anarchySF - an anarchist, science fiction podcast · Yanai Sened / Eden Kupermintz

The (State of) Exceptional Mars Express

·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

The hosts argue that every technological transition just reshuffles who gets put in the state of exception.

Mars starts as a fake emergency. Eden and Yanai open with jokes about existence, the supposedly real AnarchySF website, and Elon Musk trading Mars for the moon. Then the movie crowds in. Mars Express gives them androids, police violence, and a body that can stand right there and still not count enough to be protected. The politics stay physical. A robot begging near a giant magnet gets treated like junk, and the hosts sit with how normal that cruelty feels in the film's world. The metaphor never gets too clean. The androids are not pinned to the most obvious images of historical brutality, but their legal position is shaky, forced, and ugly in a way that feels familiar. That murkiness is the point. The hosts tie the plot's billionaire-backed move toward the stars to a version of liberation that looks a lot like getting rid of people. The comparison is dry, not grand. Mars Express does not map neatly onto one history. It shows how domination can slip into law and good intentions. The film keeps wriggling away from certainty. Machines may be pushed into wanting exile, or they may be choosing it. The episode lets that question stay uncomfortable. Big science-fiction talk about consciousness and personhood gets dragged back to daily machinery: cops, operators, code, bodies, and who gets counted. The website gag returns near the end, and even that joke about hallucinated online reality fits the mood. Funny, then bleak. The conversation moves that way throughout, from space jokes to abolition history to robot suffering, with enough self-correction to sound like the argument is being built in the room.

As heard by us

A talky Mars Express discussion that makes legal limbo and robot oppression feel uncomfortably concrete.

AnarchySF uses Mars Express to ask what it means for androids to be present and still treated as legally disposable. It moves from the film into abolition, banishment, billionaire engineering fantasies, and the ordinary bureaucratic habits that turn violence into procedure.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a Mars Express take that gets political fast without losing the jokes.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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