‘Glass Onion’ Shows Us The Power Of Breaking Shit

Image; CNBC

The sequel to Knives Out is about detective Benoit Blanc tagging along to a rich billionaire’s murder mystery party on a private Grecian island. This game quickly turns quite deadly as murder breaks out. Benoit and a surprise companion must snoop around this Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg-inspired estate to find the real culprit.

The first Knives Out was a deconstruction of the rich, specifically the Thrombey family, as they turned on their father’s nurse after she inherited the family fortune. Their vastly differing political affiliations didn’t matter to them as much as preserving their status and, most importantly, their wealth.

The sequel is more about how the wealthy use their privilege to bully people into compliance and construct alternate realities that delude them into thinking they are superior in every way. The only way to stop people like that, Glass Onion seems to imply, is to tear their world down or to stay out of f@cking way of the people who will.

The idiocy of the rich

I am not going to dive into who the murderer(s) and victim(s) are because it's unnecessary for the point of this article. Rather what I want to focus on is how billionaire Miles Bron is, in the words of detective Benoit Blanc, an idiot. A running gag throughout the film is that he says things the wrong way and goes on nonsensical tirades. There is a minor plot point where Miles Bron’s friends spend minutes of screen time solving a puzzle box he has commissioned, tasks Benoit Blanc later classifies as children’s puzzles, only for one no-nonsense character to solve the problem in several seconds by smashing the box with a hammer.

Miles Bron is not nearly as intelligent as he thinks he is, but because he has so much wealth, everyone puts up with him. All of his “friends” are positioned as having a motive to literally kill him, and the only reason they never challenge his many, many insanities directly is that he is financially supporting them. Multiple characters refer to Bron as a “golden teat.”

Bron appears to make his wealth, not due to any outward brilliance, but because he uses the money and influence he already has to bully and coerce others. He pushes his cofounder out of the company she came up with (something reminiscent of the story of Elon Musk overshadowing Tesla’s real founders, Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning) and uses his parasitic ties to get people to perjure themselves in court to cover it up.

The text makes it clear that there is no way to really fight a person like this through the avenues of the law because he has manipulated the system to give him an unfair advantage. He has literally bought off a Senator to put into production a dangerous fuel source that will make every house that uses it into a potential Hindenburg explosion. As Blanc describes of someone's hesitancy to approach Miles through public channels: “Miles’s machine of lawyers and power could burn her through sheer dumb force.”

The solution that Glass Onion proposes is to walk away. “…this is where my jurisdiction ends,” Benoit Blanc tells a character who Miles has just denied justice. “I have to answer to the police, to the courts. The system. There is nothing I can do but maybe offer you courage.” Blanc then hands her a drink and leaves her in the room so that she can seek whatever justice she wishes to take.

Mile's entourage of grifters also perceives themselves as spectators to this character's rage. They find the ensuing violence she commits initially cathartic, but as the destruction increases, they are horrified, too invested in Miles Bron’s “golden teat” to see it destroyed. They are performative onlookers, pretending like they are cheering on from the sidelines when really they will try to preserve their meal ticket. It’s only after Miles Bron’s reputation has no chance of recovery that they turn on him, on to the next golden teat.

It's Blanc who is the only one to truly walk away, and more than that, before leaving, he hands this character a chunk of Miles Bron’s dangerous new fuel source, “Klear,” so that she can use it to blow up his hideaway pad, the so-named Glass Onion. Since Miles Bron has controversially placed the real Mona Lisa (on loan from the French government) in that building, the scandal will allegedly ruin him. “Your fuel of the future just barbecued the world’s most famous painting, dumbass,” she mocks gleefully.

And it wouldn't have happened if this character hadn't worked outside the system and broke shit. We so often have stories highlighting the need to work within the system to create positive social change. Texts like Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Black Panther plead for revolutionary figures to do things “the right way.” Glass Onion makes no illusions that this mindset works. There are two correct positions: you either get messy, or you stay the f@ck out of the way of the people who will.

The glory of breaking shit

There is something cathartic in watching Blanc passively witness the violence of the Glass Onion from the sidelines. In the end, he realized his limitations — his inability to hold people like Bron accountable — and he got out of the way of the person willing to do the dirty, violent, necessary work of toppling an unjust person’s power.

The Brons of the world may not be able to be defeated in courts, but they are vulnerable. Billionaires are flesh and blood like everyone else, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that they are not invincible demigods. Oftentimes, they are idiots, so used to never being challenged that they leave themselves open in ways that they shouldn’t.

The moment you stop playing by their rules, Glass Onion suggests, then their whole house of cards (or, in this case, glass) comes crashing down.

My List For The Worst Media of 2022

Photo by Diego González on Unsplash

While not every piece of media produced this year can shine, some content was just plain terrible. These are the pieces that caused me to truly regret my time watching them. I am talking about the clunkers, the disappointments, and the ones that caused my blood to boil.

Below you will find my list of some of the worst pieces this year (see my best-of list here). And because I am the definitive person with opinions, this list is 100% objective and unimpeachable.

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age is about several upper-class families in Manhattan. We have the ingenue Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), who has just moved in with her aunts from Pennsylvania after losing everything in the wake of her father’s death; Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a young, ambitious Black woman trying to build her own way in the world of writing, and lastly, the up-and-coming Russell family who is New Money that has just moved to an upscale Manhattan mansion on Fifth Avenue. What follows is a dramatic story of three “outsiders” trying to succeed in a world of High Society.

What I wrote:

“In the end, we are not criticizing the rich as a class as much as a particular type of rich. The stodgy old money that creates a subculture based on exclusion are out, and the meritocratic rich such as the Russells and Peggy Scott, are in.

This perspective relies on a meritocratic myth about how capitalism, for all its faults, really does let those who work hard enough get to the top. George Russell was able to earn his wealth. Bertha was able to break into High Society. Peggy found herself working for a newspaper that respected her talent. Anyone can make it to the top. “Maybe we will be [invited] one day,” a servant says of possibly getting an invite to Russell’s party in the hazy future. “After all, this is America.”

Yet this fantasy is and has never been true. Those with money often get it by taking advantage of deep inequities. Something that was true with Vanderbilt in the 1800s and is true of men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today. The good “philanthropy” they end up doing with that money often serves to justify their own position in the hierarchy and, in some cases, can solidify or even worsen existing inequities (see Winners Take All).

We don’t need tone-deaf narratives reveling in the horrors of the Gilded Age and portraying them as cute fun. We need to see works that portray the rich of this time through the lens of the horrifying, regressive things they did to the poor. Or otherwise, we are just getting capitalist fan fiction that is all aesthetic and no substance.”

The Batman

Director Matt Reeves’s gritty The Batman involves a newish Bruce Wayne, AKA Batman (played by Robert Pattinson), battling against the criminal elements of Gotham City while simultaneously trying to stop a serial killer named the Riddler (Paul Dano). This Batman is a darker, arguably mentally unwell person, saying lines like “I am vengeance” to random street thugs and criminals. The trauma of his parent’s death is still fresh in his mind, and he has not had the years of training to smooth over the rage bubbling below his black, military-grade spandex.

What I wrote:

Recently the YouTuber Kay and Skittles, in their video The Batman: Critiquing Power Fantasy, described this film as a “liberal power fantasy” — one where just getting the right people to lead the system will result in change.

Despite the aesthetic of change, this narrative is conservative in that it doesn’t want anything to change. Although Batman intends to abandon his gritty Punisher-style aesthetic at the end of the film, he’s still clinging to a worldview of stopping criminals and looters. One that ultimately values preserving property rights over people’s lives — and that’s not changing the system. It’s merely the same status quo with a nicer finish.

Matt Reeves came in wanting to tell a story that departed from the conventions of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, but he ended up making a narrative that changed the aesthetic of the Batman while keeping everything else in place. He may want Batman to be a symbol of hope, but he continues to be a guardian of the status quo.

The Pentaverate

What if a secret organization of five men ruled the world? And what if they were nice? Such is the premise of Mike Myer’s new comedy Netflix series, The Pentaverate (2022) — the show that makes fun of some of pop culture’s most popular conspiracy theories.

The series follows sweet-talking journalist Ken Scarborough (Mike Myers) as he tries to infiltrate The Pentaverate to get his old job back at CACA News Toronto. Ken works with colleague Reilly Clayton (Lydia West) and conspiracy theorist Anthony Lansdowne (also played by Myers) to complete this mission. Along the way, he realizes that this all-powerful organization isn’t so bad and works to stop nefarious forces from attempting to destroy it.

What I wrote:

“Ultimately, the Pentaverate feels like a wasted opportunity. The idea of taking conspiracy theories seriously is a fun concept (see People of Earth for a show that has done this better), but we needed it to be less messy. The Pentaverate had to approach its story of a secretive organization thoughtfully, even if it was only doing that for laughs.

I appreciate where this show was trying to take us. Most organizations in the US suffer from a lack of diversity, and championing more diversity in the workplace is something I unequivocally support. It’s the idea that we make the world better by diversifying those on top that I object to.

Some organizations out there don’t need more diversity. They simply need to die — and that includes everything from business-backed trade associations to secretive conspiracies trying to rule the world.”

What Is A Woman?

“What is a Woman? is a documentary produced by a conservative commentator attempting to tackle gender, but just ends up perpetuating conspiracy theories. The “documentary” (a word I use loosely) is from the mind of conservative transphobe Matt Welsh, a man who has made a history of trolling LGBTQ+ people. The documentary is not very good, and its points have been debunked thoroughly. It was also made in a very duplicitous manner, where a fake trans organization was set up to lure activists and medical professionals into interviews.

What I wrote:

“This documentary only has niche merit in the sociological sense of trying to understand how a hate movement thinks. It should not be thought of as meaningfully trying to deconstruct the concept of gender. Learning gender from What is a Woman? is akin to learning about geopolitics from a QAnon adherent or consent from the Catholic Church. It’s just not a good idea.

If you genuinely want to learn about gender, consider reading bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody, Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, or Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. I also highly recommend YouTuber Lily Alexandre’s What Are Women? if you want to watch something instead. All of these put more effort into understanding this concept than Matt Welshnic has in this documentary.

At the end of the day, that’s what Matt Welsh wants — for you to be triggered. He wants you to give him an angry reaction that he can mine for content and possibly even use to feed into his persecution complex. I am asking you not to give him all of that power. He’s not worth it.”

West World Season 4

The HBO reboot of the 1973 movie Westworld about a group of robots in a theme park rising up against their human oppressors, 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.

What I wrote:

“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.”

She-Hulk: Attorney At Law

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is about a lawyer who just so happens to have the powers of a Hulk, representing super-powered clients. 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 but with women in a professional setting, and just as importantly, with how the MCU has framed its women characters.

What I wrote:

“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.”

Conclusion

And now you objectively know the worst content of 2022, and not just a list of content I arbitrarily strung together at the last minute for SEO purposes. I put some data into a computer, and it spat these out. It’s science.

If you want to stay in the loop with other excellent media takes, you know where to find me.

Our Obsession with Westeros (and Royalty in General) Is Unhealthy

Image; Watchers on the Wall

I am a huge fantasy fan. I have watched all three Lord of the Rings movies back to back with accompanying meals (yes, even elevensies). I am religiously gobbling up fantasy content such as the Rings of Power, Sandman, and, yes, even the new Game of Thrones spinoff, The House of The Dragon (see my take on the latter here).

People love George R.R. Martin's writing because of its alleged realism (and yes, I recognize that historians have knocked it for everything from its misunderstanding of the feudal system to orientalism). I have enjoyed these two shows, but their fixation with kings and queens has always made me uncomfortable, and not because of some historical nitpick about how Geoffrey's tyranny could be more realistic.

I am conflicted about these shows because I understand that from a class perspective, I am closer to a serf than the nobles who take front and center in the race for the Iron Throne (you probably are too). Rich people didn’t give a damn about us in the past, or the dream-like vision of the past these shows seek to depict, and they don't give a damn about us now.

Yet we watch them obsessively, both fictionally and in the real world, which says something about our empathy for the working class and the rich people who abuse them.

A Royal Obsession

Like in the real world, the nobles in Westeros don't give one fuck about the peasants they rule over. This point is made explicitly in the finale of Game of Thrones, where Maester Samwell Tarly brings up the fact that maybe a democracy would be better than a hereditary monarchy, and all the nobles laugh in his face. This scene tells us that the idea of ordinary people having any say in governance is laughable for these characters. They compare peasants to dogs and horses.

This disregard for the common people in this series hits home in the first season of the sequel, where the character Rhaenys Targaryen uses her dragon to briefly interrupt the coronation scene of Aegon II Targaryen. The dragon explodes through the floor of the Dragonpit, killing dozens of unnamed peasants in the process. She moves to the head of the proceedings to char the newly crowned king with dragon fire, and his mother, Alicent Hightower, throws herself in front of them. This action causes Rhaenys to spare the lives of all the nobles there—putting their lives above those peasants she just crushed underneath her dragon’s feet.

And again, this is not surprising because nobles are depicted as more important—not just in the logic of this universe (of course, everyday people matter less in a feudal monarchy), but in who these shows decide to center narratively. Ordinary people are not the focus of these properties—the few people to care about disrupting this system are villanized (RIP Daenerys) or killed without much fanfare.

This is, first and foremost, a show about petty nobles feuding over petty things as they disregard the lives they consider beneath them, and we love it. The House of the Dragons pilot was reportedly one of the largest premieres in the network's history, and Game of Thrones was an international viewing sensation. It's not simply these shows either, but a reflection of a more significant trend. Watch the exploits of nobles in The Crown, Young Royals, Bridgerton, Reign, The Tudors, and many, many more. That's also not to forget that Disney, one of the biggest media companies in the world, has made its career selling princess narratives to young children.

We could see this reflected in real life too. Millions of people tuned in to watch the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II — a person who represented a system that exploited countries all around the world in ways just as cruel as Rhaenys crushing peasants beneath her dragon's feet. This is the woman who, among many other things, awarded officers involved in the Bloody Sunday massacre, facilitated the expulsion of citizens from the Chagos Archipelago, and, all in all, represented the head of an imperialist empire that murdered and displaced countless people around the globe. Queen Elizabeth II was and has never been "one of the good guys," yet millions adored her and watched on till even after her end.

In general, we are willing to disregard both our social standing (most of us are not royalty, after all) as well as the cruelty royals have inflicted on members of our class so that we can empathize with them on our screens. It's puzzling, and if I were to wager a guess, this displaced empathy says something fundamental about how many of us see ourselves. To paraphrase a quote that is itself a rehash of a John Steinbeck article: "…the poor in America see themselves not as an exploited working-class but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." This meme has always rung true to me, but I would go one step further and say that many Americans see themselves not as temporarily embarrassed rich people but as future Kings and Queens in the making.

Our culture is obsessed with replicating the habits of royals. Many of the deeply ingrained traditions we have come from the nobility. Fashion trends like high heels and white wedding dresses were inspired by royals, with the latter popularized by the wedding of Queen Victoria. She forwent her traditional coronation robes when marrying Prince Albert on Feb. 10, 1840, and the Western press ate it up, causing many people to want to emulate what quickly became the standard for wedding apparel.

You can look at other things, too, like the emergence of Western restaurants. Though others had popped up outside the West hundreds of years earlier, in Europe, we can trace our history to Paris, France. The word comes from restaurer, meaning to "restore or refresh." Soup vendors advertised themselves as what we would think of today as health-food shops selling bouillon, a "restorative broth" meant to have “delicate” ingredients so consumers could replicate the eating habits of the aristocracy. There were a lot of reasons restaurants caught on (the flexibility of time and choice being a big one), but this emulation of the wealthy and not eating like a commoner was a massive part of the initial appeal.

Even our concept of modern property law comes from wanting to mimic royalty. An approximation of the famous saying "a man's house is his castle" was first popularized (though not first spoken) by Sir Edward Coke in an English ruling that limited a Sheriff's ability to enter a landowner's home. The logic was that property owners had certain rights that prevented people and even the state from entering their homes without permission. Coke went so far as to say that property owners were permitted to kill thieves and round up friends and neighbors to use "defensive" violence against intruders. Metaphorically, this logic was similar to the medieval concept of how a king might rally his bannermen to protect his lands. And as we can see with modern “Stand Your Ground” laws in America, it's a sentiment that has never really died.

Rich monarchs do something, and then rather than push against that standard, we common people try to replicate it, or more accurately, we consume it. The rich use economies of scale to sell us a cheap emulation of the lifestyle enjoyed by monarchs of old: we can wear our hair and clothes as the wealthy do, get waited on in restaurants so we can experience what it's like to be serviced, if only for an hour or two; buy our little castles and pretend that we control more than we do; and grasp at a lifestyle that is unobtainable in all but imitation.

Again, this applies to the media we vicariously live through. Most of us may not have mansions or servants, but we can gawk at the splendor of royalty and the rich on TV. There is a particular perverse pleasure in watching the rich have everything and giving them our empathy, imagining, however briefly, that we are not peasants but royalty like them.

A noble conclusion

This obsession with empathizing with monarchs and other members of nobility reflects a perverted sense of values in our culture. This is not to say that we must disregard the fantasy or medieval setting in media altogether, nor should we demonize authors’ merely responding to market trends. Still, we do need more class consciousness in our stories.

Most of us are primed to want to be royalty — defenders of our own imagined little fiefdoms — but as I briefly alluded to, most royals were awful. We shouldn't want to emulate that. Their wealth was the product of war and exploitation, and if we are honest with ourselves, that's how it still works among the upper echelons of our society. People get crushed under the feet of their oppressors (or, in the case of Westeros, the feet of their lord's dragon), and we shouldn't lose sight of where we are in that dynamic.

We must stop placing royalty at the center because, my friend, we are not in that position, never will be, and should never want to be. We are not Daenerys. Not Arya. Not Sansa. We are not princesses or princes. In this story, we call life; most of us are closer to a peasant being crushed than to a future king or queen in the making. And once most of us internalize this fact, our ability to stomach the glamorizations of the rich and powerful will probably wane.

We don't need to see the same story again and again about how “hard” it is to be on the top. I want to see the bottom. I want narratives focusing on peasants and commoners alongside nobles, showing how the latter's decisions negatively impact the former (so no, Downton Abbey doesn't count). I want to watch farmers having to relocate after another pointless war that a selfish monarch has started. I want tales of peasant revolts. I want epics focused on wealthy aristocrats trying to union-bust our protagonist's factory.

Once we start seeing these stories enter the mainstream, I hope that more will realize how unhealthy and antiquated our obsession with royalty has become. We don't have to say goodbye to Westeros, but a change in perspective is sorely needed, and maybe a little breaking of the wheel too.

Spoilers Can Be A Moral Good, Actually

Photo by janilson furtado on Unsplash

I have always been skeptical of spoiler warnings because it seems to be more about preserving an individual's "social capital" (i.e., securing benefits from social relationships and networks) than about art. The fact that many people don't care about spoiling old media or non-plot-related parts like its score or special effects makes this whole concept suspicious. If going into a piece of media "raw" is the best way to view it, why should its age matter? Why even have trailers or promotional material?

You can see how this concept can be debunked rather quickly. While there are probably some edge cases, like spoiling the punchline to a joke before it's completed or revealing the culprit to a whodunnit someone is reading or watching, in most cases, spoiler alerts seem more about popularity. At best, they are about allowing people to be part of an in-group, and, at worst, they protect companies from criticism. As I write in Spoiler Alerts Need To Die:

“When companies use spoiler paranoia to avoid meaningful criticism, it ultimately ends up hurting everyone. The audience member is hurt because they become a passive consumer unable to engage with a work critically, and are forced to consume a lot of terrible ideas for the sake of “fairness.” Content creators are hurt because they fail to learn why audience members don’t like their media.”

While I don't disagree with many of that piece's points, over the years, I have developed a more nuanced take on this issue. Spoiler alerts aren't just bad for the sake of "art," but actually obscure, actively predatory behavior.

Conversely, spoiling things can be good for our mental health.

The Case Against Spoilers

I am not going to rehash the origins of spoiler warnings because I did that pretty extensively in my previous essay (read it here), but I want to stress that spoiler alerts are relatively new. Humans have not always demanded that we refuse to discuss plot elements for media. You can point to a review of the first Star Wars movie where the reviewer "spoils" the entire ending, and no one at the time cared. We have had a societal shift in the past six decades over how we review media, and it's worth criticizing if that new norm is even good.

Again, I want to clarify that there are some cases where you should respect people's media-viewing habits. If someone is in the middle of consuming media — literally mid-consuming it — and you decide to interject yourself into that activity to reveal the ending, you are being intrusive, and I am not interested in defending that behavior.

However, I am worried about what we do outside those moments. Word of mouth is still and will probably always be one of the most effective ways a piece of media gets promoted. You tell your friends — either in person or online — that you love some new show, and then they tell their friends, and pretty soon, it can be a hit.

Yet if we can't talk about plot elements and how they resonate with specific themes, then that opinion becomes flattened to a simplistic input: a piece of media is good, bad, or okay. We can't tell a person we like a movie because of, for example, its anti-capitalist ending or dislike it because it centers the male gaze on acts of rape. Those conversations get gatekept out of the conversation so that the only people that can have nuanced opinions about contemporary media are consumers.

From the perspective of viewing media as art, you can see how spoiler alerts might be stifling to a critic like myself, but it's worse than that. Spoiler alerts trap us into unhealthy forms of behavior.

It's a cliche at this point to talk about how things like our phones have become psychologically addicting, often being compared to the "new cigarettes." Americans consume more media than they did several decades ago (13 hours and 11 minutes a day on average), and it's not the best for us. There is ample evidence that excessive smartphone usage negatively impacts our mental health.

Yet just focusing on media addiction through an individualist lens ignore the fact that this pattern of behavior was a concerted design choice by most modern tech companies. I often reference Nir Eyal's Hooked when talking about this concept. This is considered the "bible" on how applications can take advantage of human psychology to develop internal triggers (i.e., ingrained patterns of behavior) that propel us to use a particular product or feature. As he writes in Hooked:

“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.”

Nir Eyal was an alumnus of B.J. Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab based out of Stanford. It was not uncommon for Fogg’s students (such as Kevin Systrom — co-founder of Instagram) to use these findings in their emergent Internet ventures, many of which have become the foundation of web 2.0. These companies aimed to create Pavlovian triggers among their users, all with the aim to gobble up our attention.

Netflix drew upon this philosophy of digital design to make sure that its site creates these internal triggers. Its website is organized so that you are constantly looking for new media. You log in, and content almost starts playing immediately, all to the point where hours can pass before you notice anything.

This applies to the content it's airing too. The shows that Netflix makes are often structured to take advantage of this understanding of psychology. Hooks are established at the end of an episode, not to advance the narrative or to serve the plot but to get you to keep watching. As

Dominic Vaiana

writes in Better Marketing:

“Netflix has turned the art of cliffhangers into a science. The entertainment powerhouse has amassed a global audience of religious-like loyalty — and made a good chunk of change in the process — largely in part because it keeps loose ends untied and resolutions withheld. It takes every ounce of viewers’ willpower to press stop after each episode — and that is exactly how the folks at Netflix want it.”

Most modern content streamers have adopted the Netflix model for their viewers to "binge" content, and it's unhealthy. One reason we watch so much television now is that, because of these triggers, our brains often desire to know what happens next. We become hooked, even if, retrospectively, we come to not like the show very much.

This is why in recent years, one of the most significant ways to stop yourself from being hooked on a show that you consider mediocre is to either pause midway through (something that requires willpower in limited supply) or to spoil it for yourself. Many people will look at the synopsis of a product on Wikipedia to learn the ending, to stop the show from hijacking the part of our brain that craves completion. Some will even actively seek out spoilers to see if they want to watch a show in the first place.

This trend is why I don't have much respect for "spoiler warnings." It's not just about "the sanctity of art" but the much larger issue of deciding to insulate a predatory model from criticism.

Conclusion

Again, I am not telling you to interject yourself into someones viewing experience. You don't need to parachute into someone's home and tell them that what they are watching is terrible — media consumption is and will always be subjective — but when we refuse to talk about media at all, we risk people falling headfirst into this predatory system.

Sites like Netflix, Disney+, and more are designed to keep you hooked. They have departments devoted to bypassing your willpower and hijacking your psychology. These companies make content that saps away your time and attention at the expense of your mental health, and the only natural antidote to it is spoilers. We often have to spoil something in order to get the willpower to stop watching or reading it, and I believe that says something alarming about the state of content.

When, through the course of normal conversation, we reveal to a person who hasn't watched something that a show doesn't end satisfactorily or that it's half-baked for reason X or Y — that it was designed to have as little substance as possible while keeping them constantly engaged— we effectively are giving them back their time. What would have taken them hours to realize was a waste of effort becomes a choice. They are given the knowledge to see if they still want to make that decision.

Now, if you still want to avoid consuming any critical analysis of a piece of content before watching or reading it, that is your right, and I will respect it. I have no desire to dictate what you should or should not consume. Like what you want to like.

However, question why this habit of watching media "raw" developed for you and what people and entities it benefits.

We Might Be Headed For a Great American Famine

Daniel Kraft via Wikimedia Commons

Many Americans are currently hungry. Organizations like the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimate that the number of food-insecure Americans is in the tens of millions. We are a culture comfortable with a large percentage of our population being hungry, with even more on the cusp of that reality.

What terrifies me is what happens when this already tenuous system is shaken to its core. We might like to believe that our society would adjust to prevent starvation on a mass scale, but I worry that the United States has become too slow and recalcitrant to do that and, as a result, that a Great American Famine might be on its way.

An Irish aside

My favorite piece of satire of all time is Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal,” where he suggests that Irish people should cook their babies as a food source so that they can be of "use," writing: "…instead of [a child] being a charge upon their parents, or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall, on the contrary, contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing of many thousands." This piece mocked how the British treated the Irish in 1729— over a century before the Irish Potato Famine in the mid-1840s through the early 1850s.

Many of us have heard of this famine, but what's not discussed as much (in non-Irish circles) is that this mass starvation of about one million deaths or greater was more about politics than a rogue pathogen. Other countries were impacted by the blight, which we now know as Phytophthora infestans (something still quite a nuisance to modern crops), but because Ireland was a colonial holding of the British, much of their agriculture was being exported to support British industries, and interests.

This disruption was so impactful to the Irish people because the potato was a high-caloric crop that made up a large portion of the average Irish person’s diet. The British seized much of the land and diverted its yields to imperial interests, not letting Irish people eat the food they produced for those overseas. When this stress hit the Irish agriculture system, these imperial landholders were unwilling to change course so that the native inhabitants could eat. They valued British pounds over Irish lives, and that deluded logic killed many in what some have labeled a genocide. In the words of Quinnipiac University Professor Christine Kinealy via Paste Magazine:

“Following the appearance of the potato blight, a number of people in Ireland requested the government to close the Irish ports to keep food inside the country. [The British] refused to do so on the grounds that merchants would bring food in under free market forces. Of course, this did not happen.”

We can see this critique levied not just retrospectively by academics but by critics during the era. In A Modest Proposal, Swift blames those who had stolen Irish resources as the cause of Irish destitution, cheekily writing: "I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." Swift is not subtle in who he thinks should take the blame here.

During famines, this cruel indifference has been a common trend throughout history. Academic Amartya Sen described in their seminal work “Poverty and Famines” (1981) how many famines are not about whether there is enough food but if people have access to that food, referred to as entitlements. Not everyone agrees with this theory, but when we consider the surplus of food globally, at some point down the supply chain, a market failure occurs with many of these famines. Whether we are talking about the USSR or the Bengali famine of '43, many people have died throughout history because those in power are unwilling to give up their entitlements, instead hoarding them for profit.

When I look at America, I worry that an artificial famine like this is well on its way and about to get much worse.

The state of American food insecurity

Americans hold a similar position to the Irish in the sense that much of this country is controlled by a narrow set of hands. When we look at homeownership, it's a common refrain to say that individuals own most homes, but the type of individual matters here. Over a third of American households rent. That number unsurprisingly increases for poorer Americans, who tend to be younger and more diverse and devote a significant amount of their incomes to rent. You could say their entitlement to housing is tenuous.

We can see a similar trend with farmland. While partnerships and family corporations own 110 million acres of cropland, over twice that is owned by "individuals." But again, the type of individual matters. The price of farmland has risen dramatically to thousands of dollars per acre (not the kind of investment a poor person could afford). The financial industry has rushed in to secure these assets, and now over 30% of farmland is owned by non-operators, who are landlords who rent out the land to be farmed. If you would like to read more about the history of the financialization of American farmland, I highly recommend Katy Keiffer's 2017 essay on the subject. You’ll be surprised by how little has changed.

It's not poor Americans who own this country's land — housing or farmland. It's the elite, the people who are either lucky or have the cash to burn, which makes the question of entitlements significant. Many tend to think of the Irish Potato Famine (and really all famines) as a switch, where all of a sudden, the Irish people were swamped with starvation and death, but poverty was rampant leading up to it. That was, in essence, the problem: they couldn't change their diet because other products were being exported out of the country. Colonial and capitalistic exploitation made them vulnerable to disruption in their food supply.

Likewise, when it comes to food security, many Americans are highly vulnerable. Wealth inequality is a frequent talking point, with the top 1% owning trillions more in wealth than the poorest 50%, but what is not mentioned enough is how many Americans are hungry and starving as a result. The USDA estimates that around 13.5 million households (roughly 34 million Americans) are food insecure, which according to their 2021 executive report, means that: "their ability to acquire adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources." They do not have entitlements to food.

That number is worse when we look at recent survey data. According to a 2022 Pew Research poll, about a fourth of parents struggle to afford food or housing. While we are not currently in the midst of a famine (though we might be in the middle of a recession), our agricultural market does not meet the needs of at least 10 percent of all households. That's a market failure we are just fine accepting.

The American diet is not as concentrated as the Irish diet in the 1840s, but much of our caloric intake comes from meats and grains, the latter of which has a lot of soy, wheat, corn, and rice. These four crops are essential to our diets. Many Americans also get these calories from highly processed foods with lots of added sugars because these products are cheap. With so many Americans struggling to feed their households, they will choose the more affordable option.

Given that an American under caste does not have resources — i.e., the entitlements — to most types of food, only the cheap ones land-owning producers wish to afford to us, what happens when there is a disruption to our food supply?

The answer is that people go hungry. We are already experiencing that partly with the recession and the war in Ukraine, but this decade is set up for a lot of potential shocks. Water supplies in the Colorado River and the Siera Snowpack are dwindling. Crop yields threaten to lower as temperatures rise. Harmful monocropping practices open food producers up to a bunch of vulnerabilities, including blight (history is not always the most original). And all of these shocks will only be worsened by a financialized farming system that does not prioritize feeding all people.

I don't know what will ultimately disrupt American food security, but if it remains this tenuous, we are primed for starvation on a mass scale.

Conclusion

I started this article with 1840s Ireland. I want to end with 1930s America. We think of the Great Depression as a crash in the stock market in 1929. Financiers had invested people's money in risky ventures that were not secure, but it was also an issue of food insecurity. Overfarming and overgrazing, a process that began well before the stock market crash (see the less talked about recession of 1921), created a situation that devasted the American heartland. Strong winds started to blow away the soil, which is why some began to refer to it as the Dust Bowl.

This created an economic situation where there was a food shortage and, at least initially, a lack of access to the entitlements that would have allowed people to shift their eating habits. The rich at the time had hoarded a third of all wealth, and much of the poor had no savings at all: a situation that is very similar to contemporary America. Like then, I am worried that decades of bad farming and food practices, not to mention rampant wealth inequality, will catch up with our society.

Now, the 1930s were also a period of massive health changes in sanitation and medicine that, combined with the increase in the safety net that came with the New Deal, mitigated the Great Depression's impact on our mortality rates. Death rates did not appear to rise due to starvation, but that outcome was the result of policy changes that were not inevitable. Only some societies push through to help the people they lead when there are disruptions to their food systems. For every New Deal, there is an Irish Famine.

Our food systems need to change. This is a simple statement unless you represent one of the stakeholders who want to keep things as is. The good news is that the solutions to this problem are simple outside a political context. Increasing entitlements to food involve subsidizing people's food allowances, decentralizing land ownership, and localizing food production. Tasks that are relatively easy to accomplish for a species as advanced as we are.

The question is, knowing that changing nothing can lead to a famine that will claim the lives of millions, will we continue to do nothing?

The Best Media of 2022

If there's one thing I have, it's opinions. I can sometimes come across as a sourpuss, but there have been a lot of shows, movies, and games that I have loved this year. Whether we were transported to a galaxy far, far away, or a land of magic and dragons, it was a great year to sit on your ass and watch stuff.

Now being the Alex with Opinions, my opinions are, of course, the correct ones, so check out the list below to see if your preferences align with reality.

Peacemaker

Peacemaker leaves where James Gunn's 2021 The Suicide Squad left off. Christopher Smith, AKA the Peacemaker (played by John Cena), becomes part of an undercover unit trying to stop alien "Butterflies" from conquering the world. These aliens are insects that burrow into people's skulls and take them over a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

What I wrote:

“With Peacemaker, we see a window into what modern superhero shows and movies could be. Although fictional, this show doesn’t stray from the emotional reality of what America is and has always been. It does not pull punches when discussing systemic issues such as racism and capitalism.

It’s been clear for some time that Disney’s MCU is more interested in delivering a sanitized fantasy that does not challenge our larger problems, but with Peacemaker, I see a world of possibility wrapped up in an American flag and a ridiculous-looking helmet.”

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's dimension-hopping epic centers on an aimless woman named Evelyn Quan Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who runs a laundromat. Evelyn is unhappy with how her life has ended up — a life that seems to be bursting at the seams until she stumbles into a vast conspiracy about a multiversal war. As Evelyn hops between dimensions, she learns more about the sides fighting this war and how they pertain to her life and her choices, both in this dimension and in all of them at once.

What I wrote:

“There is much to enjoy about this movie. Michelle Yeoh plays the various iterations of Evelyn effortlessly. It was breathtaking to see Yeoh morph from a small business owner to a martial arts film superstar to a chef and back again. Overall, the cast of this movie does a great job selling you its multiverse premise. I loved most of the elements of this film: the direction, the editing, and the score. There was hardly a misused piece.”

Severance

The corporate dystopia Severance has been a critical darling of Apple TV+. It tells the story of a group of employees from the company Lumon who have undergone a surgery called "severance," which separates their work and life selves. Their outside selves or "outies" retain no memories of what they experience at work, and vice versa for their "innies," creating two separate people coexisting in the same body at different times.

What I wrote:

“There’s a lot to like about this series. The acting is superb, ranging from the quiet, understatedness of employee Burt Goodman (played by Christopher Walken) to the religious fervor of middle manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who worships both the company and its founding family, the Eagans. Everything from the music to the over-stylized 1980s aesthetic creates a show that places the viewer constantly on edge.

Ultimately, it’s the concept that keeps people talking. This premise is horrifying to some, but to others, it’s merely a natural conclusion of the current American workplace. “That sounds like such a good idea,” said one friend after I explained the show’s premise. “If you hate your job, wouldn’t you want to hit the skip button?”

We are so normalized to the pervasiveness of corporate culture that even satire like Severance can fly over the heads of many of us. We worship our places of work. They have become blind cults where we are willing to give our corporate owners anything they ask of us, even our minds.”

Horizon Forbidden West

The Horizon series is a fun romp set in the distant future. It's ultimately about a lot of things: a post-apocalyptic adventure where you slay robot dinosaurs with bows and arrows; a narrative about the nature of humanity and AI; a feminist tale about a kickass warrior named Aloy (voiced by Ashly Burch) that goes against over a half a century of misogynistic video game tropes.

What I wrote:

“…at this series’ core has always been a story criticizing the rich. In the first game (Horizon Zero Dawn), we learn that the reason the apocalypse even happened is that one wealthy man named Ted Faro (Lloyd Owen) recklessly experimented with nanotechnology for the military. The resulting “Faro plague” began converting all biomatter, including humans, into fuel, making life on the planet unlivable. Within 16 months, humanity had become extinct.

The cruelty of this rich man is further emphasized by the fact that he sabotages the Horizon Zero Dawn project — and the namesake of the first game — which was an effort to restart human civilization once the Faro plague succeeded in wiping out all life. He deleted the APOLLO protocol, a repository of all human knowledge, because he didn’t want future humans to know that he caused the apocalypse, rationalizing it as a kindness. Our lead Aloy exists in a hunter-gather society because of this one rich man’s ego.

We do not walk away with favorable opinions of the rich by the time the first game comes to a close, and the sequel takes this sentiment and heightens it. The rich become responsible for not only the problems of the past but also the present and future.”

Teaching A Robot To Love

This off off off Broadway musical came into being because of a fundraiser by the indie band The Doubleclicks. Teaching a Robot to Love (TARTL) is a story about a group of programmers in a company town building an AI. With themes of overthrowing capitalism, transhumanism, and queer love, this musical manages to straddle the line between not being too tragic or painful while still packing a punch, the way only a queer creator can deliver.

What I wrote:

“TARTL is excellent on many levels. For one, the characters are adorable. Singer Laser Webber did a great job writing this play with a lot of great comedic moments. We have everything from a funny slacker named Billie Pepper to the evil tech CEO Mr. Norton Norton. These may be archetypes we’ve seen before, but they are written well, with great comedic timing. Building a robot out of a human brain may sound like a horrifying plot, but coming out of the lips of standout Faun Terra (played by Jessica Reiner-Harris in the Fringe showing), they were an absolute delight.

An added benefit of being written by a queer writer is that the play manages to have a lot of diverse, queer representation. There is a lesbian romance, multiple nonbinary characters, and the central plot has a transparent trans metaphor about an AI realizing they are not in “the right body.”

At one point, the AI character MARSH sings a song titled Why Aren’t You Happy? which reflects on the feeling of not being accepted after transitioning. It was devastating in all the best ways. Lyrics like “I’m finally shaped like my mind says I should be. My parts are all fitting in the right place. Why aren’t you happy”?” brought me to tears as I reflected on my own nonbinary journey, and I am sure many queer fans will be able to relate.”

Dead End: Paranormal Park

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.

What I wrote:

“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.”

Stray

BlueTwelve Studio's Stray is a charming game about a cat navigating a mysterious walled city governed by sentient robots. 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 while simultaneously dodging deadly creatures.

What I wrote:

“…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.”

The House of The Dragon

This Westerosian prequel is set over a hundred years before The Game of Thrones show that became an international sensation, back when the Targaryen's still controlled the continent and dragons roamed the land. The House of the Dragon is about a feud between Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen and Queen Alicent Hightower and the men pushing them toward a civil war that will ravage the continent.

What I wrote:

“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.”

Andor

This show is the best piece of Star Wars content out there right now. It's a prequel to the Rogue One movie, focusing on the character Cassian Andor and the radicalization that lead him to be a central figure in the Rebel Alliance. Filled with a diverse set of characters, Andor is a genuine exploration of fascism and what it takes to resist it.

What I wrote:

“It’s hard to understate how shocked and happy I am that Andor exists. I have been banging a drum for years that Disney has been putting out programming that often appropriates the aesthetic of social change and revolution while advancing pretty regressive narratives (see my take on Black Panther and She-Hulk as examples).

Yet with Andor, we have a show that is saying something explicit about the need for direct action in fighting fascism without pulling any punches. It is an earnest text that covers a lot of ground, and like every commenter with half a brain, the fact that the Disney corporation greenlit it is shocking to me. We get a show that depicts fascism as it actually is, and that is sadly too rare in pop culture.”

Conclusion

And now you know the best content of 2022. If you want to stay in the loop with other cool media takes, you know where to find me.

What Andor Gets Wrong About Saw Gerrera

It's popular in American media, particularly media made and produced by the Disney corporation, to depict political radicals as going “too far” (see Black Panther, Falcon, and the Winter Soldier, etc.). They may have good intentions, but their methods are what the narrative often objects to. Political rebellions on TV and the Silver Screen usually strive to walk a narrow line between showing characters who fight against injustice while outwardly rejecting the methods that many real-life political revolutionaries have had to use.

This especially applies to Star Wars, which at its core, is about a rebellion fighting against an entrenched fascist empire. The portrayal of violence is inevitable, so more than most family-friendly media; this series has always needed to manage that line between being a good member of a rebellion and a bad one.

For over a decade now, the character Saw Gerrera has been the symbolic crossing of that line. His evolution through various types of media tells us something very interesting about what our society believes is acceptable rebellion and what dissident behavior it thinks should be ignored. Andor (a show I love) continues this tradition with Gerrera, and rather than focus on his temperate or tactics; it curiously roots objections against him in centrist ideology.

Saw Gerrera through the ages

There is this tendency to view properties like Star Wars through a very stifling and IP-centric lens. Since the IP of Star Wars is owned by one entity — right now, that being the Disney corporation — people will try to interpret a character like Saw Gerrera's various iterations through one cohesive lens. The truth, though, is that although Gerrera is usually portrayed as a radical who goes too far, what that "too far" is varies across time, medium, and creative direction.

In season five of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), for example, Anakin tries to push for the Jedi to use rebel cells against the Confederacy, specifically using them to overthrow the pro-Confederate Onderonian government. One of these rebels is Saw Gerrera. In a way that is very reminiscent of the post-9/11 politics of the time, the Jedi initially perceived these non-state-sanctioned rebels as bad actors. "We must not train terrorists," Obi-Wan Kenobi lectures. "How we conduct war is what distinguishes us from others." Anakin bristles at these accusations, and he and his apprentice Ahsoka Tano work to nurture leader Steela Gerrera, who is depicted as bold but also pragmatic.

Her brother Saw, however, is depicted as reckless. He isn't strategic. He eschews the soft power of propaganda and recruitment for exclusively tactical violence. "Go write a speech about it," he quips when Steela, who at this point is the appointed leader of this cell, rejects his military advice. He then arrogantly goes off to do a solo mission that threatens the entire rebellion.

We see another perspective in 2014's Star Wars: Rebels. The protagonist Ezra Bridger and his companions interact with him on the planet of Geonosis, investigating why the Empire has genocided the entire planet. He's so primed with baggage from the Clone Wars that he cannot handle the current situation with either clarity or compassion. He derogatorily calls a Geonosian survivor a bug and automatically suspects them of foul play.

However, the criticism here is not just that his PTSD from the war prevents him from being objective but that he's using the Empire's tactics of oppression and genocide. "Our enemy shows no mercy. Neither can we," he lectures, underscoring that he has some authoritarian impulses of his own. Gerrera threatens to destroy the last egg of a Geonosian queen, even when such action risks the survivability of their entire race.

His motivations are somewhat different in 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It's no longer a question of strategy or inexperience but his temperament being too unstable. While Mon Mothma lectures that Saw is distrusted because of his extremism and militancy, this is nonsense. The rebellion also does tactics people would consider excessive, especially those carried out by Cassian Andor, who shoots down a character for being unable to climb a wall to escape a Storm Trooper patrol. Andor is assigned to assassinate the protagonist's father (who is being forced to build the Death Star) and only stops because of a last-minute crisis of conscience, not because his superiors changed their mind.

The viewer sees that Gerrera is problematic, not really because of his methods, but because he's unhinged. Every interaction with Gerrera is of someone whose paranoia borders on madness. A defector comes to him with vital information, and he is so used to deceptions that he doesn't believe him. Gerrera represents here a revolutionary figure so used to fighting those both within his coalition, and without that, he cannot relationship build.

In the show, Bad Batch (2021), Saw Gerrera isn't portrayed as bad at all but as one of the first to offer resistance against the new Galactic Empire. He is shown evacuating civilians out of the reach of Imperial influence, trying to get our protagonists to fight against fascism. "If we give up now," he says in the pilot, "everything we fought for, everyone we lost, will have been for nothing." His stubbornness here is not a detriment but a positive — something that allows him to keep fighting when very few are.

Saw Gerrera in Andor

Now we need to talk about Andor (2022) because we get an entirely different perspective altogether, which is interesting given that the showrunner, Tony Gilroy, also helped to write Rogue One. We interact with Gerrera through the lens of Luthen Rael, a rebel spymaster trying to get him to join up with other rebellious factions. Gerrera refuses as a matter of principle, saying:

“Kreegyr’s a separatist. Maya Pei’s a neo Republican. The Ghorman front. The Partisan Alliance? Sectorists. Human cultists? Galaxy partitionists. They’re lost! All of them lost! Lost. What are you Luthen?”

Luthen Rael doesn't say directly. He monologues about how he doesn't think these "petty differences" should matter, and then three seconds later mocks Gerrera's political preferences. "Anarchy is a seductive concept," he lectures facetiously. "A bit of a luxury, I'd argue to a man who is hiding in cold caves and begging for spare parts."

In essence, Luthen Rael is one of those annoying moderates who doesn't perceive himself as political, despite clearly having a worldview. And in the context of the show, he’s fighting for a political future where his views are at the center of everything. The only difference between Luthen and Saw is that the latter at least is honest with himself about believing his ethics are superior. Luthen is hiding behind his privilege. His conservative pragmatism is the standard politics of the upper class — both in the Star Wars galaxy and on Earth.

Yet we are supposed to perceive him as the show’s pragmatic core. He is a centrist or moderate, fighting the good fight, despite radical upstarts like Gerrera trying to get in his way. Luthen has sacrificed his morality for a “better future” that he might never see, and the way this arc is framed leads me to believe that we are not meant to say the same for Gerrera. Despite Saw Gerrera also being a person who has fought for his vision of a better future — and in fact, for much longer than Luthen — he is not a voice of wisdom. He is instead seen as "impractical." And in revolutions, the show seems to suggest, that sort of behavior can get you killed. Gerrera is portrayed as an ideologue who would rather watch the rebellion burn if it isn't set up correctly.

Now, I love Andor (see my take on it here), but this theme that ideology shouldn't matter in the fight against fascism is a bad one. Luthen is speaking from the perspective of a privileged elite: the class of people who coopt the rebellion and ultimately get to decide the politics of the New Republic. Mon Mothma becomes the first chancellor of the new government, after all.

It's easy for Luthen to argue against principles when he not only has the upper hand but is also using these various cells from a distance. By the time someone like Saw Gerrera waits for the fight against fascism to be over (assuming it will ever be over, and of course, assuming he is even alive), that fight over leadership will already be lost. Leadership, I remind you that we will see be so incompetent in this universe that it fails to stop the emergence of a new fascist empire 20 years later.

For all this shows many, many positives, making fun of the unpragmatic nature of ideologues while advancing the ideology of anti-fascist centrism is a frustrating theme here. There is another character named Karis Nemik, who is depicted as having a solid head on his shoulders from a theory perspective, but who we meet literally asleep on the job. We aren't supposed to hate Nemik (he's in many ways endearing), but he's a little clueless and dies off fairly quickly.

The people making the most headway in this show are elites like Luthen, Mon Mothma, and her sister, who have the perspective to fight for the bigger picture. Gerrera, fighting on the front lines for so many years he doesn't know what war he is even in anymore, lacks that perspective. The show has little patience for his ideological quibbles while the threat of the Empire is still at large. And I think this sort of elitist handwringing is paternalistic and naive. Ideology will always matter in revolution, and those who want to ignore it, do so at their peril.

A rebellious conclusion

In all of these examples, Saw Gerrera is depicted as an out-of-touch revolutionary who goes too far in his pursuit of justice, but the reason he crosses that line is constantly shifting. In Clone Wars, his main problem was his brashness; in A Rogue One, it was his temperament; in Rebels, it was his tactics; and in Andor, it was more because he doesn't have the “commonsense” to sacrifice his morals. In essence, he morphs to be whatever problematic revolutionary the narrative needs him to be in the moment.

I find it interesting that the current Star Wars narrative (i.e., Andor ) is rooting its criticisms against the revolutionary radical, not with an emotional appeal like past iterations have done (i.e., this character is too reckless, naive, or deranged), but in ideology. Showrunner Tony Gilroy shows us a Saw Gerrera written by a liberal in a post-January 6th world. Gone is the pearl-clutching over tactics — even many moderates are coming around to the idea that fascists cannot be defeated in the marketplace of ideas — and instead, it's a more nuanced criticism of anti-fascist pragmatism. Tony Gilroy seems to be making the case that you must form as broad a coalition as possible, sorting out the details of leadership and ideology once the fascists have been defeated.

Now you can debate the merits of this perspective. From my view, this sort of "we are all in this together to save democracy" rhetoric has been advanced in the US since Nixon, and the political situation has materially gotten worse. Plenty of people are making cases for and against this reasoning, but it is quite the evolution from Gerrera being wrong simply because of his violent ways. That not only feels more honest to me but is far less paternalistic. Granted, having a boomer character yell at a radical anarchist for not being pragmatic still reads as paternalistic, but it's more transparent and less manipulative than in previous iterations.

It will be fascinating to see how this character continues to evolve in the future. Saw Gerrera may have been many things over the years — a rebel, an ideologue, a cultish tyrant — but the one thing he has never stopped being is a fighter.

Andor Is One of the Few Disney Shows to Get Fascism Right

Image; Polygon

It’s hard to understate how shocked and happy I am that Andor exists. I have been banging a drum for years that Disney has been putting out programming that often appropriates the aesthetic of social change and revolution while advancing pretty regressive narratives (see my take on Black Panther and She-Hulk as examples).

Yet with Andor, we have a show that is saying something explicit about the need for direct action in fighting fascism without pulling any punches. It is an earnest text that covers a lot of ground, and like every commenter with half a brain, the fact that the Disney corporation greenlit it is shocking to me. We get a show that depicts fascism as it actually is, and that is sadly too rare in pop culture.

A break from the past

There is a tendency in media, and especially in the galaxy far, far away, to depict fascism as this almost supernatural force perpetuated by one or two bad actors. On the silver screen, the Empire emerges in Star Wars because of the machinations of Darth Sidious, not because the xenophobia of the core worlds reached such a fever pitch that the people there were ready to accept any strongmen who affirmed their biases. Hitler and Stalin weren’t geniuses after all, but in Star Wars, that messy history is mostly glossed over for an evil Chessmaster who bends the galaxy to his will. As I write in ‘Star Wars’ Made Us Unprepared For Fascism:

“Much of our media has made people think they understand fascism when really they are more familiar with a caricature of fascism: that of an all-knowing, evil Chessmaster who manipulates people into doing things they don’t really want to do from behind the scenes. This type of story-telling does not seek to challenge the viewer’s complicity in that evil, which is why so many people can comfortably wrap themselves in Storm Trooper or Thanos paraphernalia without ever feeling awkward.”

Andor takes every major complaint I have historically had about the Star Wars series and addresses them head-on. It depicts fascism not as the actions of one or two evil Chessmasters but as a banal system uplifted by government and corporate bureaucrats falling over themselves to be cogs within it. My favorite character, supervisor Dedra Meero, spends much of her time in government office meetings trying to one-up her colleagues. It’s chilling how casually her peers mention being happy over things like increasing incarceration rates.

Banal fascism is everywhere in this series. You see it in the ecumenopolis Coruscant, where Senator and secret rebel Mon Mothma is constantly being watched by all the forces in her life (she can’t even trust her driver). You see it in the sterile orderliness of all the Imperial architecture. Life under the Empire is hell, an unending grind that does not need the presence of Emperor Palpatine or Darth Vader to underscore its evil.

The casualness is the worst part. There is a scene early on where an imperial officer stationed in a world called Aldhani monologues on how the Empire has conducted a campaign of cultural genocide against the natives. As he says menacingly of the Dhani people:

“They breed a sad combination of traits that make them particularly vulnerable to manipulation. On a practical level, they have a great deal of trouble holding multiple ideas simultaneously. We’ve found the best way to steer them as we’d like is to offer alternatives. You put a number of options on the table, and they’re so wrapped up in choosing they’ve failed to notice you’ve given them nothing they thought they wanted at the start. Their deeper problem is pride. The Dhanis would rather lose, they rather suffer than accept. Which is wildly ironic as they’ve choked down everything we’ve thrown at them these last twelve years. ”

He goes on to explain how the Empire used social engineering to push the Dhanis out of the highlands into industrial zones to perform cheap labor. All while killing off their religious practices in the name of “progress.” It is a banal evil that requires no superweapon to pull off and is chilling for just how common it has been employed by Empires such as ours throughout history (see the cultural genocide of many American Indian tribes as an example).

Being a rebel

From beginning to end, Andor explores what it takes to resist this system and be a rebel (YouTuber Just Write does a great job breaking down this point here). The protagonist and show namesake, Cassian Andor, starts as a disillusioned thief begrudgingly thrust into rebel activities by outside forces. A shakedown gone wrong leads to him contracting for a dangerous rebel mission on Aldhani so he can get a load of money to essentially f@ck off.

Others try to radicalize him. The rebel spymaster Luthen Rael sees his potential from the get-go. The young idealist Karis Nemik passionately tries to give Andor the philosophy for why anti-fascist direct action is so necessary, but initially, none of these teachings stick. Andor is too invested in the current system and the idea that he can secure individual safety for himself and his family.

In this way, Andor falls into a long tradition of the “disgruntled mercenary with a heart of gold” trope, who eventually joins rebel forces after an arc of resisting them. You can think of Cloud from Final Fantasy, hired by the eco-terrorist group Avalanche to stop an evil corporation from killing the planet. Another example is, you know, Han Solo from the original Star Wars film, who comes back at the last minute to help blow up the Death Star.

What makes this narrative a little different from those examples is that Andor makes the fight against fascism more than a character’s individual moral choice to be a rebel or villain. Wherein Han Solo returns at the last minute of his own volition in A New Hope, Andor parts ways after his mission on Aldhani. He f@cks off to a vacation world to try to live out the remainder of his days, not thinking about the Empire. Yet remember, this show is about how fascism is a system, so this plan doesn’t work. The Empire is on this vacation world too, and Andor gets arrested and sent to prison for what are essentially b@llsh#t charges.

The prison Andor ends up in is a nightmare designed out of a Goebbels fever dream. It is a work camp where prisoners endlessly produce widgets for the imperial war machine while nameless guards shuffle them to various places, often out of sight. There are no weapons, with the guards instead employing electromagnetic waves to pacify all the prisoners, the latter of which must be barefoot at all times for this system to work. This prison is the end stage of this fascist system: the ultimate panopticon where the idea of being watched is enough to push most people into compliance.

Yet it’s this complete crushing of hope that is the final straw for Andor. Where other people had tried to unsuccessfully radicalize him, having his agency taken away becomes the ultimate motivator. In prison, he becomes the radical one, pushing his mirror, Kino Loy, a man who wants to keep his head down until his sentence is over, to rebel against the prison instead. When they learn that the Empire has no intention of letting anyone go, this revelation lights the fire for a prison escape. Andor and Loy organize to do this not because success is particularly likely (Loy coldly says that he is operating under the assumption that he is already dead) but because anything is better than the hopeless system they find themselves in.

They would rather be dead than continue to live under fascism, which says something profound about how much humans are willing to endure and how much they are ready to sacrifice when the proverbial shit eventually hits the fan.

---

One of the central themes of this show is that as a rebel, you are fighting for a world you will likely not live to see. Something that we know will be true for Andor because he dies at the end of Rogue One, never to see the birth of the Republic he fought so hard to build. As rebel Luthen Rael says: “I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet….I burned my decency for someone else’s future. I burned my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.”

The fact that this message is being advanced in the heart of the American Empire is startling to me. I think the distance of the galaxy far, far away allows the creatives on this project to be more direct about what to do in the face of fascism, then say, projects like the Black Panther series (see my review of that here).

Yet what this series is saying applies to our world too. We currently exist on a planet where Empires like the US, Russia, and France treat countries on the periphery just as cruelly as Aldhani or Ferrix. The US was founded on a cultural genocide that has not completely ended, and we also use these tactics elsewhere. Try looking at Yemen or the history of Latin America if you are curious. If we were to take the lessons of Andor seriously, what does that say for how we should handle the empires in the here and now?

That’s a difficult message to process because Luthen is right. As a rebel, you often don’t get to live to see the fruits of your labor, but regardless of whether you keep your head down or try to escape, you can’t run from fascism. The only thing you can do is fight.

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).

captured October 18, 2022 4:31 PM

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.