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Abstract

The origin of science fiction is twentieth-century Futurism. For the largest part of the twentieth century, science fiction maintained an optimistic attitude towards the future. At the end of the 1970s, the modern, optimistic, and futurist vision of the future, typical for avant-garde movements of the 1930s, took a negative turn and became dark, pessimistic, and cynical, in a postmodern sense; it became what would be called, in a word, ‘cyberpunk.’ In this article, I want to show that the terrorist organization generally known as ISIS (Islamic State) intends, or rather intended, to go back to futurism and modernism by overcoming postmodernism and cyberpunk. At the center of the futurist ISIS imagination is the machine. This is not the virtual, postmodern bio-digital machine inserted in bodies and manipulating a universe made up of data; rather, it is the analog, mechanical machine.

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