Lapsis.
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