This weekend, the Bainbridge Film Festival presents Ghost in the Machine—a documentary whose value has been significantly increased by the results of last week’s midterm elections. Directed, written, and produced by Valerie Veatch (who was interviewed by The Stranger in May), the film concerns the origins of artificial intelligence, which the film traces back to 19th century eugenics, a project that provided no insights on the nature and structure of human mental capacities but simply justified the colonial (and therefore racist) expansion of European capital.
The documentary also explores the rise and economic mythologizing of Silicon Valley, the environmental impact of data centers, the exploitation of Black African immaterial labor (particularly in countries colonized by the British), and the first half of Trump’s second term in office, which has been defined by a very close alliance between Big Tech and the White House.
Though shot and composed 2025, Ghost in the Machine throws a very bright light on recent post-election events. This week, the CEO of the Silicon Valley-based corporation Nvidia, Jensen Huang, resigned because of an extramarital affair with a woman, Alice Huang, reported to be a Chinese spy. But what makes this spectacular scandal relevant to the issues explored in the late parts of the documentary is that Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump’s big and not so beautiful ballroom (it will be torn down as soon as he leaves office) in exchange for regulations that permitted “the sale of advanced AI chips to China.”
What’s revealing here is not the Bond-hot corporate espionage (wine in spiffy restaurants, flights in private jets, and so on), or the transformation of a big chunk of the White House into an elaborate bribe scheme, but how the intimate relationship between Trump and Silicon Valley lost much of its steam after MAGA collapsed on November 3, 2026. Watch Ghost in the Machine, which, to be honest is too short (it needed the length of Ken Burns The Vietnam War: 18 hours), and it becomes very clear why Musk gave MAGA a mind-breaking $445 million for the midterm elections. For him and his class of billionaires, this expenditure was a matter of life and death. Where will Silicon Valley go after MAGA?
As for Sam Altman, no dream, no matter how feverish, could match the nuttiness of his business model: We need to invest big in AI so it can be powerful enough to figure out how to make money on this big investment. And that’s where we find ourselves after the election. Do not miss this documentary.
See Ghost in the Machine November 13, 1:30 pm at Lynwood Theatre and November 14 at1:45 pm at Bainbridge Cinemas. Visit Brainbridge Film Festival for information about other films.
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