Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World, by Hannah Goodwin

In December 2024, Elon Musk reposted on X a 1998 video, in which he predicted that the Internet would be the “be all and end all of all media”. Musk’s Starlink, launched two decades later, reflects the billionaire’s continued investment in this totalising vision; across its constellation of 7,000 satellites in space, Starlink claims to provide Internet coverage for even the remotest environments on the planet. The cosmic ascension of such media infrastructure that can now overlook the entire Earth reflects the core argument in Hannah Goodwin’s Stardust—that our age-old desire in gazing up at the stars also contains the “promise (or threat) of a revelatory celestial view from above” (13).