The Uncanny Valley Revisited: the Posthuman Apocalypse in Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State

This paper intends to redefine Mori’s 1970 hypothesis “The Uncanny Valley” in terms of the AI age of the 21st century, analyzing the posthuman apocalypse in Stålenhag’s third visual SF The Electric State from the redefined perspective. If Mori’s popular hypothesis confined to humanoid robots is very close to the anthropocentric discourse in which the humanist ideologies of ableism and normalcy are deeply embedded, the Uncanny Valley of the 21st century newly represents the ghostliness of the AI age where AI, internet platforms, and biotechnology are combined with capital, or gets refashioned into an ontological plain of nonhuman objects which the so-called flat ontology aspires for. Set in the American West, Stålenhag’s The Electric State narrates a journey through the ruins left from a nightmare of Singularity-and-Biology fused AI-human Convergence. Neurocastered human brains converge on huge drones and get intoxicated in virtual reality, to be astray or remain the dead. Throughout the journey, the grotesque landscape of suburbia takes various hues of humor, horror, and awe. It culminates in scenes of the posthuman sublime where huge monsters, part cable and part animal, move with people connected to them, or incomprehensible shapes of giant fetuses emerge to be born. Stålenhag disrupts the Uncanny Valley of tech-capitalist accelerative innovation, while staying away from merely celebrating the ontologically flat valley. In conclusion, from a critical non-humanist perspective, this study suggests that no less attention should be given to humans in the future posthuman capitalism.