Kogonada’s After Yang Imagines a Way Beyond Tech Consumerism

“Men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings.” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)

Our stories reveal our concerns and hopes for the world. While this is true for all stories, it’s especially so for genres like science fiction. Within that genre’s particular context and motifs, our stories innately reflect our fears and desires concerning technological advancement. They often lean towards pessimism, or at least skepticism, concerning our reliance on technology. As a result, countless sci-fi movies have envisioned a world where our innovations turn against us.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ex Machina (2014) transcribe our fears that artificial intelligence might end up threatening our very humanity. Blade Runner (1982) and Minority Report (2002) consider how even our best intentions for technology can morph into new forms of oppression, rendering our future as police states and caste systems.

Such stories act as a needed countermeasure that disrupts our comfort while encouraging us to approach our world with more intention. However, if we hope to imagine new ways of life and new forms of interaction with technology, then we need something more. We must move beyond the dystopic.

Few films consider what a more positive approach to technology would look like, but Kogonada’s After Yang (2021) seeks to accomplish just that. After Yang offers a refreshing, compassionate perspective on how technology might make our world more human instead of less. It provides a fruitful counterpoint to the pessimism that’s often at the core of sci-fi. In order to do so, however, it confronts our present-day tendency toward complacency and consumerism. The questions that After Yang asks are of a generative nature: How can technology help us relate to one another more honestly? How can technology help connect and root our lives?

Kogonada’s film is marked by soft, intimate lighting and depicts a society both interwoven with nature and filled with technological advances (e.g., androids, cloned children). The titular Yang (Justin Min) is an android bought by Jake and Kyra (Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith) to serve as an older brother for their adopted daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandradjaj), so she can better connect with her Chinese heritage. After Yang malfunctions, however, the family is confronted with what to do next. Can Yang be repaired? Should he be replaced? Or should they find a way to move forward without a brother for Mika?

Perhaps Yang is simply disposable. If we substitute smartphones or other contemporary products in the place of an android, we’ll recognize that such a reaction is an easy one.

We live in a world marked by ever-increasing technological change, and these changes affect us collectively and individually. Our lives become adjusted to the ways of being that our technology cultivates. Among these adjustments is rampant consumerism as an unquestioned way of life. In her landmark work The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt observed that “within [the modern age’s] frame of reference all things become objects of consumption.”

Our society tears through goods at an alarming rate. Novelty becomes a virtue and distraction becomes a default mode of being. Thus the rise of trends such as fast fashion. The modern philosopher of technology L.M. Sacasas turns to Arendt’s work to make sense of our own age. “Today, disposability is the currency of the realm and the trash heaps growing mostly out of sight of the consumer class bear witness to this still relatively new material culture,” he writes.

Because we have not been mindful of the ways that technology and capitalism have shaped us, we default to approach technology with a consumerist’s self-concern. We turn to technology with an eye to fulfilling our own desires and needs. We are formed to treat all things, including technology, as ephemeral: good for amusing us for a short while before being tossed into the landfill. Implicit in all of this is that we will quickly purchase another new product to replace the discarded one, recurring a tightening cycle of consumption.

The people of After Yang’s society are tempted to interact with the world as mere consumers in much the same way. Early in the film, Jake inadvertently awakens one woman’s annoyance when his tea shop doesn’t have the instant tea crystals she’s seeking. She doesn’t have the patience, if even the imagination, to enjoy tea brewed from real leaves. She just wants a product to fulfill her momentary need; she can’t fathom a tea shop having any different purpose.

“Want” is a crucial word, as is “desire.” Sacasas writes that to truly understand our “technologically mediated liturgies we need to become especially attentive to what our bodies want.” Our technological habits cannot be separated from our cravings. Manufacturers and marketers are not unaware of this: Even as they target our desires through products, companies decrease their products’ durability. It’s not a new dynamic, even if we’re not yet attuned to it. Arendt tapped into the import of this shift, noting that the “very abundance [of products] transforms them into consumer goods… the endlessness of production can be assured only if its products lose their use character and become more and more objects of consumption.”

This is very much the dilemma that Jake and Kyra face in After Yang. Newer androids could be purchased that would undoubtedly fulfill the same duties as Yang. But the film considers a different possibility. In contrast to the woman in the tea shop, Jake recalls a personal moment with Yang when he shared that his original passion for tea came from its rootedness as a drink which is “connected to the soil, to the plants, to the weather, and to a way of life.” That sense of connection, of rootedness, quickly becomes a central idea of Kogonada’s film.

As Jake searches for a way to fix Yang, he discovers that there was more to Yang’s existence than he knew. His view of Yang’s purpose was initially narrow, centered on how Yang could serve their needs by watching and attending to Mika. But in his search, Jake eventually stumbles onto Yang’s stored memories—moments not merely recorded but chosen by Yang—and discovers a depth of relationship and involvement that he’d previously not been attentive to. As Jake and Kyra explore these short memories, their own memories gently come to the surface, too, bringing with them new emotional realizations. This was the effect that Yang had on everyone. Over the years, Yang became entangled with the family, achieving a purpose far deeper than simply satisfying desires. It makes it difficult for them to dispose of Yang and purchase a new android. At one point, Mika even cries out: “I wanna be with Yang.” She doesn’t yearn for a product; she yearns for her brother.

As Jake unfolds Yang’s memories, Kogonada builds a world where technology pervades even family relationships, but does so in a way that creates some new ground of meaning. In a flashback, Mika confides in Yang about kids at school who ask her about her real parents, making her feel shame about her adoption. In response, Yang takes her to a grove where trees are being cultivated, explaining to her how branches from old trees are grafted onto new ones. He shows her how the branches become a real part of the new tree, emphasizing that both trees—the old and the new—are vital to the existence of the branch. In this moment, Yang reveals how technology has the potential to serve a purpose far deeper than consumerism. This garden scene is tender and moving, touching on truths both spiritual and emotional. Yang returns Mika to her rootedness, to the gift of her family—both her birth family and her adopted one.

Despite his intended role as an older brother for Mika, Yang also effects transformations in Jake, Kyra, and others around him. Shortly after Yang malfunctions, Kyra notes to Jake that they’ve been over reliant on him in Mika’s life. They used him to meet their wants, saving them from owning greater responsibilities. But as they reflect on their interactions with Yang, they see the depth of compassion, wisdom, and generosity that he brought to their lives. As they discover more about Yang, their conversations with neighbors and strangers subtly shift into a kinder space that creates more substantial bonds.

Still, the family can’t escape the orbit of grief. Even as they find a sense of comfort while wandering through Yang’s memories, his absence is still a resounding pain. It remains to them a death as much as the loss of any other loved one would be. In the depth of this emotion, Kogonada continues to perceive a way of life where our approach to technology becomes less consumerist and more human. At the same time, he’s sober about its limits. Technology may attenuate our grief, but it can’t resolve it, nor can it fully nourish us in the places we ache most deeply. Arendt was salient on this point, as well: “The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms that can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes in which life itself… makes itself felt.”

Perhaps especially in the presence of grief, our relationship to technology can lead us either away from or deeper into our humanity. It’s easy to turn to social media, smartphones, and streaming services as a means of distraction, thus saving us from the painful conditions of our existence. But the process of distraction is also a process of isolation. In an essay on earth alienation (a phrase borrowed from Arendt), Sacasas describes how “we are being sold a retreat from the human condition and its natural habitat… [W]e are also tacitly offered an escape from responsibility and obligation, to each other and to the earth that is our common home.” Our consumerist approach to technology so frequently finds us turning to it for the sake of avoiding pain, responsibility, and obligation.

Surprisingly, it’s here that After Yang is at its most hopeful, proclaiming that such escapist responses to hurt need not be the case. Even as Jake, Kyra, and Mika continue to grieve the loss of Yang, his presence and memories lead them back toward each other and to others in meaningful relationship. Arendt, considering the import of our interactions with one another, wrote that “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” Yang, android though he was, acted in ways that fostered care and compassion, changing the constellation of relationships around him. In his absence, his impact on each person remains and is fully realized. 

Yang’s effect on the people around him is a testament to the power of technology in our lives. Although we prefer to believe that we are the masters of our fate, commanding our direction through our will, the truth is that our beings are molded subtly but profoundly by the people and things around us. This was one of the foundational ideas that Hannah Arendt built upon in The Human Condition: “Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence.” Therefore, the ways we approach the things and the people around us matter immensely. If we act as mere consumers toward our technology—or toward other people—we will cultivate selfishness and atrophy our humanity.

Our cultural landscape has been constituted by technology more rapidly than we can keep up with. We can hardly escape being shaped by it ourselves, though we are only rarely attentive to that formation. Our lack of concern makes us even more malleable to technological and economic forces that seek to shape our ways of being until we are programmed for mere consumption. As Arendt observed, “Man ‘adjusted’ himself to an environment of machines the moment he designed them.” 

Perhaps our typical sci-fi stories are correct, and the ways we’ve adjusted ourselves to technology will result in our downfall. Maybe our consumerism will ultimately consume us. However, I imagine that there are other possible futures. Futures where technology serves to strengthen our roots, connect us to each other, and cultivate our humanity. This is the future that After Yang yearningly sketches. 

Kogonada’s film is a touching, formally clever work that is awake to spiritual and existential truths about humanity. It generatively imagines a world where our relationship to technology deepens our humanity instead of distracting us from it. Here, technology turns us back to our world of things and people with the hope of flourishing, even the hope of future restoration.

In one memory, Yang and Kyra discuss the possibility of life after death as they ponder the transformation of butterflies. Kyra asks “But do you believe it’s true for all things?” Yang defers. “We can’t make any promises,” as Kyra tells Jake early on. But we can certainly hope.