The MCU Was Never A Bold, New Experiment in Cinema

When the MCU first came onto the scene, it was praised as a bold new direction in storytelling. "The Narrative Experiment That Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe" went the title of an article by Maya Phillips in the New Yorker. "…the MCU can't forget the secret formula that made Phase 4 so groundbreaking," writes Nicolas Ayala in Screen Rant. Everywhere you look, people are praising this franchise that now spans multiple mediums and platforms for its originality.

It’s not bad to like these films. Personally, Thor: Ragnarok is a favorite of mine. However, when we look closely at this idea that the MCU is some bold new direction in story-telling and art, it seems mostly marketing. The MCU, narratively speaking, was always less impressive than fans let on.

It also has been at the center of a financial project that has made the retelling and remixing of an existing story that much more difficult.

Unpacking innovation

It's hard to pinpoint where exactly this alleged innovation comes from. Other film franchises have used the concept of shared characters and a shared world before. Universal Studios implemented a defacto extended universe with its Monsters series. Characters like Wolf Man bumped heads with Frankenstein and Dracula. Toho Co., Ltd. created an extended world with Kaiju monsters like Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra. Even Jason Voorhees and Freedy Krueger started to appear in an extended cinematic universe in Freddy vs. Jason.

And even these examples are more of a legal exercise as characters from one property are introduced into another. Having expansive worlds with many points of view is not something any of these extended universes created. Is Tolkien an extended-universe trailblazer because he has separate works existing within one deep, expansive world? It seems very silly when you think about it outside of a legal context. Creators have been juggling in-depth works with many different perspectives for thousands of years — that's sort of how the canon of every major religion got started, as religious doctrines from many different voices were slapped together.

It’s also hard to view the MCU as innovative from a narrative direction. It has always been fairly repetitive. Even as we swapped characters and planets, it followed a simple overarching narrative (a new character gets introduced, we go on a hero’s journey, have a big battle, rinse and repeat). This formulaic nature was the point. One could argue that the MCU was taking the repetitive structure of TV that was popular before the Second Golden Age of Television and bringing it over to the Silver Screen. As the creator of the Skip Intro Youtube channel jokingly noted in their copaganda series:

“…you can’t convince me that this isn’t a TV show. Every episode [“movie”] ends with a cliffhanger to bring you back next week. It’s run by an executive producer/showrunner Kevin Feige. That’s TV people…”

There may be many threads to keep track of, but that logic remains true for any TV show, movie, or other long-standing property. Look at Godzilla, Pokemon, Doctor Who, or most soap operas. The lore can get unwieldy very quickly. Does that complexity in itself make it a “bold new experiment in cinema?” It’s not like the MCU has held tightly to all of them, as there have been plenty of threads unceremoniously cut (see magic just being advanced technology, the Sokovia Accords’ political implications, the arc reactor being used for clean energy, and a dozen other things).

When we think of pioneering works of film, the breakthroughs we glorify are usually not this corporate. The Second Golden Age of cinema, with texts like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, was lauded for rejecting the rinse-and-repeat formulas that the MCU seems to cling to, with characters going through self-destructive arcs that did not always finish neatly. The Sopranos ended without giving its viewers a resolution — a tension an MCU movie would rarely do.

In fact, the comfort in the MCU is that rarely are you challenged. The narratives they promote are regressive (see The MCU is for Rich People). It seems strange to praise a company's attempt to factory-produce Hollywood blockbusters that inoffensively appeal to as broad an audience as possible and call that a "bold new experiment."

It's about the money

In retrospect, when we look at the MCU, the impressive feat was not the story — again, heroes coming together to stop a big bad is as basic as it gets — but that it could happen at all. In an attempt to stave off financial collapse, Marvel's filming rights were sold off to many owners in the 90s. 20th Century Fox soon owned X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Sony owned Spiderman. Columbia Pictures (and then Artisan) held Black Panther. Dozens of characters were controlled by many different hands. This arrangement made things difficult if you wanted to tell a story that intersected with all these characters.

It should be noted that a factor in this hectic landscape is that, over the years, Disney (as well as other content “producers”) have made Intellectual Property increasingly more hostile to upstarts. As their mascot, Mickey Mouse’s initial short, Steamboat Willy, approached the public domain in 1983, Congress amended the law in ’76, so it remained in Disney’s hands. They did so again in 1998 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to the point that copyrights now extend to the author’s life plus 70 years. For works of corporate authorship, it’s even longer at 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever one comes first. That’s a status quo that benefits capitalists, not artists (they don’t need money after they are dead), and Disney is a significant reason why this status quo exists.

And so, not just anyone can work with existing IP fractured among multiple entities (and not get sued into oblivion). Disney's large size and deep pockets meant it had the means to navigate these complex legal and financial barriers. It was, in fact, one of the few entities that, due to regressive IP laws, could. Fans of Marvel have no alternative firm but Disney, which means there has been a, if not captive audience, then at the very least, a highly motivated one. As Paul Young writes in Screen Rant about Disney's initial acquisition of Marvel:

“Iron Man, however, is a prime example of what Marvel can do when left alone — but the problem is Iron Man was the first film completely funded by Marvel Studios and it took a lot of money to make that happen. That’s money Marvel didn’t recoup until well after the movie was made and released, so any other project they may have wanted to work on was on hold until the funds came back in. Now what if Marvel had access to Disney’s money during the time Iron Man was being made? If Marvel has access to that kind of coin, then we could have more than one or two high quality superhero films released every year.”

We now have the answer to that question, and we must emphasize this point because the positive being lauded is not the company's ability to make a good story or art but their wallet.

Indeed, that is something about modern cinema that Disney, though the MCU, has helped champion. These movies require so much money to create and market (not to mention paying out residuals) that they must become a massive success to even break a profit. The Eternals and Black Widow earned about $400 million at the box office and were failures for this reason (though Disney putting them on their streaming service so quickly probably didn't help).

Even successful films like Spiderman: No Way Home and Doctor Stange in the Multiverse of Madness do not have as high returns as one might expect — especially since Spiderman was a coventure with Sony. This structure demands excellence in ticket sales from a film, or it's a failure, and that appears to be the model for most major Disney films right now. When we look at other Disney titles such as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker or Avatar: The Way of Water, they earned over a billion dollars (or 2 in Avatar's case) and needed to make those massive profits to break even.

That is a financial "innovation," if you will, but I don't know if I consider it an artistic one. Instead, it mirrors the consolidation and wealth inequality plaguing end-stage capitalism. We have moved into an era of larger and larger "safe" bets, leaving you wondering what will happen if there are even one or two significant misfires for Disney in the future.

Conclusion

Looking back, it's hard to see what is artistically innovative about team-ups across multiple films. This is not a dunk on comic books. I am an avid reader of them (my favorite Marvel is The Immoral Hulk. Favorite DC is Far Sector). I think there are many ways this medium has transformed how we create art— I just don't see the narrative framework of these films to be a part of that tradition. The style and humor of blockbusters, but with the structure of a convoluted TV show, is not the innovation I think people believe it to be.

When we praise multiple brands existing within one franchise, what we are actually worshipping is one company’s collection of IP — and that seems to be more of a capitalist innovation.

We are being told to find it impressive that Disney, a company that has twisted our laws so that its intellectual property will never enter the public domain, is unique because it can vertically integrate a property in a way no one else can. Yet they were the ones who ensured that no one else could (seriously, look more deeply into their lobbying with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act).

In truth, there should be more cinematic universes: more wild intersections between popular characters we all love, but we cannot have that because companies like Disney have ensured that it is both legally and financially tough for artwork like that to be made. They then dare to sell us on the lie that they have done something bold with the art they have gatekept.

Well, if you define artistic innovation as exploitation, as blocking out the sun so nothing else may flourish, then the MCU is very innovative indeed.

The Political Appropriation of the Train Crash in East Palestine, Ohio

Democrats, Republicans, & the politics of tragedy

On February 3rd, a train operated by the company Norfolk Southern derailed near the village of East Palestine, Ohio. Authorities claimed that toxic materials had been released into the atmosphere (and would release even more themselves) and consequently ordered an evacuation.

Days later, the EPA published a four-page report saying that 20 of these cars were carrying hazardous materials such as vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether. The line often pulled from that report online is that these materials "have been and continue to be released to the air, surface soils, and surface waters," which sounds pretty terrifying without knowing much about the science behind the situation.

Almost immediately, a narrative started circulating online that the media wasn't talking about the spill in East Palestine. "Where is a statement from [the U.S. Department of Transportation] and [Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg] regarding the train derailment and subsequent ecological disaster in East Palestine, Ohio?" tweeted Nina Turner 10 days after the incident. "How can something like this happen, and federal officials remain silent?"

In a post-Flint Michigan world (a town that still is having water problems), it's not hard to imagine those in power negligently handling an environmental disaster. We are too familiar at this point with how governments can mess up. Whether we are talking about Democrats or Republicans, our government's response to environmental catastrophes, like in East Palestine, has been abysmal.

Yet when we examine the issue closely, it becomes easy to see that many actors are trying to take advantage of this disaster, including some bad-faith actors on the right.

The crash, how bad is it?

We know from reporting that, among other things, the substance vinyl chloride was purposefully released into the atmosphere via a controlled burn to allegedly prevent an explosion — hence the reason for the official evacuation order. Vinyl chloride is used in creating plastic polyvinyl chloride or PVC, and inhaling it has been known to cause dizziness, headaches, narcosis, and even death. It is a known carcinogen that can cause cancers such as leukemia and a rare form of liver cancer called hepatic angiosarcoma.

The extent of those symptoms depends very much on the concentration and scope of their release. However, it should be noted that a similar incident of vinyl chloride being released via train derailment occurred in Paulsboro, New Jersey. This emission of vinyl chloride caused some exposed to it to indicate they were experiencing health-related issues years later.

Presently, the response from government officials is to claim that the area is once again safe for people to return to East Palestine. The governors of Pennsylvania and Ohio have put an end to the evacuation order. Officials in Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, and other communities have claimed that their services will be unaffected. The EPA has announced that initial testing has not detected "anything above the action level."

Yet secondary indicators are causing people to be wary of these claims. There have been viral reports of dead fish and other animals. Journalist Prem Thakker interviewed East Palestine residents for the New Republic and painted a grim picture of pollution still impacting their quality of life, writing: "Many others TNR spoke with, in and outside the one-mile radius, reported similar symptoms: headaches, burning sensations, severe dehydration, and more. But the town's nearly 5,000 residents are left unsure about who qualifies for what support in the face of these ailments."

Both government and corporate responses to this disaster have been quite disorganized, with many residents not knowing who to ask for help and not being satisfied with the aid they receive. For example, Thakker notes that the company responsible for the train that crashed, Norfolk Southern, had offered residents $1,000 “inconvenience checks,” which had required stringent documentation to appeal for (not exactly something people can manage when they evacuate from their homes).

The company has also been accused of not properly safeguarding against soil and water contamination when they performed that initial control burn of vinyl chloride. The EPA has accused them of being potentially liable for this oversight. A report released several days ago states: "Areas of contaminated soil and free liquids were observed and potentially covered and/or filled during the reconstruction of the rail line including portions of the trench /burn pit that was used for the open burn off of vinyl chloride."

It's not that a control burn was unnecessary. As Thakker explains: "vinyl chloride and other compounds are explosive." However, from my perspective, it seems like a rush to call the situation "solved" led to them cutting some corners on remediation— allegedly.

Yet it's not just Norfolk Southern that deserves our ire. When it comes to blame, one will find that there is plenty to go around.

The appropriation of a disaster

Conservatives were quick to pounce on this tragedy, and because the Internet exists, many of them spread misinformation in the process. Disinformation researcher Caroline Orr compiled an excellent thread on how many falsely claimed that poisonous chemicals were leaking into the Mississippi River, using an outdated map in the process.

This whole mess first came to my attention when "health" (i.e., anti-vax) influencer Erin Elizabeth, who proudly conveys on her bio that the New York Times has labeled her a conspiracy theorist, shared a video on Twitter from Tiktoker and entrepreneur Nick Drom. Now the specifics of the Nick Drom video seem fine to me (I am not a scientist, so please consult one), but it was strange to see Elizabeth and many others share information like this when historically, conservatives have resisted environmental regulations for years and are often directly in the pocket of companies making hazardous materials like vinyl chloride. One would think that conservatives would be the last people to call attention to this disaster.

And yet many are touting this crash as a failure of the Biden administration and his neglect of Republican voters. As Tucker Carlson lamented on the crash: "…the Biden administration doesn't seem too concerned about it either way. Donald Trump got over 71% of the vote in the county in the last presidential election. That's not exactly the Democratic Party's core demographic."

Caroline Orr has theorized (and the Tucker quote above implies) that the angle many of them are going for is one of reverse racism. The Biden administration, they allege, is ignoring a predominantly Republican and implicitly left unsaid, white area. This narrative is about twisting a horrible tragedy into an easy-to-digest framework based on white entitlement and resentment.

It would be easy to spin this as simply more conservative culture war nonsense. However, it is worth noting that this entire incident was not only preventable, but that blame lies on both sides of the aisle. For years, Norfolk Southern and other rail industry donors lobbied to deregulate against the very safeguards that would have made this crash less likely, and they have had sympathies from both parties.

For example, in the wake of the Paulsboro crash we mentioned earlier, the Obama administration proposed a rule to increase the safety regulation for hazardous materials, only for it to be, according to the writers in the Lever, "narrowly focused on the transport of crude oil and exempting trains carrying many other combustible materials [like vinyl chloride]." In essence, passing a regulation that would not have prevented either the 2014 crash or the one that happened in East Palestine.

Several years later, the Trump administration rescinded a different Obama-era rule that, over a six-year period, would have implemented an electronic braking system that might have prevented this mess. It indeed would have been implemented already. The Biden administration still needs to reinstate this necessary rule, and as we near the end of his first term, railroad safety has yet to be a priority.

While the outright callousness of the Republican party is primarily responsible for the East Palestine derailment, we should not pretend like the behind-closed-doors indifference of the Democrats is acceptable. If people were honest with themselves, they would realize that this crash had bipartisan support.

Conclusion

As a left-leaning environmentalist, during disasters, I am inherently skeptical of reports from government and corporate actors alike. Traditionally there is hesitancy from those in power to downplay harm so they can avoid blame and future accountability. As Mary Pezzulu writes in Patheos:

“This always happens when there’s an environmental crisis in Appalachia and we’ve had some spectacular ones. These crises don’t happen because the people in Appalachia cause them. They happen because the United States government, both the Democrats and the Republicans, permit industries to do whatever they want, particularly in Appalachia which nobody but Appalachia cares about. The industries take advantage. It’s been going on for over a hundred years. It’s not more complicated than that.”

If we want to mitigate the damage of this and future environmental tragedies, we can't let this trend continue. We need regulations that protect the safety of all passengers, politicians who give a damn, and train infrastructure that isn't managed by negligent corporations (which pretty much includes all of them).

Until then, the next accident is not a matter of if but when.

The World of Online Publishing Makes Liars of Us All

Tim Denning’s website

As a blogger, I am someone who values the truth. I take the responsibility of this platform very seriously. I will spend hours analyzing and double-checking my sources, going down research rabbit holes that will never turn into content. I spend a lot of time-consuming articles and books that take me a long time to process and digest, all so I can feel somewhat confident that I know what the f@ck I am talking about.

Yet mistakes in my articles still slip through. Sometimes these are minor errors — typos and poor word usage happen more than I would like. The words “definitely” and “patriarchy” are my nemeses. Other times I get facts wrong. I recently erroneously stated that Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal came out during the Irish Famine (roughly 1845–1852). It came out over a hundred years earlier, in 1729.

I make mistakes, which bothers me because I don't want misinformation to spread. I want people to come to me for verified facts, but the current system demands that creators pump out a lot of content to remain profitable, and that leads to an ecosystem where mistakes are not only common but incentivized.

The (current) problem with online publishing

At the risk of sounding cruel, much self-produced content on the Internet is terrible. I see many writers putting out countless pieces of work littered with very transparent typos, grammar mistakes, or factual errors. For example, many writers on this platform spread misinformation about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, claiming that everyone and the kitchen sink is a full-blown narcissist, when really what they mean is that a person is mean to them (see I'm A Professor of Human Behavior, And I Have News About The 'Narcissists' In Your Life).

Other times the work is just uncritically perpetuating memes that are not based in reality. Take the user Tim Denning (please don’t harass him), a self-help expert who is probably one of the most well-known creators on this platform. He produces work that essentially equates to "hustle and work harder, and everything will be okay.” "The answer to money problems is to make more money, not cut back on expenses," he lectures, as if the hurdles of American capitalism can be tackled through willpower alone (they can’t). People like this make careers by perpetuating a useful set of lies that make you feel better (and uncritical) about your perceived accomplishments.

This type of work is getting even more common with AI-generated content, which some creators are starting to use to push out articles en mass. For example, one blogger I follow (who I will not identify because they are too small) is very vocal about using AI technology to assist with her writing, toting it as a way to increase production. When I look at her blog (and the many others that make a similar claim), however, I see a lot of self-help and get-rich-quick posts that aren't precisely War & Peace. Not all the advice generated from this frenzy is terrible, but it's no different from most SEO content.

One post of hers (which I was not able to verify if it was written via AI) ludicrously recommends that it's easy to self-publish a book over the weekend and start making money, exclaiming: "Creating an ebook may feel like an undertaking, but it doesn't need to be, especially when you have the right tools. And it's so worth the effort because you'll be left with a digital asset that can continue to make sales month after month!"

This is a statement that requires a lot of work to even articulate why it's wrong. As someone who runs a publication that pays its writers and is in the process of auctioning off several books, you can not just bang out a book over the weekend and start gaining passive income. Profitability in the world of publishing is very hard. Even if you are writing about stoicism or some other SEO-optimized soup, you are competing against the thousands of others churning out the same content. While making passive income on several books may be true if we are talking about cents on the dollar, to make that model work, you have to produce a lot of content, which often means having to rely on outsourcing labor to contractors on platforms like Fiverr even to begin to make a profit (see Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins & How I Became a Minecraft Scam Artist).

To go on the briefest of tangents, this seems to be the goal of AI-assisted technology. It's not that this copy-and-paste machine will be able to produce award-winning art (at least not at its current level of development), but it will be able to help people whose careers are simply churning out an endless array of self-help content to cut out the middle people (e.g., editors, graphic designers, etc.) that they already don't pay that well. The end goal is not to verify your facts — you need human editors to comb through your content to do that (defeating the whole point of the speed of this process), but to produce content that will sell quickly.

AI-generated self-help content may be an extreme example, but all self-published content creators have this problem, where the financial incentive is to cut corners in some areas. Again, I am not immune to this phenomenon of spreading misinformation to some degree. We could talk about my article How To Stop The Left from Losing Social Media, where I erroneously labeled the Facebook group Occupy Democrats a good model, only to realize my mistake months later (see Is "Occupy Democrats" Fake News?). I didn't have enough time to comb through every one of that article's assumptions because this platform doesn't pay me enough to do that work.

Occupy Democrats is a great example here of an organization that turned into something awful in a naked pursuit to increase its view numbers and reach. The founder described being inspired to make the company in the wake of Occupy Wallstreet, but whatever his original intentions, that morphed into this small brand pushing out regular anger porn that is often inaccurate or half-true. A brand that until recently routinely broke Facebook's Top 10 posts and enraged, click-baited, and misinformed millions of people.

It would be easy to blame this trend on scale alone. From personal experience, when you are a mid-tier influencer, some works will produce a lot of money, while others will pay nothing. There is consequently a pressure to increase the frequency so you can earn a living, but quality gets lost in trying to do that. I have often said that “maybe if I was larger, had a bigger following, and could pay editors, these editorial mistakes would become less frequent,” but reality doesn't align with that expectation.

We are not simply talking about Occupy Democrats here but even more prominent brands. Remember, we started this article focusing on Tim Denning, someone with a reach in the hundreds of thousands (and probably, millions across all platforms). He can most likely pay for an editor or two. Yet he’s still perpetuating a lot of misinformation. The lies he’s telling about hustle culture are integral to how he makes money. The incentive is to produce inspiration and hustle porn —not to genuinely depict the American workplace for what it is. If that were the case, he’d tell people that they would be financially better off, in the long run, organizing a union and taking other forms of collective action , but that perspective is harder to sell as an online course on “how to be the exception and get super rich.”

And so this is not merely an issue of scale, but the types of content being prioritized on the Internet, and everyone is susceptible to this race to the bottom. For example, recently, the Washington Post garnered controversy for laying off 20 journalists and then announcing increasing its opinion department a day later with primarily conservative commentators (I guess Democracy Dies when everyone’s watching). The Post is pivoting to more engaging, less rigorous content because that’s where the financial incentive is for them — it’s where the incentive is for many people.

Whether we are talking about bad psychology articles, human or AI-generated self-help content, political clickbait, or me not verifying my sources correctly, the frequency of production in online publishing leads to many mistakes. The point is not to inform your audience but to enrage, inspire and entertain as fastly as possible, and that not only constrains the types of content made but its overall quality.

What do we do about this?

It often feels like all online creators are circling the drain, going ever downward. Online publishing was advertised as a revolution in truth — a way to get information that was stigmatized a chance to shine —and it does that sometimes, but more frequently, it has led to the propagation of shit. We have millions of influencers sharing unverified factoids and half-truths to bump up their view numbers, subscriptions, or advertising revenue, with little consideration for anything else.

The neoliberal solution, by which I mean finding a solution through the marketplace, would be to invest in creators who you think will do a good job (you might want to check out my bio) as well as divest from the ones who have a proven track record of spreading misinformation. If you haven't already, I highly recommend unsubscribing from sites like Occupy Democrats and never taking a meme shared on Twitter or Facebook seriously.

Yet it seems naive to believe that we will find the solution to this problem within the marketplace of ideas alone. In an environment where misinformation, which users seem to be very bad at recognizing, is placed alongside "good pieces of reporting," it becomes tough for the truth to rise to the top. As the infamous Mark Twain saying goes: "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."

This is in and of itself a lie, by the way.

There is no good evidence that he genuinely said this, and my bringing it up now is meant to further highlight the point: most people spread misinformation online because they have no incentive to fact-check it. In general, some businesses and creators might strive to go the extra mile, but most devolve to the lowest common denominator to make a profit. Whether that’s appealing to people’s pseudoscientific understanding of psychology, their fairytale notions of American meritocracy, or plain ole' American racism and sexism, these biases sell, which is why we can not expect the marketplace to solve this problem.

We can’t afford to let market forces continue to guide us. The only real solution that will work is building institutions that seek to move beyond the neoliberal paradigm we currently find ourselves in — to join, build, or found a lefty organization essentially. This can take the form of joining a leftist volunteer organization like the DSA, founding a worker’s coop, especially a journalistic one, and in general, advocating for journalism not linked to a corporation.

The truth shouldn't be for sale, and until we change things, people will continue to spread lies at bargain prices.

'Dragon Age Absolution' and Rejecting the Master's Tools

Captured: Netflix

Dragon Age: Absolution is an animated series based on the fantasy video game franchise of the same name by the company Bioware (now owned by Electronic Arts). It's set in the continent of Thedas, a magical land of elves, demons, and dragons. Absolution, in particular, centers on a ragtag group of thieves as they attempt an Ocean’s Eleven-style robbery of the Tevinter Imperium Chantry to steal a McGuffin called the Circulum Infinitus — something that will allegedly raise the dead.

Since this is a Dragon Age game, though, it's thematically about something far heavier, specifically about you cannot use the institutions and tools that maintain slavery to undo it. Protagonist Miriam is a formerly enslaved person who has to go back to her ex masters house in an attempt to steal the Circulum Infinitus. The story not only beautifully unpacks her processing of this trauma but rejects the slavers who want to change the world without transforming the institutions that empower them.

In other words, Dragon Age: Absolution rejects using the Master's Tools to fight against oppression.

What are the master's tools?

The saying "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" was first popularized by academic Audre Lorde in her seminal essay of the same name. The essay described an experience of being invited to a humanities conference and being one of the few Black lesbians there in an official capacity, specifically to speak on a panel about Blackness and queerness.

Lorde discussed in that piece how the tools of racist patriarchy (in this case overvaluing white panelists) could not be used to deconstruct it. As she writes: "[The master's tools] may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support."

Dragon Age: Absolution has a very similar theme with several characters who perceive themselves as freedom fighters, despite resorting to tactics that only end up reinforcing the oppressive system they benefit from. The first is Miriam's former "owner," Rezaren Ammosine, a Tevinter magister who perceives himself as "one of the good ones." He wants to use the Circulum Infinitus to resurrect his deceased slave Neb (Miriam's Brother). Neb is someone Rezaren perceives as family, despite his real family owning Neb and Miriam when he was a boy.

Rezaren believes that once he's reunited with these people, his former property, together they can do the work of "changing the system." "Ever since you left," he monologues to Miriam, "I've been rebuilding, trying to make things right again….I have risen through the ranks of the Imperial Chantry… By the Grace of the Maker, I will become the next Divine. And together, the three of us can make Tevinter a better place for everyone."

Yet this perspective is naive because it assumes that Rezaren (who has gained his power through slavery) will be able to do away with it through sheer force of will when everyone around him benefits from the institution, including him. Tevinter society is built around the militarization that comes with stopping slave revolts, and it's doubtful those in power will let this way of life go willingly.

Rezaren's mentality is the definition of metaphorical white saviorism (e.g., a privileged person's belief that they are the main protagonist in the fight against an injustice). Dragon Age doesn’t operate under the same notions of race, hence the use of the word metaphorical here. It's very clear how fickle this image of saviorism is the moment it meets any resistance from those Rezaren’s allegedly saving. He tries to reenslave Miriam once he learns she does not want to be a part of his “family.” "I was wrong….There can be no master without a slave, and no slave without a master."

We see here how when he has to deal with his alleged "family" members having agency, he discards their opinions. Rezaren is so wrapped up in his delusions of grandeur that he doesn't realize he is the villain. This is something the text calls out explicitly in a line of dialogue near the climax. "Are you really the last one to figure out that you're the villain?" a character mocks gleefully.

Another slaver who cannot grabble with the fact that she is the bad guy is the Knight-Commander of the Templar Order Tassia (the Dragon Age equivalent of a cop). Tassia is someone who believes in working to change things from "the inside." "Not everyone welcomes the Venatori," says Tassia of a Tevinter KKK parallel to someone who has lost everything to a hate crime perpetrated by this group. "In fact, some of us are working hard to free the Imperium from their influence."

Yet the text mocks this belief. Through a humiliating bit of dialogue, where Tassia claims not to be a "lapdog," she is immediately dismissed by Rezaren. She does not have any control over her superior, who does pretty much whatever the hell he wants. Tassia fails in her alleged goal of "changing the system," The series clarifies that one of her bigger duties is stopping slave revolts. If she wanted to subvert the system, she would leak information and resources to rebel cells, not try to support this brutal chain of command.

Lastly, there is Hira, someone from a well-off Tevinter family that was massacred by the Venatori for allegedly helping enslaved people. Hira doesn't want to support the system as much as burn it all down. She is resentful for her loss in station and at the system that punished her family for trying to do the right thing. "I hate Teventir," she vents. "This place hurt everyone I love, and I am going to make all of you pay for it. The good, the bad, you all deserve to burn."

Hira is willing to do anything to get her revenge, including reenslaving her lover Miriam, to get a chance to destroy the nation she now hates. She is doing all this underhandedness while working with the Red Templars, a genocidal group that wants to kill all mages — not exactly an emancipatory movement.

Like the other characters we have mentioned, Hira is a metaphorical white savior, in this case, a revolutionary one, who is deluded into thinking her way is different. She isn't working with the enslaved people she claims to care for. The one she interacts with, her lover Miriam, is literally a pawn she has no problem selling back into slavery. It's all about her feelings of revenge, and in the process, Hira resorts to the same system she purports to hate.

A radical conclusion

Through these examples, we see Dragon Age: Absolution skewer people who believe they can change the world using the same systems of oppression that constrain it. Whether they are a cop or politician working within the system or a radical resorting to the institution of slavery to advance their goals, these characters believe that the master's tools are awful, unless, of course, they are the ones using them.

It's refreshing to see a piece of media take this perspective because often, we get narratives extolling the virtues of working within the system. Texts like She-Hulk, Black Panther, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier lambaste characters for "going too far," but in Absolution, these upholders of the status quo are the villains. We are not meant to feel sorry for slavers who squash revolts — they are cannon fodder cut down by our protagonists without a second's hesitation.

This perspective is one we need more of, both on the Silver Screen and outside of it.

The Work of Art in the Age of AI

Art by Christina Davies

This article was originally published in The Washington Socialist.

---

“Yes, AI art can be sold,” advises one Medium user. “My second thought, of course, was, how can I monetize this stuff?” begins another writer.

These writers and creators see how easily they can turn out graphics and writing with new “free” tools such as MidJourney and ChatGPT. Some see easy money: “Don’t get me wrong,” one writer continues, “getting good results is not as easy as it seems, but it definitely takes way less effort than becoming a real artist.”

These excerpts highlight something fundamental about the new image and writing generation software that has been causing a stir among professional and casual artists alike. Like everything else in our modern economy, AI technology is framed as an innovative disruption. Though just a cursory look reveals this as just another capitalist plot to deskill workers and scam the public.

---

Modern artificial intelligence is different from the pop-cultural depiction of AI (think Skynet or HAL). AI in reality is a highly specialized algorithm trained on massive data sets to accomplish narrowly defined tasks. In most cases, AI programs are fed data with the goal of “training” the software to produce a specific response or action when it identifies standard inputs.

Right away, we bump into our first problem: Where do these data sets come from? It’s easy to imagine some vast repository of information summoned from the Internet, but data doesn’t emerge from the ether. It has to come from somewhere, and in our human labor-oriented society, that data comes from people. Often, it comes from all of us — it comes from you.

You may be familiar with CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) across the web that require basic text or audio-based tasks to ensure “you are a human.” A common example is Google’s reCAPTCHA, which usually takes the form of a grid and asks users to identify specific images or a blurred-out word.

Although captchas serve the purpose of protecting websites against bots, many also serve the dual purpose of fine-tuning data sets for AI. CAPTCHAs have been used to do everything from helping AI better identify images to identifying road hazards. This technology is contributing to fine-tuning autogenerated content, with many users noting AI-generated art pop up in their tests.

Even if you do not use tools like MidJourney and ChatGPT, you’ve likely contributed to the development of these tools if you’ve navigated the web anytime in the last two decades. Were you paid for doing that labor? Did you even know what that labor was for? Or did you assume it was just some security feature without thinking twice about it?

This is, of course, assuming that these data sets are just coming from these small deceptions. The images programs like MidJourney train on often include copyrighted material. Vlogger Hank Green, for example, asked MidJourney to imagine an “Afghani woman with green eyes,” and it replicated a very similar image to National Geographic’s famous 1980 cover. In being trained on that image, it has, in essence, plagiarized it.

On the left is picture generated by MidJourney when asked for “Afghani woman with green eyes,” and on the right is the original National Geographic image.

We can see from this example that these programs have a bias toward existing content. One of the bigger misconceptions of the Internet is that all human knowledge is on here, with people often joking that we have the sum of all human information in our hands, but that’s not true. A lot of information is guarded behind paywalls or kept private altogether, and even more, has never been digitized. It takes journalists and data scientists a lot of time to track down and assemble these data sets and to create new ones.

AIs, which are aggregators of existing data, do not do this work (and might never do this work). The information they are iterating on requires human input to expand what they can do, and pretending otherwise leads to “copies” like the National Geographic example. Even if they are creating seemingly “new” work, it is the result of previous human efforts; efforts which almost certainly went uncompensated and unacknowledged.

The content produced by this software makes it easier for malicious actors to exploit for ill intent. AI content “creators” have also been noted to plagiarize work and spread misinformation. As Gary Marcus writes in the Scientific American about the potential for these tools to increase misinformation: “Because such systems contain literally no mechanisms for checking the truth of what they say, they can easily be automated to generate misinformation at [an] unprecedented scale.”

Marcus then describes how a researcher named Shawn Oakley used ChatGPT to fake studies, including vaccine disinformation, where it erroneously claimed that a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found “that the COVID-19 vaccine is only effective in about 2 out of 100 people.” This information was made up. These tools replicate the style of authoritative information without differentiating between what is and is not valid. For that, an analysis always needs to be grounded to some set of ideological principles or commitment to some standard perspective. You can’t put all of human thought into a blender and hope it gets you to the “correct” answer.

There is also the troubling issue of AI perpetuating systemic biases. The AI Avatar-generating app Lensa has recently been identified by many users for perpetuating racist and sexist imagery.

Writer Rebecca A. Stevens, a Black woman, described how she purchased a Lensa pack for her family which produced some cringing results. While her white husband’s pictures turned out okay, hers were whitened significantly. As Grant Fergusson told WIRED of AI-Generated artwork in general: “The Internet is filled with a lot of images that will push AI image generators toward topics that might not be the most comfortable, whether it’s sexually explicit images or images that might shift people’s AI portraits toward racial caricatures.”

Lensa Image generated by Rebecca Stevens, a Black woman.

People often assume technology is value-neutral, but nothing is value-neutral. Humans have opinions and perspectives, and they are baked into everything we do. The biases of programmers become reflected in the codes and algorithms they develop to run their applications. Even where we assume a programmer or engineer is free of these biases, patterns uncovered in the datasets that train these algorithms can also reproduce them. Avatar generators like Lensa would not whiten users’ images if its program did not reflect the biases of either its creators or the datasets it was trained on.

To summarize: the developers of AI applications like Midjourney and Lensa are taking labor they did not adequately compensate people for and may not have had permission to use to train their system. Then, these products are commodified into a privately-owned service that is incredibly vulnerable to long-standing systemic biases and easily exploited for malicious intent. These externalities will not be encumbered by the owners of this programs, they are encumbered by everyone else.

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What is the end goal for tools like Midjourney? Though many are currently available for free, they will not remain so.

In the short term, fares for use are lifted so companies can test their service and establish brand recognition. Eventually, these applications will be locked behind a paywall, and transformed into a service designed to cut labor costs associated with content production. The end goal is to make money by selling a service that reduces labor costs for businesses. Once this project is complete, the livelihoods of all types of visual artists will be put at risk.

The primary customer is not immediately obvious, but big money will be made selling this service to content aggregation firms: Companies and individuals who own content-hosting platforms, websites, or other media enterprises that would rather pay an algorithm to produce cheap images fast over a skilled artist at a higher premium. Content aggregators would love to cut out the cost of labor entirely and replace it with an application.

We have already seen this transition happen elsewhere. Google Translate, for instance, has become reliable enough to be used as a stand-in for skilled translation. Google Translate is far from perfect, but it’s reliable enough that many have started to use it as a stand-in for professional translation services. The software hasn’t become something that augments the labor of skilled and trained translators — its lowered the demand for them. Now, many translation jobs have turned into low-paying gig work. As translator Katrina Leonoudakis lamented to The Guardian about subtitle translations: “Knowing that these multibillion-dollar companies refuse to pay a few more dollars to an experienced professional, and instead opt for the lowest bidder with mediocre quality, only speaks to their greed and disrespect not only for the craft of translation but the art created by the film-makers they employ.”

It’s important to emphasize here that the quality of service provided is secondary. There have been numerous instances of vendors putting out the minimal viable translation because creating a readable translation isn’t the point. Many sellers are fine with putting in minimal effort to spin a profit. This technology has considerably lowered that bar while making no assurances that these products will be reliable or accurate. As a result, skilled workers face more precarious employment as the quality of goods and services on the market deteriorates.

Other industries have been affected by this sort of “disruption.” AI-assisted calling, booking, customer service, and logistics services have already dampened wages and employment in these (typically stable) industries; and nearly all modern tech companies have replicated this predictable cycle of disruption and extraction.

For example, Uber promised that their app would provide greater freedom and flexibility for its riders and customers. However, their service was hardly an innovation; The company was only sustainable because it was able to carve-out favorable regulations from local governments and was capable of marshaling enough investment capital to subsidize the cost of its rides early on. Both factors drove its (mostly unionized) competitors out of the market.

As a result, life as a driver has become more precarious. Reporting has shown that drivers are making significantly less than your typical taxi driver, and Uber has been known to put forth inflated figures for its riders’ earnings in order to trick workers onto the platform. The public also bears the cost of this disruption: the price of ride-sharing services has increased now that the competition has been pushed out of the market.

When we look at what similar technologies have done in the hands of the few, they have lowered the cost of our labor. People still work as translators, tailors, writers, and painters. It’s just that labor-saving technology, due to the arrangement of its ownership, has been exploited to lower wages and make the pursuit of honest work in these fields harder and more tenuous.

Once AI-powered image generation software becomes widespread, the working artist or designer risks a similar fate. Workers will have to compete with software that is developed with the past work produced by themselves and their peers. For employment, the worker will have to settle for the sort of alienating tasks that the machine cannot perform on its own — editing, prompting, drafting, compiling — at lower and more sporadic wages.

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Is this bleak future inevitable? Some argue that these sorts of disruptions, although hard in the short-term, will eventually raise our collective standard of living. Optimists allege that these technological advancements, despite the awful inputs that powered their creation, will eventually create a net good.

In fact, these new technologies will only contribute to an increasing precarity. So long as the profits derived from reductions in time and labor saved from new technologies are owned by a narrow few, paths to an honest living will only become narrower for the rest of us. This is not an arrangement that will deliver emancipation or improvement.

The precarity of life will never be liberated by technological progress that is not equalized. Historically, capitalist predation has only been beaten through class warfare facilitated by an organized labor movement. The small (if increasingly deteriorating) labor benefits and protections much of the working-class enjoys today — the 40-hour work week, health and safety laws, healthcare benefits, etc. — are not natural allowances provided by technological advancement. They were spoils won from an organized struggle against capitalists staged by workers.

A collective response to new forms of capitalist predation will be the only way externalities produced by this new technology are addressed. Artists and creative workers who want to stop this race to the bottom will need to pool together to protect each other from the theft of their art. Political organizations and lawmakers will need to think about what sort of protections, restrictions, or requirements are available to prevent the abuse and exploitation of this new form of technology.

Abating the devastation caused by the commercialization of these technologies, if it is possible, will be a straining effort. But the alternative will be excruciating: the reduction of creative labor into another precarious gig on an alienating assembly line.

Words That Make Every Injustice Instantly Easier to Talk About

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

Language is hard. It can be both a necessary tool for liberation and also a barrier — something that we go around in circles again and again without making actual progress on a chosen issue. Some people are so focused on how to speak correctly that they never act: trapped in a prison of their own shame and guilt.

The words below are about language, but they are also meant to introduce and expand concepts that make conversation more straightforward. These words will allow you to sidestep certain rhetorical traps and push through into conversations that hopefully let you get more done.

Queer

When conservatives are feeling uncharitable, they will sometimes offensively refer to LGBTQ+ individuals as "alphabet people." It's a frustrating dismissal meant to criticize how much diversity with gender and sexuality is being acknowledged nowadays. Still, it hints at a real rhetorical problem: no matter how many people you include at the end of the acronym, someone is always excluded.

The "+ "addition I added above is meant to solve this problem, but it doesn't really because some identities are still valued over others by being there in the first place. The plus sign nods to otherness without necessarily including it. That's why, more and more, I have just been using the Q part of that acronym — queer.

Queer is an umbrella term that can include all-nonnormative sexualities, romantic identities, and genders. Gay men can be thought of as queer. Trans women are queer. Aromantic nonbinary people are queer. (note: some people disagree with this framing and refer to it as a political association as much as relating to gender, romance, or sexuality).

If you are speaking broadly and want to generalize about the LGBTQ+ community, it's best not to exclude people, which is why the queer label is increasingly a handy stand-in.

GSRM

From rejecting one acronym to embracing another, GSRM stands for Gender, Sexual, and Romantic Minority. It's not so much about specific gender, romantic, or sexual identities but refers to the even broader umbrella of all of these identities that are otherized in our society.

This language is helpful because, depending on how you define queerness, some people may fall outside of it but still engage in romantic or sexual identities that our society stigmatizes. For example, white cisgendered, heterosexual individuals who engage in a kink or are in a polyamorous relationship endure some oppression and discrimination from society. We could say the same for a straight man in a romantic relationship with a trans woman. He's in a straight relationship, but his gender and sexuality can be called into question for the mere association with an "Other."

These people might not necessarily fall under the queer umbrella (though there is plenty of overlap), but they have interests that can sometimes align with the greater community. When the situation calls for it, it's important to have language that includes them.

White Supremacy

Many people have a definition of racism where they define it as someone saying something mean to an individual Black or Brown person for being of that race. This is often why conservatives believe that reverse racism toward white people exists because if white people can be mean to Black people about race, surely the opposite can and does happen.

Anti-racists believe racism is not just about individual actions but systems of power. If you are a Black person in this country, you will statistically be poorer, have worse health outcomes, and be brutalized more by the police. This sad state is because the laws and institutions in this country are set up to discriminate against Black and Brown people, regardless of whether or not an individual is racist. You can not have a racist bone in your body and still benefit from and perpetuate racist institutions and policies.

This reality is why many people have started encouraging others to use the term White Supremacy instead of racism because the phrase directly references a system that values a hierarchy based on whiteness. It reframes the discussion away from individualized notions of race toward systems.

-Anti Instead of -Phobic

An annoying debate happens whenever you use a word like homophobia or islamophobia. Someone will inevitably respond, "I am not afraid of gay people. I just don't like them." This counter relies on a juvenile understanding of fear (fear can often manifest as violence), but by the time you get into that conversation, the person has already gotten you to move from the point at hand: that there is a group of people they hate.

We can eliminate this sidestep altogether by categorizing them as hateful instead. They are not homophobic but anti-gay. Not transphobic, but anti-trans (see also anti-fat, anti-muslim, etc.).

Under this framing, you have moved away from defending a word to your interlocutor having to justify their biases. They will still try to wriggle out of this framing by claiming what they really don't condone is "the behavior" (as if there is a meaningful difference), but it's far harder to maintain that position when you can continuously pivot back to what they're against.

Capitalist vs. Worker

We get into many debates about wealth in the United States, but many of them are based on aesthetics rather than actual wealth. Media pundits will label you wealthy if you splurge on coffee, eat avocado toast, talk verbosely, or, in a very sad state of US politics, have little debt (side note: rich people often have lots of debt).

What actually makes you rich in this world, though, is being a capitalist. These are the people who own stuff (factories, natural resources, companies, IP, etc. ) and extract most of their wealth by either renting out that stuff to others, usually to people who don't own stuff, or by paying workers money to extract and package it for them as a good or service.

Capitalists may do work (union-busting and tax evasion require a lot of paperwork, after all), but they do not need to work a traditional job. They make money off of their stuff. Whether that be a landlord extracting rent, a company extracting royalties from media, stock owners collecting residuals, or CEOs transferring the surplus value of their workers' labor over to themselves via overly inflated salaries, the wealth of capitalists is not tied to individual labor but exploitation.

Simply put, everyone else who isn't doing that is a worker. Cut out conversations about coffee and college debt, and focus on how people make their money.

Disabled

Disabled. You can say it. You won't catch on fire. People have disabilities, and if we want to improve our ableist society (i.e., discrimination based on the belief that non-disabled people are superior), that means being able to talk about them. (side note: this applies to every identity, whether we are talking about Gay People, Black People, or most triggering of all White people. If you can't say the word, there is a problem).

When in doubt, be descriptive (e.g., Sarah has Cerebral Palsy) and use the language appropriately (i.e., don't just call out someone's disability because you are uncomfortable with it). As long as you aren't otherizing someone, it's okay to mention something that is a huge facet of someone's life.

It's best to use the language that someone prefers. Some people will have a problem with the word disabled in the same way that some GRSM people will have difficulty with the word queer. These words have long, complicated histories, and things will sometimes get messy. That's okay.

Also while we are on this subject, cut out ableist language from your vocabulary such as idiot, imbecile, r*t*rded, hearing impaired, dumb, crazy, and cripple. These words are straight-up insulting. Some disabled people may use them, but that falls more in line with how some queer people may refer to themselves as f*gg*ts or how some black people call themselves n*gg*s. It's a way for marginalized groups to reclaim an insulting history, and it doesn't go both ways.

Kyriarchy

Intersectional feminism is the idea that forms of oppression can connect to make things worse off overall for certain groups of people. For example, Black people are paid less in the United States, but Black women are statistically paid even less than Black men. Race and gender intersect here to systemically put Black Women in a worse-off financial situation.

A rhetorical problem arises when we refer to a few systems of oppression when what we really want to do is refer to all of them at once. Writers will say something along the lines of "white supremacist, colonial patriarchy" when what they want to say is every intersecting oppression. It's the LGBTQ+ problem all over again, except instead of sexual, romantic, and gender orientations, we are talking about unjust hierarchies.

This is where the word Kyriarchy comes in. First popularized by scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, it's a word that quite simply means all intersecting hierarchies, or in essence, the status quo. It's about the nodes of oppression and privilege that people experience the world with and has been likened to a pyramid by Fiorenza.

With this word, a long string of words is no longer needed. If you want to talk about white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative society without breaking out a sea of commas, Kyriarchy is your word.

Specificity

This last section is not so much a word as a concept. There has been growing frustration from some activists over terms like People of Color (POC) and Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC). This frustration exists because, sometimes, when people want to talk about a group, such as Black people, they use these broader acronyms instead.

Specificity is your friend when referring to groups of people. If you are talking about Black people, then say Black people. If you are referring to Trans-Asian Women, then say that. It's not that these larger umbrella terms we have mentioned don't have their place — they do — but many are using them as a stand-in for an "other," and that can be dehumanizing in its own way.

Conclusion

The point of this article was not to chastise you on how you are doing everything wrong, or be the end all be all of how we should speak. There were many words that I could have also included (allistic vs. autistic, land back, and even socialism, etc.), but decided to axe for time. This article is meant to be more of a jumping-off point, summarizing aspects of feminist, disability, critical race, and labor theory as succinctly as possible.

There may be terms you disagree with or want to learn more about, and I encourage you to research them. The beauty of language is that one person like me doesn't get to decide what it means. It's through conversations we move forward, so talk away.

What Representation Isn’t

NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Representation is a gift

Something that gives people hope.

A fixture they can point to on high

And say, “I can do that too.”

Representation is cool.

A trend TV execs and publishers

can tell their assistants to

“get on.”

Representation is a war.

A battleground where people decide

What forms do

And do not belong.

Representation is a closed door.

A barrier people can point to

And say, “We don’t exclude others.

Look at her.”

Representation is charity.

Something given to those who have little,

So those that have much more

may feel like good people.

Representation is a salve.

A palliative given so that those being crushed

do not imagine beyond the table

stacked on top of their backs.

Representation is a ghost.

Something that haunts those who have everything,

with what they have taken

And the privileges they may lose.

Representation is a collective complaint.

A reminder of cruelties inflicted

and promises broken.

A howl for change.

We know what representation is.

What it isn’t reparations.

What it isn’t healthcare.

What it isn’t a roof over your head.

What it isn’t justice.

Representation may give you hope.

It might guide and fuel,

but it will never free you.

Is Going to a Restaurant Murder?: Unpacking the Harm of Social Events in the Covid Era

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

I am someone who has, for the most part, not stopped masking. I still predominantly use masks when going to the grocery store and public transit. I am a huge proponent of vaccinations (not just for Covid-19, but for influenza, monkeypox, and more). I have not returned to a pre-Covid normal either. My social life consists of small get-togethers, the occasional house party (with testing), and a monthly board game night I organize for a left-leaning organization. To me, these precautions should be treated as a necessary part of everyday life, but I recognize I am in the minority here.

Some online take a far more aggressive stance about those who do not follow these precautions I have described, as imperfectly as I keep to them, to the point of equating going to a restaurant as encouraging murder. As Jessica Wildfire remarked recently on Twitter: "After three years, I honestly don't see what people love so much about eating out that it's worth committing social murder for." This opinion generated quite a stir and is helpful because it cuts to the core of a problem that underpins a lot of activism in the United States: How do you justify existing in a system that harms people?

I am not here to defend this tweet but to defend people's "unreasonableness" when venting about an injustice. I am of two minds with positions like the tweet above. On the one hand, I recognize why some people are so burnout and confused about the state of covid that they are letting precautions slips, but on the other hand, these critics are not wrong that these actions hurt others — a tension we shall examine below.

Why do some liberals and leftists abandon precautions?

I understand why people f@ck up with covid precautions: I do all the time. For example, the other day, I was on my way to the grocery store, forgot my mask, and went inside anyway. I felt terrible about it, but I still did it because I am exhausted most of the time. I often feel like I am the only one in the room who still cares about the pandemic. People will give me funny looks for being masked, and when I have low willpower, sometimes I go f@ck it and throw caution to the wind.

It shouldn't be that way. People shouldn't have to hold up lifesaving healthcare precautions through willpower alone, but that's where we are as a country. Through both the Trump and Biden administrations, the government has maintained a regime that cares more about the economy than human lives, and it's hard to know who to trust. Should I mask? Should I quarantine after travel? How many days? I can read five different sources and get five different answers, and that's not how things should be when it comes to a pandemic.

If I am thinking impartially, which is what debate bros on the Internet always tell me to do, it's naive to hold people individually responsible for that systemic failure. Many people prioritize the recommendations of the CDC over random Twitter feeds and blogs because it's easier to do, and they can't sort through the mass of contradictory information out there.

Does that make the harm from things like long-covid go away? Of course not, but that's not what's being argued here. The point many leftists are making in response to Jessica Wildfire is that this is a systemic issue, and treating it as an individual moral failure doesn't do anyone any favors. As David Klion tweeted recently in response: "Any individual going out to a restaurant now isn't making the difference. The system failed, the collective political will to save more lives faltered. It sucks, but blaming people is pointless."

For the ones that allegedly do "know better" about how harmful Covid is, they're painfully aware that our society is many years away from taking public health seriously. Biden has infamously declared the pandemic over and is the most likely Democratic frontrunner in 2024. We will probably have years of Covid precautions being treated as a matter of personal responsibility, with no reward for those sacrifices other than bragging rights on Twitter (not the soundest of motivations).

In the meantime, those who, again, do "know better" are further aware that there is always the possibility for something worse on the horizon. It's no secret that pandemics are expected to increase as climate change worsens. Combined with a deteriorating global supply chain and an over-taxed healthcare system, there's no reason to expect that we will be able to handle things better as the years go by. The argument I see a lot is that if you are someone who sees this grim future coming — and you look at current activities such as going out to restaurants and clubbing and realize that they might become inaccessible in the future for all but a few — at some point, your willpower is going to teeter out. At that point, you are just going to do the activities you want to do anyway.

This is an argument I empathize with a great deal because I am not a massive fan of willpower being treated as the solution to any significant problem. We cannot solve systemic crises such as climate change and public health as individuals. We need community, and if your answer to a pandemic is to bootstrap your way through it, that's a recipe for disaster.

Critics of this perspective sometimes counter that these actions still put autoimmune people at risk — and this is true — but that didn't start with this pandemic. Try looking up disabled activists' perspectives on our country's response to influenza before covid-19 to understand what I mean. Ableism is ingrained in how our society operates, and your actions will harm disabled people. In fact, your actions will harm all sorts of people on society's fringes (note: this is your gentle reminder that many of the things you buy are made by enslaved people).

Now you can take this reasoning to the extreme. If you are genuinely burnout, the impossibility of reducing your harm down to zero in our racist, capitalist society is almost too comforting. If you accept that some amount of harm is inevitable, it allows you to go on autopilot — something everyone does to some degree, whether it be with white supremacy, pollution, or meat consumption. The reframe becomes that you shouldn't be mad at someone just because they have hit a wall on one of the hierarchies that impacts you personally when there are probably areas where you are likewise stunted. The "everyone's a little bit racist" defense circa 2003's Avenue Q, but for disability and illness.

I will get back to why I dislike this argument later, but not everyone is approaching this with a color-blind outlook. Most are just overwhelmed or burnout. The logical, clinical answer about the current state of covid precautions in the US is that we must stop individualizing this systemic problem. This is an argument I have a lot of empathy for because, without it, you can spiral out of control the more injustices you take on.

Yet, all this being said, this answer still sucks if you are disabled or ill, doesn't it?

Stop Tone-Policing Sick and Disabled People

I have not been entirely honest. I get sick a lot (see American Society Wants The Sick And Tired To Die). COVID-19 hit, and I immediately contracted shingles from the stress. I get regular, debilitating migraines and colds that take me out for days, and that's not to mention all the mental health issues that make proactive measures such as exercise and regular hydration difficult. COVID is a considerable risk to me, and I am by no means the illest person out there.

I would prefer it if I didn't have to choose between having fun with my friends on New Year's and being sick for days afterward, but that's my life. That's a lot of disabled or ill people's lives. Our anger over society choosing to prioritize ones and zeros in a computer over our lives is valid, and there aren't many places to vent that anger. You can't exactly expect everyone to put their lives on hold.

I understand why Jessica Wildfire's frustration exists because it's cathartic to shout your pain into the void. Whenever I am the only person on a metro who is masked, a far too common occurrence, I tend to immediately text my friends and vent to them, albeit on more private channels. I was particularly enraged the other day when I saw a maskless mother cradling a maskless baby in her arms at the height of rush hour. I wanted to scream.

The Internet is filled with many spaces where people are anonymously dunking on strangers because they need to vent about systemic injustices. For example, the subreddit, Are the Straights Okay? has a lot of queer people who criticize ridiculous examples of heteronormativity (e.g., the societal expectation that straightness must be valued over all other forms of expression). When people make fun of statements like marriage being equated to murder or the strange gender expectations put on children, they are skewering norms more than individuals.

If one is straight, it might be tempting to say, "hey, not all of us are like that" (see also "not all men," "not all white people," and "not all Christians"), but this is not about any one individual. It's about how the institution of heteronormativity hurts queer people. These examples allow queer people to vent about the ridiculousness of a system they have very little control over but impacts their everyday lives. It's a form of reasserting the semblance of control.

The advice I would give to someone struggling with the "hey, not all of us are like that" reaction is to move past that initial defensiveness and try to empathize with where that anger and pain is coming from — both from themselves and to the people they are reacting to. Queer people are venting on this Subreddit because the institution of heteronormativity hurts them, and rather than saying, "can you please reframe these accusations in a nicer way" (what some would classify as "tone-policing"), maybe focus on how you can dismantle the injustices instead.

This advice applies to literally every marginalized group, including disabled and sick people. When someone says something aggressively, and perhaps ineloquently as Jessica Wildfire has done here, do you need to dive into a meaningless argument about your hurt feelings or try to explain how you maybe aren't that bad? Because for many people, things are that bad. Rather than take these comments personally, and list out rationalizations, like the ones we outlined in the first section, maybe recognize this is not about you.

All the explanations I wrote at the beginning of this article are technically accurate, but are they relevant when addressing someone venting to their followers about restaurants because they haven't left the house in months for fear of dying? When you are angry and in pain, having suffered the last three days recovering from a migraine because you decided to risk things and have fun at a party (I might be getting a little personal here), someone asking you to be "more understandable" with that anger is psychologically exhausting. When we participate in systems that hurt others — even if they are systems that cannot be easily changed — that hurt still exists. People should be allowed to complain about that harm without prefacing every comment with an in-depth look at the systems at play.

We are still in the middle of a pandemic, and every social interaction will increase the likelihood of someone dying. That is simply the reality of where we are, and again that is not an analysis that begins and ends with Covid but a host of diseases and infections. Influenza still kills people. HIV still kills people. Some groups experience more risk from our behavior than others, and as a society, we don't seem very interested in mitigating that risk more than is necessary to help wealthy people make money.

Why are people treating the words of a frustrated person like a policy memo about to go out to the President for immediate adoption? Many of us are merely looking for people to give a f@ck about our needs. Needs that are not being met, and so we are letting these complaints be known — that's what should be the takeaway. Someone's elaborate missive on why they shouldn't feel guilty is unnecessary here: internalize that injustice is happening and either do something about it or get out of the way.

A Tired Conclusion

I can see both sides of this debate. I empathize with people who are burnt out from covid precautions and want to go to a restaurant, party, movie theater, or whatever fleeting pleasure they can capture in this end-stage capitalism we are suffering under. I am there too. I am also a human that wants to do fun things, and this desire has caused me to lower my standards in ways I have regretted.

I don't take as hard of a stance as Jessica is doing here. By all means, continue to live your life, hopefully with precautions, if it makes you feel like you won't have a breakdown. I don't really care what you do — I don't know who you are, and I have no desire to dictate your life on an individual basis.

It's worth mentioning, though, that no one is preventing you from going to restaurants or movie theaters. Quite the opposite, the disabled and sick predominantly have no say in how our society operates, which means the needs of this community — needs everyone will require eventually (old age says hi) — are not represented in the grand scheme of things. Do whatever you want, but the one thing you can't demand is that those enraged with this system make you feel less guilty. This status quo is killing many people, and that tension doesn't go away simply because it makes someone uncomfortable.

Many actions we do on a daily basis hurt others, and that is just something we all have to live with and learn from. I can't speak for Jessica Wildfire, but in general, if a disabled or sick person is talking online about how people going to spaces like restaurants hurts them and that makes you uncomfortable, my suggestion, respectfully, is to get over it by which I mean to stop taking it personally. It has nothing to do with you, except in the most general sense of you living in a society that doesn't treat sick and disabled people very well.

Take that pedantic, "well actually" energy and direct it at the institutions and people f@cking things up: Insurance companies making it difficult for those to pay for the medication they need to survive; drug companies preventing the vaccine from being easily accessible, so this virus continues to mutate; rich people who would rather we work than rest and heal. Those people have timelines and existences that deserve a stern talking to.

Everything else is just getting in the way.

Debunking the Trope That “Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant”

Photo by Christina Langford-Miller on Unsplash

There is this tiring trope that happens in media. The villain has been deceiving the populace of a town, country, or galaxy for the entire runtime. It seems like they will never face justice, but then our hero steps onto a stage with evidence or leaks a hot mic recording to the public, and the villain's secret gets revealed. The crowd instantly turns on them, and the day is saved.

This trope is everywhere in pop culture. It's also a lie. A convenient fairytale we tell children (and adults), so they can ignore the reality that people are not always convinced when the truth is revealed.

A breakdown of the trope

It needs to be stated how prevalent this trope is, especially in children's media. A good example is the Pixar film Coco where antagonist Ernesto de la Cruz, who before the climax we believe is protagonist Miguel's father, accidentally reveals to the entire underworld on a hot mic that he killed character Héctor. "I am the one willing to do what is necessary to seize my moment, whatever it takes," he accidentally confesses onscreen to thousands.

The entire afterlife community turns on him instantly, booing him off the stage, and within a year, he has lost his standing in both the real world and the land of the dead. There are many other examples, particularly with a hot mic (see also Little Gideon revealing his evil plan to the town of Gravity Falls and Bellwether confessing accidentally to the cops in Zootopia).

Adult media has this trope as well. The 2011 film Horrible Bosses involves a CEO getting busted for what he has said on a recording. We see the same exact thing replicated in 2007's Hairspray, the second Mission Impossible movie, Now You See Me 2, and pretty much every other media property where our protagonist has to go up against a villain with far more political power and clout than them.

My favorite example comes from the kid movie Sea Beast (2022), which I low-key love for just how improbable it is. Character Maisie Brumble is standing on the back of a giant sea creature, far away from a crowd of onlookers, and she monologues to them how the kingdom's war with the sea beasts is a false one. The beasts have not been killing people: that's all been propaganda from the monarchy. The crowd not only hears her (which, like what?), but the speech works. Maisie can get through decades, maybe centuries, of propaganda to convince the inhabitants that their war is an unjust one.

Yet this trope is tiredly unrealistic. It's nice to believe that such an interaction is enough to topple an oppressive system. The sweetness of this trope is why it gets told in the first place, but it's not true. We have seen children in the real world monologue about the pain they have experienced with, say, a mass shooting, only for conspiracy theorists to deny the event even happened (see the Sandy Hook massacre). We have seen reporters leak politicians' statements and financial records only for the information to be ignored (see the Panama papers, the Snowden files, etc.).

The truth is often not enough to get through well-entrenched propaganda. I wouldn't care about these cute kids' movies telling children that “speaking truth to power is enough to topple empires” if this was not how actual adults thought too. Many adults continue to make the false claim that we can change things by merely bringing injustices to light. "Sunlight," the saying goes, "is the best disinfectant." Or to riff on a famous newspaper's newest slogan: "Democracy dies in Darkness."

This perspective ignores the power dynamics at play in writing, recording, and remembering history. It's a constant struggle to get people to learn about things as they happened because, like the monarchs of Sea Beast, those in power are putting out propaganda to distort the truth. When someone learns information that conflicts with that propaganda, they often don't accept it willingly but resist the truth at all costs.

For example, in the United States, conservatives have attempted to purge discussions of queer, black, and brown histories from our schools because the mere airing of the truth is not enough to get them to accept it. Many conservative actors would prefer to go on believing in the same lies they have always believed in, evidence be damned, and are removing all information that makes them uncomfortable (see the moral panic over CRT and queer rights). It takes genuine work and political organizing to get people to abandon well-entrenched narratives. Sometimes you need an entire competing propaganda arm to repeat an alternative history constantly to get to the point where the public starts questioning its indoctrination.

The history of nonwhite, nonheteronormative America has, for the longest time, been a stigmatized history — one preserved by fringe journalists, writers, and everyday people, who were not believed until decades or centuries after the fact, and still unbelieved by many. Truthseekers we consider heroes today (e.g., Ida B. Wells, MLK Jr., etc.) were hated in their heyday. Their wide appeal now is often because of political battles that made that information more palatable to the public, and even today, much of their original message has been so watered down as to no longer make mainstream society uncomfortable (see the appropriation of MLK Jrs “I have a dream speech”).

Just revealing information is never enough to create political change, and it's high time we recognize that both on the Silver Screen and off it.

An honest conclusion

One of the most significant subversions of this trope comes from the movie, Sorry to Bother You, where protagonist Cassius Green tries to reveal to the public how the corporation WorryFree is turning its workers into horse people. Cassius leaks this information to the public only for no outcry to emerge. The truth doesn't lead to a fundamental shift in society but the continuation of the status quo. As the character Squeeze says of Cassius's “call your congress members” campaign:

“Most people that saw you on that screen knew calling their congressman wasn’t going to do shit. If you get shown a problem but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem.”

And so Cassius abandons this campaign and helps Squeeze with a strike — something that has been going on throughout the film. It's implied that this slow, painful work of union organizing is needed to get people to eventually accept Cassius's information. This message advocates for workers to push for systemic reform, not simply just to “state their stories” or their “truth.” The fight for power is depicted as mattering more.

Conversely, the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" trope primes people to believe that the bare minimum is enough: that they can live in a fantasy world where, regardless of power dynamics, they can tell the truth, and people will listen to them. It's a very privileged and naive perspective that we should not teach to children, let alone adults. Kids are smart enough to know that adults lie, and it's not a leap for them to understand that adults not only lie about history but actively ignore it.

I would love more media taking the Sorry To Bother You route because while telling the truth is essential, fighting for it is what really counts.

The Anti-Trans Fans of 'Hogwarts Legacy' & The Consumers Who Ignore Them

Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world RPG by Avalanche Software set in the Harry Potter universe. This game takes place in the 1800s, approximately a hundred years before the original books. It is set against the backdrop of a goblin rebellion as well as the emergence of a new, forgotten form of magic.

The game has come under fire for various reasons (one of them being alleged antisemitism), but the most prominent is that the IP comes from the mind of author J.K. Rowling — a well-known anti-trans activist who has become a figurehead in the movement for campaigning for the erroneous belief that gender is tied to sex (side note: gender has changed culturally throughout history), has perpetuated pseudoscience and pushed for transphobic legislation. Many critics fear that the game's success will further cement her cultural influence and have consequently called for a boycott.

Today, we will examine whether bigoted people are rallying around the game — and if this and other problematic media are worth consuming.

The transphobia bubbling beneath the surface

From the onset, something we should clarify is that some transphobic people like this game, and by extension, Rowling herself, because she perpetuates transphobia (i.e. a hatred of trans people). Some see spending money on this game as another way to "own the libs." As the Steam user, PoorUglypeasant asserted on Jan 16:

“I bought this game just to put it on the top seller and piss off the woke mob trying to boycott a good game for very stupid reasons. The game is not out and already got my moneys worth by pissing off the ones who try to cancel the game just because the original author doesn’t think like them and refuses to bend the knee to those idiots.”

To pretend like ideology is not a factor around some (not all) people's support and disapproval of this game is naive. You don't have to search that hard to find users on Steam gleefully sharing transphobic talking points. "Evil = people who reject biological reality and want to chemically castrate and sexually mutilate children," erroneously commented one banned account. "There is nothing awesome nor beautiful about trans people, just like there is nothing as such in any other mentally ill person," vents another.

There are many comments like this throughout the Steam Community Hub for the game (something that speaks poorly of the platform's moderation). You can find similar sentiments across the most prominent social media platforms. Fringe far-right content creators are treating the success of this game as a refutation of "woke" ideology. "Hogwarts Legacy sales DOMINATE every gaming platform!," reads the title for the Youtuber YellowFlash 2, who then proceeds to argue that the game’s success is disproving woke “bs.”

Yet to place Rowling in the same bucket as these conservative actors is complicated. While some conservatives have come out in favor of Rowling's transphobia, she is still a liberal woman (by which I mean someone who supports capitalism but wants to expand the social safety net) writing a liberal book, and other conservatives hate her for that. As recently as last year, a far-right conservative pastor led a book burning of titles like Harry Potter and Twilight to stop "demonic influences." Not too long ago, Rowling butted heads with conservative commentator Matt Walsh, who she initially commended for his transphobic documentary What Is A Woman?, only to walk her support back because she was offended by his sexism.

Multiple things can be true. Rowling can be transphobic while also holding liberal views in other areas that clash with more traditional conservatives. She may be a figurehead for transphobia right now, but because her trans-exclusive feminism ultimately reinforces rigid gender norms, it was always destined to be coopted by more conservative men. She is ultimately pushing for a worldview that will make her materially worse off in the long run, even if she doesn't have the perspective to acknowledge that (think Serena Joy from the Handmaid's Tale).

Yet this anti-trans rhetoric is not the sole motivator for every supporter of the game. As we shall soon see, some people are passively on the sidelines or disagree with the spirit or aims of the boycott altogether.

The other people buying the game

Not everyone who wants to purchase this game is a conservative or motivated by outwardly transphobic reasoning. Some have claimed that they don’t care about the issue whatsoever. As LegacyKillaHD commented recently: "…then you have the more average casual gamer, I guess you could say. Those who actually like Harry Potter and aren’t really following along or care about the politics of JK Rowling. Those [people] are extremely excited about this game." (side note: it’s strange for LegacyKillaHD, a very online person, to claim to know how these people think).

Listen, there is a worthwhile debate to be had about whether passively ignoring transphobia still counts as transphobia, but LegacyKillaHD has a point that most consumers are not plugged into this debate at all. While transphobia was apparent in the comments surrounding Hogwarts Legacy, when one observes discussions on platforms such as Steam, most comments are about game mechanics such as romance options. We have to be careful not to fall into the "spotlight effect," where issues and arguments that matter a lot to us personally are even a consideration to other people.

Captured Jan 17, 2023: 3 out of 10 discussions are about this issue

Many people have a "hands-off approach" regarding media consumption. A lot of people believe that we should separate art from the artist. One Steam user writes: "She may be an English Terf, but the story itself of Harry Potter is pretty good. Why hate the work when it has done nothing wrong?" This is the infamous "death of the author" defense (see Lindsay Ellis's video on this topic). Although controversial, it speaks more to a consumer's passive indifference and privilege than their active transphobia.

Others commenters argue that this boycott has been pointless and ineffective, and they aren't always your far-right reactionaries. "Just enjoy the game. Rowling is a die-hard reactionist," writes one user, "[but] money won't fix it, and it's fine because no one really listens to what she has to say. Why would a sane person? Money doesn't mean smart or educated."

One may disagree with this statement (from my perspective, it sounds a little defeatist and ignores the fact that many do listen to JK Rowling), but it’s worth bringing up because this conversation is not always a rigid binary between transphobes and trans-supporters. There is some nuance here. Some consumers of this game are transphobic, others are passive supporters of that transphobia, and others still are people on the left who disagree with the political effectiveness of this boycott.

An unmagical conclusion

When we look at the reaction to this game, it's clear that celebrating transphobia motivates a large segment of the community. However, it does not seem like the overwhelming majority. The natural question becomes, considering everything we have discussed, should one boycott this game?

Drawing a line in the sand with a consumer product is always tricky to do in a capitalist society that is, by and large, toxic. Many food distributors actively use slave labor (see Nestle), exploit the working class (see Walmart and Amazon), and f@ck with our laws (see Disney). Does Rowling's publicness make her hatred worse or simply more visible? Does the arbitrariness of the boycott even matter if indecisiveness here is being used as an excuse for inaction? After all, when it comes to political activism, one has to start somewhere, and it's highly doubtful that many people engaging in whataboutism on this topic are organizing Amazon boycotts.

It's okay to be torn by these questions. We will not pretend here like we have cracked the code regarding ethical consumption under capitalism, but if these questions resonate with you, that's a sign that holding off here is not the worst thing in the world. We are talking about entertainment, not a vital service you need to have this second. One doesn't need to buy this wizarding game as soon as it comes out. We can wait to see whether these fears are accurate or, indeed, overblown.

In the meantime, as you mull this dilemma over, posted below are some games to scratch that itch for fantasy content. Many of these feature queer characters, so consider giving them a playthrough; you won’t be disappointed.

Some Queer Fantasy Games To Follow:

1. Boyfriend Dungeon

2. Ikenfell

3. Dragon Age Inquisition

4. Hades

5. Masquerada: Songs and Shadows

6. 80 Days

7. Dreamfall Chapters

8. Life Is Strange: True Colors

9. Undertale

10. Road Not Taken

Explaining How the George Floyd Uprising Was Quickly Forgotten

Leonhard Lenz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

I remember when I first heard about George Floyd's death. My partner had asked if I had heard about this new police shooting of a Black man, and I mistakenly thought he was referring to Tony McDade, a Black Trans man who was murdered two days later. I was confused by people suddenly caring about Floyd when I had already seen the videos that year of so many Black men and women killed by the police.

I didn't understand why this incident, out of a sea of injustices, jostled my fellow white people out of our complacency, but I was relieved that people seemed to care about it. There were a lot of connections formed during those earlier protests, and even what at the time appeared to be a desire to change policing (e.g., the Defund the Police movement).

All eyes looked to see what America would do, and then, well, nothing changed: a lot of ink was spilled, names were altered, monuments were replaced, some token legislation was passed, and the status quo remained the same. America gazed at the horror of systemic racism, and then just as quickly, it looked away.

How did this happen?

There are several ways a "public" (i.e., the collection of human minds that makes up a polity) reacts to an injustice once it enters the zeitgeist. Option one is that the initial anger leads to a push for substantial reform. People learn about an issue and rage against it. They then demand changes from their leaders or maybe even overthrow them, in some cases violently, until headway with the injustice is made or the public fails.

In this regard, we can think of the early environmentalist movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. Worsening pollution from leaded gas and smog as well calls to action, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, had people genuinely upset that modern society was hurting their air and water. The first Earth Day had attendance in the tens of millions, and the following years saw the passage of laws such as the Clean Air and Water acts as well as the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

There are usually backlashes against such reforms, where reactionary forces rally to turn back the clock. These forces don't always win, but any advocates of successful leftist policy should assume that an angry backlash is on its way. You can look at the overturning of Reconstruction, the second or first Red Scare, the current anti-LGBT moral panic, and even the 2016 election of Donald Trump through the lens of resentment and backlash.

This backlash occurred in the 1980s, not just against the environmental gains we briefly mentioned, but the Keynesian economics that governed the post-War period. The emergence of neoliberalism (i.e., the belief that the market should dictate all interactions) following the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism led to the dismantling of the New Deal and the Great Society safety net. The environmental movement lost its steam, moving to a non-profit-driven advocacy model that could not compete against and was, in many cases, coopted by market interests. Environmentalism pushed, and then its gains were whittled away over many decades.

Yet pushing for social change and weathering a backlash that seeks to undermine your gains is, in many ways, the optimistic scenario. The other main option is for the status quo to coopt the "spectacle" of your movement to prevent change from happening in the first place (see Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle). This occurs when your cause's imagery is plastered all over the place without it being linked to substantial policy changes.

The George Floyd uprising meets this latter option. Many political actors opted to add to the spectacle of the Black Lives Matter movement without fighting for its policy goals. Famously DC mayor Muriel Bowser put up a large Black Lives Matter mural that DC's Black Lives Matter chapter decried as meant to "appease white liberals while ignoring [their] demands." She then requested an increase in police funding: the exact opposite of the movement's goals. This was a common strategy with Democratic municipalities across America. Lawmakers committed to the vague promise of racial equality while fighting against it.

At the same time, many businesses and brands made token gestures designed to make progress seem like it was happening without changing their often systemically racist business practices. For example, PepsiCo announced after the uprising that it would rename its often criticized product Aunt Jemima, a change that took about a year to implement. However, they are still a company routinely accused of anti-labor practices such as union-busting and permitting forced labor from contractors. Their union-busting has not gone away, and while they have pledged to eliminate forced labor, the byzantine nature of our current supply chains makes that promise challenging to verify and unlikely, given troubling claims that have emerged as of late.

People who were activated by the horrors of systemic racism following the George Floyd Uprising found an entire industry of politicians, brands, and self-help gurus more than willing to channel their revolutionary impulses into more "appropriate" avenues. Rather than engage with a radical, anti-racist organization or direct action, many people consumed more anti-racist books such as Robin Diangelo's White Fragility and became involved in Diversity and Inclusion initiatives at work. These actions are fine, and you should not feel bad for engaging in them, but they will not undo racism at a systemic level. Learning about white supremacy and being more mindful of it at work will not restructure the system of capital built on racist exploitation, and anyone who tells you differently is either naive or lying.

Some may find it cathartic to get mad at individuals for falling into this pattern of spectacle and cooption, but in many ways expecting people to maintain the momentum they did in June 2020 on willpower alone is unrealistic. When the uprising was just a social movement that didn't require much sacrifice besides anger, people were really into it. The public (not you as an individual) then started to learn that systemic racism cuts to the core of the American economy. The plantation inspires our modern work norms, and how we work and house people needs to fundamentally change to combat it.

It requires more work than a hashtag or protest can provide, and if you aren't supported long-term, there is only so much work you can put in to fight it. People cannot keep protesting nonstop without a network of support. They need food, housing, financial aid, and, most importantly, organization to endure the consequences of challenging the status quo. While an impressive patchwork of mutual aid networks did arise, more was needed to organize in the long-term.

For example, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle — a radical project that sought to create an independent area separate from police jurisdiction — started in early June at the height of the uprising and fizzled out less than a month later, after momentum died down. The police then capitalized on several incidents of violence to clear out the area. Interest in this radical project was there, but a lack of long-term support and organization meant it failed to be anything more than a momentary flash in the pan. As Benjamin V. Allison and Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu write in Inkstick:

“Although the Zone engaged in governance and in negotiations with the state, it lacked a unified government or defined leadership structure, instead opting for a horizontal organizational scheme….The hyperdemocratization of the Zone was not accepted by all of its residents, as some pushed for a concrete leadership structure, but efforts to establish such structures ultimately came to naught.”

Both on a macro and micro level, the left isn’t yet organized enough in the US to engage in this type of work on a large scale. If there had been a big leftist counter-movement already in place, then projects like CHAZ might have lasted longer, and, overall, the sanitizing techniques of spectacle would have failed to funnel people away from the cause, but that didn't happen. For various reasons that are too complicated to get into here, the left in the US is fractured, and its influence is vastly overstated. It could not compete with the mainstream narrative that policies like Defund were "unrealistic." After a few short months of protest, the national conversation shifted toward the 2020 election and other more "pressing" concerns.

This burnout and cooption opened a window for a reactionary counter-narrative, which, again, happens whenever any push against the status quo is attempted, even when it fails. Conservative Democrats (and even more conservative Republicans) were never in favor of the Defund the Police movement and almost immediately started to come out against it. "No, I don't support defunding the police," Joe Biden remarked while in Houston in June of 2020, while there to meet with the family of George Floyd. This anti-"defund the police" narrative spread like wildfire in politico circles and on cable news, where they framed it as detrimental to the American people. "…you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you're actually going to get the changes you want to be done," President Obama chastised in December 2020.

The narrative that "Defund" was impractical became such a prominent talking point that the people posting black squares in June 2020 dropped off as supporters of the movement altogether. Around 67% of Americans expressed some support for Black Lives Matter in June. That number dropped to 55% several months later, where it has remained more or less since. And again, this is for Black Lives Matter, a political movement that was coopted to mean pretty much nothing. Support for defunding the police has all but cratered.

Now some people still care about systemic racism, even my fellow white people (and if you are here raging with me, thank you). There will always be those pushing against the status quo — a small few have been doing it their entire lives. However, the revolutionary energy of those first few months in 2020 has certainly dissipated, and that seems like where we will remain for some time.

A bitter conclusion

In retrospect, it's frustrating that this allegedly "once-in-a-lifetime" moment led to no substantial policy. The environmental outcry in the 60s and 70s at least gave us the EPA and cornerstone legislation like the Clean Air and Water acts. Despite the fearmongering about police budgets, most have seen their budgets increase in cities across America.

Meanwhile, the police are still killing people. In 2022 alone, we have lost Tyree Devon O'Neal Jr., Immanueal Jaquez Clark-Johnson, Eric Jermaine Allen, James Wilborn, Christopher Lee Ardoin, Jaylen Lewis, Ali Osman, Tyshawn Malik Benjamin, Darryl Ross, Derrick Ameer Ellis-Cook, Jaiden Malik Carter, Donovan Lewis, Keshawn Thomas, Melvin Porter, Mable Arrington, Kyle Dail, Jason Lipscomb, Corey Maurice Hughes, Andrew Tekle Sundberg, Kevin Greene, Normiez Reeves, Paul Derrick Moss II, Patrick Lyoya, Tyrea Pryor, Antwon Leonard Cooper, Atiba Lewis, Donnell Rochester, and many, many more (The Washington Post keeps a good database on this).

This issue didn't go away, but many people are now interested in treating it as a settled matter. A combination of cooption and burnout has meant that the same people who were so eager to post Black Lives Matter hashtags in June of 2020 have switched over to Ukrainian flags and other more "pressing" issues — now decrying defunding the police, reparations, and other anti-racism initiatives as unrealistic.

I have witnessed and participated in several "uprisings" at this point. The same thing happened in 2014 after the Ferguson uprising: token reforms were introduced that did not address the problems of our carceral state, and then nothing. Sadly I expect the same thing to happen 5 or 6 years down the line when another predictable event jostles my fellow white public out of our complacency.

If that frustrates you, good, be frustrated. Be angry. Let the injustice of this country never be forgotten. America's foundation is cracked and rotten, and its citizenry needs to take out its hammers and get to the work. For the love of whatever you hold dear, join an organization (I am partial to the DSA) or get involved with a mutual aid organization and start swinging.

The Environmentalist Message at the Heart of Disney's 'Strange World'

Image; whatsondisneyplus.com

Disney's Strange World is about a fantastical land entirely different from our own, filled with fantastic locals and strange creatures. A central throughline in the film, like most Disney properties, is about familial expectations. The explorer Jaeger Clade wants his son Searcher to follow in his footsteps and find a way over the impassable mountain chain surrounding their country of Avalonia. This expectation causes a rift in Jaeger and Searcher's relationship that continues into the present.

Twenty-five years later, Searcher, although trying to move beyond this toxic dynamic, finds himself pushing his son, Ethan Clade, to be a farmer. This dysfunctional family of explorers and farmers is thrust into an adventure to go underneath the mountains to explore an even stranger world (a la Journey to the Center of the Earth) to find a way to save Avalonia, all while balancing out their deeper interpersonal issues.

Family is everywhere in this film, yet a theme that is just as present, though it might get less attention, is how this film handles conservation. Environmentalism is a constant in Strange World. A surprising lesson is how we must handle ecological instability. The film suggests that our answer lies not with techno-utopianism or machismo but with a better balance with the natural world, even if it means forgoing the technology central to our current way of life.

An environmentalist reading

In the film, a significant plot point is that Avalonia advanced rapidly after discovering a plant called Pando: a crop that produces a harvestable energy source that now powers their machines. Because of Pando, Avalonia went from using horse-and-buggies to having floating hover ships, radio, and endless electricity.

It's fair to say that Pando is a pretty good analogy for carbon-based power sources such as oil, especially after we learn that it's detrimental to the ecosystem. Though not initially known to Avalonia, Pando is a parasite destroying the interior of the turtle-like body they all live on top of. It is not dying but redirecting its energy to stop the creature's immune response from killing it off — dooming everyone in the process.

Like with Avalonia, our planet advanced rapidly after we learned to burn carbon to power our machinery. We went from an animal-powered society to one that had electricity running through billions of homes across the planet, and this development is deteriorating our atmosphere. Man-powered climate change is making our lives more difficult, and the next decade will be filled with immense tribulations as a result.

The movie critiques leaders who are unwilling to assess their impact on the environment. Callisto Mal, leader of Avalonia, invites the Clade family on a mission into a sinkhole where she believes Pando roots, which we learn are part of one single organism, are coming from. The way Callisto is introduced makes it clear that she does not care about the environment. Her hulking ship lands on the Clade family's crops, and she does not bother to move it. It’s a small but clever way to signal to the audience that Avalonian society values technology over its environment.

Once the Avalonian mission realizes that the roots of Pando are coming from a strange Dr. Seus-esque world beneath them, Callisto and Searcher don't care to figure out how Pando interacts with this environment or even what this environment means for their country above it. Their only concern is to stop the harm being done to the Pando root system so their technology can keep running, assuming that the flora and fauna around them are pests to be dealt with.

This singular focus on a technological solution is portrayed as a reflection of the grandfather's machismo. Where Jaeger Clade wants to treat every problem with brute force, Searcher and Callisto treat every problem just as simplistically, with technology. We see this when Ethan asks both of them to play a D&D-inspired game called Primal Outpost, and the two patriarchs cannot understand the game's premise, which is working in harmony with nature. They only want to keep doing what they know without stopping to assess their effects, and the son rightfully gets frustrated by them both, depicting them as two sides of the same coin.

The father's techno-utopianism (he literally calls Avalonia a utopia, that's not me reading into it) is very similar to the net-zero approach to climate change mitigation, or the idea that we work on removing our total carbon emissions down to zero, rather than scaling down capitalist production. Often these models require adopting some undeveloped technology that will magically remove carbon from the atmosphere and stop the problem of climate change, while changing as little as possible about our current economy.

Strange Worlds seems to suggest that this approach to environmentalism is naive. You cannot continue to engage in behavior that damages your environment and expect different results. Society's behavior has to change too, and the film's climax involves our characters switching their objectives and killing Pando (the metaphor for carbon-powered fuel) so the turtle-like ecosystem they live on can continue to survive.

And as a result, there are consequences. Their technology seems to regress. People aren't navigating Pando-powered hover ships by the film's end but using kinetic energy, air-powered floatation, and horse and buggy. They have to reinvent electricity by using a wind-powered device built out of the husk of the explorer vehicle we see throughout the film.

This moral is one of degrowth or the political concept that we need to shrink the economy to conserve our environment rather than expecting it to increase forever. The film is saying that our conception of technological progress must take a back seat to sustainability. This message is a refreshing, if not hypocritical position to have from a firm that produces millions of tonnes of carbon annually.

A Shrinking Conclusion

All in all, Stange World was a treat to watch. There were other themes and premises I didn't have time to get into, such as the character Ethan's queerness or his mom Meridian Clade being a total badass, which I encourage you to check out for yourself.

The central message that the people of Avalonia needed to slow their unstainable technological growth to preserve their future truly captivated me. We are a society that is pushing for increased energy consumption to the point of insanity, hoping that fusion, renewables, and carbon capture will lead us to some post-climate change promised land without having to make any sacrifices at all.

It's refreshing to see a film bucking that trend, encouraging not some far-off techno-saviorism but behaviors we can adopt in the here and now.

‘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.

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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.