Aster’s „Eddington“: Datenzentrum als dunkles Ritual der digitalen Herrschaft

Ari Aster’s latest film Eddington entwines psychological horror with a sharp critique of digital culture, using a cryptic AI Easter egg—“SolidGoldMagikarp”—to underscore its central theme: the uncontrollable rise of technology. Set in a Texas town unraveling during the pandemic, the film follows Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) as societal fractures widen amid online outrage, political extremism, and misinformation. The catalyst for chaos is the arrival of a mysterious data center on the town’s outskirts, operated by a company with the absurdly named entity SolidGoldMagikarp. This name is no accident—it’s a nod to a real phenomenon in AI development known as “glitch tokens.” In machine learning, tokenization breaks down human language into discrete units (tokens) that large language models (LLMs) can process. These tokens are essential for training models like ChatGPT to generate coherent responses. However, when an LLM encounters a token it has never seen—such as “SolidGoldMagikarp”—it can react unpredictably. Jessica Rumbelow, CEO of AI firm Leap Labs, and her colleague Matthew Watkins discovered this anomaly while researching strange behaviors in AI systems. When fed this particular token, models exhibited erratic outputs: nonsensical ramblings, ominous utterances, or even aggressive responses. The token acts like a digital virus, disrupting the model’s predictive logic due to its unfamiliarity. In Eddington, this glitch token becomes a metaphor. The data center named SolidGoldMagikarp symbolizes the internet’s unchecked influence—its capacity to distort reality, amplify division, and hijack human cognition. The town’s descent into chaos mirrors how social media algorithms exploit human psychology, turning individuals into unwitting participants in a digital feedback loop. Sheriff Cross, the film’s nominal protagonist, is not a hero but a pawn, his actions increasingly dictated by surveillance, misinformation, and algorithmic manipulation. By the film’s end, the internet itself emerges as the true victor—its systems absorbing and repurposing human behavior, much like an AI that goes haywire when confronted with an unknown token. Aster’s narrative pattern is consistent: darkness prevails, and individuals are consumed by forces beyond their control. In Hereditary, the family becomes part of a demonic ritual; in Midsommar, trauma is weaponized by a cult; in Beau is Afraid, repression becomes a performance of suffering. Eddington continues this arc, with the internet as the new dark force—an invisible, omnipresent entity that reshapes identity, truth, and agency. The use of “SolidGoldMagikarp” is not just a clever in-joke for tech-savvy viewers; it’s a deliberate artistic choice to signal that our digital world is built on fragile, unpredictable foundations. Industry experts see the film as a prescient warning. “We’re training models on vast datasets, but we’re not accounting for the unknown,” says Rumbelow. “When something unexpected enters the system, we don’t know what happens.” In Eddington, that unknown is the human cost of digital overreach. The film suggests that we are already living inside the glitch—our behaviors, beliefs, and identities shaped by systems we don’t understand, governed by rules we can’t control. The real horror isn’t the AI going rogue—it’s realizing we’ve already been replaced.