The Apocalypse Is Already Here (for some)

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As Europeans started to make landfall in America, the apocalypse would soon begin. A disease killing upwards of 90% of the Indigenous population (estimated to be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions) would soon cause cities to crumble and empires to fall. According to one study published in the Quaternary Science Reviews:

“From 119 published regional population estimates we calculate a pre-1492 CE population of 60.5 million [across the Americas, and 2.8 million to 5.7 for North America specifically]….European epidemics removed 90% (IQR 87–92%) of the indigenous population over the next century.”

These plagues would themselves be a vanguard of a brutal invasion that would take and take until most pre-colonial cultures became shadows of their former selves. There would be over a thousand documented attacks against Native tribes in the intervening years. By the close of the American Indian Wars (i.e. the 1630s to the 1920s), the indigenous population would sit in only the low hundreds of thousands. Forced to live amongst ravenous new empires feasting on the life of the Americas, native people had to watch as colonizers set their eyes on everything they could see.

If we look at America from the perspective of the Native cultures still battling an oppressor-state, then for centuries, the apocalypse has been here. This is a helpful primer for any conversations on climate change. The apocalypse never affects everyone all at once, and often, those left to live in its wake most suffer at the hands of those who refuse even to acknowledge its existence.

Apocalypses are common

Most Americans are ignorant of the history that happened to this continent's earliest inhabitants, in part because there has been a concerted effort to prevent people from learning it. The recent conservative efforts to curtail Critical Race and Queer Theory are one such example, but the suppression of history, particularly the history of Indigenous people, has been going on for a long time. We are not very far removed from the legacy of Indian Boarding Schools (see “The Civilization Fund Act of 1819”), where white missionaries and others were paid to set up schools in tribal territories with the explicit purpose of killing Indigenous cultural practices under the pretext of "civilizing the natives” (i.e. cultural genocide).

There is too much to go over for a short article, but in essence, Indian-American relations have concerned European and colonial powers (and later the United States) making promises to various tribes, in some cases pitting tribes against one another in military conflicts and then breaking said promises months or years later. In reneging on these promises, many indigenous people have often been killed in the process, all for white settlers to gain even more of a foothold here (see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States for an excellent primer). As this author argued at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, this expansion has been quite genocidal:

“The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy….The objective of US authorities was to terminate [indigenous people’s] existence as peoples — not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.”

Unsurprisingly Indigenous scholars have been making the comparison to the apocalypse for a long time. You can read references to the apocalypse everywhere, from this New York Times piece to this academic Journal, and many more. As Nick Estes notes in an interview with Dissent Magazine:

“Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic. In some cases, we have undergone several apocalypses. For my community alone, it was the destruction of the buffalo herds, the destruction of our animal relatives on the land, the destruction of our animal nations in the nineteenth century, of our river homelands in the twentieth century. I don’t want to universalize that experience; it was very unique to us as nations. But if there is something you can learn from Indigenous people, it’s what it’s like to live in a post-apocalyptic society.”

Many Black Scholars have likewise made this connection. If one's people were violently taken from their homeland, forced to work that new land (often to death), stripped of their identity, and then even after being given some semblance of emancipation, permanently resigned to second-class status, it makes sense to perceive things in somewhat apocalyptic terms. As Gerald Horne argued in the book The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism:

“What is euphemistically referred to as “modernity” is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage being the driving and animating force of this abject horror.”

In the current era, many people are now using the concept of the apocalypse in regard to the collapse of our ecosystem. The most notable example is the group Extinction Rebellion, which frames climate change in these apocalyptic terms. "We declare it our duty to act on behalf of the security and well-being of our children, our communities, and the future of the planet itself," asserts the organization in its manifesto.

However, this framing ignores how apocalypses are largely a contextual phenomenon. The founding of America was apocalyptic for the tribes that lived here first, but it was not an apocalypse for United States citizens. In this case, one people's downfall was another's violent and brutal ascendancy.

Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups are correct that many people are dying because of our capitalist system's inability to address climate change, and many more will continue to die. I am reminded of a recent fishing trawler carrying refugees that sunk off the coast of Greece in June of 2023, killing hundreds in the process. Many of those refugees were fleeing resource wars and famine (situations that will be worsened by climate change). The Greecian government was aware of the boat off its waters and ignored it, allowing over an estimated 700 people to die.

This is not a new reaction. Western governments often ignore refugees, even though the West, particularly the US, is one of the more prominent contributors to the instability these people are often fleeing from. As things stand right now with climate change, many refugees will die because of the West's neglect and cruelty, both at home and abroad, and people are right to be both concerned and horrified by that reality.

Yet even as climate change claims the lives of millions, many will survive — they always do. And unless things change, like has often happened throughout our cruel history, people will be sorted into two broad camps: those who try to take everything; and those forced to live in the wastelands.

The wastelands are coming— The wastelands are here

It was the wastelands my fellow white people consigned many indigenous people to, particularly the Great Plains, east of the Rocky Mountains. This area was referred to as "The Great American Desert," a myth first perpetuated by Edwin James, chronicler of Zebulon Pike and Stephen H. Long's 1820 expedition. James called this region: "uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence."

During the height of the "removal era" (from roughly 1820 to 1850), which is a polite way of saying genocide, nearly 100,000 Indigenous peoples were expelled from east of the Mississippi River to this new "wasteland": an Indian territory thought to be valueless by white people. The most famous is probably the Cherokee Trail of Tears, where people from that tribe were violently forced to relocate from Georgia to what is now modern-day Oklahoma, but there were officially five of these violent "relocations" (see also the Choctaw, Muscogee, Seminole, and Chickasaw "removals").

Then, when this "desert" was deemed valuable, that land was also seized bit by bit. Indian territory would be abolished, and most of this new land would eventually be ceded to white settlers and become territories and later states. That final act of statehood led to the dissolution of tribal governments and communal lands (see “The Curtis Act of 1898”), which would further incentivize white settlers to ignore tribal laws and illegally claim land.

And we are still taking. As one example, these last few decades have been one of massive oil and natural gas projects that often go through or directly impact indigenous lands (see the Dakota Access pipeline, Keystone X, Line 3, Line 5, etc.). Under the pretext of energy independence, we have willfully violated the sovereignty of many indigenous tribes — not in the distant past, but right now.

Furthermore, this trend does not only apply to indigenous people. How many times has a Browner or Blacker neighborhood been deemed valueless in America, only for the land there to be seized for redevelopment and turned into a highway system or luxury condos (see the racist history of the US highway system)? How many times have cultural touchstones such as African-American Vernacular English or AAVE been otherized, only for them to be recontextualized as "cool" and become part of the "mainstream" (see “cultural appropriation”)?

This has been the pattern given to those living in the American wastelands. Almost everything is demanded of the oppressed, and next to nothing is given in return. And then, when those who are forced to live there nurture that wasteland and turn it into something beautiful, or it's learned that there was something of "value" there all along, colonizers change the rules and take that too. Treaties are broken. Land is seized. Culture "changes."

In the shuffle, my fellow colonizers never bother to acknowledge the harm done both before and after the taking until well after the fact. Rarely are reparations paid, and certainly, the system of racist capitalism that upholds that taking is never dismantled. The conversation is always about individuals having a “conversation” and “unlearning practices” and never about stopping the capitalist system from continuing to do harm.

And as we ignore the causes of the "wasteland" (i.e., white supremacist capitalism), we let it expand as new people come to call it home. With climate change getting worse, which is to say, with the Colorado River drying up, black ash falling over the coasts, the ocean toxifying, animals dying in record numbers, food costs rising, and forests large and small ceasing to exist, there are those looking at the future with sobering resignation. People who were promised a "good life" are terrified that that future will disappear. That if they are lucky, they too will be left to roam the apocalyptic wastelands alongside everyone else.

The wastelands are coming. The wastelands are here. Maybe you'll be wandering in one of them in the future. Maybe you are already there. And if that sounds like your fate, you might be seeing this grim future on the horizon or this grim present you already endure, and asking yourself: "What the f@ck are we going to do about it?"

Well, what the f@ck are we going to do?

There is a portion of people who revel in the coming collapse and think that it will open the door for some profound change (see “accelerationism”), but from what I understand from history, there is nothing to guarantee that the formation of a new wasteland will cause the overarching system to break. As I wrote in the article Forget Collapse: Things May Be Like This Until You Die:

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

It is the privilege of the oppressor to forget history, to unsee the margins and the wastelands they both create and rediscover. We are going to have more people slipping through the cracks in the years to come (over a billion refugees if some studies are to be believed), and that horror in and of itself will not cause change.

As a person who knows my people, I can tell you several choices in the face of this sobering reality: a false one and a true one. The false one is to cling to the teet of those in power, making yourself so incredibly useful and indispensable that when lines are redrawn, as they tend to do, you will find yourself on the right side. The more comfortable side. The one with AC and a nice view.

There is no guarantee you will achieve this feat. You can do truly heinous things for those in power and still be discarded. And if you fail, everyone left around you will hate your guts. But there is always a slim chance that you will make it, living in an insulated compound, filing reports for the people that took everything.

The other option is to fight. It is to reject the White Supremacist, capitalist system eating away at our planet. To join other activists and community members battling against that system and to engage in work that will chip away at it until we are ready to replace it entirely (so easy, I know).

I don't know if this path will succeed either. Colonizers lie, and we lie often. There will be plenty of sweet promises made to weaken people's resolve in the next couple of years (see “greenwashing”). Every last one of them will be broken. We didn't honor the treaties with Indigenous people. Capitalism hasn't uplifted Black America. Green, intersectional capitalism won't save us either, but by the time people realize that things will become more complex: the wasteland will widen.

Yet even if we do fail, the connections made in this struggle will be the ones that also help us in the wastelands because we will have to fight there, too: many are already fighting there. The history of Black, Indigenous, and Brown America has been one of resilience. It's been one of the marches, civil disobedience, and righteous violence.

People have always had to deal with the fallout of being "losers of history" because the apocalypse, the ending of things, isn't the result of the 21st century. It's been around for a while — for some.

Black Mirror's 'Beyond The Sea' Fails to Deconstruct Toxic Masculinity

Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash

The episode Beyond The Sea is probably one of the most disappointing ones in the entire sixth season of Black Mirror. Set in an alternate 1969, it's a story about two astronauts that have the ability to transfer their consciousnesses back down to Earth on their mission's downtime into artificial robots called replicas. This technological feat allows them to maintain their lives back home in a kind of inverse work-from-home situation.

What follows is a story fundamentally uninterested in both the science and the world it has created. The narrative doesn't go into the specifics of how this technology works or the many accompanying technologies that make the space station they work in possible (seriously, the ship has artificial gravity, and they never justify it).

Nor is Beyond The Sea interested in its greater world. A major plot point is that the astronaut David Ross's entire family is killed, and we are never shown grief counseling or any direction or lack thereof from mission command. The narrative is merely these two men and their families: a decision that makes everything almost too small.

Yet, rather than pick apart all the various plotholes, the subject we are going to talk about is how toxic the men are in this episode and if it succeeds or fails in deconstructing toxic masculinity.

Diving into toxic masculinity

It's not very clear that toxic masculinity was the focus of this episode. When scanning the commentary of writers, showrunners, and actors, it seems larger inspirations were the isolation of the COVID pandemic, the Sharon Tate murder by the Manson Family cult, and the early space race.

And so, why focus on toxic masculinity in this review if it's not the show's intention?

Well, regardless of what the showrunner and writer intended, it's an inescapable element of the show itself. When you have an episode focused on two middle-class white leads in 1960s America and how those men process their feelings in the wake of trauma, masculinity is an inescapable element. As Brynna Arens in Den of Geek notes about the show, and more specifically, it's ending: "[It's not] just a commentary on trauma and the vast loneliness of space, [but] also serves as an argument against toxic masculinity."

In the show, we are presented with two types of men: the "good" astronaut and the bad one. The astronaut, Cliff, is the more obvious example of toxic masculinity. He's a stern and emotionally stunted patriarch. He forces his son and wife to obey his orders and struggles to make basic emotional observations.

Cliff is unable to connect with the people in his life, especially David. When he provides access to his replica, he assumes naively that giving him an hour of time on Earth will be enough to process a recent trauma. "Well, it feels like that really worked," he tells his wife with all the emotional intelligence of a sea cucumber.

Meanwhile, the other astronaut David is depicted as initially being one of the "good ones". He has an emotionally stable support network or at least a stereotypical one for the 1960s (i.e. a wife and two kids). He handles situations with grace and humor, and everything in his life appears to be going okay (cue foreshadowing).

However, when "hippies" kill his family for his replica being unnatural (destroying his replica in the process), he is left isolated in the space station for the rest of his four-year term. Cliff then offers up his replica for an hour at a time to David. Cliff does this so that David can still go to Earth and not be as alone, an offer David unsurprisingly accepts. This setup leads to a series of events where David oversteps, which enrages the patriarch, Cliff, enough to have him cut David off from his replica.

David, the narrative seems to suggest, is supposed to be a quintessential "nice guy" — someone who feels entitled to the affections of others around him. He even tries to manipulate Cliff into giving him replica access under the pretext of accountability. After Cliff learns that David has made advances on his wife, he lectures about David's toxicity, saying: "You're a conman. The worst kind. The arrogant kind."

All of these narrative choices should lead us to a fulfilling discussion on toxic masculinity, and yet they sputter for several key reasons.

Why the narrative doesn't work

The first big reason this deconstruction fails is that the narrative's focus is more on the pain of the men in the show than the women and children it uses as props.

For example, Cliff isn't simply a stern man by 1960s standards but is patently abusive. He has moved his social butterfly wife to the countryside, isolating her from all her friends and contacts. He controls what his wife can read and who she can interact with and withholds physical contact. He may not hit her, but he does take a thoroughly possessive approach, telling David in the end that the man can no longer see Lana because she is "his."

His wife eventually confesses that she is unhappy. Yet it's not exactly clear what narratively the show is advancing with this confession because it's framed more as emotional miscommunication than the clear abuse we are seeing. Is this how she really feels, or is she couching her language toward her emotionally abusive husband?

The episode never resolves this tension or makes it plain that what we, as the audience, are witnessing is abuse. We largely don't care about this narrative thread after Lana's confession. There is a huge point made of how stunted the men around her are, Lana being the only figure David is able to cry in front of following his family's death, but narratively the show isn't much better in its treatment of its female characters.

In the end, Lana receives no closure in the episode. She is fridged (i.e. the act of killing off a female character for the development of your male characters) to make the show's ending more impactful for the two men: who both lose their families (her included) by its end. David murders Cliff's family to "level the playing field." As the camera zooms out to the coldness of space, both of them are left drifting through Earth's orbit, no longer tethered to the Earth, and we are meant to be haunted by their situation.

There were ways for this narrative to have been more satisfying, but it would have had to have focused on the reasons why these two men are awful. Perhaps if the show narrowed in on Cliff's abusiveness, finetuned David's nice-guyity, and not killed a bunch of children and women for emotional effect, we would have been left with a less convoluted story.

Instead, this entire message becomes undercut by the second major reason this episode doesn't work, which is that the central conceit of the show — i.e. the isolation David experiences following his family's death — undercuts anything meaningful this episode has to say about masculinity.

To reiterate there is no bereavement plan shown for David. No psychologist counseled him during this process. We, as the viewer, likewise never see any form of mission control at all to assist him. Not as a reflection of 1960s society but merely because it's not there in the narrative at all. We see nothing to help this traumatized man sort through this life event, which is unbelievable even for a high-stakes position like this in the 1960s. David is largely alone in the void of space, left to stew on his misery until he snaps and massacres Cliff's family.

When David starts obsessing over Cliff's family and wife, it's depicted as something we should find disgusting (and it is), but given the intense isolation we are seeing, is it truly such an unbelievable thing? There is a reason isolation has been classified by some as a form of torture, and the phrase cabin fever is part of the popular lexicon.

While men do feel more entitled to violence overall, no one knows how they personally would react in that sort of situation, and it makes this whole conversation dicey because we are left trying to find where the line is between David's toxic masculinity and his insanity.

A Jettisoned Conclusion

To me, when David kills Cliff's entire family, it narratively feels lazy. We are left with a shock ending for shock value in and of itself, and it makes the entire episode's message messier (note: this was a common problem throughout season 6th of Black Mirror, with many episodes ending in death and destruction).

It seemed like the show wanted to be this epic deconstruction of the effect of isolation on the human psyche, with the violence David enacts on Cliff being part of a cycle that men inflict upon each other. David loses his family, and then, unable to really communicate with anyone due to both circumstances and his own emotional stuntedness, breaks down, hurting those more vulnerable than him to get a man's attention. For the entire episode, one can argue that women and children are pawns men use to hurt each other.

Given that most mass shootings are committed by men, it's not an unbelievable ending for a man to take out his anger on women and children (see the news). But the show doesn't put in the necessary work to take this theme home. Many of these observations I am making are subtextual (i.e. the text doesn't spell them out). I am sure that this cyclical commentary on male violence is something a lot of viewers didn't pick up on, not because they are stupid, but because the show did a poor job highlighting this theme — if it intended to highlight it at all.

Worse, the show's central conceit (i.e. being isolated on a spaceship) doesn't help make these actions seem toxic but rather insane. Many people probably walked away with the idea that David killed Cliff's family not because of toxic masculinity but because he's crazy, and that points to the notion that the narrative was not as strong as it could have been.

From a birdseye view (or a spatial one), when you have a text where two men are being awful to each other, is it an epic deconstruction of toxic masculinity or merely an enactment of it?

Why Can’t “Black Mirror” Kill Fascists?

Netflix

The Black Mirror episode Demon 79 is a fun romp set in 1979 England. Protagonist Nida is a Brown woman that works at a department store. The episode is set against a rise in white supremacist fascism, particularly the xenophobic National Front or NF. She stumbles across a demonic rune that forces her to sacrifice three bodies or risk causing nuclear armageddon, leading her to take revenge against some of the more awful figures in her life.

There is a lot to like about this episode. The central relationship between Nida and her demon companion Gaap is delightful. The premise is also something that I love: I can never get enough stories about protagonists killing fascists (a huge reason why I simply loved the show Santa Clarita Diet).

This episode had everything I needed to be one of my favorite ones of the year, and then the ending happened, and it stepped back from its premise in one of the most frustrating ways.

So close, yet so far

For most of the episode, the show had set up some excellent commentary on the nature of politics and fascism. The racism that Nida endures is often more subtle than being directly attacked. A scene near the beginning has her going to the fish and chips place around the corner from her home. There is a sense of tension in the air as she glances at the sight of a skinhead and nervously tries to open her door. The following day she awakes to find the symbol “NF” on her front gate.

This hatred is a constant element in her life and one that she often does not feel empowered to fight against. Nida has intrusive thoughts where she violently punishes the racist men and women who harass her daily, and the arrival of Gaap and the three sacrifices conceit allows her to fight against a system that she would be normally punished for resisting.

The racism of 1979 Britain is a persistent and often banal force. Perhaps one of the best monologues on this issue comes from Conservative party member Michael Smart, who is running a “tough on crime,” “save our neighborhood” campaign — in essence, one filled with xenophobic dog whistles. He is interacting with one of Nida’s coworkers, Vicky, a pretty open NF supporter. He tells her that she should vote for him instead of the NF because he’s just as racist, but unlike the NF, will actually win, saying:

“[NF] is too overt. People feel it’s, um, bad manners. You know why I don’t print stop immigration in gigantic letters on my campaign literature?…Because…You know what I stand for.”

That’s a refreshing monologue in an industry that often tries to depict racism as an overt series of actions rather than a system of harm. Nida’s journey to murderous corruption is fun to watch because it’s centered in response to such a system. She kills a pedophile, a repulsive man that murdered his wife, that man’s roommate, and as her last victim, Nida sets her sights on Conservative nominee Michael Smart. She has been told via demonic premonition that Smart will grow to immense power and eventually succeed in building a surveillance-based ethnostate in Britain. So it seems only natural that this figure even hell has described favorably should be last on the chopping block in Nida’s race to stop the apocalypse.

We are being set up for this big catharsis, where Nida chases down Michael Smart in her car, dressed up to the nines in a fabulous red jacket, and moves to bludgeon him to death with a hammer, but then a f@cking cop arrives and stops her from killing him. Nida (and Gaap) fail their assignment, and the apocalypse begins — though Nida thankfully gets to spend eternity with her demonic companion in some empty cosmic void (yay?).

The failure to stop the apocalypse is not the issue here. Not every story needs to end in a peaceful resolution, especially Black Mirror, which is notorious for its grim conclusions. The strangeness and frustration come in the framing of that last scene, where Nida is held to this moral standard by a f@cking police officer, who convinces her not to kill a man we know would cleanse Britain of millions if he had the opportunity. And she does this for what, kindness?

For me, there is a racial and gendered element that comes with how the scene unfolds. We end with a police officer literally policing the rage of a brown woman who is trying to stop the emergence of both the apocalypse and an ethnostate. It feels paternalistic, and if there had been a white man or even a white woman in the same position, I am not sure the narrative would have let Smart off so easily.

In fact, given that this season started with a white woman smashing a simulated universe and killing billions of digital life in the process (see Joan Is Awful), I can safely say it wouldn’t. I mentioned briefly the Santa Clarita Diet (another Netflix show), but just to reiterate, there is an entire scene in that show where the protagonist kills neo-nazis for food, and we are meant to find it funny. We could also look at the dozens upon dozens of films where men mow nazis down without the viewer batting an eye.

It seemed strange to deny the audience this catharsis and ultimately somewhat cowardly, given how strong they came out against white supremacy in the first half of the episode.

A fiery conclusion

With this narrative, I see a deep squeamishness with the reality that sometimes hateful people must be dealt with by using violence. The story is perfectly fine with pedophiles and murderers getting the axe (or, in this case, hammer), but somehow draws the line at British Hitler. It feels absurd.

The most disappointing fact is that this episode was quite strong, and if it had only made this single adjustment, I would have written an entirely different review. Again, the ending could have still finished sadly with the apocalypse, but at least give us the catharsis, or if you refuse to do that, deny it to us some other way that ties into the themes of the narrative, such as the police officer being an NF supporter who ultimately defends Smart from harm.

Instead, we are left with frustrating paternalism just as dangerous as any apocalypse.

Can Netflix Critique Itself? (ft. Black Mirror)

Netflix

Netflix recently launched its sixth season of the anthology series Black Mirror, and its inaugural episode, Joan Is Awful, is quite a doozy. The episode is a bit of self-parody where a Streamberry viewer (i.e. a viewer from a platform very similar to Netflix) named Joan watches in horror as a show is aired based exactly on her life, plus or minus some significant embellishments (she is played by Salma Hayek, yall).

The second episode, Loch Henry, continues the self-parodying trend with amateur documentarians attempting to create content about a series of gruesome murders in one of their hometowns. They ultimately create this content for Streamberry, and we get an examination of the behind-the-scenes nature of how this content is made and what purposes it serves.

What follows are narratives that heavily come down against the content media environment Netflix helped build. This type of product raises the interesting question of “whether a company like Netflix can actually be receptive to such commentary, even for the ones aired on its own platform?”

The content

At every turn, we are meant to find this content ecosystem to be morally dubious. A scene early on in Joan Is Awful shows Joan consulting a lawyer and learning how the company Streamberry has every right to violate her privacy like this. "…you assigned them the right to exploit all of that," the lawyer explains. "Terms of service.…it would have popped up on your phone or whatever when you first signed up for Streamberry,"

Taking advantage of the obscure ToS agreements all software has you sign is a nightmare scenario and not one many viewers probably support. What follows is a morality play on the dangers of this invasion of privacy. We see Joan's life goes quickly off the rails. She is fired because the show releases her company's information, her finance leaves her, and the public comes to truly hate her.

Joan eventually hatches a plot to stop this show from being produced, which turns out to be the result of some magical quantum computer technology tapping into the 21st century's vast surveillance system all of us opted into via phones and the Internet of Things. The show doesn't bother to examine the specifics, as it's too busy engaging in shenanigans with Salma Hayek, fun double twists about the nature of consciousness in a simulation, and cool celebrity cameos.

You will either find that misdirect tacky and frustrating or fun and entertaining, but wherever you fall on that spectrum, the episode ultimately has little respect for that magical quantum computer technology. It ends with the version of Joan we have been watching smashing the quantum computer. It's revealed that we have been watching a "fake" reality all along. We then cut to the "real" Joan, whose life after destroying the show is better off now that she has taken "charge" of her life.

Likewise, the central premise of Loch Henry is how alienating the content production of true crime documentaries is for the actual victims of said crimes. The twist is that one of the documentarians is too close to the subject matter he is filming. This leads to a series of events that end the lives of both the character Davis's mother and partner. The narrative finishes on a pan of Davis's face alone in a hotel room after the Streamberry series, based on his attempt to uncover the truth, wins a prestigious award. He has success but now feels empty.

We can dive into whether these endings are good stories, but something that I would like to focus on is what it even means for a company like Netflix to produce and profit from such commentary.

The platform

I am not convinced this network will change its behavior after delivering this "self-referential" commentary. The second episode of this season, Loch Henry, which effectively is about how manipulative true crime documentaries are, rings hollow because we all know the platform will not change its behavior in this area. They have released hundreds of such documentaries, and in 2024, we see no signs of this trend stopping.

It isn't just the content either, but how this company responds to criticism. They don't seem to care about growth (outside the financial kind), often telling both internal and external critics to go "fuck themselves," just like the Streamberry representative did to Salma Hayek in Joan Is Awful. Following the Dave Chappelle The Closer controversy, Netflix forwarded an internal memo telling employees to quit if they were offended by the content the company produced. As employees organized around that issue, several were fired, and now that we are amid an anti-trans backlash, the company hasn't appeared to backtrack with the original content (note: a settlement of some kind has been reached, but the details on it are sparse, and it does not change this original point).

There is this frustrating standard where the company puts out “diverse” content that they receive awards and accolades for — content that appears to be the first on the chopping block when financial troubles arise — and then uses that to justify their more problematic moves. As then-co-CEO Ted Sarandos justified in that 2022 memo where he told employees to get over themselves:

“…content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm…We have ‘Sex Education,’ ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ ‘Control Z,’ Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle all on Netflix. Key to this is increasing diversity on the content team itself.”

We see here how Netflix leadership is comfortable weaponizing the more leftist or progressive content they produce and then using its existence to defend and, in some cases, finance more regressive content.

Take, for example, the hit drama Squid Game, a pretty on-the-nose commentary about how our economic system is corrosive. It's about a game show where contestants fight with their lives to secure a considerable cash sum. The contestants on this deadly game show find themselves there by "choice" because of the financial destitution they are enduring outside the games — remove capitalism, and it seems doubtful that the Squid Game would have many contestants (see America is the Squid Game).

And so, what does this Network do with that commentary?

They greenlit a reality show (see Squid Game: The Challenge) that attempted to replicate the actual games of the Squid Game without the satire (i.e., playing it straight as an actual game show, sans the killing off of their contestants). Reality shows are a product that started as a way to circumvent union labor (see the previous writer's strike), and this production has been likewise fraught with reported labor issues. As reported on the infamous Red Light-Green Light challenge filmed during a cold snap in Variety:

“…as the game got underway, the atmosphere changed. Coats were taken away; hand and foot warmers were scooped out of pockets and plimsolls; and the players’ jackets had to remain unzipped in order to display their numbers as well as the fake blood that would squirt from devices strapped to their chests if they were eliminated. When the show’s giant killer doll stopped singing, they had to freeze in position — but what began as the promised two-minute wait was quickly bumped up to 10 and then 15 minutes. Marlene says she counted a 26-minute wait during one round. (Sources close to the production say the wait time increased to allow independent adjudicators to assess the gameplay.”.

Netflix has denied these and other allegations; however, it's hard to take that denial seriously when we have established that they have a history of refusing to respond well to criticism. They also have a history of engaging with other production companies that have reported labor violations (see Love Is Blind).

There does not appear to be much self-reflection with this company's leadership. If Netflix had a Streamberry-esque quantum computer that allowed them to produce Joan Is Awful content based on a technicality like in the show, they probably would.

The point

The thing I keep gravitating to is why call it Streamberry?

Typically, the distancing done in a film or TV show of making a fake brand is for legal or financial reasons. A company doesn't want to suffer a lawsuit from a pissed-off brand, or they don't want to give a competitor free publicity.

In the case of Black Mirror, however, they are parodying themselves. Netflix is the entity that paid for and is hosting this content. This distancing is unnecessary from a legal or financial standpoint and has to do more with psychological distancing. The company may be parodying itself for laughs and profit, but it has no intention of being held accountable or changing its behavior.

A result of true self-reflection is change. If Netflix is still doing the same awful things it has always done (i.e., the promotion of harmful content, suppressing employee organizing, and potential labor violations), then what this new season of Black Mirror represents is not self-reflection but the packaging of the aesthetic of self-reflection to sell as a commercialized product — to you.

And what could be more dystopian than that?

‘XO, KITTY’: A Messy, Terrible Show That Might Be the Future of Content

English: XO Kitty Cast photo at the LA premiere on May 11, 2023

INT. KITTY'S BEDROOM — MORNING

A bright and cheerful room adorned with posters of cute kittens. KITTY, a spirited and sassy 16-year-old, bounces around her bedroom, preparing for an exciting day. She wears a pink shirt that says "Cat Lover" and shorts, her hair tied up in a messy bun. Kitty's phone sits on her bed, buzzing with notifications.

KITTY (Smiling) Today's the day, Kitty Song. You've got this.

Kitty picks up her phone and checks the screen. A series of texts from her friends appear, along with a notification from "Bao Bao," her long-distance boyfriend.

Kitty taps on the notification, her face lighting up as she reads the message.

BAO BAO (TEXT) Can't wait to see you, Kitty. It's been too long. 😺

Kitty squeals with delight and starts typing a response.

KITTY (TEXT) Me too, Bao Bao! I'm on my way to the airport now. Prepare for a surprise of a lifetime. 😼

The intro above was composited by the deep learning algorithm Chat GPT (you may have heard of it) after I told it to "Write the first page of a script for the Netflix show "Kitty, XO," plus or minus some other details for specificity. It's not a good script. "I know she'd be proud, but I also know she'd want me to pack some of her secret cookie recipe to charm Oliver even more," my protagonist says with all the tact of a subpar piece of fan fiction. If the "AI" Revolution were based on clever twists and producing great art, I wouldn't bat an eye as a writer over job security.

The truth is, however, that the world of modern content is not based on artistic merit. XO, Kitty was a poorly written show written by humans, and its ratings have been healthy, seeing as Netflix has already renewed it for a second season. It's the type of content that is the bread and butter of the streaming era, and the future of content depends on whether it can be easily automated.

The story isn't the point

XO, Kitty stars the titular Kitty as she convinces her parents to let her go to an International school to pursue her long-distance boyfriend, Dae. Along the way, she meets new friends, learns more about her dead mom, who also attended the school, and engages in lots and lots of drama.

It's not surprising that a show based on a movie where “the protagonist accidentally sends letters to her past crushes and receives replies back” is based on one or two coincidences. Happy coincidences are the bedrock of the modern Rom-Com, with the meet-cute (i.e., our two romantic leads accidentally meeting) being the foundational trope.

XO, Kitty pushes these coincidences into overdrive. Her pen pal boyfriend she moved to Korea to be with conveniently has money problems the moment she arrives, and so he is forced to date a rich queen bee who needs a boyfriend to appease socialite standards. Kitty bumps into the fake girlfriend, Yuri, coincidentally while en route to her new school and is given a ride in the girl's limo. Kitty then coincidentally is confused as a boy and "forced" to room with Dae and his best friends. And don't even get me started on the weird backstory with Kitty's mom. At every turn, the plot stumbles into a new contrivance to force our characters to interact as much as possible.

As you can tell by now, the writing for this show is not great, and critics panned it. As Abby Cavenaugh writes in Collider: "Unfortunately, XO, Kitty has none of the charm and humor that made us fall in love with Kitty in the first place. It tries, to the point of overkill — but the plotlines are so contrived and frankly ridiculous that this sequel doesn't even reach so-bad-it's-good territory."

The cleverest part is when you learn that Kitty is perhaps bisexual and has a crush on Yuri. That narrative twist recontextualizes bumping into Yuri as a meet-cute and is actually clever. It's the kind of twist that belongs in a better show, and if the writers were smart, they would have given more room for it to breathe, but sadly we are always on to the next contrivance. This show would have benefited from some significant editing. Half of these plotlines could have been axed, yet it's evident that quality was not a concern in their production but popularity and profit.

The show XO, Kitty was greenlit off the back of the success of the To All The Boys I've Loved Before trilogy, right when the final movie, To All the Boys: Always and Forever (2021), ended in October of that year. It was a purely data-driven decision about how successful that in-universe franchise had been and had nothing to do with the quality of the art.

Netflix has built its brand by making these types of decisions. They have been routinely praised and criticized for relying on analytics, which they often sparingly show to the public. It's impossible to know what exactly drives every renewal or greenlit decision, but it's been quite clear that telling stories within existing IP has been a priority. From a spinoff to The Witcher (see The Witcher: Blood Origin) to multiple stories centering around the Spanish show Money Heist (see Money Heist: Korea — Joint Economic Area, Berlin, etc.), this company's most significant investments are content that tries to ride the coattails of preexisting media, especially media they already have rights to produce or syndicate.

And yet Netflix is by no means the only company ordering, producing, and syndicating content based on this strategy. The Game of Thrones spinoff The House of The Dragon was exclusively about riding its predecessor's success, and multiple may be on the way (see also A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight). Paramount+ and Disney+'s entire strategy has been to retread preexisting IPs (i.e., Star Trek and the MCU/Star Wars, respectively). Once a modern company gets hold of an IP they believe is profitable, there is a natural incentive to keep iterating on the same kinds of stories, even if there isn't a good idea to anchor that story in: the need to advance the IP almost always precedes the need for a story.

And naturally, if that is your starting point, if one only cares about retelling the same stories over and over and over again, why would one value writing?

This technology can't do art

With the launch of ChatGPT 4, it's safe to say that this has been the year of handwringing about AI. There have been a lot of takes about what this technology will mean for the future of work, life, and the nature of art. This debate has intensified with the recent 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, where writers from this union withheld their labor in exchange for better pay and protections. A fight over the implementation of AI was initially a central sticking point in negotiations, and many are now arguing about the future of this technology.

The widespread consensus is split between two poles. Those who are advancing this technology, or at the very least perceive a financial benefit to it, see the advancement and implementation of AI as inevitable. Many executives in Hollywood and beyond conveniently have submitted the idea that AI will generally replace writers. As Nick Bilton argues in Vanity Fair:

“The more I see of these new machine-learning algorithms, though, the more I realize that the future is coming quickly. And in that future, a good number of people could lose their jobs — not to mention their grasp of what originated in the mind of a human or a machine. Soon, you’ll be asking yourself every time you read an article, Did a human write this, or did an algorithm? The answer is: You’ll never know.”

Yet many are quick to point out the supposed ability to replace writers outright doesn't currently exist. Where Are These AIs That Can Write TV Scripts, Exactly? goes the title of an article by Paul Tassi in Forbes. "AI [came] up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit," described co-showrunner for the series Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, to Empire Magazine. As Tassi goes on to say in that Forbes article:

“One particular case that keeps coming up is the idea that AI is going to replace the creative field of writing. While in some cases, hyper-generic SEO bait on websites, that may be true, in fields like TV or film writing, the tech is not there. The tech is not even close to there, and everyone is acting like the extinction of writers in these fields is imminent, and that AI is some cudgel that can be wielded against creatives as they push for higher pay.

It’s a bluff.”

As someone who has been playing with predictive algorithms for a while now (Grammarly, Inferkit, and now ChatGPT), I fall mainly into the latter camp. For this article, I tried very seriously to have ChatGPT reproduce a workable pilot script of Kitty, XO, not because I thought this was a benchmark of high art, but rather the opposite. Kitty, XO is a poorly written show, and if this technology cannot even regurgitate this repetitive content, what hope does it have in replacing all writers?

Although I was eventually able to find success, it was not in the efficient way that men like Nick Bilton are advocating. After ten iterations, I quickly learned that ChatGPT could not write a workable 25-minute script, not even an adequate draft. It can provide formulaic outlines (I'm talking bullet points). It can tell you some familiar tropes, but every prompt I used came away with narratives that were so unusable editing them would require me to effectively rewrite the entire thing from scratch.

It's important to note that this technology isn't AI in the science fiction sense. Artificial General Intelligence is where entities like Hal 9000 can think and plan. Current AI cannot think. It is a very advanced predictive algorithm cribbing work from across the web without the ability to understand if the string of words it's adding truly fits. That lack of context is critical to this discussion because it prevents AI from crafting anything more advanced than SEO copy. If something requires context to make a decision, then this technology will struggle with it.

The way I was finally able to produce a script with ChatGPT that was even half decent was the prolonged and painstaking process of having it generate a scene based on an outline where I inputted a specific set of requirements (e.g., who are the characters, where they are, what they want to accomplish, and how the scene would end), pausing to read it, thinking of what should go next, and then providing a new scene outline with an equally detailed set of requirements. I was writing paragraphs of text to get a rough approximation of each scene I wanted to tell, which inevitably needed to be edited, trimmed down, and rewritten. Every scene was filled with fundamental mistakes, with a lot of crucial context not being transferred over from scene to scene.

Eventually, my prompts were getting so detailed that it called into question the fundamental premise that AI could bang out a script. That prompting work I did wasn't effortless. It required a lot of thinking and planning to do well. Even when there were no major structural mistakes in a scene, all AI-generated dialogue was too clunky to use. Hours in, I realized that it might have been faster to have written a draft on my own.

ChatGPT struggled even to write a bad episode of XO, Kitty — and even then, not without me holding its hand every step of the way. For complex tasks, current AI is very good at producing a lot of words, but if most of that work is utter nonsense, what's the point?

The fear of AI

As far as I can tell, the fear with AI is not that this technology can replace human labor. It simply cannot at any stage do that. It's that those in power use the introduction of this technology to devalue the work of workers so they can pay them less. Even in the most dystopian cases, writers will still need to do a lot of the work to stitch together the jumble of words AI produces into something that is not merely an incomprehensible mess. It's just that those words will be less valued (see The Work of Art in the Age of AI).

We have seen this trend before of companies using disruptive technologies to devalue labor with other industries. Take the example of AI translations. Often the translation produced by modern AI is not perfect. There are a lot of mistakes and context lost with AI translations. Still, many industries have stopped caring, using them as a pretext to pay translators less, even though these translators have to effectively rewrite vast portions of it, and are expected to be paid less. As noted by Max Deryagin, chair of the British Subtitlers' Association in The Guardian about subtitle translations in TV and film:

“There is no lower limit [in pay]. It goes all the way to almost zero. “It should be a golden moment. We have insane volumes of work. [Instead, what he sees is widespread stress and burnout as subtitle translators try to make ends meet].”

This technological innovation has not led to higher gains for workers but the opposite, and the same thing will undoubtedly happen with writing. If you use the speed at which AI can produce work as a justification to reclassify existing writers as non-union prompting engineers or some other such nonsense, industry owners will be in a position to demand a higher rate of productivity for far less. Because, again, telling a good story isn't the point here. It's about generating content that fits a particular itch that current algorithms say existing audiences want to watch and pay for. As long as numbers on a screen tell companies like Netflix that audiences are tuning in, the quality is irrelevant.

Imagine you are a writer. You log into an app and check the job listings. You notice a series description for a new show: "Draft for a show about a girl named Kitty. Must tie into the Netflix series To All The Boys I Loved Before. Main character Kitty moves to Korea to find love. Ten episodes. The plot can be flexible but must be appropriate for the 11 to 17 female demographic."

That's all you get. You place a bid lower than your usual rate because you didn't get any leads yesterday. You get an automatic acceptance, provisional for completion under twelve hours. You start using the app's built-in AI, which costs about $20 a month. You have the AI give you an outline. It requires an hour or so of tweaking.

Once you are confident that the outline is coherent, you painstakingly work from scene to scene, making sure the AI iterates appropriately, having to rewrite dialogue and descriptions as you go along. 10 hours pass. It's a mess, but it makes sense structurally, and you don't have any more time. You hit the submit button. Seconds pass. Your story is fortunately approved, and you are paid a flat rate of $50.04. That draft is sent to another writer and probably another one after that. Only the showrunner will be credited.

This is the future I see happening with AI-assisted writing. One where human labor is a necessary component in an assembly line but is not valued any more than the people who stitch together our clothes or the many other blue-collar professions out there. Again, this is already the reality for many translators in the media field who have studied for years to hone their craft, only to realize their education is no longer leading to reasonable rates.

This is not a new trend with writing either (stares at Medium). One of the main reasons we are seeing more of a reaction now against automation is the unique place TV writing has in our society. The industry is heavily unionized. It is also highly visible, with famous TV writers having a lot of social capital due to social media and the Internet, which allows them to interact with the American public directly.

In other words, automation is starting to affect rich people. We are having this conversation because of the unique privileges associated with this field, but it's still addressing a real problem and one that asks as a society what we want from work and art more broadly.

Well, what do we want from art?

Writing serves an interesting tension because, under capitalism, it is both a product and not one simultaneously. As Ursula K. Le Guin said of literature: "Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art."

With AI, we are seeing a clash between these two interests come to a head in a powerful way. On the one side, those that think art and work should not always be tied to profit.

On the other side, there are those that see the point of media as not to make art but to increase numbers on a graph. They are delighted by the prospect of AI because there is nothing more they would love than to automate everything. They want to crush all of humanity into numbers.

Is that what you want too?

Or, to put it another way, would you like everything on TV to be even worse versions of XO, Kitty? Hundreds of XO, Kitty's perfectly tailored for your preferences, but in a way that is not good or even mediocre, but merely okay. Bland sludge where Kitty tells you a rough approximation of what you want to hear so you can shut off your brain and not think about the algorithm you will have to press buttons for in eight hours.

We are a society so keen to introduce technologies at a breakneck speed, comfortable with disruption (and so afraid of being called Luddites) that we do not resist things that seem terrible for fear of being called wrong.

Or, as ChatGPT would say:

“This fear of being labeled as luddites or resistant to progress has led us down a path where we often overlook the potential consequences of embracing new technologies without thorough evaluation. As a result, we find ourselves grappling with unforeseen challenges and ethical dilemmas that arise from our haste. It is crucial for us to strike a balance between innovation and thoughtful consideration, to question and critically assess the implications of each technological advancement. By cultivating a society that encourages constructive dialogue and values foresight over blind adoption, we can navigate the complexities of our rapidly evolving world with greater wisdom and ensure a more sustainable future for all.”

Hey, maybe the robot has a point.

I Support Queer Rights, But…

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14596658998/, Source book page

Of course, I support trans rights, but I just think that a rigid definition of gender is how we all must live, and I support legal efforts to make that happen. We must think about the children.

Of course, I support gay people, but you've been loud and mean in asserting your basic humanity, and while I abhor "these new laws," you really should have been a tad nicer. It's your fault, really.

Of course, I think kink, polyamory, and all of that weird "stuff" is fine inside a theoretical bedroom, but must you talk about it? Must you expose potential hypothetical children to the idea that there are other healthy possibilities to monogamy?

These are the justifications I hear a lot. And before we go further, yes, even from self-identified queer people who have internalized the message that they must not take up space in order to remain unharmed by straight society (see You're Delusional if You Think Queer People Are Responsible for This Moral Panic). There are lots of people who are pushing for anti-queerness while at the same time providing themselves with rhetorical cover against accusations of anti-queerness, and I wanted to discuss this tension.

I support queer people, but I think queerness is disgusting

This rhetorical dance is standard both online and off. Again, someone will caveat their statement by saying that they support queerness and then add a but followed by a string of the vilest arguments and justifications. As Maya Forstater argued on the website Crowd Justice:

“I agree that transgender people should not face discrimination and harassment as they live their lives. But I am concerned about the impact of self ID on women and girls, and in particular on single sex spaces and services such as women’s refuges, hostels, prisons, changing rooms and hospital wards, as well as women’s sports.”

Here, we can see a level of cost avoidance going on. Maya Forstater has internalized a bias — in this case, that the act of trans acceptance in public settings will lead to more harassment — but she doesn't want to come out and say that we must not accept trans identity in public life because that would sound awful. There is a social cost for being openly bigoted and calling an entire class of people predators. In multicultural societies such as the US and the UK, it's generally not socially acceptable to say that you want to discriminate against or exterminate a particular group (although that calculus is changing).

We can spend ages trying to understand the psychological reasons for this cost avoidance. Maybe she is playing a political game, hoping to push social conventions toward discrimination and extermination. Maybe she doesn't want to experience the shame and guilt that comes with being open about it. Perhaps she can't even be honest with it herself because doing so would challenge her conception of being a "good person." The answer is unimportant. We can never truly know what is inside someone's heart. Regardless of the justification, this caveat allows her to defer the social and perhaps even psychological costs of trying to strip away a group's social and political rights.

For years, there has been this framing that many people, particularly conservatives, can no longer say certain things. "Nearly 70% of Conservative Students Fear Social Repercussions for Opinions," summarized a recent article from the Young America's Foundation. Many socially regressive people are perfectly aware of the reality that there are things they can't say and have been trying to dance around that reality for a while now. Sometimes, as with this headline, even framing it as oppression.

It's that fear that leads to this sort of rhetorical posturing of faux-acceptance. Anti-queer people might change their rhetoric to be more direct later on, after they have pushed anti-queerness toward more open discrimination and extermination (that's partially what the recent Groomer rhetoric is for), but initially, this caveat can serve as a bridge to lay over untested waters. The "I support X but…" statement and its many derivatives allows advocates to dress up themselves and their discrimination as reasonable to those that may be attracted to the mere language of reasonableness and moderation.

For example, take medium writer Steve QJ's piece Trans Activism's Self-Inflicted Backlash. Steve insists that noted hated speech advocate Matt Walsh is a terrible person — that's his caveat. However, he goes on to say that a deeply flawed documentary Walsh has produced called What Is A Woman? — one that was made quite duplicitously (see You Don't Need To See The Documentary "What is a Woman?") — has some "good points." Steve essentially prefaces his article with the claim that he isn't a bigot and then pivots to not only push anti-trans rhetoric but to place the blame for this latest anti-trans panic onto a narrow set of trans activists.

“For the first time in history, there’s been a decline in LGBT acceptance among young Americans. And it’s hard not to suspect that that decline is being driven by one particular letter. Not because they suddenly hate trans people. Not because they’re “right-wing.” Not because they’re fascists or religious fundamentalists or boomers. But because lesbian, gay and bisexual people aren’t demanding sweeping social and societal changes, all without any debate, under penalty of being hounded out of your school or losing your job or losing your children.”

This argument sounds "reasonable" but ignores that many of the people passing anti-trans legislation never really supported trans people in the first place. Many bigoted activists have consistently tested the waters to see what arguments will turn the public against us (see the 2010 bathroom debates). Steve QJ's view is taking a few edge cases where anti-trans people are fired from their jobs for holding bigoted views (most bigots still aren't) and then claiming that those rare examples (often done by cisgender people reacting to bad publicity) are enough to blame trans people for the discrimination being levied against them.

It also ignores that many queer people have demanded sweeping changes throughout history — yes even the gay and lesbian ones. The grassroots campaign AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was a queer HIV/AIDs movement that capitalized on loud, in-your-face stunts such as "die-ins" that were not well appreciated by the public of the time. In fact, most social justice movements we consider successes now made people deeply uncomfortable. The Black Panthers, now touted for their free school lunch programs and other community services, were often demonized and are still remembered quite poorly. If polling data is to be believed, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s was very unpopular for most of its history.

And, of course, there is the elephant in the room that this rhetoric doesn't always stop at only passive acceptance of bigotry. Steve QJ has rationalized his hatred by claiming that it's not hatred at all. He is shifting the blame from the people passing anti-trans laws to the persecuted minority reacting to that discrimination. It's easy to see this logic being used to justify further radicalization. As laws get worse, trans people respond to that discrimination, and people like Steve point to their “imperfect” reactions as further justification for why they are being harmed. It's the metaphorical equivalent of the "why are you hitting yourself" meme, except instead of an annoying toddler using your arm to hit you in the face, bigots are using your pain and grief to blame you for the suffering they are perpetuating, or at the very least, are comfortable bearing witness to.

I have already argued that the US is pushing toward a trans genocide, so I will not retread those arguments here (check out Surprisingly, This Is What a Trans Genocide Looks Like). What I want to highlight is that before the passage of regressive laws and the rounding up of undesirables, there are rhetorical strategies used to defer social costs so that people can be more confident in their discrimination (see also "It's just a joke"), and the "I support X group, but…" tactic is one of them.

But what do we do about it?

Now again, plenty of people are not using this rhetoric maliciously. Not everyone who is anti-queer is a fascist. However, the foundation for fascism is there. If all it takes to get one to abandon their support for a marginalized group is the mere assuaging of one's shame, then one can be taken to some pretty dark places. It has not been lost on me that people were radicalized against queer people in a rapid amount of time, with the tide turning against issues like children being able to access puberty blockers and trans people being able to use the bathroom of their choice.

And so the natural question becomes, how do you deal with this caveat?

In some ways, I am not sure if you can do this directly. If someone is building up a psychological shield because they don't want to be held accountable for their words and actions, they are likely to meet you with defensiveness rather than meaningful dialogue. The idea that you can "win" against that is a tad naive. All you can do is politely offer resistance (or don’t) and then move on.

From a movement level, the answer to this problem comes from who we decide to prioritize, a fact many people have mentioned before (see The Alt-Right Playbook: The Cost of Doing Business, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, etc.). While deradicalization will always have a niche place, it's our base that we need to expand. Maybe focus more on reaching out to liberals and leftists who are merely misinformed, not moderates and conservatives who don't care about your humanity and are only looking for you to provide them absolution for their shame.

Ultimately, base-building is what is needed to be done. Find the people that don’t need years of work but merely a nudge, and then find a hundred more. That scales much more quickly than arguing with the metaphorical equivalent of a brick wall.

The Sadly Authoritarian Nature of the Modern Workplace

CIPHR Connect: Flickr

People often glamorize the life of a boss. This was the appeal of Donald Trump's reality TV show, The Apprentice (and for some, his presidency in general). He had people present to him their ideas, and ultimately, with his infamous catchword, "You're Fired," he got to decide if they were worth his time.

People loved that show, and its successor Celebrity Apprentice, with it consistently garnering millions of views. There has been a lot of speculation for why, but to theorize, I believe it's because people love the idea of being a boss, and the show allowed them to do that vicariously. Many Americans report wanting to be their own bosses in survey data, and that makes sense because most jobs suck (see “Bullshit Jobs”), and at least on top of the workplace pyramid, things seem more manageable.

Yet that centralization of power that many of us covet comes with it the right to lay down the law for all those working beneath you. When someone works for a business, it's the boss that has the ultimate say, and that lack of freedom is a dynamic underpinning most of our working life.

The authoritarianism of the workplace

Do you think that your workplace is fair?

I am not referring to the more abstract answer of whether, philosophically, the nature of work and existence is fair. We are born into a random universe, and shit happens. I am talking about how your boss, your leader in the workplace, governs.

When your company's executives make decisions, do they have to factor in your wants, needs, or suggestions at all?

When they have wronged you, are there any mechanisms within the organization (i.e., not outside like the courts, your union steward, or a lawyer) that allow you to receive proper restitution? Entities that prioritize your needs rather than the companies (so not HR)?

The answer for many is no.

For example, there is a common trend in businesses where management tries to make situations so intolerable that they force employees to quit (see "constructive dismissal"). If you are hourly, a company may cut your hours (or your store's hours in general) or make scheduling shifts and time off in advance more challenging. A boss might tell one's employees they are unwanted and deny them essential resources such as air-conditioning during the height of summer — all to make their employees' financial, psychological, and material situation at work so terrible that they "decide" to part ways. As someone posted in one workplace horror story:

“I discovered my boss was stealing around $8,000 of my salary a year. She was classifying my position and pay differently in budgeting reports to the federal and state government, and that difference was going directly to her salary. I confronted her, and after much resistance, it was corrected, but it didn’t come without retaliation. I was also denied the back-pay she had stolen from me. She retaliated relentlessly and gave me a poor performance review. My coworkers were also asked to review me and provided high scores that didn’t match hers. I was also monitored every hour and given frivolous tasks.

…HR did nothing to help me and was only there to protect the misconduct of management. Remember this — corruption is a chain. On my last day, they also tried to audit me. All I did was try to fight for what I was worth and avoid exploitation. My boss was embezzling money and faced no punishment at all. My advice to anyone facing these issues at work is to leave immediately. I spoke with lawyers who told me that there is rarely any accountability when it comes to workplace misconduct from management. It makes me sick that I was gaslit and treated this way for fighting for correct compensation.”

This scenario sounds like a fringe case, but elements of it are shockingly common. One 2017 study indicated that one in five American workers believed they worked in a hostile environment. A 2021 study showed that just under half of all respondents indicated experiencing harassment at work.

There are laws, of course, that are meant to stop such discrimination (as well as many others), but these are typically imposed from outside the organization (e.g., laws, unions, etc.), not within, and they are not always enforced well. For example, workers are terminated all the time for union organizing — organizing that US citizens are legally entitled to do — but that doesn't stop companies such as Starbucks and Amazon from conveniently laying off workers that just so happen to be agitating for unionization. The insecure and one-sided nature of many jobs means that if your boss (or the company leadership higher up the chain) doesn't like you, they can fire you quite quickly under some other pretext, such as being late for a minute after your shift starts.

These outside-the-workplace rights also require resources for an employee to assert them in the first place. If an employee needs to hire a lawyer to go toe-to-toe against their employer, an entity with multiple people at its disposal, then increasingly, those rights will belong only to those who can afford to utilize them. Winning an employment lawsuit is statistically a tough feat to accomplish. A study out of Cornell Law School analyzing claims from 1979 to 2006 found that employees in an employment discrimination lawsuit only won 15% of the time (as opposed to 51% in non-employee cases). It's not any better in the current decade.

More so, many of these inadequate, external laws meant to make workplaces a little fairer are actively chipped away by more conservative (and corporatist) interests. One of the main reasons unionization has dipped dramatically is because of a campaign to pass anti-union efforts such as "right-to-work" laws across the country — many pushed by leaders heavily financed by corporations. We can say the same with employment cases, with Congress consistently underfunding the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the chief body meant to enforce the prosecutions of such violations.

Any business that works hard to remove external advocates and resources from its workers is not one that ultimately respects them. Not all businesses were behind these legislative efforts (the business community is not a monolith), but in truth, there isn't an opposing force from the business community trying to expand worker rights either. At best, many are indifferent and, at worst, actively trying to undermine the bargaining power of their employees.

This imbalance relates to how contract labor is inherently structured. A worker — due to requiring resources to secure housing, food, and healthcare — must often sell their labor to a business to live. Unless one has a union to help negotiate prices or is tremendously privileged, they are already at a disadvantage negotiating an employment contract independently. An individual will always have fewer resources than a collective, especially one able to contract its own legal team.

Furthermore, a worker's highest level of negotiating power happens before they are an employee because that's when one can truly walk away and pretend they are equals (although that might not be a genuine possibility depending on their financial situation). It's that transaction that dictates an employee's power inside the business, and decision-making is rarely provided, and certainly not significant decision-making. Ask yourself the last time you could vote on any important decision as an employee that your company was making.

Once an employee agrees to a contract, the power differential between worker and boss only increases because they now rely on their employer's resources to subsist. If they were not able to secure power in that initial round of negotiations, then outside a very tenuous managerial track, it is doubtful appeasement to internal management will help there. And even if that is successful, it certainly cannot be for everyone (note: this is your friendly reminder that only a handful of people can ever be managers).

As a result, most employees essentially don't have a say in day-to-day decisions — and few have ways to file grievances and push for reforms that don't prioritize the company's needs first. Overwhelmingly one's boss only factors in their employee’s feedback if they believe it's a good thing to do. And even then, it's usually about the productivity and value that that leader can extract from their employee.

From dictating one's attire to, in some cases, one's physical appearance, bosses have tremendous control over what an employee can do at work — i.e., the place the latter spends most of their working hours residing within. If an employee disagrees with that decision-making or feels wronged by it, but their boss doesn't think it's valuable feedback, then that's tough shit for their employee.

All things considered, that feels quite authoritarian.

Conclusion: we need democracy in the workplace

None of this is how a fair exchange should work. Given everything we have mentioned, we can make the case that the modern workplace is anti-democratic. Democracy is about all participants having some say in decision-making. The entity wants to do X, and you get some (not total) say on whether that happens. The modern workplace is a strictly dictatorial structure where you are told to do X regardless of whether you think it's a good idea — and can sometimes be removed from your organization for providing that feedback.

In other words, authoritarianism.

Now you may agree with preserving the strict hierarchy we have described for “efficiencies” sake, but we shouldn't pretend these institutions are egalitarian. Workplaces aren't a democracy. They aren’t a family. They aren't really even a community as much as a strict chain of command where you are hired to do X, and your needs will always be secondary to X.

The natural question for some is, ‘How does one turn workplaces into real democracies?’

Ultimately, decision-making needs to be expanded to the people who work there. Unionization (i.e., electing an outside firm run by workers to help negotiate contracts and facilitate disputes) is often floated as a solution to this, but as much as I love unions, they don't solve the fundamental problem we are discussing. They are necessary, but they are still an outside mechanism putting constraints on your place of work and not redistribution of who owns what. They can fall victim to the same problems we have discussed. Companies coopt and sidestep union regulations all the time (see “employer-dominated unions”).

To change the incentive structure, we again need workplaces themselves to be democratized. This can come in the form of companies electing workers to sit on their boards (see “worker boards”), literally dividing up the ownership of the company to everyone that works there in an equitable way (see “worker coops”), internally electing executive functions like your CEO, CFO, etc., and many, many more. There are countless different (and not mutually exclusive ways) to democratize a workplace (and union power can help achieve them).

Knowing that workplaces are authoritarian, will you defend this structure or work to change it? Because the one thing we know about democracy is that it's not a given: it must be fought for.

No, a 4th Stimulus Check is Not "Just Around the Corner"

Back in 2020, I wrote a piece called "The Men Who Sold the False Hope of Stimulus Checks" that chronicled an online trend of "finance gurus" reporting about news on the potential release of a second round of stimulus checks. This was after the Trump administration gave out $1200 checks, and people eagerly awaited a second one (there would be three total). An entire cottage industry emerged that tried to tap into people's desperation and, in the process, often directed followers to "get-rich-quick" courses and services. As I wrote in that initial article:

“The men who preached stimulus updates…could have said that a second stimulus check was months away. They maybe could have even scrutinized the specific political leaders who held up negotiations and told their followers to bother them. Instead, they instructed cash-strapped viewers to buy stock and to sign up for get-rich classes they couldn’t afford, and we should never forget it.”

Now, years later, it's safe to say that a fourth round of stimulus checks on the federal level will not happen in the foreseeable future (note: some states and cities are distributing funds to particular groups). However, some people are still putting forth the idea that a chunk of money is just around the corner.

And so let's once again return to the good, the bad, and the downright despicable of this persistent element of the attention economy.

This is a weird grift

Something that needs to be underscored from the start is that, politically, a fourth stimulus check is a non-starter right now. No one on the Hill is seriously entertaining this idea. As the blog TEC Talks states bluntly (and correctly) in their video 4th Stimulus Check The TRUTH | Talk vs Reality: "It's not even close to happening. I do not hear any politicians talking about a stimulus check."

The House of Representatives, which the Republican Party controls, will not award the Biden administration an easy victory by handing out $1400 checks to every American. They are not incentivized to give them that economic win. If a severe economic downturn occurs before the election, they will blame the Democrats for it and then move to pass legislation once the election cycle is over. We have at least a year of inactivity on this issue.

Yet telling people this more sobering reality is not the type of content that gets clicks. Instead, many of these content creators postulate about the "near" certainty of stimulus checks and then dance around the issue for their video's entire duration.

Take, for example, Blind to Billionaire, who, in their video, $1,400 4th Stimulus Check with the 2023 Recession, argues that a more than mild recession is likely, and if that happens, a stimulus check is quite possible. He says: "Basically, we're writing [a recession] in the books here. It's coming. How big is it going to be? Well, that's still to be determined. We won't know until we're in it, and then we'll start to see Congress frantically panicking all around…[and passing] packages."

However, since recessions are an inevitable aspect of capitalism (a great system we got here), his statement is almost as helpful as saying one day it will rain. Of course, we will hit a recession one day — that doesn't mean stimulus checks granted to individual Americans are an inevitability.

Worse, Blind to Billionaire takes an almost conspiratorial tone with how he talks about this issue, saying the Feds don't want to cause a panic, and so "they" are keeping the truth from "us." In that same video, he asserts: "The Federal Reserve knows better. They know that if they were to come out and say, 'Oh yeah, we're going to see a pretty bad recession in the second half of 2023, they would cause panic and chaos in the markets." He is basically suggesting that all timid comments from the Federal Reserve indicate a massive downturn is coming.

Similar speculations are made by the Youtuber Josh Anderson, who, about a month ago, argued that there is a "pretty big chance for a fourth Federal stimulus check to go out maybe later this year or perhaps in early 2024." He's referencing the same announcement from the Federal Reserve about a mild recession, and again, given the political hurdles we have already described, this language is misleading. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would rather lick the wigs of every drag queen in the state of Florida than give Democrats the tiniest inkling of a political victory.

Then there are the users who are more transparent in their grift. How To Guys, for example, started as a Tech channel, producing videos about Windows's Operating System and Home Assistance Installation tutorials. Yet stimulus content has become their channel's entire personality, and based on the nearly incomprehensible descriptions underneath every video, they are pretty blatantly doing this content to try to gain the algorithm.

Captured under FOURTH STIMULUS CHECK UPDATE: WILL AMERICANS RECEIVE ANOTHER STIMULUS CHECK IN 2023?

It seems they are cultivating an audience on people's desperation because that's where the market is. Again there are dozens of these channels (see also Meet Bailey David, TrueLife Investing, and more). Most of them are regurgitating the same updates, often widely speculating, to an audience of desperate people. They have titles and hooks that provide the false hope that "maybe soon" a stimulus check is coming. Any conversation not grounded in the fact this stimulus will not happen soon is lying to its audience.

And, of course, this anxiety all these creators are tapping into is used not only to channel attention but, for some, to secure specific financial benefits. Creators like Josh Anderson often direct their followers to signup for stock applications such as WeBull and MooMoo. Blind to Billionaire regularly get sponsors for their videos. Many of the others we have talked about consistently give away gift cards to their audiences (a common online growth strategy), undoubtedly in the hope that they, too, will be big enough to receive similar sponsorship deals one day.

It seems ethically dubious to use the attention of people desperate for a $1,000 check, which all things considered is not a terrible amount of money in a US context, and to build an audience off of that — let alone influence that mostly poor audience to buy stocks. All sponsorships bring with them some ethical dilemmas (an issue we will not be touching today in this article), but this area of content seems particularly fraught.

Conclusion

Listen, it's hard to be a content creator, and many of the most successful are capitalizing on some questionable practices (see The World of Online Publishing Makes Liars of Us All). However, when your entire business model is about providing false hope of relief, I question your ethics.

Conversely, we have excellent content creators giving good financial and political advice. I briefly mentioned TEC Talks, which has been quite clear about another round of federal stimulus checks not being on the horizon. I am also a massive fan of The Financial Diet. People can clearly do this work well enough, but we should be critical of when others are doing a poor job, and most of the people mentioned in this article are doing a lousy job.

Again, Federal stimulus is not anywhere likely until after the 2024 election, and even in a genuinely terrible economy, the stimulus doesn't require a flat check being sent to every American. It could come in the form of business grants or loans, or tax credits for people with low incomes. We should not assume that an economic downturn, even a bad one, will make our leaders so magnanimous — they usually must be made to be.

Ultimately, be careful who gives you advice on the Internet and pay attention to their motivations (yes, even mine). Some creators want you hooked regardless of the consequences, even if that means serving up a steady supply of false hope and regret.

The Ugly-Looking Propaganda Mill in Illinois (ft. The Heartland Institute)

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the walking and architecture tour for all those catastrophe lovers out there, where we note the locations that significantly impacted species 947's collapse (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the physical, digital, and sensual locations that contributed to humanity's untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at a propaganda monger called The Heartland Institute, which produced denialist literature meant to convince Species 947 that everything was fine and that their environment was not, in fact, collapsing. Denialists are common in collapsing ecosystems (for a more infamous example, see the wedon'tgiveaglorp death cult of Deoruta VI).

The headquarters for this unsavory organization was tucked away in an ecologically unstable community known as a suburb [suh·brb] — a type of community known for its unsightly and wonderfully disgusting architecture. The Heartland Institute was no different from every other sprawling building constructed during the downfall of human civilization. The giant house, referred to as a McMansion after a popular meat patty of the time, was a massive tan structure that snaked its way down a suburban street.

One immediately comes away with the impression that there is much to look at and not at the same time. One could be mistaken for believing that some unforgiving God duplicated the same hideous features over and over again in a holovid-building game. Why the flat walls that eke across the property? Why the hideous window frames that, when shut, make it look like the house is boarded up? And why the green sign vaguely reminiscent of an upscale Earthling dining establishment known as Olive Gardin (no, connection, as far as I can tell)?

Ultimately, why were so many resources spent building something that made it seem like even the architect was bored designing it? We may never know.

What we do know from temporal research is that the massive size and unfriendly composition are partly because suburbs were about an individual's right to have a lot of stuff over community resources and emotional connections. That may seem strange and unhealthy to a species like yours, capable of surviving for millions of years without imploding, but the economic and philosophical foundations of the American Empire were deeply selfish and unstable. History has proved that point for us!

In a suburb, ideally, one interacted with as few individuals as possible. They required the use of metal death vehicles called cars to move around from place to place. An informal caste system existed between those who used such vehicles, called car-users, who found it easy to reach almost anywhere in their community, and those who shamefully decided to use their appendages, known as legs, to get around instead. These latter beings were referred to as pedestrians, and extra points were awarded to humans who ran over them with their death vehicles — something that reminds me of a game popular in the lowest levels of the Galactic Capital.

The humans behind The Heartland Institute loved this way of life. They loved cars, hitting things with said cars, and they especially loved that these vehicles were powered by gases that generated death chemicals such as carbon dioxide as a byproduct. It was essential to this organization that the production of these death chemicals went unabated. The Heartland Institute produced propaganda downplaying or denying outright these chemicals' contribution to the climate adjustment period we all know eventually destroyed their ecosystem.

For example, check out this denialist propaganda by Linnea Lueken, released in the human year of 2023, arguing that fracking, a process that used the pressure of a water-mineral compound to extract oil and gas from beneath the surface of the Earth, did not cause water pollution.

Oh, Lueken, her delusion would almost be adorable if it did not help contribute to the extinction of most humans on the planet, plus or minus one or two warring tribes. For a more credible source on fracking, please check out this human study examining the risk fracking had on infant development, this breakdown of a study proving that it contaminated water in Wyoming, or just use your common sense that there are consequences for putting contaminated water into the ground.

The Heartland Institute was founded in 1984, as Species 947's oil and gas industry was beginning to realize the harm it was having on the planet. The token hoarders in charge of such businesses sought to fund a competing narrative that muddied the waters, as the now-extinct Earth saying went. It was specifically founded by David H. Padden, a former director of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. Both Cato and Heartland allegedly received heavy funding from members of the old and gas industry. The Heartland Institute did not publicly disclose its funders; however, various reporting from the historical archives noted funders such as the Mercers (who made money from hoarding shiny circuitry) and the Koch Foundation (a gas company), among others (see the Financial Money Slugs of Ollillon to better understand the inner psychology of such parasites).

The organization had been noted for convening an annual "International Conference on Climate Change," where some of the biggest whose who of climate denialists came together to assure themselves that they definitely were not leading to the death of the planet. Fun fact, the last conference ever, happened secretly inside a billionaire's survival bunker. A faulty plumbing line burst, drowning everyone there (an all too common occurrence for those bunkers, but that's a topic for another time).

For our temporal travelers, if you would like to visit The Heartland Institute over at 3939 N Wilke Rd, Arlington Heights, IL, know that all suburban Meat Patty houses are quite concerned with privacy and security. A thick hedge surrounded the perimeter well into what humans would call the 21st century — although, like everything in suburbia, it is pretty accessible by a metal death vehicle.

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

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

See more entries here:

Queen Charlotte & the Pitfalls of Representational Politics

photo by Shakko, Portrait of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744–1818)

The Bridgerton series has officially become an expanded universe with the series Queen Charlotte. The story chronicles the origin of the titular Queen and her tumultuous relationship with King George, which, in this alternate history, leads to the desegregation of British High Society.

There’s a lot to unpack on this show. A surprising delight was how they handled the insensitively named “Madness of King George” (who most likely had bipolar disorder) with actual compassion. The show also included a gay romance and, of course, had plenty of BIPOC characters navigating these new halls of power in style.

Yet, it’s the lack of class commentary that we will examine today. This show advances a form of representational politics that ultimately is very hollow.

A royal problem

Unlike in Bridgerton, the exploration of race is present in the show from the onset. Again, the story is about the desegregation of British High Society (cheekily called “The Great Experiment”), which happens matter-of-factly after King George’s mother accidentally learns that her son’s bride-to-be from Germany is Black. The Queen gives several BIPOC people from the 1% titles to save face.

The contrivance for why this happens is unbelievable and silly from our perspective (see the Royal family’s reaction to Meghan Markle in the 21st century), but for the most part, we are meant to absorb these beats uncritically. Queen Charlotte, the show, not the person, tells the viewer exactly how it wants to be examined. In a wink and a nod to the audience, the gossipmonger Lady Whistledown (voiced by Julie Andrews) narrates: “[This story] is not a history lesson. It is fiction inspired by fact. All liberties taken by the author are quite intentional.”

In other words, stop taking this fun, ahistorical piece of media seriously.

Yet this bit of commentary misses the point of what a lot of the criticism around the original Bridgerton was about. While some triggered conservatives were angered by the alleged revisionism (a point I am not here to defend), many people on the left were not criticizing it for historical accuracy. A work of fiction does not have to be a documentary. Stories can be illogical and ahistorical if there is a reason to do so within the narrative.

However, what a story cannot do and cannot be is apolitical. All narratives have messages being advocated for, which deserve to be criticized. And Queen Charlotte has repeatedly received such criticism for uncritically placing a Black woman at the head of a very racist and exploitative empire on the one hand and advancing a type of meritocratic politics on the other. As the creator Princess Weekes argues in Queen Charlotte & The Bridgerton Problem:

“When it comes to Black people playing monarchs, British monarchs and [not in a theater way]…things get a little messy because of slavery, because of imperialism. Because of what all of that means.”

It’s this historical context that the show both ignores and embraces simultaneously. We are not meant to think about the horrors of colonialism (more on this later), but much of the plot is again about the ups and downs of desegregation. There is an entire subplot on whether the titles awarded will transfer to the heirs of this new Black and Brown aristocracy or if these gains will last a single generation. The narrative wants one to engage with this theme, and from the context, it clearly, wants one to walk away with the moral that royal desegregation is a good thing. “With one evening, one party, we have created more change, stepped forward more than Britain has in the last century. More than I would have dreamed,” one character says of an attempt to integrate the aristocracy.

The show is advocating strongly for the idea that it’s a good thing Black and Brown entrepreneurs and capitalists are being let into the upper reaches of society. “I never thought I would see this day,” the misogynistic Lord Danbury says, admiring the new land bequeathed to him, nameless servants in the background. He continues: “…the old days are over, and that this is a new world. That men are men regardless from whence they come.” One can call this outlook representational politics, or the idea that expanding who is represented in the halls of power will cause other changes to snowball.

Yet who are the old days over for?

Certainly not the many voiceless servants we see throughout the show. This assumption that we should fantasize about letting marginalized members into the halls of oppressive institutions deserves criticism. Because while the world might be getting better for the Queen Charlotte’s and Lady Danbury’s of the world, it’s a debate whether this approach truly helps those at the bottom.

Representational Empire

The British Empire may have desegregated its nobility in both Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte, but it’s still an empire. The aesthetics of their imperial holdings are almost immediate, as the protagonist Queen Charlotte lectures about the Indian sapphires in her dress in one of the earliest scenes in the first episode. The show is very much about the royals: their money, their wealth, and the countless nameless people who serve them, with very little consideration for all the horrors that gave them those shiny jewels.

There is a particularly telling scene where Queen Charlotte is told through a series of interactions that she is out-of-touch and that her “walls are too high.” She learns that her decision to pick her own oranges has led to some of her staff’s dismissal — although it’s not entirely clear if they were switched over to another position or were fired outright. She begins to feel guilty, but we don’t see her try to help these staffers — in fact, she later argues the necessity for her high status to benevolently protect her subjects.

The decision she makes to rectify her insecurities about her power is to attend a ball hosted by a fellow Black royal. It’s this action that King George accredits to being the biggest change to Britain “in the last century.” We are supposed to be comforted by defining progress very narrowly to the expansion of the upper class when historically, we know this Empire they seek to find power in was detrimental to the lives of so many people. The British Empire’s policies would go on to kill hundreds of millions during the age of colonialism. In the early 1800s, when Bridgerton was set, slavery was still very much legal in the Empire.

These decisions still negatively impact the lives of people to this day. How this Empire drew up borders from everything to the partition of India and Pakistan to the Middle East continues to have devastating geopolitical consequences. This is not to mention the resource extraction that British companies (as well as the US and other European ones) are still doing to the Global South.

It’s perfectly fine to tell a story with royals, but when one’s narrative is about how “cool” it would be to diversify the institution without providing the context of its horrors, the story ends up laundering that institution’s reputation. The conversation ends up being about who is in the room of these institutions and if they can “modernize” or not, and not whether these rooms should have existed in the first place.

Now, fictional narratives don’t have to talk about these issues in a historical way. The Bridgerton universe certainly doesn’t, but how they narratively approach the problem of monarchy, particularly the British monarchy (i.e., whether it’s ethical or not), deserves to be criticized. The one time the monarchy’s dissolution is brought up is in jest when King George mentions what’s at stake if he doesn’t appear before High Society, and it’s framed as a bad thing. If we are not getting points of view in support of abolishment (and we don’t), an alternate history that treats de-colonialism thoughtfully (and we aren’t), or at the very least highlighting the abuse of the monarchy (nope), then the narrative ends up uncritically propping up the importance of this terrible institution.

The show is so firmly planted on the side of royals that non-royals are treated chiefly as passive objects. The public is viewed as sycophantly worshipping the monarchy from a distance. Many nobles, no doubt, felt this way about the public. However, there is a difference between a character’s perspective and the viewpoint of the narrative overall. And Queen Charlotte does not care to examine any of the problems we have mentioned, preferring to go along for the ride. The few non-royal characters, much like the upstairs-downstairs relationships of Downton Abbey, are staffers quite loyal to the people they serve and are mostly narrative objects for their lord’s emotional development.

While the creators had every right to make a work like this one, we are likewise entitled to criticize it for this rather significant failing. Again the British Empire, more broadly speaking, was straight-up evil to the world’s poorer, browner residents, and it is unconvincing that “The Great Experiment” would change that status quo. Is this Blacker aristocracy attempting to disband the East Indian Company? Have they apologized for being instrumental in the slave trade? For it still existing? We certainly don’t know either way because this show doesn’t want to dive into those topics and risk having us instantly lose empathy for our royal characters — Black and white alike.

Instead, the world these new royals are aspiring to is quite conservative. They are accepted into high society because of their wealth, education, and breeding. As a young aristocrat says to rebuke her mother’s blatant racism:

“Mother said they were not us. But the king gave our family a title and land. All the families of the ton got their titles and land from the king…and mother, they are gentlemen. Daddy always defines a gentleman as a well-educated man of a good family…so they are exactly like us. Better in some cases considering several of them are from royal families of their own and have much more money than we do.”

This is an argument based on tradition and meritocratic capitalism, and given this girl’s mother is framed as unreasonable (her husband rolling his eyes and everything), it’s one we are meant to be amenable to. Yet just in the same way that today’s Black and Brown billionaires do not uplift the Black and Brown workers beneath them, we have no indication that this Blacker and Browner aristocracy will engage in more radical politics that helps the working class. The one servant character serving Queen Charlotte who has any story arc does not find acceptance. His gay lover is not around during the flash-forward scenes as it seems queerness is far from accepted in this more tolerant society. The Queen is depicted as so demanding that he has hardly had time to make a life for himself outside of serving her.

This show presents a very selfish and non-intersectional type of diversity, celebrating those at the top who “work hard” (never mind the hundreds of servants in the background who also work hard) for “getting theirs.”

A queenly address

Queen Charlotte’s narrow scope — one only interested in a pastiche of royalty in a way devoid of context — is a very telling one. We are presented with a narrative entirely removed from the effects and reality of monarchy. One that insists that through expanding the representation of those of means, their gains will trickle down to the rest of us.

Despite attempts to frame it otherwise, that is not a progressive narrative but a conservative one. It’s impossible for a pro-monarchist narrative not to be. From Game of Thrones to Downton Abby, this criticism does not apply only to the Bridgerton universe but to most modern monarchy narratives (see Our Obsession with Westeros (and Royalty in General) Is Unhealthy). Queen Charlotte merely makes this problem more visible because we are asked to imagine a world where this terrible institution is “reformed” and instantly comes up against the limits of this perspective.

You cannot morally improve Empire and have it still remain an Empire.

Some will claim not to take this show too seriously, that it’s merely a fantasy, but this is naive. All fantasies have things to say about our world, and Queen Charlotte has profound things to say. Light superficial content does not have an entire subplot where a main character is tortured. With its beautiful messages about mental health acceptance and the need for greater tolerance, it seems silly to say the show does not want its viewers to be moved and occasionally even to think.

We are allowed, as viewers, to disagree with some of the messages advocated here while appreciating others. And when it comes to how this show frames monarchy, my dear gentle reader, it has much to be disagreed with.

America Has Always Been A Pretty Unrealistic Utopia

"American Progress" by John Gast

The United States of America is both a country and an ideal. The Declaration of Independence put forth the principle that we would be a country where "…all men are created equal" and that citizens would have certain "unalienable Rights [such as] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." It is a declaration claiming that all citizens are entitled to certain rights under the law because some of our founders thought they were intrinsic to the human condition.

Yet, for anyone with an even passing understanding of history, this ideal has never remotely lived up to reality. Indigenous inhabitants were pushed from their lands and continue to be treated quite poorly. Black Americans were denied their freedom outright, and even centuries later still have significantly worse outcomes than their whiter counterparts. The freedom of America has been a limited type of freedom denied to many.

When you think about it, America as an ideal is pretty unrealistic, arguably even utopian, but that reality is rarely acknowledged. There is this double standard where defenders of America's "founding" vision use the rhetoric of utopianism to attack alternatives while ignoring the same criticism for themselves. This allows supporters to sidestep calls for change while reinforcing the status quo.

A brief history of misunderstanding utopia

The word utopia (i.e., a seemingly perfect community) has been used pejoratively for a long time. From the often-mentioned famines of the USSR to the eugenics-like prescriptions in Plato's Republic, utopias are commonly thought of as dystopias in disguise. As conservative philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel roughly wrote: "There is a tyranny in the womb of every utopia."

Yet the history behind this concept is more complicated. While the idea has been around for a long, the word itself is commonly attributed to British academic and statesmen Thomas More in his 1551 book, Utopia. It comes from the Greek word outopos, meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. The word itself was a pun of the Greek word eutopos, or good place (although he initially preferred the Latin version Nusquama).

More's book is made up of two parts. The first book is an academic conversation between several fictional and real people about governance, particularly about how one should punish theft. The characters bring up accounts of different political structures, some real, others imaginary, including the Isle of Utopia. Through this dialogue, these characters, one of them being More himself, provide a blistering critique of then-contemporary Europe.

The second part goes into further detail about Utopia — its geography, culture, politics, etc. This island nation supposedly evolved from a "primitive" state of nature to one of near perfection. Instead of focusing on private property laws, they adopted a "communality of possession," which is a fancy way of describing a proto-form of communism. Everything is shared, and "though no one owns anything, everyone is rich." Utopians hated war and detested opulence (note: they also shunned vices and had slavery, so not everything was idyllic).

Our current negative association with the word utopia might have one thinking that More was against many of the principles described in the book, as he has a fictional account of himself rejecting many of Utopia's ideals. There were probably some ideas he did disagree with. However, in an era where criticizing the monarchy could mean literal death (and would eventually lead to his execution over an unrelated matter), this literary distance was, in many ways, a safety measure meant to stave off deadly criticism.

People have often ignored this context, trying to flatten the text to only be about a man railing against an overly idealistic perfectionism—an impression supported by many publishers of the time. As noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“For much of its reception-history, Utopia has been treated as if it consisted exclusively of Book 2, and this impression was supported by some printed versions which omitted the first book. It was this that gave rise to the misleading adjective “Utopian” with its negative connotations of unreal and unattainable aspiration.”

And yet we must recognize that Thomas More was using the Isle of Utopia as a lens to criticize the monarchies of Western Europe — a political structure that many contemporaries would now label as archaic. Even with the most flowery language, utopian rhetoric is almost always about the present, a call to change and improve broken systems.

The weaponization of utopia

Yet, right now, to call something utopian is practically synonymous with labeling it as a disguised dystopia. "If something seems too good to be true," goes the common saying, "then it is." This especially applies to left-wing policy, which is routinely scolded for being a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, even if the word utopianism is not used to dismiss it.

Take, for example, single-payer healthcare, i.e., the payment of a population's healthcare under a single administrator rather than by many redundant ones. It's common for opponents, even within the Democratic party, to portray this policy as unrealistic or "too expensive." The status quo — one of the most expensive and inefficient medical systems in the modern world — is deemed more practical than one streamlined system because, well, systemic reform simply can't be done. As Joe Biden said on the campaign trail about the plans of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren:

“It is totally unrealistic and can’t be done. My plan can occur the day after I’m elected, we can get it done, you don’t have to wait 5–10 years to get it done. I’m not criticizing them personally, but look there’s a little truth in advertising here. Bernie and Elizabeth: How much is your plan going to cost?”

Almost four years later, the biggest healthcare item the Biden administration has managed to implement is Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire in 2025—a bandaid and one easily removable if Republicans ever retake office. Given the reality of how ineffective the incrementalism of Biden has been, this attempt to frame more radical reform as lackluster is disingenuous.

Also, the current medical system, by the standard of money, is again already very inefficient. Healthcare spending per person and as a share of our GDP is already much higher than in most "developed countries, and we have far worse healthcare outcomes than them. Life expectancy has actually been going down for most demographics in the US.

Let’s turn the question around: how is Biden going to solve any of this?

In fact, most advocating for Medicare-for-all aren't pushing for a utopia in the pejorative sense, where everything is perfect, but one that tries to remove the inefficiencies of the current system for something that covers more people. We would pay for it by redirecting the profits from, say, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and focusing those resources that would normally go to shareholders and salary bumps into providing people with actual healthcare. Surprisingly, rather than claiming to be perfectly grounded in a win-win scenario, it's a position that is advocating for political losers (i.e., those who have hoarded wealth via current inefficiencies), and one very much concerned with the practicalities of the current medical system.

By framing systemic reform as utopian you are telling people it's impossible — that anything that is not picking at the margins is insanity. We see this everywhere. Whether framing debates on how we reallocate police budgets (i.e., defunding the police) as "beyond the pale" or calling alternative economic systems "good in theory but not so great in practice", the goal of many on the Right has been to use the language of utopianism to depict all attempts of changing the status quo as either "going too far" or being "unrealistic."

And yet, and we must stress this, this same logic applies to America and all right-wing ideologies trying to depict themselves as realistic and commonsense. It's utopian "nonsense" all the way down.

America is "unrealistically" utopian

The thing about most of the ideologies on the Right is that they are no less utopian. Many religious fundamentalists want to restructure society under the premise of an otherworldly being’s grand design. Ethno-nationalists find that structure in the social constructs of race and ethnicity. Market fundamentalists find salvation through capitalism. Even most centrists believe that the ideal way to structure society is by finding the point in the center of the discourse. It’s all about supporting an ideological framework that one believes will build them as close to perfection as one can get.

The American ideal is no different. The argument often heard is that the principles that structured America (e.g., life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will lead the country in the right direction. The ideals of the framers that we have come to romanticize in retrospect (not to be confused with the far messier political debates of reality) were that they advocated for a system of "checks and balances," "minority protections," and political compromise that were supposed to make us a more rational society.

And yet, this vision is hard to square with the major drawbacks those utopian principles created in reality (see slavery, genocide, imperialism, etc.). To this day, even some of America's strongest adherents are some of the first to admit its flaw. In the words of a proclamation from the Biden administration:

“This country was established upon the profound but simple idea that all people are created equal and should be treated equally throughout their lives. It is an idea America has never fully lived up to, but it is an idea we have never fully walked away from either.”

Here, we get to the central tension because it's rare that American utopianism is accused of being unrealistic in mainstream discourse. When Biden monologues about reaching toward the American ideal, it's treated aspirationally — a goal to reach toward. And yet, under the same logic, shouldn't we treat it with identical disdain? Isn't America something that likewise sounds good in theory but doesn't match up well in reality? Why is American Utopianism treated positively when this exact type of argument would get laughed out of the room for any other competing philosophy?

These are, of course, rhetorical questions. The answer is that American nationalism is the dominant ideal in this country. Otherwise, America the country would not continue to exist. And yet this paradox deserves to be brought up because it forces us to ask whether these utopian ideals are worth striving for in the future. All frameworks have tradeoffs where they are advocating for losers, even if those losers are just the narrow beneficiaries of the previous system.

And so, we must ask ourselves if we are comfortable with the “losers” generated by the current system.

American dysfunction

When we look at the problems we have pointed out, many of them were caused by our founding ideals. The people instrumental in this country's origins were, for example, deeply skeptical of majority rule, or “the tyranny of the majority.” In perhaps one of the most famous Federalist papers, James Madison wrote how the new government would protect against this problem, claiming:

“[I]n the federal republic of the United States… all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”

The dysfunction of our electoral system, as well as the lopsided hold the current Republican party has over electoral politics, is, in part, because of the institutions created to "safeguard" against this founding fear. The Senate overinflates the power of less populous states by ensuring that all of them have the same amount of votes (see the Virginia Compromise). The Electoral College, in its current incarnation, has the same bias, so much so that five presidents have lost the popular vote but won the election. Furthermore, the ridiculously high benchmark to amend the Constitution ensures these policies are very difficult to change — recalcitrance that historically just so happened to empower a small, aristocratic minority.

In fact, the Electoral College was originally conceived as a tool to find a philosopher-like-king of America, who would be just as well-received as George Washington. There was no democratic impulse behind it. As Eric Black argues in Minn Post:

“…it’s worth noting that the Framers had no thought that the president would have a “mandate” from “the people.” They were looking for excellence, not popularity…. [it was] not until the fourth presidential election — the one in 1800 in which Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent president John Adams but inadvertently tied with his own running mate — did the idea develop that a president derived some of his authority from a popular mandate.”

This utopian plan to select the president never happened because the framers had a blindspot when it came to factions. They didn't provide restrictions in the Constitution itself concerning parties because they naively thought their system would be able to ignore them altogether — a very pie-in-the-sky, utopian impulse.

The parties that inevitably formed often decided political nominations in a very cagey, and indirect way. Elections for Senators were decided by state legislators until the early 1900s (note the House was a popularly elected body, albeit from a richer, whiter, more male constituency). Primaries weren’t really a thing until the late 1800s, and they had little significance on the national level until the Democratic Primary of 1960 (imagine that). For much of the 1900s, it was the infamous "backroom deals" of party bosses that came to dominate who would be put on the ballot.

There have been many good reforms in this area, and yet, to this day, political parties in the US continue to be largely private entities that hold a lot of sway over the internal rules of who gets to run under their banner (see the debate schedule). And because other policies limit voting to just two options (see winner-take-all), this effectively allows party leaders to squash dissent on their ideological flanks and slows down more just reforms.

Most of the "gains" we have enjoyed from a social justice standpoint have been the result of slowly dismantling the hold of these founding principles. Many consider it good that the three-fifths compromise (i.e., the part of the Constitution that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person to inflate the representation of slave-holding states) was abolished. Many not only think that increasing enfranchisement to social minorities was a positive, but that democratizing our elections was preferable to the more closed-door politicking of the past. Yet the architects of this country would be horrified by the ideals we have abandoned, finding themselves more at home in the Republican Party than anywhere on the left.

Rather than being supported by our founding principles, defenders of social justice frequently find themselves crashing against the wall of American Utopianism. And for those raised to believe in the idealistic principles of America, that is a bitter pill to swallow.

A pie-in-the-sky conclusion

We have seen how the rhetoric of utopia has been used to historically dismiss alternatives. When someone labels something as utopian they are criticizing it as unrealistic and ill-fated — a dystopia in disguise. It is a line of attack often meant to preserve the status quo and, in the context of US politics, is particularly weaponized against left-wing alternatives.

Yet most ideological systems have a utopian base (a vision of how things should be) because they are striving for an ideal. This especially applies to America, which was founded on principles that often directly contradicted the reality of what America would become. The Framers wanted to do away with political factions, insulate minorities from majority interests, and create a perfect system of checks and balances. Instead, political factions formed almost immediately, we now very much exist under a tyranny of an oligarchic minority, and the mythical checks and balances created a system so intractable that we cannot even begin to solve our most basic problems.

This is not to dunk on the impulse to build something better. Even if I ultimately disagree with most of the principles the framers held dear, I admire the drive to create a better world. We need utopias to guide us because it's impossible to do away with ideologies, viewpoints, and perspectives. Those who read this article and come away with the moral that all "isms" are flawed have missed the point (and undoubtedly fail to realize that their viewpoints are governed by "isms" as well).

It's the looking back that matters. When one builds a system with the eyes of ideology, which is to say when one builds a system at all, they must have the humility to realize they can be wrong — that the world they wanted to make was not achieved. And to assess the flaws in their vision before the damage stigmatizes so badly that seeing it becomes impossible.

The vision of America, in retrospect, was deeply flawed, and it will not be the last time that a dream goes sour, but hopefully, when we commit to seeing things with different eyes, the damage the next time will not be so profound.

The Owl House Subverted A Generation of Anti-Fascist Media

Deaf-Machbot

Dana Terrace's show, The Owl House, ended on April 8, 2023. It was about a nerdy woman named Luz Noceda who was transported to a magical land called the Boiling Isles. There she learned magic, gathered friends and allies, and faced off against a dictator named Emperor Belos, who wanted everyone to conform to his rule.

There has been a lot of ink spilled, and words typed about how Disney, the network that produced The Owl House, unfairly ended it because of how one executive was uncomfortable with the vibe of this openly queer show (see my article Does Disney Care About Diversity?). We will probably never know the real reason, but I encourage you to read Dana Terrace's own words on the cancellation.

Instead, I want to talk about this shows perspectives on authoritarianism and fascism. Unlike many kids' shows out there, The Owl House gets a lot more confrontational and hands-on with the types of actions it thinks are appropriate for fighting fascists, bucking over a decade of popular media in the process.

A Primer on Cartoon Fascism

Right away, it should be noted that authoritarianism (i.e., a submission to authority and a centralization power) and fascism (i.e., a combination of authoritarianism and a centralized mythos about how the world should be) are very common in children's cartoons. Everything from Steven Universe to Avatar: The Last Airbender to Amphibia has our protagonists facing off against evil authoritarians who control entire countries, planets, or galaxies.

This trope is partly because, strangely enough, fascism can map metaphorically onto traditional family structures. Parents are essentially authoritarians with a direct say over their kids' lives, albeit for a better set of reasons (usually). It's easy to see children imagining themselves rebelling against a strict authority as a substitute for the lack of control in their own lives. All the examples we listed above have plots where characters are interacting with a family member(s) who is a fascist (i.e., Prince Zuko and the Firelord, Steven and the Diamonds, etc.). While these texts directly talk about fascism, they are perhaps even more centrally speaking about family.

This perspective is one of the reasons why many of these shows conclude with relatively peaceful resolutions to their conflicts. Zuko can tell off his father, the Firelord, because Aang removes the Firelord's bending through mystical turtle magic. Steven effectively collapses the Great Diamond Authority by making White Diamon laugh. Anne Boonchuy from Amphibia stops an interdimensional, fascist empire from winning the day by revealing to its monarch some last-minute information (that and also God magic). You can resolve most problems with family members, even abusive ones, through either dialogue or distance (i.e., cutting abusive people out of your life). And so, it makes sense these shows would deliver a similar message.

And yet, and I feel I must stress this, the solution to fascism (and yes, the Diamond Authority, the Fire Nation, and the Amphibian Monarchy are fascist; please look up the actual definition) has never been kindness and distance. Historically it has been violence. Deradicalization may work on an individual level, and even then on a case-by-case basis, but it has and cannot be the primary strategy for dismantling fascist regimes. We didn't defeat the Third Reich by being very nice to Adolf Hitler, and we aren't going to defeat the regimes of today and tomorrow with kindness, either.

Most kids' shows that draw upon authoritarian and fascist villains completely fall apart the moment you stop looking at them through the lens of family. And this is because, in a nutshell, asking victims to engage in an open dialogue with their oppressors is a framework that values the feelings of the oppressor over the harm that oppressor has done and continues to do. We do not have Gods or magical turtles to help us. To save more lives, you often have to prioritize getting dictators out of power through violence (and maybe even death) over changing their minds.

And so, what does this all have to do with The Owl House? Well, its conclusion sets up and completely subverts this trope for the better.

The breaking of a fascist

There is much debate on the exact definition and criteria for fascism. Umberto Eco lists fourteen criteria in their essay Ur Fascism, including hero worship and doublespeak. Scholar Roger Griffin described fascism in two words: palingenetic ultranationalism, or a revolution attempting to reform a nation around a core myth. Regardless of the ideology used to maintain it, its generally regarded as a concentration of government power, a transition into a dictatorship, and a nationalistic mythology that allows dictators to achieve these ends.

We see all these elements in the show The Owl House. Again, the main antagonist is a dictator (i.e., a leader who holds power with very few limitations). Emperor Belos has set up a government that places him at the top of the hierarchy. His rule over the witches beneath him appears to be absolute, with no significant oversight.

He gained power by relying on a foundational lie, claiming to speak on behalf of the Titan, the mythical creature they all live on top of who granted the Isles its magic. Belos uses that myth to try to force every witch into a strict coven system under the promise that this will make everything better. He rises to power by literally promising them national rebirth. Note: there is more to his machinations, including a twist that he is a witch hunter from the 1600s seeking to genocide all witches, but that doesn't change the central premise of him using fascism to gain power.

What's refreshing is how The Owl House depicts our main characters fighting this fascism. The show set up a family dynamic that could have led us to a similar ending as all the other shows we mentioned. The side character Hunter, it's revealed, is a clone made to appear like Belos's deceased brother. We could imagine a twist that rationalizes Belos's genocidal ambitions as an extension of the grief he feels for his dead brother. Hunter would then deradicalize him through a heart-to-heart.

Likewise, Luz muses throughout the last season about whether wanting to kill Belos makes her no worse than him. We again could have seen the heart-to-heart happen through her, where she convinces Belos that modern society now abhors the Witch Trials, and he questions his current path — it's certainly an approach we have seen followed in a previous generation of kids' shows.

Instead, the show refutes this perspective at every turn. While these arguments are made, they do not convince Belos, and he begins his genocide of the Boiling Isles in earnest. There is even a heartbreaking scene where the Collector, a Godlike entity with the mental capacity of a young child, tries to stop the Emperor by saying he "just needs kindness and forgiveness," only for Belos to try to kill him.

Belos is eventually defeated through violence via a fantastic anime-esque fight scene, but what's telling is how the show treats him post-defeat. A magical McGuffin could have allowed Luz to seal him away, remove his powers, or change his mind, but instead, she watches passively as the boiling rain from which the Isles derive their namesake begins to melt him away. He lies to her, saying he is now freed from a curse, and that she should help him. When that fails to garner sympathy, he resorts to false equivalency. "You'll be just as bad, just as conniving, just as evil," he calls out, but the narrative does not accept this framing. Two other characters emerge onto the scene and curb-stomp him to death in an almost comical scene.

It cannot be overemphasized how much of a radical departure this is from all the other narratives we have mentioned in American children's television. There is no massaging away here of how all of us can resolve our differences. We are left with only a cold realization that some awful people, once all other avenues have been exhausted, must be dealt with through violence.

"This is a little more complicated," Luz tells the Collector after he tries to solve the problem of the big bad with kindness. That it is.

A magical conclusion

The closing credits are the most rewarding facet of the show. The Boiling Isles begins the work of not only rebuilding after Belos's genocidal rampage but demilitarizing: Belos's police force is disbanded, the coven system is abolished, and Wild Magic becomes an accepted form of study.

It's difficult to know how this show would have progressed had The Owl House not been prematurely canceled for "not fitting the Disney brand." When shows realize they are headed to the finish line, they sometimes shoot for the moon and add all the elements they wish to do so initially without fear of greater studio oversight. It's not lost on me that Belos's death may have been handled with a lighter touch if given a more proper runway.

We will never know, but speculations aside, I am thankful for how this show ended. In a sea of fascism being a substitute for familial dynamics, it was refreshing for The Owl House to treat this philosophy seriously with the “respect” its adherents deserve.

Many Minecraft Players Fail To Understand What Anarchy Is

Douglas Muth from Ardmore, PA, USA

If you have been following Minecraft for a while, you may have noticed the proliferation of so-called "anarchy servers." Places such as 2b2t & MC Prison where there are allegedly "no rules." Players are permitted to cheat, steal, and kill other players (virtually) with reckless abandon.

These servers are entertaining to play, and I am a massive fan of the YouTuber FitMC, who covers the history of 2b2t. They are not anarchy, though, and this pop culture example allows us to set the record straight about a widespread misconception.

What is anarchy?

Anarchy comes from combining the Greek word an (without) and arkhos (ruler). It refers to a philosophy of trying to break down hierarchies, often by pushing against the state, capitalism, and really any rigid power structure that exists.

It is not, as what it is commonly referred to, as having “no rules.” Anarchist organizations have many rules and frequently try to craft policy and leadership roles in as decentralized a way as possible. Though like any philosophy, there are different methods and even disagreements on how to achieve this objective.

Now, this is probably not the definition you have heard, instead being told that anarchy is the opposite of structure and order. This misconception comes down to a philosophical disagreement. Many believe that the absence of strict hierarchies will lead to the worst aspects of humanity surfacing (e.g., rape, murder, etc.) — a belief that conveniently benefits those at the top of many hierarchies.

Yet when we look at history, we often see a different picture emerge. A common historical example brought up frequently in this discourse is pirate ships. The pop culture perception of pirates is that they were evil merciless plunderers, but the past was more complicated. Although there were a diversity of pirate governments (not all of them kind), some ships had robust democracies, constitutions, greater gender and racial parity among crew members, and a more equitable distribution of shares than their British counterparts. As The Guardian explains:

“It wasn’t as hierarchical as the Royal Navy. Captains were elected. And they lived according to a code.”

According to article one [of a code that prevailed on Black Bart’s ship]: “Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure.”

Contrary to common misconceptions, pirate ships were not more violent than, say, the British Navy (the entity that eventually mercilessly stomped piracy out of existence). In fact, pirates often relied on deception and branding to cause ships to surrender before an actual fight ever broke out (see The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, CGP Grey's video How to be a Pirate Captain!, or David Graeber's Pirate Enlightenment).

There are many other historical examples of anarchy that contradict the popular definition (see also Freetown Christiania, Exarcheia', etc.) We don't have time to cover them as this aside is more meant to highlight that the pervasive conception of anarchy in pop culture is often false, including, as we shall soon see, in Minecraft.

"Anarchy" in Minecraft

Anarchy Minecraft servers try to meet the second, more conservative definition of anarchy, advertising themselves as places with "no rules." Yet even with this definition, these servers fall flat. All games are a series of rules: that's how you can play them in the first place. Sports are based on collective norms. Take, for example, soccer. You are not physically prevented from picking up a soccer ball. Instead, you agree to kick it to participate in a soccer match.

Video games, unlike the agreed-upon rules and norms of in-person games, are conversely governed by universal laws inside a simplified virtual reality. You can edit and slice a game's code all you like, but the moment you do, you are constrained by those new limitations. Unlike soccer, there is no rule-breaking in video games from an architectural standpoint, merely adjusting the reality around you and adding or removing new constraints.

This problem becomes even more complicated with servers (i.e., "a computer that acts as a central authority to define the current state of a multiplayer game"), which require social norms, on top of the ingrained game mechanics, to even participate in them. Or, put more simply, players who act like dicks on these collective platforms will routinely find themselves booted from them completely.

In anarchy servers, even though one can often use modifications, bots, and an assortment of traditional "rule breaks," there are still social rules — the biggest being that you cannot disrupt the functioning of the collective game you are participating in, and still expect to participate in it. For example, in 2b2t, players sometimes weaponize items such as item frames and enchantment tables to create "lag" machines that lower the server's Transactions Per Second (TPS) rate to crash it. The owner behind this server, who goes by the moniker Hausemaster, has booted players, banned items, and patched mechanics that cause this lag — in essence, for violating a core social norm of the server.

Many of these servers also adjust code and implement various plugins to create a status quo on how players should behave. Lifesteal SMP has created an elaborate heart-stealing system (see more here) and enforces a strict code of conduct where they bar people from insulting moderators. Mineberry prevents hacks and selling accounts. Purity Vanilla likewise bans hacks, lag machines, and duping exploits.

Look at all these rules we've found. One may argue that these adjustments make sense, but that's not the point. It's instead to reinforce the fact that the conservative concept of "no rules" is nonsense. This narrative of anarchy is more about fostering a Hobbesian "war of all against all," a conservative hell where players hunt and destroy everything in their wake than it's about creating a real place with “no rules.” Again, this is impossible. The mere act of coming together demands organization: it demands rules.

What it does not always demand is a strict hierarchy, but even by this definition of anarchy, these servers usually fail. These anarchy servers do not have decentralized leadership. They are typically owned by one or two individuals. Players have little say in the decision-making, even for wide-reaching policies that impact everyone's experience, such as implementing a tiered queuing system where players who pay receive preferential treatment (a real example that happened with 2b2t).

It's argued that there is no governance here because server administration is frequently focused solely on maintenance rather than moderation. And yet, as we have already seen, this is a lie. Governance is still happening. If you are making decisions for a group — that is governance — and just because you have decided to abdicate many (though certainly not all) of these decisions, that doesn't mean you lack the authority to do so. Players have no formal control over the operation of servers like 2b2t, merely less oversight and even less input.

And when they do "abuse" that lack of oversight, they can be punished if these abuses are considered dangerous, harmful, or inconvenient by those in charge. Rights can be taken away without due process or mediation. That's not anarchy in any sense of the word.

A chaotic conclusion

Now I am sure there is that "one true anarchy server" out there ready to point out that not everyone thinks this way. No doubt, somewhere on the Internet, a small group of people is democratically maintaining the operation and governance of an anarchy server, doing some awe-inspiring things under the radar (see this short-lived socialist revolution on the Stoneworks server as an example).

But this is not the majority stance — either in mainstream society or in this subculture of Minecraft anarchy servers. Anarchism is poorly understood in both these worlds, often used as a stand-in to represent a cynical belief about human nature being “evil” and needing society to correct it. These organized “unorganized” servers are far from natural and require a lot of work to maintain. They are constantly under threat because the “survival of the fittest” attitudes they foster encourage behavior that is just as destructive to the servers themselves (see lag machines) as it is to their fellow players.

In the end, Minecraft players don’t understand anarchy, but while you still may not agree with it, hopefully, now, you, at the very least, realize what it is. The fantasy of “no rules” is appealing, but it is a fiction, and it might be time to start questioning why this belief exists in the first place.

Sometimes It's Okay To Give Up Hope: The Future Isn't Lost

Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash

I talk to my friends, and the futures they paint for me are bleak: Gilead, Bladerunner, Max Max. They tell me that there are no good futures left: that we are irreversibly headed for constant wars, depleting water, food shortages, and reduced life expectancies. As Bill McGuire, a climate scientist at University College London, told The Daily Beast of climate change: "There is no doomerism, simply realism.”

I am not one to sugarcoat our present reality (see We Might Be Headed For a Great American Famine). There is nothing wrong with recognizing current dangers, and those who tell you to ignore reality under the banner of positivity or optimism are being toxic (see toxic positivity). You should be allowed to be pessimistic, to point out the inefficiencies and cruelties within this system, and to say that they are wrong.

However, there is a world of difference between recognizing that things are dark and claiming that there is no hope for the future — and that's the tension I want to discuss today. Because while things are bad, the assumption that the future is already lost, that our lives are forfeit, is a dangerous thought distortion that ultimately cedes ground to those f@cking up our world.

Beyond hope and hopelessness

When we talk about words like pessimism and optimism, they can get muddied very quickly, depending on the context. With pessimism, are we referring to the feeling (i.e., anticipating a negative outcome from any given situation) or the philosophy (i.e., assigning a negative value to life or existence)? Optimism is used colloquially to mean that things will generally work out, but as a philosophy, it is associated with the world being fundamentally good, and even by some that we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

In general, I don't find it very helpful to turn concepts such as "pessimism" and "optimism" into static personality traits that are either all-positive or all-negative, when doing so ignores the context at play. While being permanently dour is not always helpful, sometimes it's okay to be hopeless or critical about things, as it's just common sense that results from years of personal experience.

For example, while I am hopeful about humanity's overall potential, I can be pretty pessimistic about our current political and economic systems — because, from my perspective, they are f@cking up the world. There is a rather clear correlation between wealth and higher emissions. More affluent people pollute more than anyone else. Why would I be waiting for capitalism to solve the problem of our deteriorating ecosystem — a problem it caused? That's like watching someone punch you in the face nine times and expecting the tenth one to be different.

When we don't address the context for our optimism and pessimism, this conversation about hope and hopelessness becomes a series of meaningless slogans.

Optimistic about what?

Pessimistic about whom?

These questions are far more helpful than claiming to be a run-of-the-mill optimist. If you do not define what you are optimistic about, it implicitly means that you are optimistic about the status quo, and from where I am looking, that mindset is equally as dangerous as having no hope at all.

Yet removing the context in the opposite direction is still not helpful either. If you have given up on the future and claim that your life is already forfeited because of a fear of fascism or climate change, I want to likewise challenge this assumption. The future is not lost because it has yet to happen, and there is still time to build something else.

A cause for hope and despair

Again, this article is not telling you to take your causes for concern over our system and to bury them under a facade of acceptance for the status quo. No one wants that, especially this disaffected blogger who routinely criticizes our larger society (see The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending).

Yet it might be helpful to imagine the possibility that things can improve because none of us can truly predict the future. Contrary to popular belief, we are a technologically advanced species that has the resources to change many things extremely quickly. We can split and fuse atoms, go into the void of space, genetically modify plants and people, and are quickly verging on advancements that, to our ancestors, would have been viewed as signs of Godhood. We have the means to do so much more good than what we are doing presently.

Where we have yet to advance very much is with social innovations. Because of a few scraps of paper and 1s and 0s in a computer, we let billions starve. The lines of ink on a document allow us to justify refusing people access to technologies and resources that could genuinely improve their lives. If we were to “innovate” our economic system (in other words, move beyond capitalism and liberal democracy), we could begin to solve many of our problems.

Imagine a world where there is no oil industry that blocks climate change legislation. No agro-business pumping processed foods into all of our diets. No defense contractors siphoning away our resources to wage war. No lobbyists keeping an industry alive through bureaucratic inefficiency (see Turbox Tax, healthcare, the penny, and more). A world where basic needs are provided for, and the full potential of every human brain is working on solving our most severe problems from the bottom up.

This world could be within our grasp, but we aren't going to get there with our current political and economic frameworks. Historically, it is, in fact, because of people working against capitalist interests that many of the gains we know today have occurred. As Linda McQuaig writes in Rabble:

“…according to British anthropologist Jason Hickel, who notes that the dawn of capitalism plunged much of humanity into misery, with reduced nutrition. As a result, life expectancy actually fell in Britain, dropping from a lifespan of about 43 years in the 1500s down to the low 30s by the 1700s.

Life expectancy only began to improve towards the end of the 1800s — and only because of the public health movement, which pushed for separating sewage from drinking water. This extremely good idea was vigorously opposed by capitalists, who raged against paying taxes to fund it. So sanitation, not capitalism, may be humanity’s true elixir.

Indeed, things only truly got better, says British historian Simon Szreter, after ordinary people won the right to vote and to join unions that pushed for higher wages and helped secure public access to health care, education and housing — again over the fierce objections of capitalists.”

To solve our problems, we need to "innovate," which means realizing that some systems and beliefs are hopeless. It's vital to be skeptical of the status quo for genuine change to flourish, but for that skepticism to work, it also means acknowledging that a good future is possible. It means giving yourself the grace to hope for something better.

A future conclusion

In many ways, all this talk about the world collapsing gives the powerful too much credit as it assumes that they will control everything forever. Systems change. As Ursula K. Le Guin said in a speech in 2014: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

The rich already control much of our present. They write our laws, decide our salaries, and often (either directly or indirectly) choose who lives or dies. Why give them our future too? Why cede that ground to them in your head?

Recently, I have refused to give the powerful the mental victory of our collective defeat. I have permitted myself to imagine that there is a possibility for things to get better, even if that better tomorrow only exists within my mind. This shift has been freeing because it has allowed me to keep going, to not wallow in despair, and to begin asking myself how I can obtain that future.

I know things are bad right now. You can spiral down the infinite what-ifs of the future, where you imagine all the horrible things that can happen. Moral panics. Fascism. Climate change. The list goes on. But flip that logic on its head, and ask yourself: "What if I survive?" What if the future does become better? And what will it take to help that happen?

Contrary to what some may think, the rich do not yet own the future, and it's time we start acting like it.

Kurzgesagt’s Neoliberal Stance on the Environment

Image; Internetstiftelsen

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell is a charming YouTube channel that attempts to demystify complicated topics in a way everyday people can understand. Each episode involves a narrator explaining subjects while adorable little animations help to illuminate the topics as clearly as possible.

When focusing narrowly on science explainers, I think Kurzgesagt does a lot of good things. They have produced hopeful and optimistic content that I believe has been positive for many viewer’s mental health. It is my hope that the criticism given to them now will be treated in that spirit of education and not defensively reframed as an attempt to “knock them down.”

In the past, this blog has accused the Kurzgesagt channel of a "neoliberal bias," by which we mean one that favors innovation through the marketplace over other, more direct options. We have not claimed that they are maliciously plotting with neoliberal actors such as privatization advocate Bill Gates, but rather that there is simply a shared bias between them. As I write in The Inescapable Neoliberal Bias Behind' Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell':

“To be clear, [Kurzgesagt] CEO Philipp Dettmer and his compatriots are probably not in cahoots with Bill Gates, scheming on ways to enhance this billionaire’s chosen narrative. It’s more than likely that they share a similar philosophical foundation, which creates a positive feedback loop where they are rewarded for advancing views palatable to the very powerful.”

Nowhere do we see this more than in their stance on the environment, where they support technocratic, market-oriented solutions to their millions of followers. In the process, the brand oftentimes dismisses the actions that many committed activists believe are necessary to combat climate change’s worst effects, giving their viewers a drastically incomplete picture.

A bias toward markets

This bias I am referring to is pervasive in their analysis of solutions to the environmental crisis. For example, in their video on nuclear energy titled “Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?” the brand argues that we need this power source to electrify the power grid. And in the process, they lean on the concepts of "net zero" (i.e., "the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere") and electrification (i.e., “converting existing industries that rely on fossil fuels to ones that are powered by electricity as the source of energy”).

These concepts sound good, but the underlying logic relies on a bit of techno-optimism where we don't change our behaviors through reducing consumption, changing IP laws, altering housing and transportation on a systemic level, and redistributing land, but adopting technological fixes without having to restructure society significantly. In particular, the concept of "Net Zero" is highly controversial and has often been accused by activists of allowing corporate actors to sidestep the issue of regulation and redistribution by over-relying on technological innovations that do not fully exist yet and cannot be fully implemented through the market alone (see Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap).

Likewise, electrification not only assumes that we keep consuming electricity at our current rates but that every step in electrifying our power grid will likewise not increase our emissions. As activist Tom McBrien of We Power tells my publication After the Storm in an upcoming interview on the future of energy policy:

“First off, why EVs and overall electrification isn’t necessarily the answer?… You need certain materials like lithium or cobalt, which are extremely toxic, just to get out of the earth, and if you see where these minerals are coming from, they’re generally not coming from the US. One of the reasons is that it’s so harmful just to produce them that it’s clearly against a lot of environmental laws.

So what do we do? Of course, we look to countries in the Global South that don’t have as strong protections for their workers and for their environment and communities. In a lot of instances, we’re kind of indirectly trashing these other places and putting people in really hard conditions. And then we feel all good about ourselves because we’re driving an electric vehicle without thinking about the supply chain that led there.”

These criticisms are not significantly addressed in this video or any video they have put out (so far). We see this promotion of net zero and electrification in much of their other content on climate change. In "Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, It's Complicated", the narrator argues for a series of policy innovations (e.g., electrification, reducing oil subsidies and funneling them into renewables, etc.) to achieve a "zero CO2" or “net zero” world. As the narrator continues: "Be it from technologies from carbon capture or a new generation of nuclear power plants to new batteries that revolutionize the energy storage from renewables. "

Some of these ideas are fine, but again, what's not mentioned are political innovations that would seek to challenge the current economic system, such as land redistribution, delaying or sabotaging energy-intensive infrastructure (see How to Blow Up a Pipeline), and changing IP laws to reduce incentives at production rather than through tax penalties that corporations can always create loopholes for.

This brand would rather lean on controversial, highly corporatized framings, such as net zero, than argue that we might have to challenge our economic system’s insatiable need to grow indefinitely, which points to some unhelpful priorities on this matter.

Technology is king

It’s very apparent that there is a technological, market-oriented bias to this channel’s framing of climate change, and sometimes the "solutions" they entertain are genuinely off-the-wall and dangerous. In the video "Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do," the narrator builds the case for this technology, saying, "In the near future, it might become necessary to try something radical to slow down rapid [climate change]: geoengineering" or the practice of adjusting our atmosphere on a planet-wide scale.

While this video goes over many of the potential negatives of this technology (e.g., changing rain patterns, deteriorating agriculture, widening the hole in the O-Zone layer, temperature shocks, etc.), it ultimately cautions rejecting it entirely, claiming: "But blankly opposing geoengineering is short-sighted. The sad truth is that we are already running a geoengineering experiment…Hopefully, we will never have to use Geoengineering, but if we need to in the future, we better have done the science. We better be prepared, or a panicking humanity might accidentally press the self-destruct button."

It cannot be stated how harmful such a mentality is. When it comes to technology as complicated as geoengineering, we will never be able to anticipate all the potential harms of such an action. We could destabilize our ecosystem in far quicker and more powerful ways and not realize so until well after the fact. As Aaron Fernando writes in the speculative fiction The Visible Hand:

“…our world changes at a breakneck speed and on industrial scales. Harm is done on massive scales, rapidly. Ecologies get destroyed quickly, but they take generations to heal. There must be something else. A complementary mechanism — one that foresees harm and stops it before it happens”

It seems truly unhinged to suggest the idea of this technology, even as a "last result" (note it's already being tried in the real world), when there are far more straightforward, less unpredictable social technologies (e.g., land redistribution, IP reform, Degrowth, etc.) that do not involve the potential destruction of our ecosystem — innovations that this channel has never seriously considered.

It highlights a bias on this channel, where they would rather promote the "careful consideration" of such a genuinely catastrophic technology than even to begin to challenge their basic assumptions surrounding politics and economics.

The dismissal of corporate harm and activist solutions

Even when these videos are not promoting such dangerous solutions, sometimes what’s noticeable is not the content itself but what is absent from it — i.e., a total refusal to criticize the systems at play. In "Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? — Who Needs To Fix It?" the narrator focuses exclusively on emissions coming from individuals and countries. This not only sidesteps the exploitation from imperialism that created (and continues to reinforce) this divide but ignores the conversation about corporate harm, often the vehicle for that imperialism, altogether. It’s not that the data here is wrong, but it’s missing a vital part of the context.

Whether we are talking about fossil fuel companies, agriculture, car production, or more, many greenhouse gas emissions come from firms creating products and services. Some policy experts will often try to counter that even more emissions are produced by things such as consumers driving vehicles or heating their homes, but this is, in many ways, a sleight of hand. It’s referencing a type of agency that most people do not have. We didn't wake up one day and decide that cars are the most effective way to get around or that we love throwing out our clothes after ten or twelve uses.

Most companies twist our laws to kill more sustainable, convenient alternatives, forcing us to purchase and use those goods and services to survive. We do not have such large amounts of consumption because consumers "love their stuff," but rather through a combination of suppressing alternatives and practices such as planned and perceived obsolescence, where products are designed by many firms to be used a couple of times and then discarded.

Furthermore, companies routinely weaponize their influence to bypass "green" regulations. In one example, hundreds of companies in Germany used a loophole in the Renewable Energy Act to pass their costs onto the German taxpayer, who suffered higher energy bills as a result.

When many companies cannot bypass these regulations, they switch their emissions to countries abroad and, in the process, further exploit the Global South. Countries with weak environmental policies, such as Trinidad and Tobago, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovakia, consistently receive more “exports of direct CO2 emissions relative to their GDP.”

To collapse that context and make emissions a matter of what happens when countries accrue wealth ignores how, under capitalism, most firms try to externalize their costs onto larger society. They often don't care about the lines on a map when doing so. In a world where the reach of corporate firms expands across borders, it makes Kurzgesagt's analysis very superficial (note: outside of general remarks toward the fossil fuel industry, I have yet to see a serious effort to examine the causes I have addressed here, which is strange given how in the weeds they have been willing to go in other areas).

Rather than focus on how maybe our economic system is a problem in and of itself, this brand is routinely dismissive about any such challenges, often handwaving "radical" climate activists' concerns as unserious. For example, in their video Can YOU Fix Climate Change? the narrator says:

“Some argue that a move away from capitalism is the only solution to this mess. Others insist that markets should be freer without any interventions like subsidies. And some suggest that we need what’s referred to as ‘degrowth’ and to cut back as a species overall. But the truth is, at least as of now, no political system is doing an impressive job of becoming truly sustainable and none have really done so in the past.”

Sidestepping the contentious issue of how countries such as the US have often overthrown economic alternatives, you would expect that with such a framing, they might go into the specifics of Degrowth or what anti-capitalist environmental policy even means. But no, there is no attempt even to begin to understand these policies in this or any other video.

Instead, Can YOU Fix Climate Change? ends by telling viewers to "vote at the ballot, and vote with your wallet." That is a neoliberal framing because it avoids collective actions, such as working with protests to interfere with carbon-emitting equipment directly or weaponizing labor power to halt production. Instead, it prioritizes individual steps taken in the marketplace of finance and ideas. That is a strange approach for a video that claims to eschew individual action as a solution to climate change.

The only call to collective action I can find in that “Can YOU Fix Climate Change?” video is a sign to unionize in the background — something that the narrator does not comment on and that you could blink and very much miss. When they address what society can do in their companion video (We WILL Fix Climate Change!), they focus on the work of technology and policies constructed from the top-down by engineers and entrepreneurs, not work that activists, urban planners, and laypeople can do from the bottom-up to achieve that future.

It’s a type of philosophy that claims change must be begged for from those at the top rather than made from all of us at the bottom.

Conclusion

Now I want to still stress that I don’t think this channel is evil. From what I can tell from these videos, Kurzgesagt has given many viewers hope about the future, and with a depressing topic such as climate change, that is a beautiful thing. Doomerism is not a philosophical outlook that I find helpful. I reject the claim that everything is hopeless and love that this educational channel promotes a positive outlook.

Yet when we narrow solutions to climate change to market-based and technocratic ones, claiming the problem is "the fossil fuel sector' and not intrinsic to our destructive economic system, we become blind to how corporations capture solutions and externalize costs. The future Kurzgesagt paints is a rose-tinted optimism, ignoring the work of activists at best and refusing to acknowledge more effective solutions at worst. If we want to mitigate the worst aspects of climate change, not just for those who can afford to do so, but for those on the frontlines in both the Global South and at home, then, in a nutshell, it means embracing radical solutions that are a little outside of our comfort zones.

The Disaster Town The Government Ignored (Flint, Michigan)

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the “Apocalypse Tour.” This is the walking and drinking tour for all those disaster junkies out there, where we observe the locations that had a significant impact on species 947’s collapse (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the physical, digital, and psychic locations that contributed to humanity’s untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at a community that was ravaged by pollution or “death chemicals” due to political incompetence. No, we aren’t referring to East Palestine, for those history buffs out there interested in the pasts of archaic flesh bags. Nor are we referring to the Farsider Dark Matter Incident, where a dogmatic resource monger swapped out its inhabitants’ biological components for precious metals. We are instead speaking of the human community of Flint, Michigan, in the imperial polity known as the United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh].

Flint was a city northwest of the human industrial hub known as Detroit. Over half of its inhabitants there had darker skin pigments, meaning they belonged to a lower caste in US society. America had a “hidden,” quasi-racialized caste system, which is a fancy way of saying that they systemically discriminated against citizens with darker skin pigments but pretended like they didn’t. US lawmakers often believed their society was entirely meritocratic while ignoring that Black Americans were far more likely to receive worse health outcomes, have less access to lodging, and earn fewer subsistence tokens known as “money” [muh·nee]. For another historical reference, see the bulged-eyed vs. recessed-eyed caste system of the Pink Jungles of Reylor VII.

The crisis revolved around those subsistence tokens. Decades earlier, the community had been impacted by the withdrawal of a transportation factory owned by a company (or “resource monger”) known as General Electric, which had in the past paid many of Flint’s inhabitants money for assembling ground transports known as automobiles [aa·tuh·muh·beelz]. These vehicles were powered by the very same death chemicals killing 947’s ecosystem. The loss of GE’s factory and the refusal of the USA’s various governments to help people belonging to its lower caste meant that Flint’s local community was low on tokens.

A political leader named Rick Snyder [rik snai·dr]— an Earthling long accused of disliking members of this lower caste — decided to seize control of Flint’s democracy and place it directly in the hands of an emergency manager or dictator, whose job was to prioritize the hoarding of tokens at all costs. In April of 90,350 XE, or 2014, this emergency manager decreed that Flint would switch its water supply from a well-regulated and well-maintained source to one that was not, because it would cost fewer tokens to do so.

This decision almost immediately caused lower caste citizens in Flint to notice a dip in their water quality, but because American society prioritized tokens above all else, these concerns were ignored. There were spikes in incidents of Legionnaire disease, which for non-warm-blooded organisms is a condition that, if left untreated, can cause the organs of species 947 to fail. Tests would soon detect increased concentrations of the element Scooma, known colloquially as lead, which could be debilitating to humans in high enough concentrations. These conditions, however, were not investigated because Snyder’s appointed dictator was worried about what added scrutiny would do for his token collection.

It was not until reports from members higher up than Snyder’s government showed that concentrations of lead were indeed dangerous that some people started to act (note: qualitative data was usually not believed in this society unless quantified by members of the upper caste). The Environmental Protection Agency and Center for Disease Control released reports that this spiritual society would classify as “damning,” and soon the negligence was reported on more frequently in their corporate press.

Yet Snyder was unable to admit wrongdoing, leading to contradictory reports, where some levels of government asserted that the water was safe to drink, (what we may know as a lie) while others asserted the opposite (in other words, the truth). The city voted to reverse the water source in 2015, but the dictator refused to comply. It would take months before they phased out the inferior water source completely. Many of those responsible would ultimately face no legal repercussions for the decision to endanger these lives, and by 2022 in Earth time, most cases against the parties responsible were thrown out in the USA’s inefficient legal system.

This situation may sound confusing, but one must remember that the higher caste of species 947 was very truth-adverse, preferring to construct entire alternate realities rather than admit culpability: a flaw that would seal many fates in the end.

For temporal visitors who want to visit this community, we advise you to respect its inhabitants. The victims of this attack were not responsible for the stupidity of their leaders and often had no political say in the formation of their laws. And so please consider this information before respectfully visiting this part of humanity’s tragic history.

If you wish to assuage your guilt, we advise you to acquire some subsistence tokens and send them over to organizations such as the Flint River Watershed Coalition that are devoted to improving the area’s water quality.

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

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

Calling Marianne Williamson 'Kooky' Reeks of Sexism

Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In March of 2023, spiritual leftist and failed 2020 presidential democratic nominee Marianne Williamson announced her bid for the presidency. Almost immediately, commentators began attacking, not her policies, but her kookiness. "Let the Cranks Run," Jack Shafer argued in Politico, a picture of Williamson on the thumbnail. "If I had a, what's it called? A little globe here, a crystal ball," Biden's press secretary mocked when asked about her bid, "Then I can tell you…. If I could feel her aura. I just don't have anything to share on that."

This is not a new line of attack. When she ran in 2020, commentators routinely brought up this alleged mysticism. "Marianne Williamson for Secretary of Crystals," read a 2019 title in Salon. "I was just waiting for her at some point to be like, 'We don't need a plan, my friends. Just give me one vial of CBD oil, and our chakras will be aligned,'" Trevor Noah joked of her performance at a 2019 debate.

In as roundabout a way as possible, these commentators were and still are calling her crazy. A kooky person who believes in kooky things and should not be taken seriously: a woman to be dismissed. These comments deserve to be scrutinized, not only because they tap into a very bitter history, but because they are being used by people who claim to support feminism and other progressive issues.

If we want to scrutinize controversial women, and Marianne Williamson does have things worth being examined; we should focus on those items, not indirectly bringing up the trope of the crazy woman.

The devil's in the uterus

It should surprise no one that people have been calling women crazy for a long time. The word hysteria, a word that means showing unhealthy emotion or excitement, has roots in the Greek word hystera, meaning "womb." This connection exists because there was an ancient belief that the uterus roamed inside a woman's body in search of semen — something that should give one pause the next time they use this word. As the decades passed, it became a "diagnosis" whose cure has been everything from bed rest to reading less to getting a good f@cking.

What does this have to do with people making fun of Williamson for crystals? In many ways, everything. Witchy things such as "crystals" and magic are currently depicted as belonging to the feminine domain. Women are more likely to believe in things such as astrology or tarot, and while we can debate the reasons for that, marketing for these practices still remain heavily woman-oriented.

This gendered association is not biological (men can like magical things, too), but it does have a long, complicated history. Healers, wise people, or however you want to call magic users, have been around for a long time, and these practitioners haven't always been women. There have been Kings who have consulted tarot cards. Male scholars who believed in astrology. It would be easy to come down with a gender-essentialist view of witchcraft, saying this was always a realm that exclusively belonged to women, but history is more complicated.

Our current association has more to do with how the Middle Ages decided to treat women in Western Europe. In no small part due to the misogynistic book the Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1487), a text that synthesized a lot of longstanding beliefs of women being duplicitous and feeble and claimed they were a good reason for them to be susceptible to devil worship, our current conception of the witch was, if not born, then popularized. As the book became reprinted over the centuries, the image of the haggard, broom-flying woman who preys on innocents such as children was quickly solidified, and all women, particularly female-oriented professions, such as healers and brewers, started receiving more widespread accusations of witchcraft.

This fearmongering helped give rise to a moral panic that we know today as the witch hunts or witch trials, where thousands of people were killed for no good reason — again, something that might give one pause the next time they want to use that word when someone tweets at them meanly. While some countries had greater amounts of male victims (see Iceland and Russia), historically, and especially in the United Kingdom, the country chiefly responsible for colonizing America, women were more likely to be executed for witchcraft in the Middle Ages. And wouldn't you know it, the same rhetoric we see with hysteria was evident during these persecutions, with many women erroneously believed to be susceptible because of their "feeble" nature. As Dr. Charlotte-Rose Millar writes for the University of Queensland:

“…much of it had to do with ideas about women’s temperaments. One of the most vitriolic texts, Heinrich Kramer’s 1487 Malleus Maleficarum described how women were ‘chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions’ and went on to blame her greed, her credulous nature, her feeble mind and body, her slippery tongue, her jealous nature and her inherently evil disposition for her tendency to give in to the Devil’s influence.”

In other words, crazy. A possessed witch was not in control of her senses, hysterical.

One cannot separate modern-day society's hatred of witch-like practices from misogyny. Craziness has been tied in the West, for centuries, to womanhood. And magic, so closely linked with the feminine because of these massacres, has been decried along with it. When people claim to believe that a man's corpse was buried in a cave, arose as a zombie to talk to his followers, and then magically teleported to the afterlife, they call it having faith in Christianity. But when people talk about other aspects of spirituality, such as crystals and magic, it's treated as kooky women's shit.

Some might have initially countered these claims against Williamson by pointing out that she allegedly doesn't believe in crystals and things of that nature. Yet that retort is disrespectful to the millions of people who do. Even if Williamson believed in these stigmatized types of spirituality, it wouldn't make her crazy or deserving of ridicule.

And so these comments, especially about her alleged fringe spirituality, are tapping into the trope of the unhinged witch. The Biden administration was perpetuating bigotry here. It doesn't matter if press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is a woman — women can still perpetuate misogyny (note — the witch hunts are an excellent historical example of that). And she appears to be perpetuating this meme to make Marianne Williamson out to be an unserious person not worthy of consideration: a woman who needs to be politically burned.

But what about the crystals?

This tactic is frustrating because while you may disagree with Williamson, she has run on pretty substantive issues. Her 2020 campaign was centered on the need for reparations (i.e., providing descendants of slavery restitution for that historical injustice), a policy many would argue that we need (see The Case for Reparations). Her current campaign is centered on bread-and-butter economic issues such as Medicare-for-all. As Nathan J. Robinson writes in Current Affairs:

“Certainly, Marianne Williamson’s 2024 platform is dead serious….Williamson lists a very clear and detailed 25-point labor plan that includes ensuring universal paid time off, criminally prosecuting executives who target labor organizers, establishing a National Worker Resource Center to help workers organize, requiring worker representation on corporate boards, banning intrusive employer surveillance of workers, ending noncompete clauses, preventing employers from wrongly classifying full-time workers as independent contractors, stepping up NLRB enforcement measures, ending right to work laws, and much more.”

Biden will likely run again, and it's clear that he doesn't want to address these issues because, frankly, she is more progressive than him. It's easier for him to leverage misogyny, laundered through the lips of a woman, than it is for him to take her seriously. That would mean a bitter primary where he has to go on the record speaking out against progressive policy.

Now there are fair criticisms of Marianne Williamson. There have been numerous reports that she has been mean to her staff, possibly even making them cry. As Lauren Egan notes in Politico of staffers talking of her 2020 campaign: "Those interviewed say the best-selling author and spiritual adviser subjected her employees to unpredictable, explosive episodes of anger. They said Williamson could be cruel and demeaning to her staff and that her behavior went far beyond the typical stress of a grueling presidential cycle."

Although if we are going to go there, and we should, Joe Biden is in a similar boat. The president has been routinely described as having a "short fuse," a very charitable way of saying he has anger problems. Unlike Williamson, he has also been accused of using his power to put women in positions of intense discomfort (what some might classify as harassment). And so, while Marianne Williamson's leadership deserves to be scrutinized, this sadly seems par for the course, when it comes to our options for president.

Another criticism of Williamson is her position on medication for mental health. From what I can gather from past remarks, she seems to believe that our society is profoundly unhealthy and that doctors can often overprescribe medication for situations that are more environmental than biological. For situations of "Normal Human Despair," as she calls it. She did a video recently for The Gravel Institute, where she blames neoliberalism for a mental health crisis.

And listen, while our current economic system worsens our mental health, the line between environmental and biological problems is not as clear-cut as she often argues (a misconception that is quite pervasive, even among experts). This is an area where I vehemently disagree with her (the revolution isn't going to get rid of depression, y’all). Though again, something tells me President Biden would have equally cringeworthy thoughts on mental health if one got him off the record and away from speech writers.

Finally, one might also disagree with her policies. Not everyone believes that we need reparations or to reduce wealth inequality. That's a normal and healthy debate to have, but all of this other talk of her being a kooky woman, commentators have advanced, is gross to me.

A hysterical conclusion

Karine Jean-Pierre's comments, in particular, were disappointing. Biden started his term telling staffers he would fire them on the spot if they disrespected colleagues. It's a shame that the same logic doesn't apply to Williamson when it comes to civility. I guess reaching across the aisle doesn't count for "kooky" women.

There is a lot to like and dislike about Williamson. Her progressive policies are a breath of fresh air in a primary I thought would be very stale. Yet I worry about her managerial style (though, again, most leaders at that level are more petulant off-camera than I would like).

However, even if she were a kooky witch praying to a crystal every month charged by the full moon's rays, that would not be a reason to disparage her. If you believe in the principles of respect and comradery, they should apply to even the people you think are weird.

Disney Doesn't Need To Campaign For Copyright Extension

toa267, modified by AnonMoos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For years, Disney, and all major media holders, have pushed to extend copyright so that their Intellectual Property can remain outside the public domain — i.e., materials not protected by IP laws. Their political meddling has been detrimental to our property laws. As I wrote in The MCU Was Never A Bold, New Experiment in Cinema:

“…a factor in this hectic [media] 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”

We are approaching this period once again, as that crucial bit of Disney IP enters the public domain next year. The question going through many people's minds is, "if the Mickey Mouse company will once again push for an extension?" You can find such speculation in article after article after article.

While this fate is always a possibility, the sad truth is that lobbying or not, the company has already laid out such a legally regressive policy regime that, barring any significant changes, it does not need to lobby Congress at all to keep its IP indefinitely.

A brief history of Disney's IP

It cannot be understated how Disney's brand has been turning IP, much of it either in the public domain or coming from elsewhere, and placing it inside walled gardens. Its cornerstone brand is Disney Princesses, something that emerged in the 2000s to retrospectively lump together princess stories from the 30s, 50s, 90s, and beyond into one cohesive "label," and nearly all of them were based on works in the public imagination.

The first major princess title came out in 1937, during the studio's Golden Age, with Snow White, which was based on an oral German folktale made popular by the Brothers Grimm. Every prominent Disney princess, from the Little Mermaid, drawing on Hans Christian Andersen's book of the same name to Aladdin, being loosely modeled after One Thousand and One Nights, has relied on using fairytales, folklore, and works of fiction in the public domain.

How does one build a brand and merchandise something that everyone should be able to use?

The answer is that the Disney company has been quite litigious over its depictions of these again public stories. They infamously have done everything from making a Florida day care center remove Disney characters off their walls to almost trademarking Dia de los Muertos for merchandising, if not for a massive outcry (similar attempts made for Hakuna Matata). When it comes to merchandising, they seem willing to advance whatever the law and consumer comfort will allow.

And more than being protective in court, this effort extends to the law itself. The company infamously has campaigned for the extension of copyright law to the point that Steamboat Willie, the original Mickey Mouse short first published in 1928, is set to enter the public domain on January 1, 2024. Again, the mouse was initially set to become public in 1983, only for Congress to conveniently extend it via the 1976 Copyright Act.

The same thing happened with the 1998 Sonny-Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. According to a paper by Kaitlyn Rose Bernaski titled Saving Mickey Mouse: The Upcoming Fight FOR Copyright Term Extension, the lobbying by Disney for the 1998 campaign was particularly significant. They set up a Political Action Committee (PAC) that heavily donated to the bill's sponsors in both the Senate and House, totaling nearly $800,000 (note this was before the nearly unlimited money of Super PACs as a result of Citizens United). The then-chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, even personally met with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who eventually became a cosponsor of the law.

Disney's lobbying, alongside other Hollywood entertainment companies, paid off. Now we are at a point where all works now enter the public domain long after anyone who had anything to do with them is alive. This is the standard all over the world (see the Berne Convention). In fact, many European countries had already extended their copyright laws before the 1998 law was passed.

People sometimes erroneously argue that this legislation was all done to benefit artists and their descendants and keep us in line with "European Standards," but these justifications are red herrings. We hardly see corporations rushing to push Congress to meet other European standards, such as parental leave, drug pricing, or single-payer health care. We similarly do not have any evidence that this legislation significantly benefits descendants. As copyright scholar Dennis Karjala told Pricenomics in 2016:

“All of these arguments are either demonstrably false or, at best, without foundation in empirical data. The extensions are corporate welfare, plain and simple — and they have caused a lot of harm to the general public.”

It's debatable whether these laws benefit artists in the aggregate. Most of the wealth from these brands is not going to the descendants of artists either but to megacorporations like Disney, who have been more than willing to distort our laws for profit. The question people naturally ask is if this will happen again, and unfortunately, the sad answer is that it doesn't matter.

The Courts are on Disney's Side

At this point, there has not been the same type of movement by Disney to push for an extension. This is in part because of the Internet. The American public is much more interested in copyright law, as the rights of images, songs, and videos affect our day-to-day lives much more than they have in the past. While there is no guarantee that concern would translate into stopping such a law, it does mean that it would be harder to conceal.

For example, the debate over Net Neutrality 8 years ago was heated (as well as the one in 2020), with many influencers making videos and pushing followers to call legislators in protest. Why Net Neutrality Matters (And What You Can Do To Help) pleaded a CollegeHumor video. No doubt something similar would happen if such a legislative campaign to push copyright extension were tried now. Again, it's not that such actions stop lobbying efforts, but in the age of content, someone somewhere is usually talking about it. And so, unless we see some major turn in the next couple of months, the Mickey Mouse Company will not fight these older properties falling into the public domain.

In many ways, the deadline for such a push would have been in 2018, when copyrighted works made after 2022 started to enter the public domain, or even in 2022, when Winnie the Pooh joined, not in 2024. Yet a push for such an extension during this period didn't happen. One could argue that Disney does not need to do so. After all, Disney has Star Wars, the MCU, the Simpsons, and more. What's one animated short compared to everything else it has acquired?

Yet that ignores that a corporation would never willingly let go of money. The main reason they didn't push for such legislation is that no matter what happens, they will probably be able to collect checks on Mickey Mouse's visage for decades to come. And that's because of the other legal protection in this equation — trademark law.

Even if Disney does not snap its white gloves and push Congress for another extension, how trademark law is set up means that only the Steamboat Willie short will enter the public domain, not Mickey Mouse's likeness. Copyright only prevents you from copying an original work. A trademark protects the work and ideas of a business's brand. As Christopher Schiller notes in the article LEGALLY SPEAKING, IT DEPENDS on Trademarks Defined: "the mark is separate from the thing being marked. If the thing you want to protect is the mark itself, then you have to appeal to other areas of law (e.g., copyright.)."

And so, theoretically, if you wanted to protect a work, you get a copyright. If you want to protect your company's association with a particular word, idea, or symbol, not the work itself, because it's part of your brand, then trademark law is your friend. Disney does not care about Steamboat Willie as much as it cares about protecting its association with the character Mickey Mouse. And so, it employs trademarks, and unlike copyright law, which is limited to a particular time frame, they can be renewed indefinitely.

In terms of content, trademarks can often apply to particular iterations of a character. For example, this is why you can't retell a Winnie the Pooh story where he wears his red shirt. The book, while in the public domain, didn't have that depiction of the character. It was a Disney invention, so the company has trademarked that specific representation of the character and is quite litigious when someone "infringes" on it.

Furthermore, current legal precedent has concluded that some works develop a "second meaning" where they become automatically associated with a particular brand or company. Since Mickey Mouse is so deeply associated with the company Disney, even if it entered the public domain or was deemed to have an otherwise weak claim (see descriptive marks), they could still most likely retain trademark status. Although we will be able to copy the short Steamboat Willy in 2024, one will not be able to use the Mickey Mouse imagery legally on, say, merchandising and not expect Disney to challenge them in court.

Disney has over 20 trademarks for Mickey Mouse in various Mediums, which, again, last indefinitely as long as they are renewed, and hundreds for all other properties. This applies to every Disney brand: Star Wars, The Simpsons, and Marvel. The way things are right now, we will all be dead before they enter the public domain, and even then, their trademarks will give them effective commercial ownership in perpetuity.

Conclusion

At this point in time, Disney doesn't need to push for a new law. It must only stop the current regime from being overturned in Congress and the courts. Look at our current leaders, and ask yourself if Disney should be worried.

The situation around copyright law is bleak. If we want to change things, we must realize where we are. We exist in a world where the bad guys have already won. We are not in the quiet before the storm, waiting for the enemy to finish us. The evil armies have already broken through the gates, killed the king, and taken over.

Sure, in an ideal world, we would strengthen fair use or void the Sonny-Bono Copyright Act altogether, but that requires political power we do not currently have. We need the tactics of an insurgency: to invalidate the effects of copyright and trademark law by operating under the assumption that the law is not on our side.

Unfortunately, the way most ToS agreements work makes it very difficult for me to suggest concrete alternatives. Instead, I ask you to watch the following Disney movies (consider it my community service for being such a bad girl).

• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

• WALL-E

• High School Musical 3: Senior Year

• Beauty and the Beast

• Bedtime Stories

Surprisingly, This Is What a Trans Genocide Looks Like

Elvert Barnes

Everywhere we see people comparing trans existence to an insidious threat, a malicious ideology, indoctrination, contagion, or plague. "The leftwing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of abuse," Donald Trump said recently.

Trans people have never been entirely accepted in our society. However, our existence has become more visible in recent years, and with this, we have seen increased calls to end the "trans threat." We are in the midst of a moral panic as a highly motivated portion of our society attempts to legislate trans people out of existence. And because such a thing is impossible, the methods they are resorting to are becoming more and more extreme.

Before rounding people into camps or dumping them into pits, there is the long, deliberate process where those who wish to do harm convince themselves that their path is righteous, and that the other side is ridiculous and undeserving of empathy. In many ways, this latest wave of anti-trans hate started as a joke. The "I identify as something ridiculous" joke, the infamous "one joke" where conservatives, through comedy and speeches, likened trans identity to something inherently absurd. Ted Cruz, for example, infamously said his pronouns were "kiss my ass."

This sentiment has not died down, but a darker element has become more prominent in recent years. Through misinformation texts like Irreversible Damage and the film What Is A Woman?, hate activists have erroneously likened trans identity to something inherently dangerous, especially to children. We have seen people compare trans identity (and queer identity in general) to the act of "grooming" or establishing a relationship with a minor to make them more amenable to sexual acts. This strategy is not unique to trans people and has a long history of being employed for anti-gay rhetoric and, ultimately, anti-semitism.

This language has also not just stayed inside conservative circles either (it was never just there) and has permeated every aspect of our culture. These talking points have been repeated by liberal entertainers such as comedian Dave Chappelle and writer JK Rowling. They have appeared in New York Times editorials and even escaped the lips of loved ones and friends.

This is the backdrop we need to keep and mind as we discuss the steps of genocide. It's never just an immediate jump into killing fields and gas chambers. It begins with words, book bannings, censures, discriminatory policy, and finally, the lighting of a match and the pulling of a trigger.

What is genocide?

The definition of genocide is hotly contested among academics and policymakers. It is usually framed as acts perpetrated by one group intending to destroy parts or the whole of another. For example, sociologist Vahakn Dadrian defined it in 1975 as:

“…an attempt by a dominant group, vested with formal authority and/or with preponderant access to overall resources of power, to reduce by coercion or lethal violence the number of a minority group whose ultimate extermination is held desirable and useful and whose respective vulnerability is a major factor contributing to the decision for genocide.”

Not everyone agrees with this perspective. Some limit genocide to something done solely by a state apparatus, falling outside "legitimate warfare" or to specific groups of people. As with every definition (to any word), there is never a universal consensus, as certain definitions are satisfactory to some and exclude others.

If we are strictly going by the definition set out in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — something that has over 150 signatories — then queer people are not included in this scope at all (note this framework was also adopted in the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court). This convention only applies genocide to a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, not a sexual or gender one.

Yet while there is some value in this convention, claiming that a definition, first ratified in 1948, is the only valid one selects an arbitrary line crafted decades before Stonewall and the mainstream movement for LGBTQ+ rights. Queer people were being sent to concentration camps alongside other Holocaust victims, with some being forced to carry out their sentences even after the camps closed. To this day, some countries still have the death penalty for queer people, which have been described as genocides in all but name.

In other words, there is still a systemic effort by political actors, state or otherwise, to eradicate queer people, including trans people, from existence, and that horror deserves to be highlighted.

We will assume that the current UN definition is flawed in this area. Yes, you can include other groups of people that powerful white men may not have considered in the 1940s. If you have problems with that, examine that tension — it might lead you to some interesting places. As Adam Jones wrote in their book titled Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction:

"…the debate over genocide definitions should not blind us to the core problem to be addressed. As the Zen adage has it, let us not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself….So much energy goes into the definitional struggle, and so much emphasis is put on words that minimize the extent of the event that first, the significance of the event and its enormous human tragedy are written out of existence, and then the event itself becomes as if something else."

Do not howl at the finger-pointing at these anti-trans laws and practices instead of listening to others' pain. As we shall soon see, terrible harm is being done to the trans community, and these cries of genocide are far from unfounded.

We will still be using the UN framework in our analysis because it's the most recognized one, and there is value in utilizing it to critique both what belongs in this definition and what is missing. According to the UN Genocide Convention, there are five main acts of genocide:

• Killing members of the group.

• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

A genocide needs only one of these actions committed with “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group” to qualify. If genocide were expanded to gender expression, trans people in the US would currently qualify rather straightforwardly for two of these aspects, one would be debatable, and two would be on their way.

Eradicating trans community

“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

During many genocides, there is an attempt to strip away the rights of the group the aggressor wants to destroy — a death of a thousand cuts that brings society from a position of tenuous tolerance to one where they are comfortable with the population's death. For example, during the pre-War period in the 30s, Germany passed hundreds of laws against Jewish people, barring them from Civil Service, universities, economic institutions, and much more. The Cambodian Genocide had years leading up to it, where Pol Pot purged more "moderate" communists from leadership. America's Genocide against indigenous tribes not only involved many acts of terrible violence but also laws that "justified" stealing native people's land.

The current moral panic meets this pattern very directly by trying to make trans life more difficult at a systemic level in the hope of laying out a more exterminationist framework further down the road. Transness is merely the questioning of the gender binary (i.e., the false notion that only male and female genders exist). It is not something that can ever truly be eradicated (how can one remove the existence of a question?), but you can make every aspect of gender expression so difficult that trans people cannot exist in public life as who they are.

We are seeing this now with regressive laws that seek to deny trans people, specifically trans children, access to gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers and hormone treatment, all of which are relatively safe (see Dear Ted Cruz: I Do Regret My Transition). Nearly a hundred bills have been introduced this legislative term, with 11 states proposing the outright criminalization of such healthcare, and the language being used is quite extreme. "'Gender-affirming care' makes about as much sense as 'Depression-affirming care' or 'Schizophrenia-affirming care,'" rightwing author John Hawkins commented on an NPR story, "There are few things sicker and more evil than encouraging mental illness in children."

Framing this group as mentally ill or not in their right minds gives these actors the rhetorical power to legislate us away under the banner of “curing” us (see also conversion therapy). If we are not really capable of making decisions, then surely one can use the power of the state to deny our wants and desires under the banner of safety.

From departments of health gatekeeping same-sex marriage to sanitation being used to justify racial segregation, this is a frequent argument brought out by reactionary conservatives, and the reasoning is ultimately exterminationist. One does not frame a group as “unclean” and expects for them to be on equal footing. Nazis were also framing their genocide under the rhetoric of health, depicting Jews as a pestilence or virus that must be dealt with. It’s a common tactic to use the language of safety as a pretext to hurt others.

This anti-trans "safety" rhetoric is seen not only in laws, but also with the executive offices of conservative governments trying to close the door to this vital healthcare. The Texas Attorney General's office has called prescribing puberty blockers "child abuse" under state law. Missouri officials have begun investigating a transgender youth clinic using this very language. Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey saying: "We take this evidence seriously and are thoroughly investigating to make sure children are not harmed by individuals who may be more concerned with a radical social agenda than the health of children." Dozens of similar investigations have been opened nationwide, with the end goal of shutting this care down.

There is also the most straightforward prohibition, which is legal recognition. The ability for someone's new name and pronouns to be reflected in public documents has been seriously resisted in recent years. Montana passed a ban recently on changing the gender on one's birth certificate (though it has thankfully been blocked by a judge). Tennessee, Oklahoma, and West Virginia have similar laws, and more are being introduced in legislatures across the country.

Finally, we have the ability to exist in public spaces, which a government can seriously hamper. Employment and housing protections technically exist for gender discrimination (see Bostock v. Clayton County for employment and Biden's HUD executive order, respectively), but these rights are very tenuous. Housing is protected under an executive order, and that takes simply one bad election to reverse course, and of course, just because these rights exist on paper doesn't mean they are enforced universally. Trans people report discrimination in this area all the time.

With employment, those rights are enshrined via the Supreme Court, but all over the country, states have been attempting to carve out exemptions, particularly of a religious nature. A case out of Texas, in particular, had a lower court rule that businesses could discriminate against employees under this rationale, and it is currently being deliberated by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Time will tell if courts narrow their scope enough to legally push for such exemptions, as we have seen with abortion, or if these rights established in Bostock will indeed hold.

In other areas of public life, state and local governments have also passed legislation to limit trans people's use of their preferred bathroom or to play in a sports team that reflects their gender of choice. Drag shows have likewise been targeted in this moral panic. These are not specifically about transgender people (Drag Queens and Kings embody a gender expression, not necessarily a Trans gender identity), but when your view of gender is so regressive, any deviation is viewed as dangerous. These laws are, again, about whether trans people can exist publically. Even if these laws, in some cases, only affect a minority within a minority, it's ultimately about signaling to the trans community that we should not feel safe in this country.

We see above a network of laws and government actions; all meant to make trans identity more difficult and ultimately push for its eradication. Without even going into the other steps, these laws, taken together, constitute an act of genocide, and unfortunately, we are just getting started.

Removing Trans Parents

“Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

It is common during genocides to remove children of a hated group away from their parents so they can be reared "correctly" by members of the aggressor group. Tens of thousands of Aboriginal Children in Australia were, for example, taken from their families via assimilation policies. The governments of the United States and Canada often took children away from their tribes through state-boarding schools so that they could lose connection with their language, religion, and culture.

A quick note: this is one of the only elements of "Cultural Genocide" that remained within the original UN definition. This was a battle that lawyer and scholar Raphael Lemkin, a key party in the UN Genocide Convention and originator of the term genocide, ultimately lost, as the current definition only includes physical and biological elements. Lemkin wanted culture to be at the forefront of this new word because he perceived genocide as attacking the identity of a people or group, but these elements were not retained for various reasons, including signing parties such as the United States and the United Kingdom being uncomfortable with them. The fact that these countries have perpetuated cultural genocide was probably just a “coincidence.”

This omission is frustrating because there are hallmark elements of cultural genocide happening right now within the United States when it comes to trans people that would not meet the UN's definition, even if gender expression were recognized. In states such as Florida, legislation has surfaced that requires the education department to review all literature that will be viewed by children, and a lot of queer literature is being removed as a result.

From Missouri to Louisiana, we see similar moves in school boards across the country, and the pretext given is usually to "protect" children from sexually charged content. The Missouri law aims to ban "sexually explicit content," bigotedly interpreting the mere presence of queer people in a narrative as sexual. These books are being purged from schools and libraries in an effort to tell a more sanitize history where Trans and other Queer people do not exist.

If you want to destroy a people, you have to destroy the idea of them. Community cannot be born if you do not know about what resources and histories are out there. In removing the history of our queer ancestors, conservative exterminationists can depict deviations from the gender binary as current anomalies rather than natural outgrowths of expression we have seen throughout history.

Yet even disregarding this larger element of cultural genocide happening to trans people right now and simply focusing on the removal of children, the current moral panic is quickly moving to meet this criterion. All over the United States, Republicans are introducing and passing bills that would criminalize parents who support their trans children — hence, removing them from their care — and it's the same logic as the book bannings above.

In Florida, a recently introduced bill (Senate Bill 254) would grant Florida courts emergency custody of kids who receive gender-affirming care. According to Yahoo News, the justification for this law comes from the same statute that “protects” children from domestic violence and abuse. The law reading:

“A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child, is subjected to or threatened with mistreatment or abuse or is at risk of or is being subjected to the provision of sex reassignment prescriptions or procedures….”

Likewise, the Governor of Texas last year directed the Texas Department of Family Protective Services (DFPS) to begin investigating the parents of trans teens for child abuse. These investigations have been temporarily blocked by an Austin judge against members of the LGBTQ+ parents organization PFLAG, but only because the scope of the directive was deemed too broad. The governor’s office is still fighting the injunction in court, and the Republican legislature is pushing to change the law legally to criminalize such medical care outright. If that were to happen, these investigations could theoretically resume.

As we can see from the examples above (and the many others being lobbied for across the country), the rhetoric of "child abuse" and "mistreatment of children" is being used to justify the transfer of trans children from a safe, loving environment toward one that will break their identity. This is a mass relocation waiting to happen, and while we are not quite at the level of every trans child being ripped away from their parents, the legal framework for that horror is being built now.

Inflicting harm

“Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”

We have so far been focusing on the discriminatory elements of these laws, but harm is a large part of many genocides, as oppressor groups mutilate, rape, and torture their intended targets. Again, queer people were also interned during the Holocaust, alongside and, in some cases intersecting with other persecuted groups such as Jews and Roma. Nazis intent on finding a "cure" performed horrific experiments on queer inmates.

This rationale is very similar to today's conversion therapy, where there is an attempt to cure a queer person using pseudoscientific methods. This practice is legal in over half of all US states and has been described by a UN Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity as akin to torture. Some studies have indicated that conversion therapy correlates highly with increased suicide. One anonymous person in The Guardian claimed that sleep deprivation was used on them for years to make them more compliant:

“I would get there on a Friday evening, in time for mass. I would have food, and then it was time for prayer, which went on until 1am. Then I’d be allowed to go to sleep, but I had to be up for 6am for another mass. The lack of sleep was deliberate — to make you more compliant. It’s simple — if you’re tired, you’re more likely to agree to things.

After morning mass, I’d sit for hours and hours in an office with someone talking at me. And I genuinely mean talk at me, I never got to speak. “You’re not gay, you’re not gay,” they said repeatedly. “Why do you think you’re gay?” They tried to convince me that being gay was a terrible choice. I told them that I wasn’t gay, it wasn’t my sexuality that I was in conflict with — [but] my gender identity, or what I now call it: that I was transgender….

Over time, I became withdrawn. To be told for hours at a time that what you say is wrong, you learn that it’s better to say nothing at all. It went on like this for three years. I didn’t have anybody to help me — and I started to believe that, actually, they might be right. I collapsed mentally — I was doubting my gender, my sexuality, my own mind.”

This practice is still happening to children all over the United States, and there is an effort from anti-trans legislatures to expand this tortuous practice. In Indiana, for example, a bill (Senate Bill 350) was introduced to prevent regulation of this practice throughout the state. While trans advocates have had some victories in banning conversion therapy, especially for children, it remains an uphill battle in most of the US.

It should likewise be noted that forcing a trans person to "detransition" (i.e., moving away from their previously preferred gender, either willfully or by force) or denying a trans person care outright is a type of harm. If I, as an assigned male at birth or AMAB person, were to stop taking estrogen right now, I would start experiencing hot flashes and go through some menopausal symptoms. It wouldn't kill me, but it wouldn't be a pleasant experience.

Many trans people, including children, currently have developed entire identities around their preferred genders. Girls, boys, and enbys who have delayed their puberty or started going on hormones, some even going stealth (i.e., not letting anyone know they are trans), now have to experience that work being undone in states such as Tennessee. Girls whose voices are cracking. Boys who can no longer grow facial hair. That is traumatizing, and that's not to mention the danger that people who pass may suddenly find themselves in as they lose the ability to move through such spaces seamlessly.

Now returning to the criteria of genocide above, notice how the UN definition frames harm here, not just physiologically or biologically, but psychologically. There is mental harm that comes with these anti-trans prohibitions. The suicide attempt rate for trans people is already high, sitting at 40%, and is even higher for ideation. However, research shows this lessens significantly when giving trans people access to gender-affirming care and good support networks.

Conservatives often frame this reality as selfishness — as if trans people are throwing temper tantrums to get their way — but even this justification is unusually cruel. Puberty blockers are relatively safe (anyone who tells you differently is spreading misinformation). By denying someone something vital to their mental health because they aren't "asking nicely enough for it," one is still doing harm.

And as we know, this justification anti-trans legislators are spreading is a lie. One of the most prominent reasons trans people detransition is because of social stigma, discrimination, and family pressures. One of the biggest reasons trans people feel suicidal is because of the same reasons. While some people willfully detransition because they are done experimenting with this aspect of expression, in many cases, anti-trans advocates cause that pressure. They are not the "cure" but the harm. They then try to gaslight trans people into believing we are selfish and broken.

Stopping Trans Birth

“Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

This is where the UN definition is again severely limited because while this act applies well to ethnic, racial, and religious groups, trans people are, in many ways, a willful birth. The decision to declare your gender and your gender expression involves a hundred little steps, not all of them the same. Laws don't eliminate your transness, but they can make it so that your expression becomes very difficult. The person inside you, the one you want to be, openly, dies in darkness.

In part, this is why the fight over trans healthcare for children is so vital. If you want to medically transition to a gender you were not assigned at birth, then preventing your initial puberty will make the process of hormones (if you choose to do that later on ) much more successful. The older you get, the less effective hormones are from a developmental standpoint. As UCSF notes in a very helpful guide about estrogen intake:

“Starting hormone therapy in your 40s, 50s, or beyond may bring less drastic changes than one might see when beginning transition at a younger age, due to the accumulated lifetime exposure to testosterone, and declining responsiveness to hormone effects as one approaches the age of menopause.”

This delay does not mean your transition later in life is less valid (you are listening to the words of someone who transitioned much later), but it does make everything that much more difficult. It denies the world of a trans birth that much sooner, and that appears to be the logic of these laws.

All over the US, laws are being passed that stop medical transitions. Tennesse horrifyingly just banned gender-affirming care for minors. The same has occurred in Mississippi and Florida. As a mother of a trans child said of the Florida bill: "you're basically being told that your child shouldn't be able to be who they are, and that it would be better if they didn't exist in the way that you, medical professionals, and the child who is thriving, feel is best for [them]."

Trans adults are not immune from this legislative backlash either. Another bill in Tennessee, if passed, would prevent people from using Medicaid to pay for gender-affirming care. Oklahoma is not only considering a similar bill but one that would prohibit gender-affirming care for any hospital using state funds.

Bills like this are being introduced all over the country. While it's too soon to know what laws will pass when the dust settles, again, the end goal is unmistakable: it is to deny trans people, not just the resources that would make their lives easier, but to delay indefinitely the ability for them to be birthed into the world at all.

Trans Death

“killing members of the group.”

The systemic killing of a group of people is an undeniable act of genocide. It barely requires reinforcing. Look at the Holocaust in Europe or the Armenian Genocide — so many dead. When exterminationist rhetoric goes unchallenged, bodies tend to pile up.

And not every one of these killings needs to be organized from the top down. The Cambodian Genocide was known for brutal mass killings via central processing hubs (e.g., prisons, pits, etc.) but also killed many more people through incompetence, such as neglecting to treat malaria, overwork, and mass starvation. The American Indian Genocide was (and is) filled with not just organized state massacres but extra-judicial killings, where white settlers, empowered by propaganda and an indifferent legal system, lynched Indians, oftentimes on a whim.

However, we should emphasize that even here, there are intersections with trans identity. One act of colonialism from white settlers was stigmatizing different gender expressions among various Indian tribes, and the Khmer Rouge wasn’t exactly accepting of queer people.

America is already a place where these extra-judicial killings are happening to trans people. We could point to the recent Q-Shooting, where a shooter, empowered by anti-queer propaganda, shot up an LGBTQ+ nightclub and killed five people. We could also look at the many murders of trans individuals that happen every year. Trans people are killed all the time because their otherness makes individuals uncomfortable, and even when not killed, they are disproportionately victims of violent crime.

Trans people’s free expression is currently being legislated into nonexistence, which empowers people to act against us. There is the terrifying development of how many of America's conservative militias have started targeting queer events, coming to pride festivals and drag-story hours, armed with guns and other equipment. There are nearly 100 far-right militias across the country, and some, such as the Proud Boys, have forced their way into queer events. Sometimes these members have gotten violent or alluded to violence. These provocateurs have pushed or shoved counter-protestors. Others have harassed queer organizers, likening them to pedophiles and saying the vilest language. "Most of us want to kill all of you," a man allegedly yelled at counter-protesters at an event in Texas.

These are armed, organized groups perpetuating exterminationist rhetoric. Their infrastructure is already set up to inflict more intense brutality: one does not buy and bring a gun to a peaceful event simply to shove people. What happens when these militias no longer feel they have to hide behind the pretense of civility? "Kill your local pedophile," a Proud Boy allegedly shouted at a drag queen story hour in California.

Now, thankfully, there has been incredible organization from the left against these fascist militias, but if we fail to keep fighting them, trans people are headed for more bullets, mobs, and organized lynchings.

Conclusion

We could argue that trans people are currently experiencing laws that "deliberately inflict on our lives a calculated effort to bring about our physical destruction." We could claim harm, particularly mental harm, is being perpetuated against us. We can even argue that trans people are experiencing elements of cultural genocide the UN definition fails to consider. Conversely, one could claim that genocide isn't happening at all because gender expression and sexual orientation, as well as political groups in general, are beyond the scope of the Genocide Convention.

The conversation around genocide is frustrating because the popular zeitgeist’s definition (i.e., concentration camps and gas chambers) fails to encapsulate the complexity of the current legal definition, and the legal definition is severely curtailed to exclude many groups and categories of harm. The law does not view this matter holistically, which is a failure because genocide does not fit neatly inside the lines of strictly drawn definitions. Cultural, biological, physical, and psychological elements intermingle to create a cocktail that is always unique and always deadly. To point at a single nitpick and claim this harm against trans people isn't happening is again howling at the "pointing of this harm" instead of recognizing the horror unfolding around us.

Our current flawed political framework is partly to blame for this confusion. There is an alternate future where political actors did not push Raphael Lemkin's more holistic definition of genocide into the background. However, that would be a timeline where we recognized the genocides committed by modern Democracies, not just rogue fascist groups.

America has always been a country very good at genocide. We were founded on it. The conditions we mentioned here can arguably apply to several other groups within the US. Indigenous communities in the US have been experiencing ongoing genocide for hundreds of years, and you can make the case that Black Americans also meet this criterion.

In truth, the reason for this sudden hatred against trans people isn't because America has suddenly become worse for Trans people — it's always been bad for us to live openly here — but because conservative Americans finally understand that we exist. Three decades ago, we would have been lumped in with gay men and women, flattening the distinction between gender and sexual orientation. Fascists and proto-fascists are targeting us now because we seem new and strange, and they impossibly wish to use transness as a wedge issue to exterminate the greater queer community and otherness in general.

We are already very far along in this process, and we shouldn't have to reach the point of literal gas chambers to call out the genocide happening in front of our very eyes. Unless something is done, we are two legislative cycles away from the right to medically transition via puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries being banned in at least one-third of all states, regardless of age. We are one presidency away from housing and employment protections being stripped away. Several more from gender expression itself becoming codified. Nothing good can come from that arrangement.

We are already in the middle of a movement to exterminate the trans community. The question is how bad things will get. Nothing is ever an inevitability. We do not have to accept the calls of death we are hearing (and one hopes we don't). We, however, must first recognize that this is what the road to trans genocide looks like, and it’s paved with “calls for safety,” “decency,” and “the common good.”

The Movie ‘The Menu’ Is a Disappointing Class Commentary

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

Seth Reiss and Will Tracy's satirical romp The Menu is about the maniacal Chef Slowik enacting revenge on those he perceives as slighting him. It centers around 12 customers being ferried to the private island to pay for a $1,000+ per plate dining experience. Throughout the night, it quickly becomes apparent that none of them are leaving alive.

The Menu advertised itself as grilling the expensive lifestyles of the rich and powerful. "I have to know if you are with us or with them?" Chef Slowik asks a patron in the trailer. Commentary on wealth is everywhere in this film, but it feels very incomplete. There were entire segments where it was difficult to know what the point was — all of its messaging complicated by the fact that Chef Slowik isn't the downtrodden revolutionary he believes himself to be, but a tyrant.

The film spends so much time being clever that it ends up serving a very undercooked story.

Boiling resentment

The most generous way to view this film is a deconstruction of foodie culture. The film is filled with fun lines such as, "Do not eat….Taste" and other phrases that lampoon real-life, high-end dining. Some of Slowik's victims are a notorious food critic who is depicted as a pedantic blowhard, his angel investor, and a fan who knows everything about food but cannot cook. These are caricatures that are fun to laugh and roll your eyes at.

However, it's clear that class commentary is something this text wants to talk about. Early on, the wealthy guests are given a seafood meal, and one of them not so subtly tells us that they are "eating the ocean." The restaurant makes bread (described as the food of the common man) only to make a show of not serving it to the guests. As Slowik lectures. "But you, my dear guests, are not the common man. And so tonight… you get no bread."

Slowik perceives himself as a victim of these entitled guests, a service worker who has had the joy of his work stolen from him. There is a scene where he monologues to a sex worker — someone invited to this gathering last minute, but Slowik still intends to kill anyway — where he tells her that as a fellow worker, he understands her pain. "No, I don't need details," he shushes, "You know, I… I know what a bad customer is."

Yet, I want to stress this, Slowik isn't that poor service worker anymore. He is a businessman and a cult leader. All his staff treats him with divine reverence as he claps for them to move in unison. They sleep in stark quarters while he sleeps in a more spacious cottage. There is a scene where guest Margot has to fight off Slowik's maître d'hôtel Elsa, because she erroneously believes that Margot will replace her as Slowik’s favorite. Slowik's kitchen is a toxic environment, and he is just as abusive, perhaps even more so, than the men and women around his table. This cult connection is something that writer Will Tracy admits to directly, saying in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

“A lot of kitchens in restaurants like this — especially this restaurant because it’s on an island and they live on that island — function the same way that a cult functions. They try to limit your access to the outside world and in doing so, they limit the sources of approbation and spiritual nourishment that you get from family, friends, cultural pursuits and communal pursuits. They replace all of that with the approbation and, at times, very harsh criticism of one single figure.”

Slowik is someone who thinks he's a victim, even quoting MLK Jr's famous line that "freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed." The film treats this sentiment both unseriously and seriously at the same time.

For one, Slowik receives cringe looks from one of the film's only brown characters because, well, the idea that he is oppressed is ridiculous. Slowik is an abusive person who psychologically and, in some cases, sexually abuses his staff. He thinks that this grand, murderous gesture somehow will be atonement for his past mistakes — that it's somehow justice — but it's more of an easy out than proper accountability. Slowik's ultimately a bitter, wealthy white man angry that he no longer financially controls his restaurant (what he thinks should be his) and so is taking everyone out with him.

And this is something the film's creatives would all admit to, calling his performance "bullshit," but the film's narrative never goes far enough to place him in the explicit villain role alongside the other guests. That's not just me being hyperbolic. During an interview, Seth Reiss said that while perceiving him as a villain is valid: "We don't see Slowik as a villain…In The Menu, I think there are no heroes or villains."

And so if he's not entirely in the wrong, then in some ways, Slowik's punishment of these rich people at the end of the film (i.e., he burns them alive as human smores) is supposed to be just desserts. These are the people "eating the ocean," after all. Maybe they should all go up in flames?

And don't get me wrong, some terrible rich people are dining at Slowik's restaurant that night. The tech bros and a nondescriptive, older finance guy don't earn much sympathy. However, there is also a pedantic food critic whose crime is leaving bad reviews, her yes-man editor, a vain actor, his assistant whose crime is she didn't have to take out student loans, and a wife trapped in a loveless marriage. These people might have personality flaws, but most are still working professionals, not the capitalists "eating the oceans," and certainly no worse than Slowik himself. It's a type of class commentary based more on vibes than criticizing the capitalist system f@cking over the world. As Alison Stine writes in Salon:

“Multiple yes men and women face the wrath of the chef, which doesn’t seem fair, nor something the character who expresses repeatedly he had to pay his dues with “s**t work” would carry out. But Julian’s empathy extends only to traditionally attractive sex workers and high-end service workers….The white, male chef has more privilege than some of his diners, especially the characters of color. But the film takes a very retro view of privilege and class, aligning with the chef who longs for ye olde hardscrabble days of flipping burgers and the idealized, manic pixie dream sex worker.”

This inconsistency is what makes The Menu so frustrating because we have a deranged, bitter white man who has psychologically tormented his staff and fans his entire working career. The foodie they made fun of for not knowing how to cook willingly chose to come to the dinner, despite knowing he would be killed because he was that obsessed with Slowik. Slowik took advantage of that to validate his own pettiness. He is essentially rounding up a mob he indoctrinated to kill people (and, in some cases, just the idea of people) who have wronged him personally, and it's disturbing to watch.

That's not the logic of an MLK Jr. It's not justice, accountability, or even revolution. It's the logic of a tyrant, a cult leader, and, one could argue, a capitalist.

Conclusion

When we look at the inspiration for The Menu, it allegedly came from Will Tracy, going to a similar island restaurant in Norway as a patron. I cannot speak for Seth Reiss and Will Tracy's life experiences; what I can find online has been sparse. The two may have worked their way up a restaurant chain on the side as they pursued becoming famous writers. I don’t know.

However, the genesis of this film was a rich person spoofing on his own personal experiences as a guest at a fancy restaurant. That perspective, coupled with, from what I can tell, no alternative research for the backend of these restaurants beyond mere aesthetics (and certainly no attempt to center it in the narrative), led to a very stilted story about class.

This film is ultimately not angry about how our current capitalist system is exploitative or unjust (those are just the appetizers we munch on as food for thought) but about the unfulfilling nature of the modern client-service relationship. The climax of the film comes when Margot outsmarts Slowik by calling his food passionless and getting him to cook a plain ole American burger instead (note: we learn that Slowik was a burger-flipper earlier in his career). This act makes Slowik feel better about his craft, and he (again, as the tyrant) lets her leave. She made him feel again, and that rekindling is what the film suggests we need more of: the joy of our respective crafts. As Reiss remarks in that same Hollywood Reporter interview:

“There’s something to be said about how these are two service industry employees who do enjoy or have enjoyed what they do. At the end of the movie, I think Margot enjoys providing this experience for the chef and Chef enjoys providing this experience for Margot. Both of them ultimately enjoy this perfect service industry customer relationship because when done well and right, it can be quite lovely. Everyone’s respectful of one another. So there’s something I think quite nice about that final moment whether or not she’s playing a game or whether he’s aware she’s playing a game. There is something in a nanosecond very lovely happening.”

Yet, and I must stress this, there is nothing lovely about this relationship. The emotional labor she is doing at that moment is one of survival. Maybe in a post-capitalist world, such relationships could be built on more equal footing, but in the present, they are built on exploitation (yes, even your job).

The problem is that Slowik has too much power, and his demeanor and respectfulness don't change that dynamic. He gets to decide if Margot lives or dies. He abuses that power, as many do, but even if he were the best client who has ever existed, the way capitalism works is to force people into positions they don't want to be in (and no, this is not a dunk on sex work, but all jobs). This creates a dynamic that demeanor alone cannot change — and this film only seems willing to deconstruct that power in a very superficial way.

From Parasite to Glass Onion to Sorry to Bother You, there are so many films that have something substantive to say about capitalism and class. While The Menu has things to say about the ridiculousness of high-end restaurants, its class discussion is based more on aesthetics than anything meaningful about capitalism itself. This leaves the viewer with a half-baked message that lets a bad taste linger in one's mouth.