Fresh off a stint as Vice President for the much-buzzed about AR hardware company Leap Motion, the designer, futurist, and all-around dystopian, Keiichi Matsuda is back at filmmaking. Merger, his first narrative work since 2016’s viral short HYPER-REALITY, is online for good starting today, and in a short 4 minutes the piece artfully extends Matsuda’s existing ruminations on broad societal trends such as augmented reality, techno-capitalism, and the creeping gamification/optimization of life, while extending their expression to a new medium—360/VR. 

Brief, yet pleasingly to the point, Merger centers around a tele-operator (Sarah Winter) struggling to maintain her place in a future where the advancement of algorithms has come to dominate. Corporations are now self-optimizing, and artificial intelligence runs the world. Pressure mounts on our operator to justify her utility, and maintain her role in a world that has undergone a paradigm shift—one where machine logic is no longer a supplement to human progress, but the inverse is true. 

How does a human adapt? The genius of Matsuda, and the reason that his Black Mirror-esque works have resonated with millions, is that his futuristic visions are so clearly plausible. The steps our protagonist takes to simply tread water are the logical conclusion of trends we see all around us: an insanely titled work/life balance, a deleterious acclimation to information-overload, and a stringent program of lifestyle-design, optimizing for both physical & emotional “wellness”. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Silicon Valley culture will recognize the precedents—if you’ve ever read a Medium post with a title like,  “5 Things to Do to Win the Morning”, or swiped right on Tinder, or been pressured to take up meditation, you’re familiar with this ethos.

In an article this morning on The Verge, Matsuda explains that, “We don’t feel like we have agency over the outside world, but we do feel we have agency over ourselves. So we optimize, prioritize, and do anything we can to try and get that little bit of an edge over the competition.” We’re entering an age that will be defined by relentless competition. Why do you think that technologists are the biggest backers of Universal Basic Income? They see as inevitable a world where the majority of humanity is surplus to requirements. The most popular author in tech-circles at the moment is Yuval Noah Harari, whom openly muses about a world in which everything we presently think of as distinctly human will be combined with, and superseded by technology. While the ultimate conclusion of the film is still, as of yet futuristic science fiction, Matsuda is keen observer of present-day science fact, which adds a chilling edge to his speculative work.