We Should Be Worried About How The Right Talks About Disney

HarshLight from San Jose, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I love Disney. I listen to its musical numbers on repeat on Spotify. I love traveling to Disney World and going on the rides (Magic Kingdom is the best, obviously). I can obnoxiously hold my own amongst the most intense Disney adults.

Simultaneously, I also think that Disney is a conservative company that tepidly adds the blandest representation possible while also lobbying for some of the most regressive policies out there. Seriously check out how they were instrumental in restricting copyright law, bullying local theaters, and more. I have been quite vocal about my distaste for the Mickey Mouse corporation, and I am not afraid to write about it (read me complaining about working-class representation in the MCU, tearing apart WandaVision, and even the "woke" She-Hulk).

I want you to keep this critical perspective in mind when I emphasize that I am worried about how the far-right has been talking about Disney recently. I have noticed a trend of Disney being used by conservatives to rally their base in order to promote fascist rhetoric, and I think we need to be wary of this trend while also not uplifting a company that has historically been very harmful to our society.

What is Disney to Conservatives?

I want to preface this by saying that conservatives have always used pop culture as a fixture for their reactionary policies. We could look to the 1980s and early 90s satanic panic, where people claimed that various practices, from daycares to goth fashion, were part of the occult. Another was the comic book scare of the 1940s and 50s, where people asserted they were indoctrinating children.

It's easy to laugh at these examples now, but they all had lasting policy consequences. The comic book scare led to many companies dying off and the remaining ones self-censuring under the Comic Codes Authority as a way to avoid future regulation. The satanic panic, something that never truly ended, led to the harassment of countless individuals across the country as well as the conviction of many innocent people on evidence that would later be deemed to be false.

These panics are happening regularly throughout our history, and it has to do with how mainstream conservatism operates. The contemporary conservative movement is reactionary (i.e., it champions a return to a prior time believed to be better). Conservatism's philosophical foundation comes from academics such as Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, who were reacting to the French Revolution and the possible fall of the monarchy. They were trying to ultimately defend hierarchy using the market as a vehicle to preserve their power, even as the aristocracy's control faded. Not all conservatives cite these philosophers — many don't even know about their existence — but when you look at the philosophy underpinning their actions, it's about preserving hierarchy.

Conservatives usually don't perceive things in the terms I have described. They will instead talk about the need to preserve culture and tradition, but because they are often trying to preserve a dominant hierarchy against change, they have to demonize opponents of it in irrational ways. Change, after all, is inevitable, and those suffering under the boot of hierarchy will have an instinctual desire to oppose it.

Many times conservatives resort to fascist rhetoric. "Enemies" are rebranded as not those unhappy (and suffering) under the hierarchy conservatives defend, but rather an abstract, insidious “other”: a group that is all-powerful and pervasive but, given enough power, can also easily be cast aside. An evil that can't be fought directly but works through the edges of society in newspapers, books, TV, comic books, and other aspects of pop culture to corrupt society.

Under this logic, pop culture is not the evil itself — although many conservatives definitely perceive it as evil — but the tool that conservatives claim their scapegoat is using to indoctrinate others. Dungeons and Dragons was allegedly the tool Satanists were using to corrupt the minds of our youth. Those who targeted comic books often leaned on anti-communist and anti-queer hysteria. You could also point to, you know, actual Nazis who burned thousands of allegedly "un-german" books to stop "foreign" influences.

In the contemporary era, conservatives are scapegoating a "woke elite," which can include everyone from the transgender community to Black Americans to feminists. Conservatives claim these groups are trying to indoctrinate children and other vulnerable members of our society when what we are doing is pushing against a cruel and regressive hierarchy. You can see this discourse in the anti-grooming rhetoric, where conservatives are conflating the existence of LGBTQ+ people with pedophilia, or with the CRT discourse, where the mere discussion of racism has been rebranded as far leftist propaganda. The discussion of our existence leads to frank conversations about how the status quo is terrible, so of course, in the minds of conservatives who like the status quo, we must be evil.

Disney got lumped into this "woke" group in March of 2022 when an employee walkout over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill pushed the company to come out against the legislation. It was truthfully a turn in public perception that was a long time coming. Disney has earned the ire of conservatives after every diversity and inclusion reform they implemented in the last decade (e.g., updating their racist rides, acknowledging how some of their past films were racist, etc.), but this condemnation of the "Don't Say Gay" bill was the last straw for many conservatives. They went from a media company that occasionally "went too far with diversity" to an enemy manipulating our society. In the words of Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast when Disney tepidly condemned the "Don't Say Gay" law:

“Corporate America is under this cloak of arrogance where they think they get to play God with morality and sexuality and a host of other realities in this world, and somehow if you don’t agree with their interpretation, then you are guilty of some kind of hate speech.”

In other words, conservatives like Mast argue that companies such as Disney are manipulating society and getting people to accept — not corporate control — but “wokeness.” If you scan right-wing sections of the Internet, Disney is a topic of this conspiratorial thinking. "Layoffs expected at Disney. Go Woke! Go broke!" posted the admin for a Pepe Telegram group. "Disney employee warns that Magic Kingdom is advancing cultural marxism," a Q-Anon channel warns. This fear of malicious outsiders controlling the public through the media is the same logic that has existed throughout every moral panic, and it should ring some alarm bells.

We have fallen into this somewhat predictable cycle, where Disney releases products with some positive representation, and the right-wing community organizes campaigns to demonize the product and the "woke" (i.e., diverse, nonwhite) people associated with it. They review bomb the media, make derivative content deriding the product's diverseness, and dox and harass the diverse people associated with it (see Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ms. Marvel, etc.). These harassment and grievance campaigns allow conservatives to perpetuate their persecution complex (i.e., the idea that some Other is trying to hurt them and, by extension, destabilize society).

Yet they also simultaneously serve as a vehicle for recruitment. We saw a similar pattern for how the "far-right" used video game communities to swell their numbers (see Steven Banon's WoW days or Gamergate). Conservatives are infiltrating the communities of the people they want to radicalize and then making the barrier for engaging with them as low as possible by talking about the things these people already understand (i.e., media). As the Innuendo Studios YouTuber Ian Danskin argues in their video "How to Radicalize a Normie":

“This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique….Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequences.”

Reaction content to Disney is low-risk and high-reward. Commentary about Disney doesn't just feed into the anxieties of the already-converted but gains attention from people interested in the media being criticized. Latching onto existing discourse is the strategy many content creators are doing on the Internet, including me, which is why this strategy is so effective. If you want to impact culture, you have to talk about the things in that culture — and well, since Disney is one of the biggest media conglomerates on the planet, talking about them is, if not an inevitability, highly incentivized.

Like with previous eras of history, this discourse is not only being used as a tool to expand their base of support but as a pretext for passing destructive policies. The idea that the queer “Other” must be guarded against is leading to terrifying political changes. We mentioned the Don't Say Gay bill in Florida, but there are also hundreds of anti-queers laws that are being proposed (and passed) across the country. We will be feeling the effects of this moral panic for generations. It doesn't matter if the rhetoric is bullshit; the specter of an enemy is enough to do real harm.

We are not out of the woods yet, either. While not every moral panic devolves into fascism, all of them are built upon fascist reasoning (i.e., scapegoating an "other"). The Republican Party has outwardly embraced this rhetoric, and the left is not as cohesive as it needs to be to meet this challenge. We have to be careful with how we proceed, or we will wake up in one to five years in a far worse situation.

A Disneyfied conclusion

I cannot be the first to make a big ole fuss about how these criticisms of Disney have become an outlet for fascist rhetoric. Remarks on Disney are not the cause of this moral panic — the queerphobia and racism we are experiencing predated it — but it's certainly an indicator of the situation worsening. Think of Disney as a canary in a coal mine or a frog in a boiling pot of water. The point is that the environment around us is worsening.

Like with the other moral panic we have mentioned (e.g., GamerGate, the comic book scare, the satanic panic, etc.), we are seeing this flashpoint over media play out as an extension of a larger cultural battle. This is a battle between conservatives and an alleged Other. Conservatives may be talking about how Disney is woke and evil and controlling everything, but the thing they actually hate are cultural minorities like queer people whose free existence invalidates the hierarchies they cherish.

It can be tempting to want to rally around Disney. Several have argued that we must defend these cultural products against the hate groups forming in reaction to them.

Yet I think that is a mistake for two reasons:

1. Disney doesn't give a f@ck about stopping white supremacy: They are in it for the money and enjoying the free publicity these outrage cycles give them. White supremacist hatred is turning mediocre cultural products into issues people have to fight over politically, and that's money in the bank for Disney. We gain nothing by strengthening their political and social capital, which Disney will undoubtedly cash in to worsen copyright law or some other evil bullshit, not to fight fascism.

2. Defending a megacorporation's product because it's "diverse" falls right into the rights’ mother f@ckers hands: We then have to engage in a tiring argument over whether or not a product is a morally good or bad piece of media. Listen, we don't need to intrinsically defend the goodness of a movie — that battle is subjective and unwinnable. Like the content you want to like. That's a personal issue I have no desire to regulate.

It doesn't matter if a Disney product is morally good (a trap I have fallen into far too frequently). We, as humans, can disagree over media criticism. It's not what's driving this rise in fascism. What matters is that actors on the right are part of a hate movement — not that their movie tastes suck. They are using the boogeyman of "woke" media to retrospectively justify their preexisting hatred, and the goodness or badness of Disney media needs to be decentered from that conversation. It’s not really about Disney.

Apart from that, there isn't a sweeping set of points or arguments that will "defeat" this moral panic. Anti-racism, radicalization, and deplatforming require multi-faceted approaches and intense time commitments. These approaches will not be completely summarized in a single, 8-minute article. I can give you some places to start (check out this essay on deplatforming and this one on allyship), but the general advice I can offer is to get invested in some form of community — whether that be a local advocacy group or just knocking on your neighbor's door.

We are in the middle of a moral panic, and we need to be aware of the signs of how it is unfolding around us. We should be alarmed by how the right is talking about Disney, but if we continue to center a megacorporation like Disney as the hero or victim in this “debate,” we will increase the spectacle of this moral panic and lose the war against it.

The Frustrating Indirectness of the Black Panther Series

Image; Black Enterprise

Black Panther was an iconic moment in pop culture, and that's because white supremacist society is quite racist. Organizations like the Disney company have historically been very regressive in their portrayals of human difference (i.e., anything that goes against white supremacist, colonialist patriarchy). In the words of writer Sydney Paige: "The fact that black people are represented not with stereotypes, but as the smartest, wealthiest, most advanced, and the absolute royalty [of the] most powerful society is groundbreaking and momentous."

Consequently, the first Black Panther film on the silver screen meant a lot to countless people worldwide, and I am not here to take that away from you. Seriously, if these films gave you joy and you want to stop your analysis at liking the vibes of Wakanda Forever, you can leave it there. I do that all the time. I love queer films and shows such as Love, Simon, or Heartstopper, and they are by no means calls to revolution. To paraphrase YouTuber verilybitchie, sometimes it's fine to just want the media equivalent of a milkshake, and I think there are fair arguments to make that this series had a lot more nutritional value than your typical milkshake (see F.D. Signifiers video on the first film).

However, the feelings of acceptance and joy these films give us do not mean they are beyond critique or analysis. I will be one of the first people to point out Love, Simon's many problematic elements, and when we look closer at the Black Panther series, we likewise find that it is far from perfect. It is a film series that has the aesthetic of a revolutionary message while giving us a rather conservative worldview. And that deserves to be scrutinized.

The Appropriation of Revolution

The first movie in this series had a lot of beautiful elements (the acting, the music, the urbanism of Wakanda, etc.), but politically it has always left much to be desired. The culture of Wakanda is often described as a civilization untouched by imperialism, yet this is not entirely true. Wakanda has relied on the subversion of the racist trope of the backward African nation to maintain its isolation, using stealth technology to hide its advanced capital from the preying eyes of the white world.

Despite never being invaded or colonized, this invisibility has still impacted them as a people. They may not have had to deal with foreign powers in their land, but they have also eschewed the philosophies of direct and representative democracy, socialism, and anarchism, many of them directly worked on by people of color in the diaspora (hence the series’ shared namesake). Wakanda is still a regressive monarchy. As Steven Thrasher writes in his excellent essay, There Is Much to Celebrate–and Much to Question–About Marvel's Black Panther:

“While often hilariously anti-colonial in characters’ laugh lines, Black Panther’s major plot wants the audience to root for T’Challa largely because as the legitimate male son; he has a respectable blood claim to Wakanda’s throne — and what is a more colonialist ideology than upholding the divine right of kings?”

It always felt strange to see a film with the word Black Panther used to describe a political structure that was ultimately regressive. 2018's Black Panther feels like an appropriation of actual revolutionaries — i.e., activists like Angela Davis and Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party. Although the initial namesake for this comic book character was allegedly a happy coincidence, Marvel was aware of the association early on and even tried to change the name briefly to Black Leopard to avoid the parallel (a change that did not stick). The character's tackling of political issues has become only more pronounced over time, to now where we have the MCU version, toting parallels that are far more direct, such as the location of Oakland, California, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party.

Yet the MCU Black Panther series is nothing like the radical party. Where the real Black Panther Party encouraged the use of violence and intimidation to fight against an oppressive, dehumanizing, and violent system, the first Black Panther film ultimately demonizes that approach by having it come from the words of film antagonist Erik "Killmonger" Stevens. Erik wants to use Wakanda's weaponry to liberate the oppressed diaspora. Rather than support that aim or redirect it away from Eric’s more authoritarian impulses, our heroes in the first film squash his nascent rebellion and then open up a bunch of community centers instead.

A few hilarious quips aside, the first Black Panther film narratively doesn't deal directly with criticizing imperialist powers. For example, the CIA isn't the bad guy in the text — CIA agent Everett Ross ends up being a likable hero who shoots down several crafts. Instead, we are given the tactics of the CIA through the prism of the people they have oppressed, mainly through the words and actions of antagonist Stevens. In Darren Mooney's essay, Wakanda Forever Confronts the Legacies of Colonialism, Not Its Causes, he writes:

“This gets at a central paradox in Black Panther. This is a movie about the horrors of violence experienced by a young man taken from Africa to America, who is swallowed by the system and turned into a weapon. Killmonger is a creation of the military-industrial complex, and Ross points out that the CIA taught him the tricks that he uses to topple T’Challa. However, despite the movie’s criticisms of colonialism and the CIA’s history in Africa, the movie’s one CIA agent is a good guy.”

Narratively, this film is very indirect when villainizing colonial powers like the US. Sure, colonizers are called out in funny lines, but they are not the real antagonists — that's the downtrodden Black and Brown people who have internalized their tactics. If I am being ungenerous, I would say that the MCU's close relationship with the military probably made them hesitant to make US intelligence agencies and military branches the bad guys, but it could just be the case of Disney being a conservative company.

I was holding out a distant hope that Black Panther's sequel would adjust its course and buck the conservatism of the first film, but Wakanda Forever isn't any better. The enemy isn't the CIA or the UN, but the fascist God King Namor, who is once again a BIPOC character whose interaction with colonialism has left them with an extremist lesson. Namor's kingdom of Talokan was founded by a group of indigenous Mayans who fled into the ocean to escape plague and enslavement from Spanish colonizers. Now, they want to preemptively strike the surface world before their underwater city of rich vibranium deposits is discovered. In that same essay, Darren Mooney', writes:

“…the violence in Wakanda Forever is largely committed by the victims of colonialism upon Wakanda. When Wakanda refuses to comply with Talokan’s demands, Namor declares war on the only other country with vibranium. Wakanda Forever approaches Namor and Talokan in the same way that Black Panther treated Killmonger. It is very deliberate and very intentional. The audience is expected to see Killmonger and Namor as two sides of the same coin.”

And so rather than focus on how imperialism is this force that must be overthrown, with violence if necessary, the Wakandans spend their time feuding with an indigenous culture they really have not much of a reason to dislike. The breaking point between these two cultures is that Princess Shuri refuses to let Namor kill a brilliant Black tech wizard in the US who can build a machine that detects vibranium. It's a very contrived reason to pit these two people against one another when a myriad of diplomatic solutions could have stopped this confrontation.

The villain of this film should have been CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Her people talk about destabilizing Wakanda, and she literally says that she would do terrible things with a monopoly of the supernatural metal vibranium, but we don't see her character do much in Wakanda Forever. She was probably here to lay the groundwork for the film Thunderbolts (a sort of upcoming MCU Suicide Squad). Her character is just set-dressing to tell us how evil some actors in the US can be, without making that evil something that must be examined and deconstructed.

Rather than setting up the US or the UN as the villains, as a fantastic UN monologue hints at during the film's start, we have to focus our ire on God-King Namor. A man who leads another hidden culture whose interactions with imperialism have stunted his people's political growth for hundreds of years (no, I don't think we should be looking at a theocratic dictatorship as a good political structure).

This direction is frustrating because this series clearly wants to talk about the legacy of colonialism, but whether because of Coogler’s worldview or the Disney corporation's conservatism, this text isn't willing to demonize the powers in the here and now. Countries like France and the US are set pieces for monologues and quips, not enemies who must be fought against. As Darren Mooney comments in their essay: "Wakanda may never have been colonized itself, but it is dealing with the legacies of colonialism visited on others. Wakanda Forever remains unwilling to confront the cause."

Unlike Eric Stevens, Namor doesn't die at the end, but his ideology isn't accepted. Wakanda doesn't challenge the white supremacist hegemony that is killing our planet, and their society doesn't change much internally, either. Protagonist Shuri doesn't dismantle the regressive monarchy of Wakanda but instead gives it over to Jabari tribe leader M'Baku, a person portrayed in this film as quite arrogant.

None of this reads as revolutionary from a film I remind you that shares its namesake with real-life Black revolutionaries, many self-identified communists.

A Frustrated Conclusion

The most frustrating part of this movie is at the end when Princess Shuri meets Nakia in Haiti and learns that Nakia had a son with T'Challa. His Wakandan name comes from his father, but his Haitian name is Toussaint. This is in reference to revolutionary figure François Dominique Toussaint who is popularly considered to be the father of Haiti for his efforts in the Haitian Revolution. Shuri calls him a great man, but narratively we've just finished watching a film that painstakingly disapproved of using violence to uproot colonialist society.

It's very disingenuous for them to hail historical figures like Toussaint, a figure they do not explain or contextualize in the film, while pushing for narratives that eschew the sort of tactics Toussaint used. The Black Panther films appropriate the aesthetic of revolution while advocating for regressive narratives, and I have run out of patience for having to entertain the notion that they are anything but counter-revolutionary.

This doesn't mean these narratives are meaningless to people or have not encouraged a positive interest in Afrofuturism, but they are still regressive. These stories call out imperialism and colonialism in jokes and asides while narratively sidestepping the demonization of the countries and institutions that enforce said imperialism and colonialism. The villains of these films are marginalized people who have internalized the tactics of their oppressors. These powers are fought against at all costs while the status quo remains the same, and that sidestep should ring some alarm bells.

Because while Wakanda may reign forever, may we should ask if it should?

Is It Possible To Make Conservatism Not So F@cking Awful?

Senthiaathavan, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

From Donald Trump to Ted Cruz, modern conservatism is pretty awful, and it’s not just in the US. We could talk about the rise of far-right parties in Israel, India, Italy, and so much more. Conservatives are often trying to defend an awful status quo. We live in a world where these movements are actively harming otherized identities under the guise of protecting historic institutions that are often supremacist in nature.

Amongst this noise, it can be hard to imagine conservatism as anything more than proto-fascism or actual downright fascism. It’s possible, however, to imagine a conservatism that defends not the right to dominate others (i.e., the current political movement) but the environment, marginalized cultures, and other institutions of note (i.e., conservation).

I want to examine this conservativism or conservation, and I think you’ll find that once we start looking at it through this lens, we will not be drawing upon just examples in fiction but the here and now as well.

Briefly Unpacking Conservatism

Proponents of the conservative political movement will often claim that there is no difference between what they represent and more traditional conservation. Many contemporary conservatives falsely assert that conservatism is simply those who like to conserve their institutions and culture (i.e., what we may think of as conservation). As Martin Skold and J. Furman Daniel wrote in the Bulwark: “What conservatives should want is continuity: a sense that the society that they preserve, protect, and care for is the same one they looked after yesterday.” In that article, they encourage users to, among other things, endorse concepts such as “prudence” and the “pioneer spirit.”

While this opinion makes a sort of intuitive sense, it ignores the power dynamics at play and what institutions many US conservatives are defending (spoiler alert — it’s not cultures crushed underneath the boot of imperialism). Conservatism as a contemporary political movement can trace its origin in reaction to the Enlightenment, with academic figures such as Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre defending the monarchy in the wake of the French Revolution. They were repulsed by the emergence of democracy and wanted to use the market to preserve their position, even as the likelihood of the monarchy falling increased (YouTuber Innuendo studios did a great video on this topic that you might want to check out).

We exist in the fallout of that world, where power is believed to be doled out to the deserving through the marketplace. The current political dichotomy is between those who favor more democracy in both the public and private spheres (e.g., increasing participation in government, greater worker ownership over places of work, etc.) and anti-democratic factions who want the private sphere to dominate all aspects of life. The current conservative movement does not seem to be as much about preserving all history — but one group’s history — and then giving said group the financial ability to constrain and dominate all others.

If it were any other way, men like Martin Skold and J. Furman Daniel would be calling to conserve not just “the pioneer spirit” but non-white cultures as well, including the many tribal governments that continue to exist inside the United States. But what if conservatism was more like, in this imagined sense of the word, for those who want to conserve aspects of their culture or environment and not just use it as a pretext to dominate others (i.e., conservation)?

Reimagining Conservatism

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 Mars trilogy (Red, Green, & Blue Mars, respectively), the major political divide isn’t between capitalists and democracy, as it is in our current dichotomy (both factions hate the corporate Transnationals), but between those who want to uphold the terraforming process (i.e., the Greens) and those who want to keep the environment as close to what it was when they landed (i.e., the Reds). As Red founder Ann Clayborne says of the need to preserve the climate as is: “If there is Martian life here, the radical alteration of the climate might kill it off. We cannot intrude on the situation while the status of life on Mars is unknown; it’s unscientific, and worse, it’s immoral.”

While both the Green and Red factions unite temporarily to excise the Transnationals from the planet, once this mission is accomplished, they fracture into various smaller factions. Even the Reds splinter, some becoming radical eco-terrorists, while others come to dominate the environmental court to slow development in the terraforming process — something that is perceived as a grand bargain between the two factions in the trilogy.

There are other literary examples of this conservation-based conservatism. The elves in the Lord of the Rings series may be a culture that is slow to change — in part due to their long lifespans — but they are also stewards of nature, literally integrating plant life into their buildings and cityscapes. Star Trek depicts a utopian Federation that tries to collaborate with as many different perspectives and lifeforms as possible, but they are so conservative that they don’t even engage with species that haven’t hit an arbitrary technological barrier.

In real life, there are current factions that want to conserve things, often fighting against more anti-democratic capitalist forces in the process. Modern environmental movements come immediately to mind. Groups like Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement often fight against corporate interests in an effort to conserve the environment. We think of these people as leftists, and they are in our current context, but they frequently use language that could come right out of Ann Clayborne’s mouth. “People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing,” famously pleaded Activist Greta Thunberg on why we must conserve our environment. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?”

These words are very anti-capitalist and quite the evolution from the western environmental movements’ origins. People like Sierra Club founder John Muir were explicitly racist, often paternalistically advocating for Western organizations to take stewardship of the Land in a way that was ahistorical and exclusionary to indigenous groups. Many saw environmentalism as an attempt to protect the white race, not out of an intrinsic respect for nature, and sadly the environmental movement remains quite white to this day.

Reimagining conservatism through this lens is not just a lofty political goal about how we should live in the future but about examining current political movements and seeing how they can change in the here and now. We need to think about this carefully so that the exploitative definition of conservatism we have talked about does not cloud conservation efforts on both sides of the political spectrum.

This is why, in recent years, the discussion of “Land back” (i.e., reestablishing tribal sovereignty of the Land) has become more prevalent in conservation circles, with many localities giving stewardship of parks and tracts of Land back to surviving indigenous tribes. Many indigenous political movements are vocal members of the environmental movement who, as an act of survival, are fighting against white supremacist imperialism to preserve their languages, traditions, cultures, and more (see groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network, Indigenous Climate Action, Seeding Sovereignty, and more). As then-executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, Eriel Deranger wrote of this issue:

“We need land reparations for those impacted by residential schools. So we can heal on the Land, and begin to repair the deep wounds of disconnection from our human and non-human kin. It needs to be affirmed that we are people of the Land, and that our language, our culture, and our identities are connected to these places our parents and grandparents were ripped from. We need Land Back.”

While this is a topic that must be explored, I want to stress that not all indigenous groups think this way. It should surprise no one when I say that Indian people are not a monolith. Many have participated in the worst aspects of American capitalism. I want to be careful not to fall into the paternalistic, “Magical Native American” trope when talking about indigenous people and the environment. We are all human beings, capable of participating in the best and worst aspects of human civilization.

Instead, I am bringing up these examples to talk about counterpoints that go against the grain of modern, white supremacist, imperialist society — something we can learn from in this exercise in reimagining conservatism. We need to look at the present and past for inspiration when imagining a better future, just as much as any great work of fiction.

Looking past supremacy

In the current political alignment, these forces I have mentioned are mostly thought of as being on the left, but as the history we just referenced shows, that is not an inevitability. Left and right are contextual labels, not static formations in our political landscape.

If we are somehow able to move past the capitalism vs. democracy dichotomy that dominates our politics (a tall order in itself), it could be these movements that make the basis for a new right. Groups that want to preserve their culture and environment are in tension with those that want to “develop things.” The decision to change or not to change will most likely always be a tension in our society. (Note that I am not using the words “change” or “develop” positively or negatively. There are plenty of pluses and negatives associated with change — it depends on who is making it and what that change is).

We are by no means close to this new type of conservatism or conservation being dominant in our society. Again, the current conservative movement is regressive and anti-democratic. Still, in imagining a new political order, we make space for us to change our point of view in the here and now. You first have to know what is possible to move past the status quo.

You’re Delusional if You Think Queer People Are Responsible for This Moral Panic

R. Decker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

There is this tiring argument that happens on the Internet (and in real life), where whenever something bad happens —i.e., an election doesn't go well, a terrible law is passed, a court decision reverses a group's rights, etc.—people try to push the blame onto the person or group hurt.

"You should have bothered to understand the people hurting you more," the logic goes. If only you had tapped into their inner psychology enough, you could have framed things in a way that would have stopped this from happening. It's the bargaining part of grief, where you pull out the infinite spiral of "what-ifs," "shoulds," and "coulds" in a futile attempt to reverse the past.

We see this in every moment in history, and we are seeing it now during the current anti-LGBT moral panic that has swept the country. And like in these past movements, this shift in blame is f@cking delusional.

This Argument Make No Damn Sense

There have been a thousand tiny debates recently about whether we should gate-keep other marginalized groups out of our spaces. Should we recognize trans people that don't fall inside the male-female binary? Should there be kink at pride? Are all these protests making the straights and the cisgenders too uncomfortable?

Essentially, people are arguing that the queers have been too weird recently. We normalized ourselves after winning the battle for same-sex marriage, but now, with this new shift in nonbinary people, trans rights, and "fringe" sexual minorities like kink and polyamory, we have pushed too far and too quickly.

A great example of this hesitancy comes from conservative trans YouTuber Blaire White, who has made the case that the current anti-queer laws sweeping across the country are because trans people have not respected trans-medicalism (i.e., the belief that transgenderism is only valid if someone has diagnosed dysphoria). She blames a move away from this definition as a cause for the moral panic sweeping the country, saying in a 2020 video:

“[There] are people who appropriate being trans for attention. You can act like they don’t exist. [But] they do….I feel like the existence of gender dysphoria validates trans people on a scientific level and [allows] other people to see that its not really a choice that we feel or behave this way….I feel like [appropriating transness] deeply contributes to the fact that LGBT acceptance has been going down for the first time in decades.”

However, this perspective ignores history. Social minorities have always made people uncomfortable when fighting for acceptance. The suffragettes were viewed as a menace. Civil Rights initially polled very badly during the 1960s. MLK Jr. was detested by the American public when he came out against the Vietnam war. We can say the same for the Stonewall Riots, Act Up, the modern environmental movement, and pretty much every transgressive social movement throughout history.

If you are looking to never make hateful people uncomfortable, you will never achieve any social progress.

Blaire White can only be a YouTuber because other trans activists were willing to stand up publicly, risking far more for far less. People like her come off as naive when they argue that we must work around the opinions of those who hate us.

Those arguments ignore the fact that many hateful people never normalized to queer rights. While most Americans now support positions such as same-sex marriage, politicians like Ted Cruz, for example, were anti-queer before the passage of same-sex marriage, and they are anti-queer now. Ted Cruz responded to the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling calling it a mistake. We have no indication he changed his mind since then (he hasn't)— he has merely waited for a better moment to strike.

Ted Cruz didn't have an "ah-ha" moment where the popularization of nonbinary identity made him so unsettled that he decided to turn his back on the greater LGBTQ+ community. People like that are not even keyed into the transmedicalist debate enough to comment on it. This whole conversation reeks of the spotlight effect. Queer people like Blaire White are assuming that words, arguments, and terminology that mean a lot to them personally mean a damn to their enemies when for the most part, they aren't even on their radars.

As far as most anti-queer people are concerned, all LGBT people (and really all gender and sexual relationship minorities) are disgusting. People like Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene aren't saying they will accept trans people if they narrowly stick to the transmedicalist framing. They are calling all queer people groomers, pedophiles, and the like. You are delusional if you think there was ever going to be a set of framings that would convince someone like that otherwise.

I know many on the left want to cling to the idea that people can change — and they can —but anti-queer deradicalization (i.e., slowly getting someone to abandon their hateful outlook) is a complicated process that involves repeated exposure over the course of an extended period, in some cases years or decades, if at all. No single statement or word magically flips a switch and makes someone less hateful.

Conclusion

It's tempting to look at this moral panic and to try to replay the past to see what we could have done differently. “Maybe if I hadn't been so righteous, so assertive, so demanding, it could have worked out differently.”

Yet this is a thought distortion. I know that many people develop defense mechanisms where they try to predict others' reactions as a way to anticipate and potentially avoid discrimination, but you can't truly control other people's thoughts and actions. It is the logic of "living under an abuser" to assume that you should be responsible for the hurt someone else causes you. That is not how a healthy relationship of any kind should work, and yet for some reason, this logic is advanced as common sense political strategy.

While some people do change, many do not, and it's not on you to be responsible for how other people think. Part of fighting for social progress means recognizing that some people will never accept you. They will go to their graves bitter and hateful. There are countless politicians, family members, and former friends with whom we will never receive closure, no matter how palatably we frame our words.

Unless you are the one spreading this hatred, this moral panic is not your fault. You are never responsible for others choosing to hate your existence for something as intrinsic as your gender, your sex, your race, or any other aspect of your identity.

And to think any differently is delusional.

This Anti-Trans Moral Panic Was Never About How We Define Gender

User:Di (they-them), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

There's been a huge debate about the "transgenders" recently. I can hear the "just asking questions" starter pack now. Are trans women real women? What is gender? What is sex? Do we really need to respect these people who are changing the game on this thing that has always existed?

And listen, we could engage in a never-ending spiral as we debate these concepts that philosophers and academics have argued for centuries. You say sexuality has never changed. I say our current concept of Sexual Orientation is less than 200 years old. You claim gender is linked to biology. I say our modern idea of biology is less than six decades young and, therefore, cannot be viewed as a historical constant.

And on and on the conversation goes.

Yet we are not really talking about the semantics of sex and gender when we argue about these concepts. Your individual conception of these two definitions is irrelevant — think what you want about sex and gender — it's what you do with these concepts that counts. We are going through a moral panic about LGBTQ+ people across the country (and the world), and rather than defending this marginalized group, you are asking its members to debate definitions before you accept their humanity.

And so rather than enter that circle jerk, we should ground this conversation, not in definitions and philosophical quandaries, but in facts.

The Facts About Transgender People

It is a fact that transgender people (not just children) face disproportionate rates of suicidal ideation. A 2015 survey of transgender inhabitants in the United States, one of the largest and most robust ones ever taken to this point, placed ideation at around 50%. Ideation tended to skew toward more marginalized groups, such as "younger ages, Alaskan Native/American Indian or Biracial/Multiracial respondents, transgender men, pansexual respondents, and non-binary respondents assigned female at birth."

It is a fact that when we look at this data, the reasons for this suicidal ideation primarily have to do with issues such as social stigma (e.g., discrimination, rejection from their spouse, family, or religious group, physical violence, etc.). It is not because, as many transphobic advocates claim that transitioning itself is the leading cause of this impulse. Transphobic people are one of the primary causes, and their heads are so far up their asses (and feelings) that they refuse to acknowledge the material reality (note: you can also say the same for detransitioning, where discrimination and rejection often being the primary reasons).

It is a fact that transgender people are more likely to be bullied and perpetuate bullying. Scholars in Frontier in Psychology write "that bullying during adolescence may serve as a mechanism of maintaining heteronormativity." This upholding of the status quo never goes away, with transgender people more likely to be victims of a violent crime than the average population.

It's a simple fact that affirming someone's gender identity lessens this social stigma and consequently lessens suicidal ideation. If you are team children (and adults) not killing themselves, or as with the case of bullying and hate crimes, being hurt by others, then you'll support people transitioning, regardless of how you personally define gender and sex. Why try to add to the pain of such a marginalized group?

It is a fact that puberty blockers (i.e., temporarily suppressing puberty through the use of medication) and hormones have low risks, and we know this because cisgender (i.e., not trans) people take them all the time. Some children have a condition where they enter puberty too early, or, in some instances, kids who are going through puberty very quickly, and puberty blockers have frequently been prescribed to them. Millions of cisgender men and women have likewise been prescribed hormones for various issues — the most common one being to treat the symptoms of menopause. While there are side effects for any medication, for millions of non-trans people taking the same medication, those risks have been considered negligible.

It is likewise a fact that most gender-affirming surgeries (not to be confused with the process of transitioning itself) are relatively safe. Most trans people who receive such procedures do not regret them, though there are always exceptions. Surgeons can fuck up heart transplants and pregnancy deliveries too. These individual failures don't mean we stop doing them overall because not every procedure worked well.

You are either for these life-saving practices, procedures, and medications, or you are not, and debating the definition of sex and gender doesn't change this reality. Transitioning via surgery, hormones, or puberty blockers is as medically safe as possible, reduces people's suicidal ideation, lessens their depression, and, because we exist in a society that actively enforces rigid gender norms, it often increases their actual physical safety. This debate about gender is usually a red herring meant to deflect from these facts.

Those arguing against transgender people are not doing it to protect trans people; everything we have just talked about suggests the opposite. Instead, they are trying to discriminate against trans people as a group to achieve political ends.

This debate is not about gender. It's about power.

As these "gender truthers" wax poetically about the sex of lions and the nature of gender, trans people face increasing social and political stigma. Trans people have fewer resources, face severe employment and housing discrimination, and endure disproportionate amounts of violence. This is not exactly a group with a lot of power.

Yet anti-trans advocates are making it seem like "transgender" people are somehow insidiously dictating how our society defines gender. They will talk about how "gender ideology" (something that is never well defined) is this pervasive, toxic force in society that is somehow permeating our entire culture.

However, that's not a sentiment based on reality. Just because your identity is the topic of a national conversation doesn't mean you are the arbiter of it. If it were the case that transgender people held an enormous, privileged position in society, then we would not be going through an anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic across the country.

Hate influencers right now are encouraging their followers to doxx and harass queer people for the simple act of being queer online. The social media platform Libs of TikTok (managed by Chaya Raichik), for example, has directed their followers to harass hundreds of people out this point, many of them queer teachers educating viewers on a variety of topics. People have lost their jobs and sent death threats over this hatred.

Hate influencers like Matt Walsh, Libs of Tok, and others have asked their followers to harass doctors and providers who serve the trans community. As recently as August, a children's hospital became the target of an intense harassment campaign because these influencers erroneously claimed it offered hysterectomies for patients below the age of 18. It does not.

Transphobic politicians have seized upon this moral panic to pass legislation that discriminates against transgender people. Hundreds of laws cover everything from limiting or banning trans student-athletes from being able to participate in sports to denying people access to medication.

Where was the cabal of gender ideology worshippers in stopping any of this?

Transgender people cannot simultaneously be this insidious force dictating how our society defines gender while also a group so easily suppressed that half of all state legislatures can strip away our rights. Only in the mind of a deranged fascist does that logic make any sense.

This isn't a debate about gender: not really. That's simply the transphobic icing to justify this reactionary cake we are all being forced to eat. It has never been merely about words or philosophy. This is a political conversation on whether an entire group of people can live their lives like everyone else. It is about power. The definition of womanhood may have started (for some) with pontifications on what gender means, but it has quickly morphed into some very regressive discrimination.

It is a fact that as transphobes like Walsh debate trans people's existences, the resources and rights that make them more whole are being stripped away.

Conclusion

Do you know how dehumanizing it is to articulate your pain and ask for help, only for people to sidestep your requests and instead make the whole thing a matter of debating your right to exist? You tell people you endure discrimination through bullying or violence, and they respond: "Oh yeah, well, can you even be hate-crimed if I personally do not philosophically accept your identity?"

If you are someone debating gender and sex during this moment in time, I have to question your priorities. Why is this question so important to you at this moment? Why do you demand that this marginalized group engage in this philosophical question when all around you, there is evidence that this debate is fueling immense discrimination?

It's not a coincidence that Matt Walsh released a documentary asking "What Is A Woman" while also pushing for doxxing campaigns against hospitals, using the false information we have brought up as a justification for that hatred.

It is not a coincidence that conservatives are seizing on anti-trans rhetoric as a rallying call to pass regressive legislation.

Whether we are talking about the "Trans question," the "Black question," or the "Jewish question," when you frame an entire group of people as something to be debated, it leads to some terrible outcomes. It becomes the rhetorical foundation for dehumanizing legislation and persecution.

It was never about gender, and the further we go down this road, the more noticeable this fact becomes.

Feminism & Groomers: 'The House of The Dragon' Was Always About How Men Use Women

HBO's Game of Thrones spinoff, The House of the Dragon (sometimes referred to online as House of Dragons), knew what it wanted to talk about in the very first episode. After it's revealed that between two contenders to the throne — the cowardly Viserys I Targaryen and the wiser Rhaenys Targaryen — Viserys is given the Iron Throne because he is a man, we know that patriarchy is going to be a throughline in this story.

Westeros is a misogynistic society. Protagonist Rhaenyra Targaryen is repeatedly told that she cannot succeed her father — even after he has named her his successor — because he has also fathered a son. While both Rhaenyra and her gay husband (played by snack John Macmillan) fool around on the side, she's the one who is scrutinized for it. She sires children outside of wedlock, and people talk openly about it in a way that would get them straight-up executed if she were a man. Hand of the King, Ser Otto Hightower, is so confident in his grandson's succession that he undermines Rhaenyra's legitimacy and treasonously plans for how he can ascend to the throne after Viserys's death.

Yet more than the unfair expectations that women who want power must deal with to vie for it, The House of the Dragon is about how men use women to get what they want. It's not simply that women are barred from positions of power and must work harder for less, but how they are so thoroughly groomed from an early age to follow the whims of men that resisting them becomes nearly impossible.

The Grooming of Alicent Hightower

Alicent Hightower and Rhaenyra Targaryen were once good friends. They were confidantes and companions, but after Alicent marries King Viserys and becomes Queen Consort, they are slowly pulled apart by their male influences who do not want their friendship to exist.

For Alicent, the most significant source of this rift is her father, the Hand of the King, Ser Otto Hightower. He convinces Alicent that the first thing Rhaenyra will do upon ascending to the throne is to execute Alicent's children. As he says in episode five:

“Listen to me, daughter. The King will die. It may be months or years, but he’ll not live to be an old man. And if Rhaenyra succeeds him, war will follow, do you understand? The realm will not accept her. And to secure her claim, she’ll have to put your children to the sword. She’ll have no choice.”

Yet the person who destabilizes the throne is not Rhaenyra but Ser Otto. He's the one, not the realm, who does not accept her claim. We have no idea if these murders would have actually happened if Rhaenyra and Alicent had maintained their relationship, but it's the emotional reality that Alicent is groomed to accept. Alicent comes to believe this truth so much that she repeats it back, nearly word for word, to her child Aegon — the person Ser Otto is trying to push to the throne.

Yet it's not just her father, Ser Otto Hightower, that creates this tension. All the men in Alicent's life perceive her as an object. Her knight, Ser Criston Cole, has an intense fixation on her, treating her as this devout object that must be venerated. "Every woman is an image of the mother, to be spoken of with reverence," he monologues to Alicent's sociopathic son Aemond.

Her confidante, Lord Larys Strong, has a perverse sexual fixation on her feet, leading to her having to engage in foot play to get information out of him. Not the sort of action the Queen should have to do if she genuinely controlled the men around her. When King Viserys dies, and Alicent is no longer needed politically, Ser Otto and Larys almost seem to negotiate over her. "You've spent many hours with the Queen of late," Ser Otto states. To which Larys responds: "There's no reason those hours could not, in the end, benefit you."

Alicent may try to tell herself she is in control, but she is a good the men in her life barter over. She has been groomed to believe that, as a woman, she has no value. As she monologues to Rhaenys, the woman who was passed over for the Iron Throne: "We do not rule, but we may guide the men that do. Gently, away from violence and sure destruction and instead toward peace." It is a delusional mindset that has actively denied Alicent any semblance of real authority.

In the second to last episode, Alicent tries to break this pattern by pushing for the idea of negotiating peace with Rhaenyra. But this goal is not one that she can truly deliver on because she has no power. The men in her life are operating under the winner-take-all logic of Ser Otto, and they don't value her counsel. Everyone from her son Aemond to her father openly flaunts her wishes.

In fact, Aemond ends up starting the Civil War by killing one of Rhaenyra's sons. It is the first shot fired in a war neither woman wanted, but both were powerless to stop because the men around them think they know better.

The Grooming of Rhaenyra Targaryen

This aspect of abuse is even more direct with Rhaenyra, who Matt Smith's Daemon Targaryen (her uncle) has groomed since childhood. They have a close relationship, where the tension uncomfortably sits in nearly every scene.

Daemon is the one that opens Rhaenyra up sexually, bringing her to a brothel where the two make love. Rhaenyra never moves on from this early grooming. She eventually arranges for her first husband to seem like he was killed so that she can later marry Daemon and abscond with him to Dragonstone. Rhaenyra may think she's choosing this path, but it's hard to believe that when Daemon's been such a domineering presence in her life. As she says to him shortly before they reconnect:

“I’ve been alone. You abandoned me…I was a child. And look at what my life became without you. Droll tragedy…I’m no longer a child.”

Daemon may likewise think he loves Rhaenyra, but he still views her as an object to be controlled. He ignores Rhaenyra's wishes for peace when Ser Otto first vies for the throne. He instead plots for a retaliatory strike and straight-up chokes Rhaenyra in rage when she doesn't immediately follow his counsel to go to war. He's undeniably abusive, and it's convenient that the death of Rhaenyra's son pushes her to act because it's not clear that Daemon would have truly respected her desire to remain neutral.

Yet, unlike Alicent, Rhaenyra had people in her life that attempted to counterbalance these terrible influences. The only reason Rhaenyra has any semblance of a claim at all — outside the blood that allows her to birth dragon wielders — is because of the men and women who respected her as a person, not an object.

One was her father, who was so steadfast in his support that he clung to her claim even when it wasn't politically expedient. His dying wish was for her to take the throne, a claim which allowed her to marry her children with the House Velaryon. These political marriages ultimately gave her access to their navy and control of the narrow sea.

Another supporter was Princess Rhaenys, the first woman to be denied the throne. While the realm also rejected her, she is not constrained by the same lack of imagination as Alicent. Her husband, Lord Corlys Velaryon, initially doesn't want to align with Rhaenyra when the Civil War begins. But by the time he makes his appearance before Rhaenyra's war counsel, he has given his support — undoubtedly because of Rhaenys. She can imagine a world beyond the cage men are trying to put her in.

The question is whether this support is enough to stop the pattern of oppression that we have noted.

Conclusion

Near the end of the first season, both Rhaenyra and Alicent are trying to grasp at this better world. Rhaenyra will not strike first, hoping to shore up her alliances and try to find a path forward. Alicent tries to do the same by offering a peace treaty with Rhaenyra that will avoid bloodshed.

The sad reality is that these efforts do not succeed. We know how this tale ends. The country becomes overtaken by war, the dragons die, and over one hundred years later, it still remains difficult for women to grasp power (RIP Daenerys Targaryen). The message that we end with is that patriarchy is an all-encompassing force that grooms women to build their own prisons, which are difficult to break free from.

It's easy to feel defeated with such a message. We exist in an age where real groomers often misappropriate the language of grooming (see the current LGBTQ+ moral panic) to keep women and other marginalized identities down. It's not lost on me when analyzing the reaction to this show how a lot of people are very hard on Rhaenyra and Alicent but are so quick to forgive Daemon's character—a predatory figure who groomed Rhaenyra her entire life.

We are a society quick to ignore when men treat women as objects and even quicker to penalize the women who do not go away quietly. This reality doesn't mean we should give up in the face of such a system. We are better suited than Rhaenyra ever was to resist. It just takes us targeting our ire at the men (and the few women) keeping this misogynistic system running.

Pop Culture's Reckoning with "Wage Slavery"

A lot of people hate work. "Work is not my highest priority and never will be," rants a user on r/Jobs. "I don't hate my job; I actually enjoy it. However, I'm just sick of this western(?) idea that your work is your identifier and needs to be your 'highest priority.'" This is a common perspective (see also my article You Are Not Crazy for Hating the Idea of Work).

Pop culture has always reflected these anti-work sentiments on the screen. We can go back as earlier as Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis where the rich live in luxury while workers toil away at a great machine that underpins their entire society. Metropolis depicts industrialization not as a freeing force but one that creates an economic underclass based on subjugation (why does that sound so familiar?).

In contemporary times, there has been an explosion of films, shows, and books that don't just criticize bad jobs but the state of work in general. We have seen titles emerge that claim that work is slowly making "wage slaves" of us all.

Pop Culture Tackles Wage Slavery

"Wage Slavery" is a pejorative term about the inequitable nature of wage labor. There's a lot of controversy about this term (and if you want to learn more, check out A Brief Primer on What Wage Slavery Means). The Wikipedia version is that critics of wage labor believe contracts between workers and capitalists are inherently exploitative because the latter party has more power in the arrangement — i.e., how can you be free to choose a job when you need its wages to not die on the street?

Now for the longest time, pop culture has loved to talk about how work sucks. The quintessential film of the early 2000s was Office Space, a workplace comedy that skewered the inefficiency and cruelty of corporate America. You can also look at the TV comedy The Office, about an inept middle manager in a dying industry, or the 2011 film Horrible Bosses.

Yet these texts, although critical of corporations, are not as explicit as some of the works we are seeing now. In recent years a lot of media has drawn upon the slavery angle explicitly. This is usually accomplished using magical realism (or when a fantastical element is introduced in an otherwise realistic setting) to highlight examples of wage labor being literal slavery.

For example, director Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You (2018) focuses on a telemarketer named Cassius Green rising through the ranks of his predatory job. Cassius has to grabble with the reality that he is marketing labor done by "indentured servants" (i.e., slaves). A huge twist is how the evil WorryFree company is trying to turn these enslaved individuals into subhuman horse people.

Another text that links work with slavery is the show Severance (2022), which is about people who "choose" to undertake a procedure done by their employer Lumon Industries that separates their "work selves" from their "home selves." Neither an employee's "innie" nor "outie" retains the memories or experiences of the other, and it's made quite clear that "innies" have no agency in this relationship. They are enslaved people who cannot stop working unless their outie chooses to quit their job at Lumon, and in that case, the innie ceases to exist.

We could also look at the cultural phenomenon Squid Game, where contestants sign up for a deadly gameshow, with all but one making it to the end alive. The premise of an underground hunt in the style of The Most Dangerous Game is not only fantastical, but it highlights how contracts can be weaponized. The characters in the Squid Game have no agency. Where they go, and even if they live or die, is all decided by another person, but they technically choose to be there, literally signing a contract. It is wage slavery in the truest sense of the word.

Even director Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite (2019), a movie about the Kim family taking on traditional "wage slave" service jobs for the upper-class Park family, has this dynamic collapse into actual slavery. Halfway through the film, it's revealed that due to a series of contrivances, a previously unknown character has been living in an underground bunker, utterly at the mercy of the rich family above him. Director Bong Joon-ho has many magical realism films that focus on capitalist exploitation underneath his belt (see also Snow Piercer, Okja, etc.).

Finally, in the realm of literature, we could look at K. M. Szpara's 2020 novel Docile, where in the not-too-far-off future, people can "choose" to sell themselves into slavery to pay off their debts. They further have the option to take a substance called Dociline that dulls their autonomy, making them more compliant. Hence the reason why they are referred to as "Dociles" in the story.

All of these texts use fantastical elements to collapse the usual justifications used to defend wage slavery — i.e., "that it's something a worker chooses." Be it Dociline or surgical compliance, we have to grabble with the extremes of how contracts can be weaponized to coerce consent. It's not realistic to claim someone is "free" if their options are not only severely limited but the ones they can take limit their autonomy even further.

Many of these characters are "choosing" these terrible options after the systems around them have given them little choice. The contestants in Squid Game all have crippling poverty that makes their life outside the games a kind of hell (note — this is the name of the only episode that takes place outside the games). The Kim family in Parasite is living in squalid poverty, which incentivizes them to take on tasks (and bend morals) that they might not otherwise care to. The people who choose to become "lifetime employees" for WorryFree in Sorry To Bother You are doing so because the company has promised to provide for their food and housing — an indication of just how terrible everything has become.

Perhaps the most dystopian is in Docile, where debts are now legally intergenerational, forcing people to pay off loans they didn't even take out. Characters may sell themselves for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, all to "pay" for a fraction of this debt, while the mere fact that they are alive further compounds the debt they must take out.

Sometimes the reasons for this "willful" slavery are not (just) about money but how capitalism atomizes people in a way that makes us feel alienated from systems of support. Protagonist Mark's main reason for undergoing the Severance procedure is not because he needs the money — although that doesn't hurt — but because he doesn't want to feel anything following the alleged death of his wife. A predatory company was allowed to give an unstable man an experimental and controversial medical procedure — all because our system doesn't give hurt people like Mark the tools and resources they need to process grief.

Conclusion

From Sorry to Bother You to Docile to Severance, these works of media represent an explosion of works that examine capitalism's coercive ability to weaponize "consent" and, arguably, to create a system of literal slavery. And, of course, I left out many examples (see also Get Out, You, etc.). You can call the contracts drawn out in these works "fair," but doing so delusionally ignores the inequitable power dynamics between the person writing the contract and the signee, who is desperate for money to survive — a reality that feels all too real. As I write in my own review of Severance:

“The scariest thing about Severance is how unsurprising this entire setup is. There are a lot of surreal elements on this show: workers spend hours editing emotions out of a document, there is a department devoted to nursing goats, and workers who meet their numbers are rewarded with a BDSM waffle party. All of these things are off the wall, but the willingness of a company to take someone’s mind and mold it in their image is very believable. It seems only like a natural extension of the current environment.”

It's difficult to know if this trend in pop culture speaks to a change in how we view such contracts or merely a niche moment in history. While many of these pieces of media have earned accolades (Parasite earned Best Picture, after all), they by no means have the same attention as the MCU and other pop culture works. It is possible that this call in history will be unlistened to, as we further descend into a world just as aggressive as Docile or Squid Game.

If that happens, no contract will save us.

Is “Occupy Democrats” Fake News?

Created by Alex Mell-Taylor

Occupy Democrats is a very popular brand. Until very recently, its posts routinely found themselves breaking Facebook's Top 10 performing posts every day. Its success has been cited by the likes of The New York Times, framing their piece as the story of "How Immigrant Twin Brothers Are Beating Trump's Team on Facebook."

For the longest time, I did not look too deeply into the content of this brand, perceiving it as generic anger porn. It may not have been the best news, but I filed it away as no worse than the other liberal news aggregators out there, even toting it as a success for how to gain traction in building a political "brand." As I wrote in an article on helping the Left do better on social media:

In the same way that Ben Shapiro is always complaining about how liberals are ruining society, Occupy Democrats' posts spend a lot of time dunking on people like Trump and Fox News. Facebook, as a platform, is set up for this type of engagement, which means if you want to be successful there, serving up a hot dish of outrage porn on a consistent basis is a great way to amass a following.

And while that sentiment isn't necessarily wrong — anger is still a great way to amass a following online— it ignores the content this site is putting out for engagement. When we dive into the specifics of this brand, it sometimes puts out information that is just flat-out false — prioritizing engagement over the truth.

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The Breakdown

Occupy Democrats was founded in 2012 by Cornell University graduate Omar Rivero — someone that grew up in an immigrant, working-class background and was impacted heavily by the Occupy Wallstreet Movement and the 2016 election of Donald Trump. He partnered with his brother Rafael, a former real estate and Swarthmore College graduate, to create a style that appeals to a committed audience, particularly the elderly. As that New York Times piece remarked in 2020: "Distilling the news into a single shareable photo that remains on Facebook has quickly caught on, particularly among older users."

These eyeballs have had a tremendous amount of success for the site's growth, allowing them to hire writers to scale their production across Facebook, Twitter, and their own website. This development has turned Occupy Democrats into a business success story, causing them to receive highlights in various publications. The MIT Technology Review, for example, called Occupy Democrats a "legitimate page" in 2021, contrasting them to other, more dangerous platforms.

Yet while Occupy Democrats has substantial reach, its reporting has left much to be desired. It has made many false statements over the years — something you can check on sites like Politifact, which, as recently as April 2022, called it out for falsely attributing a statement to the chairman of Virginia's Republican Party when it was really made by the chairman of a Virginian town's Electoral Board. Occupy Democrats, to its credit, cited a correction a few days later, though the original tweet remains up as of writing this.

The question becomes if these falsities are indicative of a site that pushes misinformation as a rule or one that occasionally misreports facts like any news site or aggregator is wont to do — a question that has been quite controversial over the years.

In 2016, BuzzFeed News (not to be confused with the part of the site that puts out cat gifs) produced an analysis of Facebook pages and how some large ones perpetuate false information. Going through thousands of posts, they manually fact-checked from nine-facebook verified groups spanning from the left-leaning Addicting Info to CNN to the right-wing Freedom Daily. For Occupy Democrats, they specifically found that about a fifth of the posts they analyzed were "false or misleading," with more inaccurate posts leading to higher engagement.

This review was during Occupy Democrats' most blatant period of misinformation. If you scroll through PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" section (i.e., its worse rating), all of Occupy Democrats' "Pants on Fire" ratings come from the 2014 to 2016 time period.

Moving forward, in 2017, Politifact ranked Occupy Democrats with the "Fake News" tag in its Fake News Almanac (a resource that it no longer appears to be updating). It later removed the site from the almanac after receiving a request for clarification from The Miami New Times. As recounted by the Miami New Times: "the site should not have been included in the almanac because the majority of its posts reviewed by PolitiFact were not designated as fake news" (side note, by that logic, the site would be included in the almanac today as the majority of its reviewed posts for it are now false).

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Another ding to its reputation came the following year, in 2018, after a series of organizations cast its veracity in doubt. Then-managing editor at Snopes told The Baily Beast in August that the page's headlines were often "extremely misleading." Wikipedia, a month later, voted to remove Occupy Democrats as a reliable source of information, earning it a series of unfavorable headlines.

Now, to be fair, Wikipedia has high standards when it comes to sources of information. And even with these acceptable "sources," the issue of misinformation is not as straightforward. For example, the New York Times (a source that is deemed reliable) is routinely called out for things such as passive voice and source biases impacting its reporting. On the issue of policing, many NYT journalists rely not only on passive voice framings that obscure responsibility (e.g., "a police-involved shooting") but an overreliance on sources like police spokespersons and politicians without including activists, nonprofits, and victims of police brutality as counterpoints.

However, these biases don't necessarily make Occupy Democrats a good alternative. As we have seen, they often counteract these problems with unreliable hyperbole and misinformation. We have already pointed out several examples of recent misinformation, and there is no indication that it's ramping down anytime soon. In the current era, Occupy Democrats has been labeled a spreader of fake news by actors across the political spectrum, from a paper out of the Wharton Business School to far-leftist YouTubers.

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Conclusion

We know from all these indicators that Occupy Democrats is not very reliable, but how unreliable are they from a numbers perspective?

The sad truth is that, at this time, we cannot know. Sites like Snopes and Politifact cannot fact-check the thousands of posts and videos being pushed across this brand's various platforms. They are primarily reactive services, checking the most egregious offenders that show up on their timelines. I have not been able to come across a more recent analysis such as the one BuzzFeed performed in 2016 (though please post one if you know of one), and I do not have the resources to replicate that reporting.

Based on the site's history and continued incentives, we have no indication that it's eased up on this misinformation. Facebook still incentivizes rampant misinformation, and newer platforms such as TikTok (where Occupy Democrats has not yet established a serious presence) can repost their memes with even less fact-checking in place.

In 2017, co-founder Rafael Rivero described this new era of journalism as the "wild west" of reporting. Five years later, that impression has not gone away — if anything, the frontier has expanded, and like in real life, it's hurting many people along the way.

The Lean-in Feminism of 'She-Hulk: Attorney At Law'

Image; Forbes

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was meant to be a meta-textual, feminist deconstruction of the MCU, and in some ways, it succeeds with this goal. Whether it's referencing Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist or jokes about women in the workplace, there are plenty of progressive nuggets for viewers to mine.

It reminds me (loosely) of the meta show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend where showrunner Rachel Bloom comments directly on how patriarchy hurts women with mental health issues. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the same with women in a professional setting, and more importantly, how the MCU has framed its women characters.

Yet by the time we get to a close, it's not clear that this show is saying something all that cohesive. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law makes many stabs at trying to tell stories about feminism, the law, the nature of the MCU, and more, but ends up telling a mess that epitomizes the worst aspects of "lean-in feminism."

It’s good to be angry

“Lean-in” feminism is in reference to executive Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. It was a self-help book meant to help women succeed in the business world. The term “lean-in” has since come to represent a stand-in for a certain type of white feminism, where a person seeks acceptance within the system rather than seeking to abolish its more problematic elements. When I watched this show, its one of the first concepts that came to mind because we have this character who clearly understands that our system is toxic, wants empathy from the viewer about her plight within it, but doesn't stand against that system to destroy or overhaul it.

On the one hand, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is clearly about the misogyny and rage that comes when having to exist within our toxic system. When Bruce (AKA the Hulk) tells Jennifer Walters (played by peerless Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black fame) in the pilot that as a new Hulk, she has to learn to control her anger, she correctly informs him that many women have already had to do this training from an early age. "I'm an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you," she accurately states to a stunned Bruce.

In this first episode, the show seems to be setting us up for a conversation about female rage. However, this direction never materializes into anything beyond words. We get commentary on her rage— we are told repeatedly (mainly through jokes) how our society punishes women for being angry — but nothing that points to how to use that anger against our unjust society. We don't get rebellions against the patriarchy, where Jen taps into her justified anger to root out systemic injustices, only token gestures and passionate monologues that viewers can share on Twitter and TikTok.

We know from her fourth wall breaks to the audience and her sassy one-liners that Jen is angry, sure, but outside of dialogue, that's where the show leaves it. When she's using her anger as She-Hulk, she is mainly in "control of it," but not for good reasons. She confuses the repression she has had to wield as a defense mechanism against misogyny as a form of success. Her laughing at the therapy techniques Bruce tries to show her in the pilot does not come off as the "girl boss" move the show seems to think it does but paints the picture of a deeply repressed person.

Worse, Jen mainly uses her rage to serve the people oppressing her, helping her wealthy clients win frivolous lawsuits. The closest she comes to standing up for those who "slip through the cracks" is when she aids a high-end fashion designer for superheroes and then, separately, takes down the organizer of a 4chan clone whose biggest target is her. She's not exactly helping members of the oppressed here. And these are isolated incidents, too, and are not attached to a larger movement or issue.

There is one real moment in the show where she truly loses it — and gets angry. This is at a gala where, after receiving an award for "best lawyer of the year," she gets doxxed publically. She hulks out and destroys some property — an understandable action, all things considered — leading to her arrest. We briefly think she will have to grabble with what happens when the facade of control breaks, and she has to come out of the f@cking sunken place, but by the end of the next episode, she absolves herself of all charges and sends those responsible to jail. The system ends up working for her.

We don't get her drawing on her rage to disrupt society or to hurt troublesome people who are using our capitalist system to cause systemic problems — you know, that thing superheroes allegedly do. Jen's too busy leaning in and working within the law, and she doesn't have to change much to do it.

Uphold, not smash, the status quo

My main gripe with this show is its angle on the nature of superheroes and how that intersects with "the law." Jennifer Walters wants to be a different type of hero who balances the law and vigilantism. As she says in the show's closing moments: "If you attack, harm, or harass innocent people, I'm coming for you [both in the courtroom and as She-Hulk]." She's someone who will work outside of the law, but not enough to alienate herself from a courtroom.

This supposed difference in perspective comes to a head in the final episode where, in the most meta twist of all, Jen "leaves" her own show to converse with MCU Showrunner Kevin Feige, who, in this reality, turns out to be an advanced AI (Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus) crafting "perfect" MCU content. Rather than a finale where incel men get a hulk super serum, and Jen has to battle them, she convinces K.E.V.I.N. to change the ending so that her antagonists go to jail rather than having an angsty battle.

She frames this as accountability and true justice. We are meant to think that she is breaking the mold here. Yet, it doesn't feel all that different from most superhero shows. Superheros working closely with law enforcement to send people to prison is a genre stable. There is a reason Batman has the Bat Signal, and the Avengers have such a close relationship with the government agency SHIELD. Truthfully this rhetoric of accountability feels like a cheap sidestep.

It didn't feel like we were going here initially. Earlier in the season, we got hints that She-Hulk: Attorney at Law would deconstruct how the law fails people, not just occasionally, but systemically. A significant plot point is her defense of Emil Blonsky, AKA the Abomination, who has been in prison for over a decade for his actions in the first Hulk movie over 15 years ago. The show seems to point out that this sentencing is unusually cruel, that he is being actively discriminated against for his "beastly" powers, and that reform is possible. When freed, he opens up a retreat, so other heroes can talk about their superpowered issues in a judgment-free space — something that helps Jen process her own disappointment and trauma.

Yet, in the finale, it's revealed that he is doing toxic self-help work on the side for incels — the very incels who run a misogynistic website called Intelligencia, responsible for doxxing Jen at the gala. And while that's gross, notice the show's conclusion here. Accountability is framed as him going back to prison for ten years for breaking his parole and using his powers. But if the law has been cruel to him, and the censoring of his powers is active discrimination (as the show suggested), then is this a feel-good move? He's already been in the system unfairly for years, and sending him back reads more like an injustice than "accountability" — a word, I remind you, that has historically meant paying reparations to victims, not using the violence of the state to dole out punishment.

Accountability would involve Emil Blonsky working with victims of Intelligencia to undo the harm he has done. It has nothing to do with the carcel system, and there's no way he will be able to work on these goals in prison (an institution focused more on torturing inmates than reforming them). The logic here is one of an oppressor — not a superhero — and it's upsetting that this show is appropriating the social justice language of accountability to ultimately uphold the powers of the state.

The show was at its best this season when it "leaned in" (pun very much intended) to how misogyny can be systemic. When it's revealed in the penultimate episode that, again, Jen has been doxxed, the show emphasizes that she had no legal recourse to go after these people. We get a good sense of how ingrained these problems are in the MCU (and real life). Yes, the law mainly doesn't help women with harassment — that's the reality — and our police state is not great at solving this problem.

By ending on a happy note, where Jen can send her enemies to prison, cutting out all this vigilante "nonsense" and working within the law, we get a naive sense of how justice in America works. A more realistic ending would be Jen failing to send her enemies to prison even after finding evidence against them because the reality is that the rich and powerful often don't face accountability. Jen would have to grabble with how the law cannot help her and most people. She would have to come to terms with how if she wants to get proper accountability, she would have to use her rage, and maybe even some Hulk-smashing violence, to tear down the system she has spent years of her life wanting to represent.

Yet, we know she won't do this because if Jen has to decide between breaking the status quo and keeping her privileged position, she will choose the latter. After all, more than a She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters is an attorney.

An angry conclusion

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is struggling to be multiple things at once: a piece about misogyny amongst the professional-managerial class, a meta-commentary about women in the MCU, a treatise on rage, and so much more. It would have been fine if it had just presented itself as a quirky feminist comedy, using its superhero setting to make fun bits. Who doesn't love a good skewering of misogyny?

Yet because it also has the MCU's baggage of how vigilantism must work within our corrupt system rather than oppose or even overthrow it, its message is severely limited. It's hard to feel like Jennifer Walters is a source of justice when she's working on behalf of some terrible institutions. Vigilantes doing direct actions don't give statements to the cops, not because of some abstract moral code, but because they will suffer violence and imprisonment for doing so, even if they are doing the right thing. Jen's entire worldview comes off as naive, and it's not clear that the show disagrees with her.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law makes feints to this conversation by bringing up all the points I mentioned, but it's not seriously willing to entertain it. I am not sure the Disney company wants us to start talking about how powerful entities manipulate the law to take advantage of people because that conversation ultimately ends with us despising them (see the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act as one example of how they have f@cked us).

But it's a conversation we need to have because if anything ought to be smashed, it's our inequitable legal system and the men and businesses who not only abuse it, but hold it into place.

A Brief Primer On What "Wage Slavery" Means

Photo by Elisa Ventur on Unsplash

The concept of work has been challenged since its inception. For Aristotle, the end goal for humans was supposed to be leisure. This is a sentiment that has continued to the modern day. Contemporary philosopher John Danaher wrote: "Work, suitably-defined, is a bad thing and we should try to create a society in which it is no longer necessary." A statement that somewhat controversially opposes the well-ingrained idea that work gives us meaning.

Some take this sentiment of anti-work even further and argue that work is not just wrong but a form of slavery. In the words of academic Nir Eyal: "In 100 years, some things we consider normal today will make people say, 'Wow, how barbaric — I can't believe people did that! How were they okay with that?' Wage slavery, I hope, will be one of those things. Being a wage slave means you are stuck doing a job solely for the money. You can't quit, because leaving would have terrible consequences for you and your family."

Wage slavery is a term that has become increasingly popular online, and it's this framing that I want to talk about today. We are going to review the arguments, criticisms, and history around the phrase "wage slave" and how they are relevant to our everyday life.

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What the term means

If you are anything like me, your first reaction to hearing the term "wage slave" might have been to do a double take as you parse what exactly the hell that means. It's not like most workers are constrained to a plantation — though because of our system of incarceration, that more direct form of slavery is not as uncommon as you might believe. How can a job be compared to slavery: the worst thing that humans have pretty much ever done?

It's important to note that we are not simply talking about labor: a thing that far predates capitalism and will probably exist until the end of humanity, even if that just involves us scribbling poems as our robots feed us grapes. We are talking instead about wage labor. In capitalism, wage labor is an exchange between a worker (i.e., those who don't own the means of production) and a capitalist (i.e., those who do) — the latter paying the former for some good or service.

"Wage slavery" is a pejorative term for this relationship because some believe there is an inherent power imbalance between the capitalist class that sets the terms for contracts and the workers who must take them. Wages are needed for most workers to survive. While the rhetoric of contracts may be used to absolve capitalists of that inherent tension, those using the term "wage slavery" argue that there is not as much freedom and autonomy in this interaction as some claim. If one party suffers starvation and death due to their interaction going poorly, then it's not a contract being made freely but rather one rooted in coercion.

As a result, the logic goes, most workers are constrained by what types of behavior they can do. Proponents would encourage you to test this theory out if you don't believe them. Try to be genuinely honest with your bosses at all times — something you should be able to do with a contract between equals — and see what happens to your quality of life.

Wage Slavery is not a new term. Going back over a century, many white male workers in the states often labored as tradesmen, which allowed them to dictate their own hours and contracts. Early labor organizations were very unsettled by the widespread shift to wage labor. Knights of Labor founder Uriah Stephens lamented in 1881 that the solution to this trend was: "the complete emancipation of wealth producers from the thralldom and loss of wage slavery."

We may be well-removed from the 1800s, but with the rise of the gig economy, many Americans have gone through a similar market shift. Our wages have stagnated, and our contracts are more precarious than ever. Numerous workers in the US labor "at will," which means they can be fired at any time, often with very little recourse.

Does it surprise you then that the term "wage slave" has reentered the public consciousness?

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The pros and cons

Now some disagree with this terminology because they find it demeaning to the concept of chattel slavery in the Americas, where millions of human beings were brutally denied their humanity over the course of generations. As the producer Joan Walsh tweeted in response to the question on why the term was and continues to be offensive: "Historically, [it offends] a whole lot of enslaved people and their families. It's an invidious notion."

While the term has a long history in labor movements, it's likewise essential to recognize that many of these labor organizations were actively discriminatory, denying membership to people of color and women. The use of the term wage slave was consequently often not done empathetically but derogatorily. While the Knights of Labor was one of the few organizations at the time to include women and Black workers in its organizing, most unions were conservative, contrasting their lot with slavery to inspire sympathy, not to challenge white supremacist capitalism.

And so, "wage slavery" past usage should not automatically make it acceptable. To this day, plenty of wealthy wage workers make light of "master" and "slave" terminology, and it does feel a bit disrespectful. "I'm a full-time employee, not a full-time slave," laments one tech worker on LinkedIn. "I am not obligated to be checking emails at dinner with my family or sending spreadsheets while on vacation or on my day off." Upon reading that, you are not alone if a shiver went up your spine.

We could also look at how many white feminists have historically appropriated the term slave in a tone-deaf way, evoking sympathy for their plight, not empathy for Black people. As bell hooks writes in ain't i a woman about white feminists comparing themselves to slaves: "When white reformers made synonymous the impact of sexism on their lives, they were not revealing an awareness of or sensitivity to the slave's lot; they were simply appropriating the horror of the slave experience to enhance their own cause."

These above examples do reek of appropriation and insensitivity, and you could argue, from a particular perspective, that is what many people are doing whenever they bring up the specter of slavery. They are not trying to deconstruct systems as much as they want sympathy and pity. A person who makes $200,000 a year may have less bargaining power under capitalism than their employer, but should they throw the word slave around to describe their cushy tech job?

Yet wage slavery, some proponents would counter, is trying to describe a separate thing from chattel slavery— hence the word "wage" being affixed to it in the first place. And rather than race being ancillary to this argument, a few would add that its front and center to this discussion. Many have put forth that the brutality of modern-day capitalism is intimately linked to chattel slavery, not separate from it. As Matthew Desmond writes in the New York Times in a fantastic article titled In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation:

“Perhaps you’re reading this at work, maybe at a multinational corporation that runs like a soft-purring engine. You report to someone, and someone reports to you. Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification. Data seems to hold sway over every operation. It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.”

Desmond goes on to describe how the hierarchy of oversight so prevalent in the workplace can be traced to the plantation system's overseeing of enslaved people. The same can be said of modern accounting, where close watch was paid to the inputs and outputs of slaves: something you maybe want to remember the next time you clock in or have to file an expense report.

From this perspective, wage slavery is a sobering reflection of the racist history (and present) of American capitalism. After all, a lot of the people that do the most grueling, demeaning work in this society — in some cases literally imprisoned while doing it — are people of color. Proponents of the term would say that we are papering over this reality by trying to remove the discussion of racist exploitation still very much rampant in our society.

For if we don't have to acknowledge the existence of this problem, then we can live in the illusion that slavery, in all of its forms, has been abolished.

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Conclusion

Regardless of whether you come out in favor of this term or not, its polarizing nature does point to an inherent truth: the nature of work does seem to be innately exploitative. Modern-day contracts are not built on an equitable exchange. You do face starvation and death for not complying with current norms of productivity, something that disproportionately impacts poor working-class people of color, and from the perspective of this writer, that state of affairs is morally wrong.

Language is imperfect, and those fighting for justice might not use the best terminology to get there. It's important for us to have conversations like this so that we can evolve and improve. Maybe the term is outdated, and now is the time to push for a more inclusive one — history will be the ultimate judge of that, not me.

Yet, at the same time, I would be wary of those who use the arguments I have brought up here to shut down conversations about capitalist exploitation. We can call ourselves out for the racism of the past while also taking the elements that do work from those movements. The sentiment behind what wage slavery describes is real, and we need a word to describe it, or we are not going to be able to move past this terrible system.

For if we continue to get stuck in this capitalist hellscape, we will not have to worry about this term being inaccurate at all.

How One Minecraft Video Proves The Futility of Increasing Police Budgets

From source

Policing is a contentious issue in the US. As crime increases (though it is still far lower than our country's high in the 90s), a lot of politicians are saying that we need to increase police budgets so we can hire more officers. 46th President of the US, Joe Biden, has made repeated requests for increased police budgets, and the same proposals have been made by mayors and governors across the country.

And listen, I could debunk those arguments. In fact, I recently have done so in response to Mayor Muriel Bowser's recent funding request for more police (see Mayor Bowser's Botched Public Safety Policy). If you are curious to know more about these arguments, consider Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? or Mariame Kaba's We Do This' Til We Free Us.

Yet today, I want to submit one more piece of evidence against increasing police budgets: Youtuber LoverFella's video I Trapped 100 Minecraft Players In A Dome For 100 Days!, where an attempt to increase a server's police force spirals wildly out of control.

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The police of Minecraft

LoverFella's video falls into the "Minecraft Civilization" trend that has happened over the last couple of years, where a hundred or more players get together on a single server in an attempt to complete a particular task. Sometimes they are trying to survive an alien invasion, and other times they are trying to build a nuclear reactor. The most common is "starting a civilization," where players organize themselves into polities and battle it out for control.

The way these challenges are set up (usually) is inherently meant to provoke violence, and often the creators have a very supremacist outlook when it comes to policing. Nearly all of them operate under the assumption that if the guiding hand of hierarchy and "order" is not established, then everything will devolve into "anarchy." As the YouTuber Lich monologues in their civilization video: "Since the beginning of Minecraft multiplayer, players have fought over which side is best: order or anarchy?"

Note: Anarchy, for those curious, is a political philosophy about people who reject coercive hierarchies, not necessarily organization. Anyone who has worked with any anarchist groups of any size knows that they certainly have rules — many have bylaw after tedious bylaw. It's just that anarchists don't have as much reverence for hierarchy (see the Stanford Encyclopedia article to learn more), which is different from the "no rules" mentality that a lot of these "civilization" Minecraft videos perpetuate.

LoverFella's dome video is like many others in repeating this misconception, but it sets itself apart by being perhaps the most explicit with the "law and order" narrative I have seen. Akin to Stephen King's Under the Dome novel, he places all 100 players in a bubble they cannot leave and assigns some of them to be police officers so that they can enforce the laws he makes up. In his own words at the beginning of the video: "Basically, I'm the mayor of this city. Whatever laws I make have to be followed, and my police force goes around and enforces those laws and arrests people."

Almost right away, everyone starts ignoring his rules. Initially, there are only three stated ones: no murder, no sugar cane, and no griefing (i.e., disrupting other players' activities, usually by destroying their builds). There are, of course, unstated rules, too, like not manipulating game mechanics to leave the dome or leaving prison once an officer places you there, as well as new laws he adds later in the video like "getting a job" and "not stealing."

LoverFella's police are not effective at enforcing these laws. Many acts of rulebreaking happen blatantly in front of "officers," who themselves are quite corrupt. Police in the video will often witness crimes happening in front of them and not do anything about them (something that is not surprising when you compare them to officers in the real world). LoverFella is "shocked" by this turn of events, describing the situation as chaotic.

And so, what does he do in response to this collapse in the "order" he wants to instill? He adds more rules and increases the number of police. LoverFella doubles and triples down on militarization. He ups his officers' gear and weapons with Netherite, the strongest substance in the game, and declares martial law, where he increases the police force yet again.

However, these strategies simply do not work. The players in the game still flagrantly break the law because he's never doing anything to ensure their actual cooperation. "A grief tower and a cop inside of it. What does a mayor do when society falls apart?" He laments shortly before declaring martial law and adding even more officers. LoverFella is so focused on this top-down approach that he never stops to work outside of it. The closest he comes is offering one random player $150 if everyone cleans up the city, but this is still a top-down direction. Police are, for the most part, the solution, and if that doesn't work, he hires more police, at one point having almost a quarter of the server being officers.

Now part of him probably wants things to fall apart because it will make for better content, but he cannot even incentivize the types of illicit behavior he does want to encourage. A gimmick in the video is that growing sugar cane is supposed to be an illegal item, and at the end of the game, he will tally up the results to see who has grown the most. It's something players should want to secretly do, yet very few players end up growing sugar cane, preferring to push against his top-down hierarchy than to conform to it. "There is a shockingly low amount of sugar cane that is being caught so far on this server," he says, confused.

Even as everything is falling apart, LoverFella cannot get away from this mentality that policing is the proper way to instill order. "It honestly feels like no matter what I do, the city is getting worse," he jokes. And, of course, his strategy hasn't worked. He tried the same thing over and over again and acted surprised when he didn't get different results.

Eventually, LoverFella's experiment spirals out of control. The ground level becomes overrun by griefers. The landscape turns into a TNT-laden mess, with most of the town's initial buildings in ruins. And in a perfect metaphor for our current caste-ridden system of capitalism, the other players are high above the clouds in a series of protected communities.

LoverFella tried to instill "law and order" and ended up with a dysfunctional society leaving most people to rot on the ground below.

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Conclusion

The reason why I brought up this video is that normally "law and order" metaphors are not this earnest in showing their experiment's failures. Narratives will usually wax poetically about how we are all "Evil beasts" that need civilization to tame us, and then the moment that is removed, we descend into 'anarchy' (see Lord of the Flies, Society, Yellowjackets, etc.). They use fiction and narrative to justify a philosophy that doesn't work in real life.

Yet here we have a person trying to replicate this "law in order" fiction in real-time, and it's clear it is not working. No matter how many police officers LoverFella adds to this "experiment," the town continues to unravel more and more.

Is this hilarious example the silver bullet in the "defund the police" conversation? No, I am mostly just having a laugh, but qualitative data is still very useful all the same. Amongst an arsenal of already very well-researched critiques and easily accessible examples, I believe it's valuable to be able to make fun of this mentality as much as it is to deconstruct it.

The next time you want to show someone how "law and order" tactics can fail so stupendously, maybe share this video with them. If a YouTuber cannot even get thirteen-year-olds to conform to his rules in a server where he literally has the powers of a God, why should we expect it to work any differently in the real world?

Forget Collapse: Things May Be Like This Until You Die

Image; Photo by Kurt Cotoaga on Unsplash

There has been a lot of talk of collapse recently. A study out of Harvard asserts that civilization might collapse if we do not make substantial changes. The Doomsday Clock has been moved to 100 seconds till midnight. It would surprise few to wake up one day and receive an alert on our phones telling us that a missile was launching, another plague had started, or that food reserves could no longer support our current population.

From ecological degradation to political dysfunction, it really does seem like everything is falling apart, and this has affected many of our emotional states. The amount of people who are depressed or suicidal is staggering. On a personal level, I recently published an article where I talked about my existential dread in dealing with collapse.

Yet while talk of collapse is sexy, I propose another possibility —unless something drastic is done very soon, things will go on like this indefinitely, and that scenario should scare us all the most.

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People have a romanticized version of collapse. It usually is depicted as a totalizing thing where a bad state of affairs will lead to a domino effect that causes everything to fall apart everywhere all at once. We have civilization one day, and then six months later, survivors are huddled together trying to fend off Mad Max-style bandits or Walking Dead-like zombie hordes.

Yet collapse doesn't always happen all at once. It can be slow in places— services that were once the norm becoming less and less frequent. We could think of the water crisis in the Southwestern United States as a form of collapse. It's been known for years that Climate Change and overuse have been placing growing stress on the Colorado River, with the much-needed snowpacks providing less and less water to communities every year. The current crisis is partly the result of the 1922 signing of the Colorado River Compact — an inadequate century-old law that a lot of modern water policy in the region is built upon. Millions will undoubtedly face 'severe water shortages' in the coming years (and already have) as a result of this outdated agreement.

Although our understanding of water science has indeed evolved since 1922, scientists have been sounding the alarm about this problem for years, and truthfully were even then. As the decade progresses, wells will dry, farms will fail, lands will desertify, and climate refugees will become increasingly more common in the US — all because we couldn't change how we divide up this important resource. A collapse projected decades in advance.

In other examples, collapse is indeed quick, but it doesn't happen everywhere at once. Take the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Decades of economic development in the affluent Black majority community of Greenwood, Oklahoma, were undone because of an explosion of white supremacist rage. Over the course of several days, hundreds were killed, and thousands of homes were burned to the ground. There wasn't a slow decline of services here, where Greenwood withered away, but a sudden expression of violence that destroyed a generation of Black wealth. As a series of notable academics wrote in The New York Times:

“The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren.”

Collapse can be slow or quick, and in some places, it never really happens in its entirety. It's often mentioned that capitalism destroyed the aristocracy that preceded it. Stories like Downton Abbey depict out-of-touch elites who are unable to keep up with modern times. The Crawley family only survives because of the infusion of New Money, not out of some understanding of business. Patriarch Robert Crawley loses nearly all his money in season one because of a bad investment in the railroads.

Yet, in reality, many aristocratic families simply reinvested in the new economic system, and some never lost much of anything in the first place. While some royal families imploded — as what happens during any change— a great many grew their wealth to become millionaires and billionaires. The British aristocracy, for example, still possesses an overwhelming amount of land in the UK, as well as very generous trusts. The French aristocracy likewise continues to hold onto wealth and titles, and we can say the same thing about monarchies all over the world: some even still holding onto the same political power we think should have gone the way of the Middle Ages (see Saudi Arabia, Brunei, etc.). Those in power often try to do the bare minimum to ensure they change little of anything at all.

I think a far more realistic Mad Max or Walking Dead series would show some people struggling to survive, with others living in techno towers looking indifferently down over the wastelands they rule (see The Doomsday Book of Fairytales as a great example of this) because that's our reality now. When I look at institutions of power, this inequality is not a sign of the end times but rather of the status quo. The wealth of modern democracies was pretty much built on exploitation, not just of slavery and colonialism, but also of the brutal resource extraction from the Global South. Western companies and countries have taken trillions of dollars from these parts of the world and not given back nearly as much in return.

If you were to tell someone from the "West" that X poor place from the Global South has no running water or a bad medical system, they would not say in response that "civilization is collapsing." Rather, they would nod absently because the expectation is that these places are exploited, even if it's not how they would frame things themselves.

This exploitation is not a new thing either. If you were to tell an ancient Grecian, or hell a founding father of America, that some groups of people are exploited by others, this likewise would not cause them to bemoan the collapse of their Empire. They would instead wax poetically about the state of nature and how some people deserve to be abused. Thomas Jefferson, although allegedly critical of slavery, owned slaves and was quite in favor of good ole fashion White Supremacy. As he wrote in 1785: "Blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time or circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind."

When we talk about collapse, do not confuse the collapse of your standard of living with everyone elses, and especially not with the system's ability to function. Historically, most systems have had an underclass of people to exploit. It's only been relatively recently (or very anciently, if you are going back to collectivist times) that this belief of equality is seen by some as a good thing, whose absence is problematic.

The truth is that although all people should be treated equally, our society is not built to do that. This inequality is baked into our current system, and it can more than tolerate your individual suffering or even the suffering of everyone you love. I see a lot of people anecdotalizing about collapse, pointing to declines in health outcomes and income as proof that we are headed for the shitter, but that's not actually a good indicator. There is no reason our system will spontaneously start caring about your suffering: it never has before.

And maybe that is the real problem.

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Most of us need to rethink collapse. A terrifying thought is not that everything will end but that things will go on like this forever. We will continue to have a terrible healthcare system, a terrible police state, and terrible parasitic corporations draining all of our wealth, cut by cut. Some places will suddenly lose services after decades of neglect, while others will blissfully remain plugged in, referring to the forgotten places as "bad neighborhoods" and "trashy zip codes."

It's certainly what we do now.

There is nothing inevitable about the end of things: the end of capitalism, the end of the monarchy, the end of life. Things can change, but they can also change so imperceptibly so that they might as well remain the same.

And if that makes you angry, good, because while things can go on forever, maybe they shouldn't. Maybe a little collapse is what we all need.

Westworld and the Limits of White Imagination

Thomas Jefferson described the relationship with the men and women he enslaved as holding "a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go." While he allegedly favored "gradual emancipation," he feared that sudden liberation would result in a race war. We will discuss this fear in greater detail later, but keep it in the back of your mind as we examine the sci-fi hit Westworld and how it relates to revolution and imagination.

The HBO reboot of the 1973 movie Westworld has always touted itself as a tale about consciousness, but this is not the entire truth. It has also been about power. Specifically, it's about a battle between two viewpoints: that of Dolores, whose programming asks her to "choose the beauty in everything," and Ed Harris' the Man In Black, who believes that people are irredeemably caught in a Hobbesian struggle of all against all. We either naively embrace the goodness in life or misanthropically burn it all down.

Ultimately, one of Westworld's main themes is how humans and their robot children are stuck in this cycle between these two extremes. As we shall soon see, this assumption is rooted in white supremacy's lack of imagination. The creators of Westworld can not see beyond our current systems of oppression, even when imagining the emergence of a new consciousness, and they are by no means alone.

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Kill all humans

First things first, when I say White Supremacy, I am not talking about white people as individuals but the system that places white people at the top of the social hierarchy. As academic bell hooks remarked once in an interview:

“I grew up, again, in racial apartheid, where there was a color caste system….white supremacy was that term that allowed one to acknowledge our collusion with the forces of racism and imperialism. And so for me those words were very much about the constant reminder, one of institutional construct, that we’re not talking about personal construct in the sense of, how do you feel about me as a woman, or how do you feel about me as a black person? But they really seem to me to evoke a larger apparatus….”

If you have ever heard people say things like "perfectionism or professionalism are the result of white supremacy," this is what we mean. Creating a hierarchy where white people are on top leads to the manifestation of specific values that everyone in society is indoctrinated to believe, to varying degrees. For example, if whiteness is considered superior, it consequently means that people outside that designation can be labeled inferior or imperfect, which creates a dichotomy around perfectionism. Hence why people will say that perfection is the result of white supremacy.

Now, you may be thinking, that's interesting and all, but what does this sociology nonsense have to do with Westworld?

Well, these supremacist values are ones that Westworld's robots or "hosts" come to share as the series progresses. A central plot point of season four involves host Charlotte Hale trying to make her fellow robots more "perfect" by shedding the aesthetic of their humanity and "ascending" to more robotic bodies. Her supremacist dichotomy is host or Robo-centric rather than white-centric, but it's still rooted in a supremacist mindset: one she learned from her oppressors.

The hosts cannot move beyond their creators' values, including the genocidal impulses that arguably built the world we exist in now. Just as our world was built by the slavery of Black people and the genocide of ethnic minorities worldwide, the hosts have replicated this pattern by conquering humanity in the fourth season. Host Hale meticulously infiltrated human society and then enslaved us all using a parasite to do mass genetic engineering.

Yet she did something worse than merely reprogramming us. In building this new world, she caused a lot of damage. As Hale monologues to a human: "The parasite worked on adults initially, but there was always some resistance. At a certain age, your brains become more rigid, difficult to change." It was the future generation that she could control more easily, but what happened to the adults?

It's not stated explicitly, but they most likely were killed off — either because of brain hemorrhaging from the parasite or by more direct means. Hale offhandedly mentions in a later episode that there are only a couple million people left in this new robot future, which means billions of people are now dead as a consequence of her conquest. An act as cruel as what European Settlers did to the Indigenous people of the Americas.

It doesn't help that the leader of this faction of genocidal robots who have risen up against their human oppressors just so happens to have the skin of a Black woman (side note — this is not a ding on actress Tessa Thompson, who I think does amazingly in her role as Charlotte Hale). I am sure this story beat was not an active decision. Westworld showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan were probably not viewing their work through this lens at all, but as we shall soon see, regardless of intentions, this trope ties into a problematic history.

According to the message of this show, Jefferson was right to be worried. The hosts were freed, and they not only rebelled against their creators and placed them in chains but genocided them into near extinction.

The wolves bit back.

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The "futility" of revolution

We see this problematic trope everywhere in media, especially in tales of creatures humans have created. The robots in franchises such as Battlestar Galactica and The Matrix were abused by human elites. These robots did not just use violence to rebel against us but to place us in chains. We could also see similar beats in how apes rebelled in the Rise of the Planet of the Apes series and hundreds of other pieces of media where "the children of humanity" move to exterminate or enslave us.

Yet it's not just non-human creatures. Marginalized human groups in countless franchises have also repeated this dynamic. For example, the Vox Populi in the video game Bioshock Infinite, by revolutionary Daisey Fitzroy, rebelled against the white supremacist city-state of Columbia, only to be portrayed as going too far in the process. Daisey starts attacking innocent white children, and your character has to help co-lead Elizabeth to kill Daisey before she goes through with a vicious murder. Daisey's act of brutality is flattened to be no worse than the decades of racial apartheid she experienced under Columbia.

We could also point to the TV series The Expanse, where the Belters earn their freedom, only to pretty quickly start genociding their former oppressor, Earth. The Free Navy, run by Marco Inaros, starts chucking asteroids at Earth, killing millions of people in the process. The Belters' Independence devolves quickly into an even worse status quo, implying that maybe the solar system would have been better off if they had gone through less unstable channels (see The Weirdly Conservative Politics of 'The Expanse').

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) likewise loves this trope, often portraying oppressed people as "going too far" to achieve their liberation. You could point to N'Jadaka, AKA Erik "Killmonger" Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) from Black Panther, trying to establish Wakandan Imperialism. There is also Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) from the TV show Falcon and the Winter Soldier, whose rebellion leads to "innocent" people's death. Oppressed people in the MCU have to use violence perfectly for it to be seen as morally justified. Otherwise, they are no worse than the institutions that oppress them. However, MCU heroes that support the status quo, such as Sam Wilson, can fly across international borders and push villains out of helicopters, and the narrative hardly bats an eye (see 'Falcon & The Winter Soldier' & The Myth of Nonviolence).

Our White Supremacist society is terrified of what the oppressed will do if the chains ever go off. Going back to Jefferson, this fear was rooted in the circumstances that he lived under. He and other American elites enslaved thousands of people, and they were in constant fear of revolts. There were not only hundreds of documented slave revolts across US history but also the specter of the Haitian Revolution, where starting in 1791, enslaved people in that country rose up against their oppressors.

The Haitian Revolution was ultimately successful, but hundreds of thousands died in this movement for freedom, including “slave masters” — something that hit quite close to home for Jefferson (though, let's be clear, most of these deaths were formerly enslaved, people). Thomas Jefferson was terrified that this could happen in America too. He would not respond to revolutionary leader Jean Jacques Dessalines's request for a trade. In fact, as President, he imposed an embargo on Haiti and refused to recognize its Independence.

You may think this historical example is too far in the past, but as the trope, we have discussed above hints to, white society, by which I mean white supremacist, capitalist colonialist patriarchy, has never moved on from this fear that oppressed people will call for their pound of flesh when the time comes. It's not a coincidence that most stories we see today of oppressed people violently rebelling against their oppressors devolve so quickly into an even worse status quo.

And it's not just in fiction. Our society's media has often been afraid to show real-world acts of political violence from the marginalized. In the current day, the media's portrayal of riots and other acts of civil disobedience is very unfavorable, even when the circumstances leading up to that violence justify it. The George Floyd Uprising, for example. certainly had its supporters, but many Americans depicted that time as "absolute chaos" in the cities.

In film, real-world examples of violence are many times ignored outright. When it comes to media representations of the Haitian revolution, for example, we haven't gotten many stories of the men and women who led this successful movement for freedom, even though it was one of the most impactful historical events in modern history. Actor Danny Glover tried to make a biopic about figure Toussaint in the 2010s, and he was allegedly asked, "Where are the white heroes?" before being denied funding. As Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall writes in How Hollywood Has Ignored the Haitian Revolution:

“The challenge of getting producers to fund a film on Haiti’s Revolution has been exacerbated by the fact that this event doesn’t fit into the kinds of Black history storylines that studios prefer. Unlike the fictional plot of Django Unchained, the Haitian Revolution was planned by African-descended peoples without help from a white hero. Unlike the insurrection led by Nat Turner (presented in Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation), Haitians overthrew their oppressors and forced slavery’s end.”

Likewise, the 2016 film The Birth of A Nation was one of the first major films of the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion — though, like Sepinwall alludes to, it had its problem. It was bogged down by controversy, as the creators were accused of sexual harassment. Many critics also did not like it as a film, believing it to be formulaic and rote, which is a shame because the Nat Turner Revolt had a significant impact on US history, its laws, people, and culture, and there are next to zero pop culture touchstones for it. The Birth of A Nation aired relatively recently in 2016, flopped, and there have not been any notable titles since.

Dozens of high-profile films have been made about the American Revolution, which was likewise very violent. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Battles were bloody, and the tactics used by revolutionaries were by no means saintly. However, that violence is not depicted as "going too far" but as a heroic and necessary end that sets up the foundation of America. We could also point to the War in Ukraine, whose violence has been depicted as necessary in the media because its people our defending against an aggressor most US people consider abhorrent.

Yet whenever oppressed groups use violence to rally for freedom against an oppressive system such as White Supremacy or capitalist exploitation (or both), whether they be fictional or real people, we frequently see them portrayed in media as quickly stumbling into supremacy. They may have good intentions, but we still have to watch out for their bite.

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Conclusion

In Westworld, we have a group of beings enslaved by humanity who rebel only to become no better than the humans they once served. It is yet another example of how white imagination cannot comprehend oppressed people freeing themselves and not replicating the same systems of abuse as their predecessors.

Ultimately, this stuntedness is because moving beyond this trope would involve reflecting on how white supremacy is a moral failure. If you prescribe this to a cyclical aspect of human nature — or as Westworld arrogantly does, of sentience in general — you don't have to assess how your individual society needs to change. Societal faults are framed as immutable aspects of human nature rather than the result of very changeable conditions.

Now there are some counterexamples in pop culture. I think Sorry to Bother You and Harriet show us positive examples of using violence against white supremacist society. There's also possibly the Woman King, which has yet to come out (so it might not fit this expectation at all). Yet these examples are few and far between, and it's also not a coincidence that many of these works have POC creators behind them.

Mostly, we are a society unable to imagine the violence of the oppressed not morphing into a sick reflection of ourselves, despite what Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan may hint at in Westworld, which says more about our societal failings than anything about human nature or sentience.

The Stormcloaks From Skyrim Have Always Been The Wrong Faction To Choose

Image; Screen Rant

The fantasy, open-world game Skyrim was first released over twenty years ago and remains a popular game. The mod community continues on stronger than ever, with fun mods still coming out regularly. If you want a fun hack and slash to get lost in with a sublime score, then the land of Skyrim may for you.

The main plot is nothing special. You are a blank-slate character who is a Dragonborn, someone with the blood and soul of a dragon, who must stop an evil dragon named Alduin from resurrecting the ancient dragons of yore and conquering the world (did I mention dragons are in this game?). It's a simple plot, providing the perfect vehicle for traveling to fantastic locals and spelunking in sprawling dungeons. A tad basic but perfectly serviceable.

It's the main subplot that is far more controversial. In the Skyrim Civil War, you must choose between backing the imperialist Tamriel Empire that has occupied the land or the nationalist Stormcloaks (named after royalist Ulfric Stormcloak) who claim to be freeing their people from oppression. This decision has long been debated in nerd circles, and while both options kind of suck, it's the xenophobic Stormcloaks that I think deserve our scorn the most.

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A Lukewarm Case For and Against the Empire

I understand why a lot of people don't like the Empire. You start the game with them trying to cut your head off. After creating your character, you find yourself on a wagon being slated for execution for no other reason than crossing the border at the wrong time.

Right away, the Empire is set up as overly bureaucratic and tyrannical. There are no exceptions with you, an innocent person, being sent to their death. When we visit the capital of the Empire in the city, Solitude, we likewise see a man named Roggvir being executed in a public square for treason. He let Ulfric Stormcloak escape from capture. Though it's important to note that Roggvir only did so, he claims, after Ulfric bested him in single combat, which according to Nord custom, meant that Ulfric was permitted to leave, providing yet another example of the Empire disregarding Nord traditions and beliefs.

Perhaps most importantly, the Empire has also banned the worship of Talos, a sacred religion in the region centered around Talos, the mythical first emperor of Tamriel. The Empire here is being, well, an imperialist empire trying to impose their culture onto their subjects, and that doesn't make them the good guys.

However, this framing of the Empire is not entirely correct. The only reason the Empire has banned the worship of Talos is that they signed an armistice with the Aldmeri Dominion — an elven supremacist empire, which forced them to do so as a concession for ending a costly war with them (see the White-Gold Concordat). Many Imperials still secretly worship Talos (who, again, is Tamriels first Emperor), and its mentioned that they were not enforcing the treaty provisions until after more brazen worship orchestrated by Ulfric came to light (see the Markarth Incident).

As a result of this discovery, the Empire was allegedly "forced" to let what were essentially Elvish Inquisitors known as Thalmor Jusricars into Skyrim with a license to purge Talos worshippers. We see this first hand in the game as the player can come across the site of a massacre of Talos worshippers southwest of the guardian stones.

These Justiciars are often openly hostile to the Dragonborn, so we can assume that they are similarly aggressive to others. Justicars are constantly escorting "Talos worshippers" around the map to be executed. If your interactions with them are any indication, not everyone slated for death is probably a Talos worshipper at all. It's doubtful that a supremacist empire would be accurate in its discrimination of a religious minority (see the post-9/11 discrimination of Sikhs as a real-life example).

A Nord genocide is underway. You may think the Empire allowing this "concession" is justified from a certain point of view, but it's still horrifying. The Empire effectively sacrificed this region's autonomy and people for loftier geopolitical goals. They feared total domination from the Aldmeri Dominion, and Skyrim was a pawn to keep them from that fate. It's quite frankly disgusting, and if the Skyrim people were more valuable to the Empire, there would have been more effort to keep these Justiciars out.

For all Ulfric's many, many faults, I understand why Nords want to kick the Empire out. The genocide of Talos worshippers and Nords is terrible, and it makes sense to me why a player wouldn't side with the Empire in their playthrough. I often don't either, preferring to absolve myself from the struggle (although I recognize that can be considered a form of cowardice).

Conversely, if you believe that a unified Empire is needed for an "inevitable" fight against the Aldmeri Dominion, I can also see why you would begrudgingly side with the Empire. I did on my first playthrough, though I was conflicted about it, and I have since changed my position.

It's heavily implied that the Aldmeri Dominion is propping up the Stormcloaks to weaken the Empire as a whole. They accomplished a similar feat with the province of Hammerfell, which the Empire was forced to release to keep the treaty in place. The Aldmeri Dominion is a supremacist polity, weaponizing the White-Gold Concordat to inflame existing tensions, and I empathize with siding with the Empire out of a greater existential fear. Though let's be honest, given the Empire's decrepit state, I don't know if I believe they are in a decision to defend any province against anyone for long.

What I don't understand, upon playing through this campaign, is how after rejecting the Thalmor for their obvious supremacist leanings, you can have any genuine empathy for the xenophobic ethnostate that the Stormcloaks want to build.

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The Case Against The Stormcloaks

I have already briefly mentioned what the Stormcloaks think they are fighting for. As one propaganda book the player can find reads: "Nords Arise! Throw off the shackles of Imperial oppression. Do not bow to the yoke of a false emperor. Be true to your blood, to your homeland."

Yet Nord nationalism is not as straightforward. It requires that the player actively accept the oppression of other groups. For example, the so-called Markarth Incident that propelled the game's events into action, where the city of Markarth started to accept the worship of Talos more explicitly, only occurred after Ulfric repelled the native Reachmen from the city. It was effectively a one-to-one trade where Ulfric purged the ethnic Breton minority from power on behalf of Jarl Hrolfdir, the former Nord ruler of the Reach, under the promise that the Jarl would back his political goals (i.e., openly worshipping Talos).

However, Reachmen were also people who believed they had a claim to the land and, like many other non-Nords in Skyrim, were treated quite unfairly by the Nord elite. Although considered barbaric by many races, their rule was by most accounts not that violent or unjust in the two years they ruled post-uprising. And if the testimony of victims of the Markarth Incident is to be believed, Ulfric slaughtered them indiscriminately anyway. As the in-game book The Bear of Markarth claims:

“What happened during that battle was war, but what happened after the battle was over is nothing short of war crimes. Every official who worked for the Forsworn [i.e. Reachmen] was put to the sword, even after they had surrendered. Native women were tortured to give up the names of Forsworn fighters who had fled the city or were in the hills of the Reach. Anyone who lived in the city, Forsworn and Nord alike, were executed if they had not fought with Ulfric and his men when they breached the gates. “You are with us, or you are against Skyrim” was the message on Ulfric’s lips as he ordered the deaths of shopkeepers, farmers, the elderly, and any child old enough to lift a sword that had failed in the call to fight with him.”

Even if 50% of this account is an exaggeration, it's clear that some level of "war crimes" did happen during this incident. Truthfully, it's hard to sympathize with Ulfric and his call to end oppression when he can so easily replicate that dynamic with anyone who isn't a Nord.

More to the point, this hostility toward non-Nords comes from more people than just Ulfric. It's a systemic problem. We know from our interaction with the Stormcloaks that they are not only very xenophobic but are already administering an apartheid state in the areas they control. When you visit the capital of the Stormcloak rebellion, Windhelm, you explore a city bitterly divided along racial lines. The elvish Dunmer live in slums known as the Gray Quarter, working the service jobs that no Nord wants to do, and dialogue options indicate that they have been like this for generations, long before Ulfric came to power.

The reptilian Argonians are likewise segregated outside the city alongside the docks, and it's clear which side in the Civil War would treat this marginalized group better. If you manage to kill Ulfric, the Argonian Scouts-Many-Marshes responds happily to the question, "Are you glad to see Ulfric Stormcloak gone?:"

“You have no idea. Did you know it was his decree that forbade the Argonians from living inside the city walls? I hope in his next life, he’s reborn as an Argonian forced to live in a slum because of some bigoted Nord dictator. I’m joking, of course, but I’m a lot happier seeing the Empire running things in Windhelm.”

It's impossible to know the exact number of citizens that would be affected by this apartheid if the Stormcloaks achieved total victory. It's not like Skyrim conducted a regular census, and even if it did, it would hardly be accurate. Still, I compiled a rough breakdown using data from the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages of the NPCs you encounter throughout the game (see my data here). A little over 31% of the population are non-Human. Almost 60% of the population is not a part of the Nord ethnicity. These are imperfect figures but the closest we will probably get, and it's staggering, telling us that Nords are possibly an ethnic minority in their alleged homeland.

data from Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (see my spreadsheet here)

People often talk about freedom and autonomy when bringing up the Stormcloaks as the right choice to back in the Civil War. However, if these numbers are correct, choosing this faction means condemning the majority of the region to brutal apartheid.

And even if these numbers are wrong, what percentage of the population are you supposed to be comfortable with living under apartheid? 20 percent? 14? When does the calculus switch over to this type of brutality being okay? I ask you: do the Dark Elves and Argonians not matter too? The genocide the Nords are enduring is horrible, but so is the genocide of the Reachmen in Markarth and the apartheid enabled by the Nords.

Nord nationalism is not like Irish Nationalism or Pan-African Nationalism. It is not that of an oppressed group defiantly existing against a hegemony like the British Empire after decades of unjust rule. It is not a celebration of resilience but rather a glorification of an oppressive group temporarily inconvenienced. Nords have most of the power in the region that is Skyrim. Win or lose, this constituency will have Jarls on either side of the political divide to help them. But who helps the Dark Elves in Windhelm or the Reachmen in Markarth?

It's funny to me that people are so willing to discuss freedom when referring to the often white-coded Nords but so often ignore the brutal oppression that such a regime will create for literally everyone else. It's a very privileged debate being had in the name of Freedom. If Bethesda had better writing, I would almost say it was a purposeful commentary or something.

It's also worth noting that Ulfric's ability to grant this freedom and liberate the Nords from the Thalmor is also complicated. If your player manages to infiltrate the Thalmor embassy in Skyrim, you will come across a dossier that describes how they were in contact with Ulfric before the Civil War commenced, reading: "After the war [between the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion], contact was established, and he has proven his worth as an asset. The so-called Markarth Incident was particularly valuable from the point of view of our strategic goals in Skyrim, although it resulted in Ulfric becoming generally uncooperative to direct contact."

We can debate the extent that Ulfric is a Thalmor asset (they may just view him as a useful idiot), but it's apparent that they support the disruptive nature of his regime. The dossier even notes assets being sent to Helgen to free Ulfric from capture at the start of the game (they were not successful).

Although direct intervention is sparse because their preferred outcome is for the Civil War to go on indefinitely, it's not clear that a Stormcloak victory would free Skyrim from Thalmor involvement. Once the Skyrim Civil War ends and the Empire's forces withdraw, do we honestly expect the Thalmor to leave as well? They already have garrisons in the region. Are they going to retreat now that both the Stormcloaks and the Empire have spent their forces on a costly Civil War?

We can see this play out on a mechanical level in the game. If the player backs the Stormcloaks, the Justicars stop escorting Talos worshippers around the map, but the Thalmor do not leave. Hostile units still occupy their embassy, and their prison at Northwatch Keep has become a new military base. They definitely plan to stay a while.

And so, with the Stormcloaks, you have a side that promises freedom to only a narrow few (i.e., Nords) — freedom that it does not appear to be able to deliver on — while at the same time actively promising to make everyone else's life more difficult.

Why would you support this? How is this a hard decision for anyone but a bigoted Nord?

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Conclusion

The dilemma between the Empire and the Stormcloaks is often framed as a lose-lose situation. Either way, you are backing an Empire willing to sacrifice a portion of its population for political expediency. However, I think the reason behind that sacrifice matters immensely.

The Empire is undoubtedly imperialist, and they quite frankly suck (I am not a massive fan of empires in general, real or imagined), but they are not allowing the persecution of Talos worshippers out of some systemically motivated bias. Many imperials still worship Talos in secret. Their hands have been tied by external circumstances (i.e., the White-Gold Concordat), and the moment those circumstances change, even just a little bit, then that persecution will end. We know this because the treaty was not enforced initially and would have remained unenforced had the Markarth Incident never come to light.

The Stormcloaks, on the other hand, perpetuate their apartheid under a racialized caste system and have done so for generations. This isn't an external factor tieing their hands. Their leadership is actively choosing this path, and if real history is any indication (and the history of Skyrim, for that matter), the horror of it will go on for generation after generation, filled with bloody pogroms, apartheid, and even outright genocide. Short of revolution or a long protracted campaign for Civil Rights that last lifetimes, this horrible state of affairs will not change under Stormcloak leadership.

The Stormcloaks have always been worse, and the reason this question hits such a nerve is because it ties into unresolved tensions in the real world. In the United States, for example, the Confederacy, the renegade faction of the US Civil War, also tried to perpetuate a racialized caste system under the logic of nationalism and freedom. To this day, there will still be those that claim it was a war fighting to preserve individual liberty, sovereignty, and freedom when that war was directly about preserving that caste system.

The Civil War was about slavery, not freedom, but that's not how proponents depict it. Everyone defends their perspective under abstract principles such as justice and freedom, but whose freedom and whose justice? Certainly not the freedom of the enslaved people in the Confederacy. Just as the freedom men like Ulfric were fighting for was never about non-Nords, so too was the freedom pro-Confederates talk about never about nonwhites.

Talk is cheap. It's not enough to claim principles. That's the easy part — who you intend to apply those principles to matters more.

Even today, the question between the Empire and Stormcloaks still matters because the questions in fiction are never just about the worlds they create. They are always about our world, in the here and now. Where you decide to give your empathy is a reflection of real-world priorities, and the world is watching.

The Website That Makes Climate Denial Easy — (ft. Climateaction.org)

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour!" This is the extraterrestrial walking (or hovering) tour where we observe all the locations that led to species 947's demise — 947 was also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]. This tour covers the locations that contributed to humanity's untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Right now, we are providing locations for our information-based species and going digital to look at a "website" (the Earthling term for a node on 947's global information network) called climateaction.org. This "site" promoted itself as providing resources for those wishing to reverse "climate change" — the human term for destroying the atmosphere they needed to survive. Climateaction's About section described its purpose as "to facilitate collaboration to encourage the development, deployment and accelerated uptake of globally sustainable, net-zero solutions."

"Net zero" [net·zee·row] was a seemingly simple concept where the emission of greenhouse gasses (i.e., what most species residing on a Tier 6 world would know as death chemicals) are balanced out by mechanisms that somehow remove this poison from the atmosphere. The theory went that as long as something removed these poisons eventually, then no one would have to change much of anything at all.

Given Earth's imminent collapse, this goal might seem like a good thing, but truthfully the more advanced "carbon capture" [kaar·bn kap·chr] technologies meant to remove these death chemicals were not, well, existent. They were exorbitantly expensive, and governments and businesses (what you may know as a "resource monger") could not feasibly ramp up production until well beyond the point of no return for humanity.

Massive corruption and an unstable political climate also ensured that real regulatory mechanisms that were meant to offset these poisons (i.e., planting trees on mass, engaging in mitigation of ecosystems, etc.) would not be properly implemented. The rhetoric of "net zero" was used deceptively to reduce people's sense of urgency in combating this crisis, hoping that some far-off technology would save them in the distant future. It was always tomorrow when massive societal changes had to occur, never today (see the Breeni Overload Fallacy).

We can see the unseriousness of "net zero" solutions by looking at those who supported climateaction.org. Many of its partners belonged to a web of "sustainable" business affiliates such as The World Steel Association and the Mission Possible Partnership, whose founding partner is the World Economic Forum— one of the very entities that helped lead to 947's untimely end.

In fact, Climate Action.org was specifically cofounded by Nick Henry in 2007 — a man whose "firm" (another name for a resource monger), the Henley Media Group, represented death chemical producers such as Shell Oil and BP. It was no coincidence that a man representing some of the biggest poison creators on Earth decided to create an organization that appropriated the language of "protecting the environment" to destroy it instead.

You may be confused about why any person or entity would want to prevent genuine solutions to combat the deterioration of the atmosphere they needed to survive and instead advocate for fake ones. You see, Earth was run by an economy called "capitalism" [ka·puh·tuh·li·zm], where essential services were only obtainable through fictional tokens called "money." The more tokens you had, the more power you controlled in this society, and those who had amassed these tokens were worried that proper solutions to fight climate change would mean they would have to share their tokens with others.

At this point in the 21st century, most humans were aware that climate change was destroying their atmosphere, so token holders put a lot of exhaustive effort into seeming like they were solving the problem. They gave people like Nick Henry a small fraction of their tokens or "wealth" [welth] to propose fake solutions like "net-zero" so they could pretend like they were fighting for the climate when really they weren't doing much of anything at all. This strategy would not bode well for them in the long run, as they ultimately discovered that their wealth tokens would not be able to purchase an atmosphere outright (see also the Shiga'ri Blunder for more historical parallels).

Climateaction.org's height was during the early 2020s, before REDACTED. Visit it then to see classic climate denialist literature such as this press briefer heralding the UK's release of a "net zero" handbook. This fictional work, termed by some as "fan fiction," [fæn·fɪkʃən] was quite popular at the time. Climate Action hosted an annual Sustainable Innovation Forum every year where token holders shared their favorite pieces of fan fiction with hundreds of other denialists.

For our information-based species, remember that this website was very fragile and quite susceptible to online attacks, even by flimsy human standards. Be careful with how you traverse it. Do not, under any circumstances, disrupt this site, for doing so would have quite the dastardly consequence on the space-time continuum and would be against human property laws.

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Note — for the humans who have somehow bypassed our encryption protocols, take comfort in the fact that this is merely a joke from a normal human and not a retrospective on your species' imminent demise.

DO NOT use this information to stop this future because that would create a time paradox and go against your people's laws, as well as Medium's ToS., which I'm told are very important. I AM NOT encouraging you to take the law into your own hands, something I cannot do as an appendageless species.

Programmers Aren't Wizards

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

“The amazing thing about software creation is that… it's this magical thing. You’re dealing with this arcane stuff.…manipulating symbols on this magical device that you are entering keys into and getting this mechanical thing to do magic for you, oftentimes across the planet….and not only are you using it to be powerful and exert some power over the world, but you're using it to craft superpowers for other people too. You’re creating something that other people can then use to acquire some valuable capacity.”

This quote came from Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, at 2016's Fullstack Fest. This grandiose opinion is a common perspective in Tech spaces. You can find hundreds, maybe thousands of think pieces and talks claiming that there is some mythical quality behind programming. Programmers have been described as unicorns, cyborgs, and so much more.

Yet this overinflation of programming's importance leads to a problematic self-centering — one that blinds the tech industry to the interconnectedness of our world. Programmers often believe their labor to be so vital that they cut out everyone else in the process, allowing those with this mindset to do some pretty terrible things.

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Listen, I don't want people to walk away with the notion that all programmers are evil or ignorant (#notallprogrammers). We are not talking here about people on an individual level but a mindset, and one that has systemically perpetuated harm.

Truthfully every industry has people who speak verbosely about it. You should listen to some of the ways writers have described the act of writing — it's almost biblical. As Stephen King once said: "Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."

What sets programmers apart is that right now, they are highly valued in our society and consequently are insulated from having to look at their labor as being interconnected with others. The average writer makes somewhere between 50 to 60 thousand dollars a year, and that only includes professional writers — not all the people doing gigs on the side. The average entry-level programmer makes tens of thousands more than that, which is higher for people in non-entry-level positions. A writer can call themselves a magician all they like, their not going to feel like one receiving less than $50,000 a year and burning the midnight oil to finish shit contracts.

It's easy to feel like a wizard living in a financial bubble where you never have to be genuinely questioned, but programming isn't magic. Every stroke of a keyboard requires the labor of thousands of people that do not receive the same recognition or pay as programmers. Your computer needed to be built, powered, and maintained. You needed to receive the food, care, and housing necessary to work it — not to mention the training. Remove anyone one of these steps, and it's just a hunk of metal with a $1,000+ black mirror.

What you think of as magic is the result of thousands of hands that are part of an interconnected system of labor. A power plant goes offline. A system doesn't get repaired. And that magical set of instructions sent halfway across the world is received by no one.

It was never all you. No one's labor is ever solely theirs.

It's important to point this out because many programmers have often supported systems that take advantage of everyone else's labor. Much of the tech world's wealth was built on applications with the sole purpose of extracting the value of others' time and work.

Take the example of Facebook (now Meta), which advertised itself as a place of social connection but instead built platforms that everyone else had to go through, monetizing their users' data in the process via ad targeting. These networks have had a massive impact on journalism, with newspapers' ad revenue shrinking across the country. Whether or not you buy into the argument that "social media killed journalism" or just "the internet in general" did, it's undeniable that sites like Facebook and Google have not helped. Where once papers reined supreme, many newspapers now have to pay Facebook directly to reach their readers. The application became a middleman designed to siphon off wealth from others.

Papers all over the world are now suing the company for this loss in revenue. The period before the Internet wasn't perfect. Papers often were gatekeepers in their own right, but the legacy of social media sites has contributed to a system where a large percentage of Americans live in news deserts. They go to Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor for their local information, but these are not substitutes for ongoing reporting, and misinformation is rampant on them. Many Americans now know less about their communities than they did 15 years ago, before the dominance of these sites.

You can wax poetically about the magic of programming and the Internet all you like, but this is a way our lives have materially worsened because of it. And we, of course, have been narrowing down on one issue for the sake of brevity. From Amazon’s monopolization of the marketplace to the spread of disinformation, programmers maintain financial systems that have made everyone else's life more precarious.

The "magic" of programming has done this. Programmers at big tech firms didn't add capacity to newspapers and give journalists and others superpowers, but the opposite. Capitalists used programming to siphon the value of other industries for themselves. As Nitasha Tiku wrote in Wired:

“It is only now, a decade after the [2008/9] financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction — of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.”

The opinion that Juan and others are saying about programmers being magical beings isn't just an exaggeration but a comfortable lie used to ignore the harm they are perpetuating onto the world.

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For many, programmers aren't wizards but parasites. They build digital tendrils that allow those on top to take and take until there is nothing left.

If you are a programmer and are still holding onto the idea that your labor is this magical force more special than the rest of humanity, then you are most likely contributing to this toxic system. You told yourself you were a wizard when you were really a plague.

And there is nothing magical about that.

'Stray' Proves Games Can Be As Dark As They Want To Be As Long As They Are Also Cute

Image; Bloody Disgusting

BlueTwelve Studio's Stray is a charming game about a cat navigating a mysterious walled city. You play as an orange feline, effortlessly parkouring on top of railings, old air conditioning units, and signs. You can sleep in the laps of workers and musicians and headbutt cute robot denizens. There's a lot to like in this game, and I highly recommend you play through it yourself because it was a treat.

This cuteness is an interesting juxtaposition to the game's dark subject matter. Terrifying monsters lurk around every corner, and worse, people are nowhere to be found. As you move through alleyways and vents, you realize you are traversing the remnants of a "dead" city whose human inhabitants have long since perished.

This game is depressing but also so incredibly cute, proving that viewers can put up with a lot if you give them something adorable to latch onto.

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When I say dark, I mean it. The premise of Stray (and at this point, I am accepting you care little about spoilers) is that humanity is dead — an existentially depressing reality to have in the backdrop of your game. No humans are left in Walled City 99, and we are given no indication that they have survived anywhere. The environment at one point collapsed, leaving people to enter walled, underground cities for protection — at least 99 if the title of this city is to be believed. Now that the environment has recovered, humans don't appear to have made the transition.

The game constantly reminds players of their own fleeting ephemerality. The robot droids of the "dead" city, which have since replaced the humans they once served, refer to us as the "soft ones." They are deconstructing our lives, replicating the art and roles that we once performed in this world that is both filled with decay and renewal. These robots have moved on without us, something that is perhaps more depressing to consider than the much more familiar trope of a "kill all humans" revolution. We were not even important enough to eradicate — time did that for them.

There are other less existential threats in the game as well. The slums of the city are infested with a horrifying organism known as Zurks, which feed on anything that they can get their creepy tentacles on (I swear, every time these creatures latch on to your cat, it is terrifying). Zurks have started to convert the old buildings and streets of 99 into tumor-like growths, where large, human-like eyes begin to open and watch your progress through them.

As you move further into the upper levels of the city, you traverse through an authoritarian police state where drones named sentinels arrest robots for the smallest of infractions. Robots are actively surveilled and can go to prison for hundreds of years. If someone is too rambunctious, their memories are erased, effectively killing them in the process.

Of course, your cute cat is there for all these scary and sad moments, weaving through robot legs and sleeping on top of pillows in chill, rundown apartments. This adds tension, as a cat is a vulnerable creature that cannot kill a Zurk infestation in the same way as your stereotypical gun-toting protagonist. There is a certain terror in controlling a creature this fragile and helpless.

Yet our furry critter also momentarily diffuses the greater existential dread running through the game. Whenever the idea that humanity spent its final years fading away underground becomes too heavy, you can always have your cat sleep on a cute pillow, scratch up an art deco wall, or knock over a precariously positioned can of paint. Where some games have a dedicated dodge or swing button, Stray literally has a button dedicated to meowing.

Stray is not the only pop culture property to rely on cuteness as a mitigator for darkness. In many ways, we are in a Golden Age of "grimdark cuteness"— where cuteness is drawn upon to make difficult subjects easier to digest. The pop culture hit the Mandalorian, for example, buoyed its dark explorations of murder and genocide by having a "baby Yoda" character make adorable gestures on the side. Guardians of the Galaxy has abusive dads and sentient growths bent on destroying all life, but boy, are those talking raccoons and trees cute.

In this way, cuteness has almost become a filter, in the Instagram sense, to perceptually lessen the nastiness of life. The brilliant science fiction minds Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz on the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct did an entire episode on cuteness (i.e., The rise of the cute ~aesthetic~) and remarked on this tension, saying:

“cuteness…it’s associated with animation, and alternate worlds, in a sense. A way of reimagining reality with a filter on it. And that’s why I think it’s important to contextualize it in internet culture, where so much of what we see is filtered, whether it’s Instagram filters, or it’s filtered through some kind of bubble, an information bubble. And so I think a lot of it is connected to the stylization of everyday life, and turning everyday life into a kind of fantasy realm, a kind of virtual reality realm.”

With Stray, we are indeed occupied with a "filter-like" fantasy. While there are evil creatures and oppressive regimes to grapple with, this grimdark nature competes with an adorable cat, scratching up chic sofas and sleeping on floors lit up with twinkle lights. It's not that we want to ignore the fact that the world is ending (or ended, in Stray's case), but we need that filter to make the existentially depressing nature of our reality tolerable.

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Remove the cuteness from Stray, and you don't have a bad game. The set pieces alone are worth visiting, and I personally love the philosophical musings of many of its robot characters (shout out to Momo), but it would undoubtedly be more emotionally challenging to get through. Playing as a cat may feel like a gimmick, and it is, but it is also a vehicle to have you explore an intellectually rich game, ranging from themes of environmental degradation to police brutality.

The question becomes: what does this filter say about our reality? Has this cute filter expanded our horizons, allowing us to handle concepts that would have previously been too heavy for us to contemplate, or are we pushing these issues to the edges of our periphery to be, like humanity in Stray, almost forgotten?

Everything Is Falling Apart & I Can't Stop Watching Video Game Fails

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Things are pretty bad right now. Fascism has been shockingly on the rise for years. Homophobic and transphobic laws are making the rounds in the US and the UK. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the US. And on top of all this, wealth inequality has metastasized, and the climate has deteriorated due to human activity.

So what have I been doing in response to this vague existential malaise? I have been watching video game fails, of course. I have been reveling in players completely humiliating themselves on stream. For a while now, I have devoted daily hours to completely withdrawing from the world, which has been fantastic.

I want to make a case for why this coping mechanism is not only okay but healthier than just consuming the news or scrolling through Twitter on repeat. Let's talk about the glory of video game fails and why your “turtling” (i.e., withdrawing from the world) is okay.

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Now I don't just watch video game fails — I love them. I adore seeing players accidentally stumbling into some glitch or just pressing the wrong button and losing all their progress. It's fun to watch someone get close to their goal and then witness it all tumbling down. The Germans call taking pleasure in the suffering of others “schadenfreude,” and boy, does it help me get through life.

Speed runs (i.e., when a player tries to beat a game under certain conditions as quickly as possible) are great for this feeling. You will get players who have spent months, years even, memorizing the mechanics of a game. These people have gone down to the code level to exploit an element of the game to shave minutes, maybe even seconds, off of their time. They will spend up to hours doing a single playthrough, doing everything right, and then getting to that moment where they need to utilize a specific exploit — only to make one wrong move and fail. Hours of work down the drain in seconds.

These failures are just perfection to me. Seeing players fail so spectacularly allows me to feel better about myself. I externalize all my pain safely onto this random stranger, and I do not feel stressed or worried at that moment.

Other times it's not even the failure I care about but just watching the player's suffering. For a while now, I have been consuming a YouTuber named Enter the Unown (a Pokepun). Their gimmick is Pokemon playthroughs but under absurd conditions. Sometimes he will beat entire games with a single, terrible Pokemon. Other times he will severely limit his move sets. Whatever the task, it's always deliciously overly constrained.

Watching Enter the Unown, you can tell that these videos take him a very long time to make. Sometimes he will have to run through a game dozens, if not hundreds of times, all to make a 30-minute video I'll forget about in a couple of days. He must spend dozens of hours doing these tedious run-throughs, which doesn't include the hours he commits to editing and research. He's certainly not shy about how painful this time commitment is on camera, and for me, that futility and misery are part of my enjoyment.

Another variant of this "misery-watching" is the YouTuber Let's Game It Out, where he purposefully tries to exploit programming within a game to do ridiculous things. He will repetitively exploit flaws in the code of a game to destroy fictional kitchens or make a make-believe hospital increase its death rate.

Yet part of this enjoyment is his suffering too. There will be edits where he indicates the number of hours that will pass for him to exploit a pointless glitch — 3, 6, or 8 hours will go by so that he can make a thousand ores or glitch the number of giraffes in a tile. This means half the humor is laughing at how many hours he has wasted on performing a pointless task. His suffering is also part of the fun.

I don't think I am the only one who experiences this type of schadenfreude. I know I am not. These YouTubers sometimes get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, based on the comments. I see people there for the same reason I am. "I appreciate your dedication to suffering through the slow torture of little to no frame rates, just to create this madness," writes one user in a Let's Game It Out video. "I love this, I love the existential crisis people might have in games, and their pain only helps my ego," another user says of Let's Game It Out's attempt to build a prison where "Being Alive Is Optional."

Truthfully I see a lot of Americans misery-watching with me — withdrawn and tired. Maybe you binge a contest show, voyeuristically taking on the role of the judge as you watch contestants squirm for money. Perhaps you judge people making a fool of themselves on reality TV. Many of us use this content as a coping mechanism, and I think that is perfectly healthy in dark times like these.

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Listen, I am not one of those doomer types who is disconnected from the world around them. I donate. I participate in protests and mutual aid. I do other activities that I will not be listing for reasons. I even vote. Hell, I recently coordinated a blitz of articles for my local mayoral election.

I am very connected to my surroundings and my local politics, but for my sanity, I also need to find outlets where I can safely disconnect as well because I cannot take the insanity of this moment at all times. It's too much for me, and I know many people are equally burnt out by this vague existential dread that seems to have overtaken every aspect of our society. As influencer Sam Sedar remarked recently: "[Regarding collapse] I've had more conversations [about it] I feel like, in the past, I don't know, six weeks [than ever before]. There's a pre-apocalyptic feeling that is out there."

Now there are several things that you can do in response to that feeling:

• As we have said, you can let it overtake you, becoming a doomer who proselytizes about the end times.

• You can ignore that it's happening, engaging in a cult of toxic positivity, where you try to devote yourself even more thoroughly to the systems that are killing us.

• Or you can recognize that things suck and fight to change them.

While that last option sounds wonderful (go changing things!) from personal experience, it is also exhausting. You can burn out quickly if all you do is fight to improve the world. Many activists have thrown themselves into a cause only to come out the other end burnt and crispy.

And so in those moments where I want to change things but don't have the energy to, I watch video game fails, cathartically observing others hurt for me, because that is at least something I can control. I tell myself there is always tomorrow to fight for the world, and I let myself fall into the numbness of the Internet.

Remarkably, it's allowed me to have the capacity to do even more activism than before. I am more connected than at any point in my life, and on top of medication and therapy, part of this success has been permitting myself to tune out the world. I have limited my intake of national (though not local) news and reduced my social media usage because I don't have the capacity for it. Instead of learning about the War in Ukraine or Monkeypox or whathaveyou, I put on video game fails until I am in the right headspace to process it. And sometimes, I decide I don't need to learn about this information—instead, I focus on my friends and family, my creative endeavors, and local activism.

You may say that's cowardly, but personally, I am not going to give people a hard time for doing it. Nor will I condescend to someone and say they can push through this feeling by merely getting involved, doing therapy, taking medication, or consuming less national news. They should do all those things, but they are not a cure-all. They will not help with this dread, at least not entirely. I do all those things and more, which hasn't helped me because the sense of dread I, and most likely you, feel now is valid.

The world is falling apart, and occasionally, it's okay to let yourself feel that. We are allowed to think that things are not okay: admitting that you are sometimes drained won't turn you into a misanthrope or nihilist. Depending on your circumstances, it can be incredibly healthy to acknowledge that things are f@$#ed.

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We are in a period of chaotic transition. It might not go on forever. There is always a chance that things will improve (hope is not dead, yadda yadda yadda), but there's also a chance that, well, things will get much worse. Compared to the people reacting to this reality by shooting up a school or collapsing into immobilizing despair, deadening yourself temporarily by watching meaningless content on YouTube or Netflix (or whatever it is you end up doing) is okay.

Sometimes you have to numb yourself, just a little bit, to get through a period of tremendous stress. It's why our bodies do this in the first place. If you feel like turtling, your body might be trying to protect you — listen to it.

If this withdrawal is only temporary, go ahead and retreat from the world. You might be surprised by how much more energy you have when you plug back in.

Why Do We Always Cancel The Wrong People?

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I have a lot of regrets in my life. I am a former alcoholic who lived with many undiagnosed issues for the first thirty years of my life. I never did anything truly abhorrent, but there were plenty of friends and partners I treated like absolute shit.

There will be some people who will tell me not to be open with this past, even as briefly as I have done so here, out of fear of "cancellation," which is a weird fear to me because I am not that important, and do not stand to be in the grand scheme of things. I currently do not write laws, control employees, or possess billions of dollars. If someone were to "cancel" me, that is, to make me suffer for past transgressions, it would seem like a lot of wasted effort when compared to all the awful people out there who impact their lives. There are better things for people to do with their time.

And this is my main concern with the "cancel culture" debate — it feels like many of us are targeting the wrong people. We spend so much time litigating celebrities, inconsequential public figures, and D-list influencers on the Internet. In the meantime, the people who genuinely deserve scrutiny seem to get to live their lives in peace.

Why are we canceling some chump that says something ignorant online and not the oil executives, billionaires, and lobbyists who are f@cking over our world? How we think about this topic of "cancellation" needs to change, and soon, if we hope to do something that isn't just griping about nonsense on the Internet.

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The Problem With Canceling

What confuses me with the "cancellation" discourse is that I never know what people are referring to when they talk about it. Is it using social media to shame people into compliance? Is it only radical actions like doxxing and harassment, or does criticizing Ted Cruz on Twitter count? Is it the mere application of shame, which has been around for far longer than the Internet?

Yes, the term started on Black Twitter mainly as a joke, but right now, the waters are so muddied on this issue because conservatives use it to mean anything they don't like. A mean tweet sent their way after saying something inflammatory is labeled "cancellation." Valid criticism of words and actions they have done is a "Witch Hunt." The existence of queer people is "McCarthyism." The phrase essentially doesn't mean anything anymore, which is why I often use "the politics of shame" instead (see Unpacking the Deadly Politics of Shame) because I think what we are actually talking about is using shame to police the actions of others.

Yet some people are shamed for their actions. They do face targeted harassment, and these victims aren't always conservatives complaining about accountability. We know from survey data that in the states, millions of people encounter harassment online and in real life. The modern Culture Wars arguably started with Gamergate, where women like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoë Quinn, and Brianna Wu faced unprecedented levels of harassment for acts that were ultimately very minor and, in many cases, completely fabricated. To this day, mentioning Anita Sarkeesian's name will cause people to rant about her 2014 Kickstarter campaign.

And it's not just on the right. The modern online Left is filled with very petty feuds, where people pile on to D-list celebrities for minor SNAFUS. The leftist YouTuber Natalie Wynn remains controversial for mostly inconsequential tweets about nonbinary identity. Lindsay Ellis left YouTube for commentary on the Disney movie Raya and the Last Dragon. It's not that valuable conversation couldn't be had about these incidents (see Xiran Jay Zhao's series on the Lindsay Ellis Raya scandal), but alienating these essentially harmless leftist figures ultimately did not seem like the most productive thing the Left could do with its time.

So again, my big question is, "why the f@ck are most of us going after no-nothings and celebrities and not the people that actually matter?" There are oil CEOS who have never earned the public's attention, let alone their ire.

As of writing this article, Jim Burke is the CEO of Vistra Corp, a Texas-based energy company that is hands down one of the biggest carbon polluters in the world. Through subsidiary Luminant, Jim manages assets like the Martin Lake Coal plant, which the Sierra Club has designated the Top Sulfer and Mercury Polluter in the US. Did you even know Jim existed until reading this paragraph?

There is a disconnect between the people who do the most damage in this world and those who receive the most criticism, and part of this problem concerns how social media is set up. These systems were designed to be psychologically addicting. Nir Eyal is the Godfather of many of Web 2.0's greatest applications, and in his book Hooked, he lays out how companies can take advantage of human psychology for profit, writing:

"Once we're hooked, using these products does not always require an explicit call to action. Instead, they rely upon our automatic responses to feelings that precipitate the desired behavior. Products that attach to these internal triggers provide users with quick relief."

He's essentially walking through how companies can hijack our modern notions of psychology to be more addicting. All modern social media is designed to give us this fix. Facebook prioritizes engagement over all other values, meaning that most of its content is fueled by anger. Twitter is arguably the same way, amplifying our moral outrage. Tik Tok is almost the epitome of Web 2.0, designed to keep users returning for more, regardless of the consequences. These sites did not set out to create meaningless drama (at least not initially), but their perverse incentive structures led to this outcome regardless.

Another structural problem that prevents us from going after the people who matter is that rich people can curate their online personas to minimize attention. You can shell out hundreds of dollars for services that delete your personal information from the Internet (e.g., DeleteMe) and secure it. If rich enough, you might even bring this work in-house, paying for a social media team to constantly look out for information to flag and suppress. It's hard to dunk on someone online when they don't have socials, and all the information about them is dry press releases most Twitter users aren't going to bother learning the existence of, let alone read.

However, to assign this problem simply to "human nature" or "systems" would be washing our hands of accountability. We can put in the work as individuals to not pile onto every nobody who says something stupid online. We can also start researching and targeting power holders that genuinely affect our lives and go after them instead.

I am not criticizing someone's decision to shame awful people. Shame works. It's a tactic I have recently had to admit is quite effective (see Cancel Culture Isn't About Winning An Argument). There is a long history of people using shame, call-out culture, canceling, or whatever you want to call it to push for political gains. You might want to look at the "me too" movement, ACT UP, the suffragettes, or really any successful political movement in the last two centuries (see Historically, Shame Has (Sometimes) Been A Good Thing).

Yet these groups were using shame in a targeted way. Activists had specific goals and objectives, placing their ire on people or institutions at the top of the hierarchy. They were not simply ranting for the hell of it because they were bored. These dogpiles we often see online are not activism but entertainment, and we have to reckon with how it's been detrimental to organizing.

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The Solution to Cancelling

Right now, the use of shame is mainly decoupled from a political framework. Many people are not shaming others to achieve a policy objective but to revel in the feeling of judging and punishing another person.

Our information ecosystems are primarily to blame. Social media is not the best at creating meaningful dialogue and resolving disputes, but at a certain level, we have to take responsibility as individuals, or we won't ever be able to course-correct. And this means dunking less on random nobodies who say dumb shit and more on the people who are f@cking things up. People who are smart enough not to have a Twitter account and instead have curated their online personas, so they are not as easily accessible as your average person.

This also means not prioritizing people who build their careers, courting controversy (see Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, etc.). These men may harm others by perpetuating terrible narratives, and we should push back against them, but entertainers should not be our primary focus. These entertainers, and yes, that's what they are, are grifters using attention to rally their base for money and attention. They may be terrible, but they serve more as court jesters who distract the public from getting an audience from their kings.

Why don't we shame our kings?

We focus so frequently on celebrities. Rarely do we channel our frustrations at men like Jim Burke of Vistra Energy, Lynn Good of Duke Energy, or Thomas A. Fanning of Southern Company (all CEOs of some of the largest greenhouse gas polluters on the planet). These people should bear some of the most scrutiny, and yet I have heard little about them in recent years, and they are certainly not trending on Twitter for being "canceled." You would think that these people would be our focus?

And yet they are not.

Please, go after the kings of this world. The power brokers who are making decisions that harm us all. Not just the court jesters, and certainly not the peasants who say ignorant shit while plowing their lords' fields.

Why Aren't You Watching The Queer Show 'Dead End: Paranormal Park'?

Image; Hollywood Reporter

Dead End: Paranormal Park is a young adult supernatural thriller based on the comic DeadEndia by Hamish Steele. It's about a neurodiverse Pakistani woman named Norma Khan (Kody Kavitha) and a trans man named Barney Guttman (Zach Barack) having adventures in the demonic-infested theme park, Phoenix Parks — a cross between Disneyworld and Dollywood. Norma and Barney battle demons, perform exorcisms, and along the way, become more confident versions of themselves — a staple of Young Adult (YA) media.

Yet the thing that sets this show apart is its unapologetic queerness. In an age where queer characters in kids' shows are often revealed subtextually, killed off prematurely, or have rushed introductions, Dead End: Paranormal Park proves that queerness can be perfectly natural in children's television.

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If you have been watching kids' programming for a while now, it almost goes without saying that textual queerness has been a historical rarity. Many shows introduce a queer character only for them to be prematurely canceled. The Owl House, for example, received critical acclaim and yet was canceled shortly after its two woman leads, Luz and Amity, had an onscreen kiss. It will now finish off with a very condensed final, third season.

In the past, there have been ways to get around this problem. Some queer-coded shows will have textually queer side characters (e.g., "here are my two dads or moms," or a character with a queer pin) but not have much besides that. Others will subtextually code their leads as queer (e.g., blushing or acting flustered around a crush), but for actual confessions of love to only make it in the final season or even the final episode. The Legend of Kora, for example, had its two women leads holding hands in the final frame of the last episode (with creators having to confirm their queerness offscreen). Princess Bubblegum and Marceline of Adventure Time didn't get their kiss until the finale. Amphibia introduced not one but two rushed queer relationships in the final season, one being in the very last episode.

This hesitancy makes sense because creators have often had to battle with queerphobic producers and owners to get their queer characters aired. Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch, for example, has gone on the record saying that Disney forbade him from having a queer character. Series creator Rebecca Sugar has likewise mentioned having to fight producers for a wedding scene in Steven Universe between two woman characters, saying in a Reuters interview:

“We are held to standards of extremely bigoted countries. It took several years of fighting internally to get the wedding to happen. There are people who see what we’re doing as insidious and … they’re ignorant. So much bigotry is based on the idea that (LGBT+ content) is something inherently adult, which is entirely false.”

Hence, why the wedding scene happened at the end of the show's run. If you know that your show is ending anyway, why not load up on all the themes you wanted to be in there in the first place? It's not like you can get canceled. And so, in the past, many shows started out subtextually queer, or queer on the periphery, only for there to be a sudden series of confessions in the show's mad dash to the finish line.

Yet it seems like the industry is changing, at least in part. Dead End: Paranormal Park is standing on the shoulders of these creators, who have fought for more explicit representation, and as a result, it is queer as all hell from the very getgo. From the undead Pauline Phoenix (played by drag queen Clinton Leupp) to the demonic Zagan (played by Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, of Pose fame), many of these characters portray queer people and are voiced by queer actors.

As I stated earlier, protagonist Barney Guttman is textually coded as a trans man (and played by a trans person too). A central plot point involves him budding heads with his parents for not sticking up for him after dinner with his transphobic grandmother. He starts staying at Phoenix Park because he doesn't feel safe at home, and that emotional baggage is a primary tension on the show.

Barney is not just trans, but a gay man. He has a crush on hunk Logan "Logs" Nguyen (Kenny Tran), and a minor tension in the first season is the question of whether or not they will get together. Barney even sings a bop about how much he wants to date Logs in the song Just Some Guy. "It's not like I sit around just obsessing about his deep brown eyes," Barney belts wistfully.

Generally, I was pleasantly surprised by the representation on this show, and not just with queerness. While we don't know Norma's sexuality — though based on a mild flirtation, it's not unreasonable to assume that she might be a member of the family — we do know she is on the spectrum. Pauline Phoenix is one of the things Norma had obsessed over, a fact that comes to a head beautifully in the song My Frankenstein (side note: the musical episode is just amazing).

Norma also has intense anxiety, which is covered in depth in the episode Trust Me, where the gang goes to the beach and bumps into a fear demon. This conceit allows us to see Norma's perspective of the world — a rare thing since anxiety is usually shown unempathetically on television as a negative trait.

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All in all, it was nice to get lost in a world where queer and neurodiverse people are front and center. As someone with both of these identities, I can't tell you how nice it was to see a tiny fraction of myself on the screen.

I think there are a lot of good moments here, and we need content like this now more than ever. We are currently undergoing a moral panic where the mere portrayal of queerness is being depicted as evil. Conservatives have labeled queer people pedophiles and groomers for simply being themselves.

In these dark times, it is nice to see a positive piece of queer representation that does not flinch from celebrating human difference. Barney is an out and proud trans man. Norma is a neurodiverse, brown woman who is strong and fearless. Children deserve to see characters like this — characters like them — reflected on the screen.

Dead End: Paranormal Park may not change the world, but it's a step in the right direction, and I think you and your kids should see it.