Joseph Suglia’s Brainstare comes at a time when surveillance is no longer just a metaphor but a real aspect of daily life for millions. Warehouse workers are controlled by algorithms that monitor their “time off task” to the second. Office employees are watched by “bossware” that records keystrokes and screenshots. Delivery drivers are assessed by cameras that analyse their posture, gaze, and facial expressions. Meanwhile, tech giants pour billions into brain-computer interfaces, even though their commercial uses are still unclear. The trend is clear: capital aims not only to control workers’ time but also to access their very person.
In this context, Brainstare’s core premise has significant dramatic impact. It depicts a corporation creating a program that lets employers access employees’ memories, the last sanctuary of privacy; the inner life becomes corporate property. The central dramatic question is straightforward: who gains from this technology, and why? Which social groups would embrace it? Which would oppose it? And what contradictions within capitalist production lead to the emergence of such a system?
These are not unknowns. The urge to deplete the worker completely stems from the focus on profitability and management’s desire to detect and suppress dissent. A memory scanner is the dream of every union-busting consultancy in the U.S. It represents the natural evolution of the modern workplace, where surveillance is embedded into the system used to deepen exploitation and quell resistance.
Suglia’s framing, “Some welcome this technology. Others resist.” subtly avoids the real issue. Who exactly resists? Is it lone individuals, heroically standing apart? Or is it the working class, whose collective interests directly oppose the corporations using the device? This distinction is crucial. The lone rebel, common in American pop culture, threatens nothing. In contrast, the organised working class, acting independently of corporations and political parties, is the only true force capable of resisting capitalist expansion.
Suglia’s broader output raises doubts about his readiness to face this reality. His critiques of modern novelists, despite their strengths in syntax, focus more on taste than on deeper issues. The social mechanisms that produce poor art, such as the culture industry, literature commodification, and intellectual decline, remain largely unaddressed. Instead, the emphasis is on the lone genius, the solitary aesthete, or misunderstood creator. This perspective peaks in Suglia’s self-image: he claims Brainstare as “the greatest film ever made” and himself as “the Greatest Author in the World.” Whether deliberate provocation or marketing, these claims conflict with a view that requires understanding class.
The irony intensifies when examining the film’s structure. Suglia presents Brainstorm as the first full-length feature to utilise artificial intelligence as an artistic tool. While new technology in art isn’t inherently reactionary, cinema itself was once revolutionary; studios now exploit generative AI to threaten the jobs of actors, writers, animators, and visual effects artists. These are the very workers whose 2023 strikes centred on this peril. A film that explores corporate exploitation of workers’ inner lives, made with technology built on artists’ unpaid labour, prompts questions its creator seems reluctant to confront.
None of this diminishes the power of the core image. Workers punished for slow scan rates or missed quotas will see truth in the spectacle of a boss invading their memories. Art that reflects, even in part, the growing oppression of work life is better than the constant influx of superhero movies and self-focused domestic stories. However, recognition does not mean understanding. Classic dystopian works Orwell, Zamyatin, even Huxley grasped something fundamental about the social relationships they portrayed. They knew that surveillance supports the ruling power and that domination is a political, not a psychological, condition.
Working people today already understand that bosses try to influence their thoughts. They need works that explain how these conditions develop and how to challenge them, not solely relying on individual brilliance, but through collective action by the working class. Brainstorming hints at this understanding. Whether Suglia recognises this is another question.
Books by Joseph Suglia available on Amazon
1. Watch Out: The Final Version (2022)
- Format: Paperback & Kindle
- Description: Revised and expanded third edition of Suglia’s cult novel about Jonathan Barrows, a man who “falls in love with himselfliterally.”
- Print length: 225 pages
2. Table 41 (2018 / 2019)
- Format: Kindle & Paperback
- Description: A metafictional novel in which the reader becomes the main character, moving through the “world of words” Suglia constructs.
- Print length: 296 pages
3. Brainstare (2024 / 2025)
- Listed by Amazon as one of Suglia’s “most important works.”
- Appears on his Amazon Author Page, though the search results did not show a direct product listing.
4. Years of Rage (forthcoming complete edition)
- Not yet available for purchase, but Amazon lists it as an upcoming release on Suglia’s Author Page.
