The Myth of “100 Companies Being Responsible for 71% of Global Emissions”

Photo by Kouji Tsuru on Unsplash

If you have been around the Internet for a while, you may have heard the statistic that “71% of Global emissions are coming from only 100 companies” since 1988. The statistic comes from a report by the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) that was released on July 10, 2017, the headlines of which were shared around the Internet, including by a widely cited The Guardian article released the same day.

This newspaper article has been disseminated by activists and commentators around the Internet, including me, and since it has received some rightful criticism over the last year for being inaccurate, I figured that there was some due diligence owed on my part.

Before we get started, it should be noted from the onset that estimating the total number of emissions produced by greenhouse gases is not actually straightforward. The CDP had some entities provide tallies willingly via public reporting while others had to estimate. That doesn’t discredit the CDP’s information, but it does tell you that there is a level of estimation going on.

Yet regardless of what the actual number is, these 100 companies, which relate to the cement and fossil fuel industries, have contributed significantly to climate change. None of the information I am going to dive into discredits that reality, and so, while we should always demand our information be accurate, be wary of those who use a discussion of numbers to sidestep the harm these companies and state institutions have perpetuated.

And so we are going to be talking about why this popular meme about the environment is wrong and why it might not matter.

No, it’s not all emissions

“…71% of Global emissions are coming from only 100 companies”

The most immediate caveat that has to be made with this statement is what we even mean by a company. While many of these entities are structured as for-profit businesses, a plurality, like the Assets Supervision and Administration Commission in China, falls under the administration of states themselves or are state-owned businesses like the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, where most of the shares are owned by the Saudi Arabian state. As written by Lloyd Alter in Tree Hugger:

“The first point is that if you look at the actual list in the report, Exxon and Shell are the only private companies to even make it into the top ten; the rest are all government entities. China (Coal) is by far the biggest emitter of them all at 14.32%; fully 18.1% is just Chinese, Russian and Indian coal, so it’s incorrect for anyone to say “just 100 companies.” We are dealing with national governments and the entities that they own.”

To me, this counter is disingenuous. I may alienate some people by saying this, but the state capitalism of China is not communism (defined as a moneyless, stateless society where the means of production are controlled by workers). Electricity is still a service residents mostly have to pay for in places like China. These services are still working within the global capitalist system, even if many of them are owned and operated by the state. It would be like saying the goods you buy weren’t participating in capitalism because they were transported on a state-built road or carried via a government packaging service.

But if you read The Guardian headline and came away with the conclusion that investor-owned companies like ExxonMobil are the main direct contributors to these emissions, well, that’s just not true. The situation is a tad more nuanced than that — as reality tends to be.

However, this disagreement is small compared to the larger and most consequential clarification, which is that the CDP study was only focusing on industry GHG emissions. The study discounted emissions relating to land-use change (e.g., the altering of the landscape via deforestation, urbanization, afforestation, etc.), methane deriving from farming, landfills, and other non-industrial sources. If you are like me, wondering what non-industrial sources even mean, it appears to be anything outside emissions that result from company-owned facilities and vehicles as well as the use of sold products.

And so, if you are using this number from The Guardian piece to mean all emissions, again, that’s not very accurate. Industrial emissions are still a substantial amount — 15% of the US economy according to EPA data from 1990–2021 — but it’s fair to argue that as a slice of overall emissions, these 100 companies may be much lower than 71%.

In the United States, the Industrial GHG emissions figure is estimated to increase to 30% (again, according to information from the EPA) when you factor in “end-use electricity” — i.e., the energy directly consumed by the user (the very thing done in the CDP study). That number is roughly the same globally. That is not the 71% some have shared, but it’s still significant. If we extrapolate the CDP percentage onto the EPA figure, that’s still 21% of the entire economy. We are talking about potentially a quarter of all emissions since 1988, at minimum, being caused by just 100 companies.

And yet, even here, there is more complexity because we have to dive into whether we agree with both the CPD’s definition of industry emissions and the data they used to get their results.

Into the weeds, we go

The amount of emissions considered industrial depends on how you slice and dice the numbers. There are many indirect scopes besides just the “various facilities and vehicles these companies own” and the “use of sold products.” Do you factor in the electricity, heating, and cooling the companies purchase from other entities to maintain their operations? How about the transportation of these company’s employees? Does the transportation and distribution of their products come into play?

None of these scopes were included in the CDP figure, and yet, I must stress that there is a good case to be made that they deserve to be included. These emissions may be difficult to quantify, and double-counting is an issue, but that doesn’t cause them to go away. If one does count them, the number these companies contribute to total emissions might be much higher — although that is entirely speculation on my part as I have not run the numbers.

There is also a more, shall I say, philosophical issue of whether you count the consumer into industry emissions or not at all. According to Politifact, in its initial debunking of this claim, the majority of fossil fuel emissions are from the consumption of these products. As Ellie Borst clarifies: “…direct emissions that come from company operations, such as extracting and refining oil, typically account for around 12% of a “carbon major” company’s total emissions. The other 88% comes from the consumption of the products.”

From my perspective, we probably should add the latter information into industry emissions because not doing so contributes to the unhelpful framing that climate change is mainly a consumer issue (a framing the fossil fuel industry has promoted for decades). After all, it seems sort of silly to say that these companies that extract all of this oil and gas — and have lobbied governments around the world to kill energy alternatives — are not doing so under the expectation that it will be used. It’s not like your typical consumer has much agency on how to heat or power their homes.

Here, we have bumped into a philosophical issue on how data should be counted — one that is ultimately a political decision that will be settled in the voting booth, the courts, and the streets.

Furthermore, there are issues related to how you factor not just the emissions that come from the production of oil and gas but also leaks from these companies’ infrastructure. For example, Our World In Data conservatively calculates 5.8% for “fugitive” emissions (i.e., unintentional and undesirable emission, leakage, or discharge of gases or vapors from pressure-containing equipment or facilities and from components inside an industrial plant, not all of which comes from the fossil fuel industry).

However, recent studies have indicated that these emissions might be much higher than this figure. As reported by Ask MIT Climate, “a 2022 study focused on gas production in New Mexico, a group of Stanford researchers estimated that leaks equated to more than 9 percent of all production in the area, based on aerial surveys.” The consensus on this is simply not at a level where we can comment on a number with exceeding confidence. We will probably be arguing about this number for generations.

Again, there are countless ways to slice and dice the numbers, and while it is misinformation to uncritically share the 71% figure as a total figure of all emissions, I still am wary of those who want to massage these emissions as an entirely consumer-driven problem, which is exactly what Politifact does in its fact-checking. Despite sharing criticism from the study’s co-author, Ellie Borst ends her piece by saying: “The study tied emissions from consuming “carbon major” products to the companies that produced those products. So, in theory, everyone driving an electric car would create less demand for gasoline and decrease companies’ emissions.”

From my perspective, this framing is reckless and irresponsible as it tries to shift the burden from these companies, which have substantially more clout over our politics, to the individual consumer — a neoliberal argument that centers the problem on one of individual preferences. We have to be careful not to rely on such a framing even as we search for the truth.

A warming conclusion

I am a layperson, so I do not know how you take all of this information and turn it into one number. If there is a figure that factors in all these points we have talked about, externalities, as a classically liberal economist might call them, I have not found it. As Borst says: “Research that accurately compares the total global emissions to the data collected from the 100 most-polluting corporations worldwide does not exist yet.” Though please share your favorites.

And none of this goes into the social cost these entities' propaganda has had on our overall system’s emissions. ExxonMobil, which showed up as number five on the list in 2017, knew about the fossil fuel industry's effect on global warming since the 70s. It has engaged in astroturfing denialist think tanks and activists so they could avoid regulation, and we can say the same about many actors in this industry.

How do you factor in the pollution these companies have added from convincing our society not to change its patterns of behavior? Can you?

Regardless, I still think we have a duty to share accurate information, and I apologize for sharing the 71% figure as a total for all GHG emissions rather than just industry GHG emissions from 1988 to 2015. This was untrue, and I (and the activists I consider comrades) do not get a pass when it comes to the sharing of misinformation.

All this being said, however, do not lose sight of the fact of where the blame lies. These companies, regardless of whether they have contributed to 21% of total GHG emissions or 70%, bear tremendous responsibility for our warming world.

And that’s a fact you can take straight to the fact checker.

Letting Go of Our Heroic Image of Ursula from 'The Little Mermaid'

Meetmeatthemuny: A scene from The Little Mermaid at The Muny in 2017. Featuring Emily Skinner as Ursula.

Ursula, the sea witch, the many-tentacled monster of the seven seas, has always been the villain in Disney's retelling of The Little Mermaid. She is the magical creature our mermaid heroine Ariel bargains with to be able to walk on land. The ever-crafty and manipulative Ursula demands our protagonist's voice (and a three-day time limit). She unfairly sets Ariel up to fail, all so the sea witch can enact revenge on the girl's father, King Triton.

Surprisingly, there was a period when some (though certainly not a majority of people) championed the idea that she was a hero. As KT Hawbaker writes in Bustle: "I no longer hide from the villain — and in fact, I've come to think that Ursula is actually the hero of The Little Mermaid" or "…anti-hero," as she clarifies one sentence later. "[She] isn't exactly the villain of the story we were led to believe," argues someone on Tumblr. "She tries. She gives Ariel options. She wants what we all want: to be heard, to be acknowledged, and to be taken seriously."

And yet, while Ursula is working against King Triton's patriarchal monarchy — not a good government, in my opinion — it seems a bit of a stretch that she is a figure worthy of admiration. She is, after all, a shark, a saleswoman who tries to trick Ariel into servitude. We surely shouldn't see her as anything less than a villain, and yet, clearly, other people disagree — some for perfectly valid reasons.

Many viewers' identification with Ursula reveals a fascinating tension with “villain-worship,” as not all reasons for her admiration are created equal. Some love the monster Ursula because they see something of themselves in her ostracized figure, while others want to rule the world.

But feminism…

In a text, there is a difference between a protagonist and a good person. A protagonist is the leading character whose story we follow, and an antagonist is a person resisting whatever goal that character tries to achieve. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is the protagonist. She has a goal: to walk on land, learn about the "somewhere up there" she fantasizes about, and, more broadly speaking, bridge the divide between her two worlds. It's her story: everyone else is secondary.

You can make the case that King Triton is antagonistic toward Ariel's initial goal of walking on land; he provides the initial impetus for the story, but by and large, her biggest barrier is Ursula. The sea witch may give Ariel what she thinks she wants (i.e., legs) but does so by removing her voice, denying our protagonist the agency to navigate this new, unfamiliar world. She also, you know, puts in a clause in the contract saying that if Ariel fails to win the heart of Prince Eric in three days, she becomes Ursula's property, which is definitely not hero behavior.

What people mean when they argue that Ursula is the hero is not that she is the protagonist — she structurally cannot be — but that her intentions and actions are not as cruel as we first believe. The most significant cause for sympathy for the sea witch is that she is an otherized figure — both narratively and thematically. She not only was spurned by King Triton, who within the text is shown as possessive and unreasonable, but is portrayed as a loud, unapologetic, fat, queer-coded woman. As Ariane Lange writes in Buzzfeed:

“Ursula herself is not a tongue-holder, which is her downfall. She clearly did something to get herself “banished” from the halls of power…She is overweight in a world that doesn’t like overweight women….she is unapologetically fat. And that, of course, is the most unruly kind of fat.”

The demonization of otherized identities has generated a rich history of marginalized people seeing themselves in the fictional monsters on the Silver Screen. Queer readings, for example (and Ursula, modeled after the Drag Queen Divine, is definitely queer-coded), have been done on everything from Godzilla to Freddy Krueger. This type of film analysis not only ties into the historic demonization of queer characters in cinema (See the “Hay’s Code” and the “Television Code”) but the feeling of otherness that comes with societal stigmatization. As written in the book It Came From The Closet:

“Though the current horror landscape is slowly (slooooowly) telling more queer-centered and -adjacent stories, we largely remained tasked with reading ourselves into these films we love, to seek out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways in which we encounter, navigate, and occupy the world.”

If you are a large, loud woman suffering under the oppressive forces of patriarchy and anti-fatness or just an otherized person in general, I can very easily see how you could identify with Ursula, and that's fine. We are allowed to love and admire problematic evil characters, especially if we see shades of ourselves in them. Liking "bad guys" on TV because society also considers you (perhaps unfairly so) a “bad guy” is not the same thing as condoning that behavior in real life.

And yet, this context aside, I feel like I must stress that your identification with a character is not the same thing as that character being a hero within the text. Disregarding for a moment that Ursula traffics enslaved people, she is not a freedom fighter in The Little Mermaid. She is not trying to free the Seven Seas from authoritarianism but to become the authoritarian herself, which is a key difference. We don't know many details of what her position was before she was ostracized, and we certainly don't know what the process of her removal was like, but we know her motivation: resentment. She wants Triton gone because he wronged her, and she does not offer any other ideas for how she would rule differently.

For the people in the back, just because a character has been wronged in a text doesn't justify the violence they perpetuate as a result of that violence. It depends on the context (i.e., what they are trying to do and what they materially accomplish), and in this case, Ursula's desire for vengeance is not the same thing as justice for the residents of the Sea — a lesson that is important for people in the real world as much as it is for characters.

She is also, again, a slave trafficker, which brings me to my next point for why people claim not to see Ursula as a villain. Can Ursula be bad if Ariel agrees to her villainy?

But Capitalism…

The most frustrating argument for why Ursula is a hero is that her actions are validated because Ariel willingly signed a contract and shouldn't complain just because she failed to adhere to it. Ariel, the argument goes, must now face the consequences — that doesn't make Ursula the villain. As argued in the blog In dubio pro coffee:

“The plot of this movie is the perfect fact pattern for a contract law exam…Ursula offers feet and the chance to keep the feet in exchange for Ariel’s voice, and Ariel agrees to that and signs the contract, accepting the terms and conditions….Ursula agrees to give Ariel feet in exchange for Ariel giving up her voice and kissing the prince in three days. Finally, there is clearly an intention to be legally bound, as they have a contract in writing and everything. Since Ariel agrees that if she doesn’t kiss the prince within three days she will have to work for Ursula forever.”

I cannot stress how repulsive I find this argument because it is one that validates the existence of indentured servitude or slavery simply because there is the pretext of consent. There are people alive in the modern day who signed unfair contracts because they are economically desperate, only to realize that they will never be let out of them.

If you are the type of person who thinks that slavery is okay because of imagined "consent," ignoring the complicated reasons that bring someone to such a position, I don't think we are going to find common ground here. In the same way, the inhumane conditions at sweatshops aren't acceptable simply because people sign onto them; the power dynamics at play with voluntary slave contracts cannot be ignored. As Andrew Sneddon writes in their piece What's wrong with selling yourself into slavery?:

“Slavery, including voluntary slavery, is wrong because it is unjust, not because it infringes on the value of freedom. In general, slavery is unjust because it treats equals unequally. In particular, it treats people who have the same physical structures grounding the same sorts of cognitive capacities as having different rights regarding the exercise of those capacities. Selling oneself into slavery runs into the same problem.”

Circling back to The Little Mermaid (that was a heavy tangent, wasn't it?), it seems disconnected from reality for a legal expert to suggest that this contract deserves to be honored. There is a level of one-sidedness happening here in this contract negotiation between Ariel and Ursula. Not only is Ursula lying about the seriousness of the terms, facetiously calling herself a saint, but she's suckering a naive person. Ariel is a privileged princess who does not understand the terms of the deal she is signing. How could she? There is nothing that makes selling yourself permanently to someone worth it, and those who strike such a bargain either don't understand the terms or are so desperate to achieve their short-term goals that they are taking the risk: one they will most likely come to regret.

In fact, the most refreshing part of the live-action remake is that they double down on just how unfair such contracts can be. Ursula adds "a little something extra" to her spell, making Ariel forget that she needs to kiss Prince Eric to break the curse so that she can all but assure Ariel's failure. It's this change that, without a shadow of a doubt, shatters the illusion that the contract is in any way fair.

Ursula is not heroic here, merely yet another unscrupulous woman stacking the deck, and if you are applauding her for her business acumen, I question your priorities.

A drowning conclusion

Ursula, the Sea Witch, tries and fails to capture the mantle of power. She uses Ariel as a bargaining chip in her bloodless coup of the Seven Seas, and it doesn't go too well for her. The narrative ends with Ariel reconciling with her father while Ursula's dead corpse sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

Otherized and manipulative, there are many reasons that someone can see a hero in Ursula. For some, it's her struggle against society that they identify with. She may resort to evil means, but she is doing so because she has been pushed to the margins, and if that's where you, too, reside, there is a certain catharsis that comes with rooting for the villain. Some can go too far with this identification, believing that she is in the right, but there's nothing wrong with wanting the bad guy in fiction to win, especially one you identify with.

Others, though, honor not her otherness but her business savvy, and it's this reverence for contracts and "consensual coercion" that I think needs to be left behind as we advance forward into the 2020s. You are not a hero for taking advantage of someone's desperation for profit, and whether we are talking about the ocean down below, the stars up above, or the land in the here and now, you never were.

The Many Types of Death Vehicles

Photo by Tim Meyer on Unsplash

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those with a certain itch for things pertaining to collapse, where we note the locations and things that significantly impacted species 947's destruction (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the complex locations, tools, and items 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 death vehicles, colloquially known as "cars" [kaarz]. These were metal boxes that 947 used primarily for transportation. It’s debated whether humans religiously revered cars. More space was made for cars in human society than for people themselves. It’s highly possible as humans covered their fragile planet in concrete pathways known as roads [rowdz], which operated as moving altars of worship, and every year, millions of humans were sacrificed to the roads in rituals known as "car accidents" [kaar ak·suh·dnts].

Like everything that people did, these cars were heavily pollutive, not only because they released combustive chemicals to move their feeble wheels forward but also because the roads themselves, made of a substance known as Asphalt or bitumen, released harmful death chemicals of their own. The released death chemicals were all carbon-based and were more likely to be discharged when subjected to higher temperatures: the very thing climate change was increasing.

It's easy to be baffled by the car-based religion humans worshipped, and still, not all of these religious totems were created equally. Some of them emitted far more in terms of greenhouse gases overall, dwarfing their more fuel-conscious cousins.

And so today, we are going to catalog the worst of the worst in the year 2023, considered by scientist ReUechurd W'elf to be the tipping point of human civilization before REDACTED.

Pickup trucks

Photo by Dusty Barnes on Unsplash

Large slabs of metal, with an open metal box in the back, called a bed, these death vehicles initially served a purpose, or at least that is how they were advertised by car-producing Resource Mongers such as Ford. Xeno-anthropologist Roileen Benz, when looking at the early mythology of these religious symbols, claims that pickup trucks were about "blue-collar" [bloo kaa·lr] workers transporting their materials to a "job" [jaab] — i.e., the thing members of the lower castes had to do to obtain subsistence tokens so they could live. These jobs were called things such as "handy" men and contractors, and while not glamorous, they had a certain nationalist appeal.

However, somewhere along the line, the pickup truck became a status symbol for members of the aspiring Resource Monger class. The vehicle was seen as a more upscale good, and in the process, the open metal bed, which blue-collar workers used to transport goods and materials, became less and less critical to its overall driver base as the death vehicle's new affluence disconnected it from the demographic that it once aspired to serve. As a result, they became sleeker, bigger, and deadlier.

It should surprise no one that these trucks generated many death chemicals. Even electrical vehicles (ones that drew on electricity to run rather than hazardous chemicals), although better than their fossil fuel-powered counterparts, had batteries made of substances such as cobalt and lithium, which could be quite harmful to the environment.

The Ram 1500 TRX off-roader was probably the most pollutive death vehicle out there. It was built in the beautiful Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in the town of the same name on 38111 Van Dyke Avenue.

Large SUVs

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

An SUV, or a "sport utility vehicle" [sport yoo·ti·luh·tee vee·uh·kl] was supposed to have a combination of "off-road" and "on-road features." SUVs were for those who loved the idea of worshipping their car Gods in the wilderness and yet had a job that forced them to be on a highway every day to obtain subsistence tokens. In my language, we would call such people "basic," which roughly translates to "those stuck in a mundane routine, clinging to meaningless garbage to feel special."

“Brands” (the 947 term for a good or service owned by a Resource Monger) advertised the SUV as being perfect for people living in the "suburbs" [suh·brbz]: an inefficient community that required a death vehicle to get a passenger almost anywhere. The roads were often not laid out efficiently in the suburbs, as it would interfere with religious worship. When we asked xeno-anthropologist Roileen Benz about what they thought about suburbs, they told us, "I have been studying primitive cultures for hundreds of years, and this is the worst way to organize habitat modules. We are not surprised 947 destroyed their ecosystem."

Large SUVs were big, with plenty of space for passengers and storage, and with that came more significant fuel usage. SUVs were perhaps one of the most popular types of vehicles sold then, with their collective emissions emitting more death chemicals than in most human countries.

Those who want to see such vehicles in the wild can visit the BMW Spartanburg Plant at 1400 SC-101, Greer, SC.

Sports cars

Photo by Andre Tan on Unsplash

From the Ford Mustang to the Chevrolet Camaro, these vehicles put the vroom-vroom in accelerating-death-machine. They were metal boxes that went fast and were generally lower to the ground. The Chevrolet Camaro could go 198 miles per hour. You would think such a vehicle would be banned on roads where “walking-humans” (i.e., a lowly subcaste known as "pedestrians" [puh·deh·stree·uhnz]) walked, but you would be mistaken. Remember that would interfere with the ceremonial car accidents, which, given humans' general ambivalence, must have been considered a great honor to participate in.

The old stereotype was that those who drove sports cars were overcompensating for subpar genitals, which would not be the first time an insecure gender decided to pour its resources into wasteful machinery (see the Little Wee Wee Tyrants of Megaplex Prime). While some car hobbyists may have had strict definitions for what a sports car was, restricting it to any vehicle that seated two, had a soft top, and could be used for competition (humans do love their arbitrary definitions), there was no standardized one.

And while car worshippers bickered about this detail, the collective emissions of sports cars could be quite high when considering that until the early 2020s, elite car makers were exempt from emission standards in Europe. US standards were actually more stringent at the time, but many car lovers actually went out of their way to defend the more pollutive engines.

For the Ford Mustang, you can check out the Ford Flat Rock Assembly Plant to see how a sports car is made at 1 International Dr. in Flat Rock, Michigan.

Luxury cars

Photo by David Levêque on Unsplash

Rarely driven and reserved for the highest members of 947’s caste, these cars were effectively toys. For brands like Buggati, only thousands were made at a time. They were quickly picked up during release and then placed in massive garages, mostly unused.

Luxury cars were highly stylized. Their sleek, angular lines are speculated by some xeno-anthropologists to be a mating call, signaling to those interested that what the driver lacks in personality, they more than make up for in hoarded wealth. The luxury driver could be deeply insecure about, well, everything, so discretion is advised when approaching one in almost any environment.

The assembly of your traditional Bugatti can be observed at their factory in Croatia, address: Ul. Velimira Škorpika 26, 10000, Zagreb, Croatia.

A speedy conclusion

It is a mystery why more humans did not destroy these vehicles that were wrecking their environment, especially religious atheists (i.e., non-car owners). As Earthling John Lanchester noted in their article Warmer, Warmer:

“It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen?”

Unfortunately for species 947, we will never know, as the last of their scientists were all swallowed by REDACTED, and we have been just too bored to check.

For our temporal visitors, see how many of these deadly vehicles you can find in the wild. We encourage you to do some research of your own, finding other "brands" we have not had time to go into detail, such as the Ferrari.

Remember that cars were inherently dangerous, as any piece of metal moving at high speeds could be. It's advised that you proceed carefully when interacting with these death machines and set your rayguns at their highest possible levels.

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:

Our Leader's Solution To Climate Change Is To Pretend Like They Have Solved The Problem

Photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy on Unsplash

On May 20, 2023, the G7 concluded its regular summit. This loose pact of countries, a competitor to BRICS and other such geopolitical alignments, put out a statement, the "Hiroshima' Communiqué. Alongside supporting the War in Ukraine and other such goals, the statement claimed these countries were committed to "phasing out coal," claiming the G7 would move toward: "…the goal of accelerating the phase-out of domestic unabated coal power generation in a manner consistent with keeping a limit of 1.5°C temperature rise."

At first glance, this legalese seems good, great even. However, there is a catch. Not only is no end date given for this phase-out, but it says nothing about the fossil fuel methane and other "natural" gases, which have increasingly become more and more abundantly used as the United States' reliance on coal has started to wane. As Harjeet Singh, Head of Global Political Strategy, Climate Action Network International, said recently of the Communiqué more broadly:

“The G7, among the richest nations in the world, have once again proved to be poor leaders on tackling climate change. Paying lip service on the need to keep global warming below 1.5°C while at the same time continuing to invest in gas shows a bizarre political disconnect from science and a complete disregard of the climate emergency..”

It has been increasingly clear from the leaders of the world that even as the effects of climate change become more pronounced and the knives of people sharpen, their solution is to propose half-measures that do not solve the problem— to pad out the time until their lifespans end or their bunkers are built.

From the US to Russia to China, our leaders don't give a damn

We need to recognize that things are dire. We will potentially reach a global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (at least temporarily) this decade. If we continue along this path and refuse to make radical changes on a systemic (not individual) level, we will face a world of increasing famines, sea rises, and a series of compounding effects that cascade into downright apocalyptic scenarios.

For example, trapped in the world's rapidly thawing permafrost, chemicals such as methane and DDT, as well as microorganisms, many of which our bodies might not have defenses against, could be released in the next few years. This terrifying scenario keeps me up at night sometimes, and we are talking about a natural process here and not the frightening geopolitical scenarios that will result from a warming planet (see Climate Change is a Bigger Existential Threat Than AI).

And yet our leaders are not treating these scenarios with the urgency we require, often passing statements like the Hiroshima' Communiqué, which provide lip service to fighting climate change while providing loopholes for their country's economies to continue to emit and, in many cases, increase their emissions.

The five biggest historic polluters of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the United States at the top, followed by China, Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia. If we reframe this to focus on the ten countries with the most prominent current emissions, we can add India, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to the list, with the US and China swapping first and second place. However, except for Japan, whose peak was over a decade ago, and Germany, carbon emissions in these countries have primarily increased or flatlined.

China, the biggest current polluter, is showing an increase in its emissions, experiencing a record high in the first quarter of 2023. And yet the rhetoric we are hearing is one allegedly concerned with tackling the climate crisis. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the country has pledged to be "carbon neutral" by 2060, saying in an address to the United Nations: "We aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030."

However, not only is the 2060 date so far off that it might as well be meaningless, but China has not cut its coal production, even as its development of renewables has increased. Rather than work to reduce collective consumption and production in the short term, it is ramping up solar, wind, and other renewables while keeping the base of its economy the same. The country is hoping it can shift toward electrification from renewables in less than a decade while keeping current levels of consumption and production stable in the meantime, setting its date for "peak" carbon emissions to 2030 — the decade we are projected to hit an increase in warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

And listen, maybe one or two countries could attempt this strategy if every other country was radically cutting its carbon emissions, but not the biggest current CO2 polluter on the planet, and certainly not when every other country and their mother is trying the same insane strategy. Even if China meets its goal in time (a big if), the peak it reaches before wrapping down the usage of fossil fuels still matters. As a species, we are still expected to grow our emissions globally this decade, and the amount of CO2 we sign up for now will have repercussions felt centuries down the line.

When we narrow in on the United States, again, the most prominent historical polluter of carbon by a wide margin, it has likewise made significant investments in renewables (which is a good thing). However, it has achieved this goal while also, unfortunately, doubling down on methane production or "natural" gas as a transitionary tool, which, when you factor in leaks, might not be better than coal. A study from the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters has recently found that the CO2 emissions of "natural" gas are "on par with life-cycle coal emissions from methane leaking coal mines" when you factor in leaks.

And so this brings us into a dilemma because the Inflation Reduction Act — the primary vehicle the Biden infrastructure has used to channel funds into the green economy — although coming with some significant improvements, also arrived with it a "poison pill" provision to require that permits for energy projects on federal land must be offered for auction to oil and natural gas developers before they could auction them off for renewable projects, which was an unsettling compromise to many environmental activists. As one activist in an impacted community said of the law's passage:

“All of the talk of environmental justice, of being the environmental president, of doing the most for impoverished communities and impacted communities, just seem to be mere words. They see us as charity, and as fodder for them to make billions in profits, while our communities and our cities, our homes and our health are sacrificed and treated … as though they have little worth of value.”

Even before the law was passed in August of 2022, the Biden administration approved more oil and gas permits in its first year than the Trump administration did at the same time. That number went down in 2022, but it still sits above 2,000 approved permits a year. With only about 22% of our electricity production coming from renewables and only climbing at a rate of about 2 to 3 percent a year, this government seems intent on adhering to the same unhealthy holding pattern with fossil fuels as China, except with oil and "natural" gas instead of coal.

China and the US are the two biggest polluters, accounting for over 40% of the world's total emissions. I do not see how we can achieve our global goal of a massive reduction in emissions without them abandoning this strategy of hurting the future for the complacency of the now. I do not think the rest of the world's leadership is currently prepared to make the sacrifice without them either. Even the more positive examples we have mentioned are not immune from the approach of burning fossil fuels now and hoping for a more climate-friendly economy later.

For example, Japan's emissions seem to be increasing these last few years due to the "post-COVID" recovery. It remains a heavy consumer of coal and natural gas. In fact, the country remains firmly committed to maintaining robust Liquified Natural Gas reserves to meet its energy needs. While renewables are increasing, this fossil fuel-dependent reality is not going away anytime soon.

Although one of the most progressive countries on this list, Germany remains one of the largest producers and consumers of coal in Europe. In Germany, when the war in Ukraine created an energy shock back in 2022, many old coal plants were temporarily switched back on, or their lifespans were extended to meet the demand. That process has been partially reversed now, and while renewables are partly responsible for that positive trend, we also have to thank the EU's stockpiling of "natural" gas.

Meanwhile, this shock to the system that temporarily extended the life of coal — i.e., Russia's hostile advance into Ukraine — has hardly been "carbon neutral." Artillery has exploded oil depots and power plants, which have resulted in widespread fires and leaking pipes that have released methane and CO2 into the atmosphere. We don't yet have a complete picture of that pollution, though some estimates place the initial engagement of the war at 100 million tonnes of CO2. For context, according to the Anthropocene Magazine, those are the emissions of a country like the Netherlands in the same period.

It should surprise no one that Russia, the initiator of this brutal conflict, is also very bad at reducing its emissions. Like many other countries' leadership, Putin has also pledged to be carbon neutral by 2060, but his country's policies are not even attempting to reach that goal. The Action Climat Tracker describes Russia's climate change policies as: "unambitious or have an unclear expected effect on emissions," including the bizarre claim that its forests will be doing most of the work, despite not much evidence on how that would be the case or how they will address the issue of rampant forest fires in Siberia. It's a type of magical math that is even more unhinged than in the other examples we have discussed thus far.

And it's hardly surprising as their economy relies on fossil fuels to survive. The oil and gas industry is about 17% of their nation's GDP, making up a large part of their imports. The revenue from these industries accounts for upward of 33% of their Federal government's budget. No one in power is incentivized to change their behavior, especially since, despite recent sanctions, they still export plenty of coal and other fossil fuels to the European Union.

From my perspective, if Europe (and, by extension, the United States) were interested in a post-fossil fuel world, they would have both made more attempts to wean themselves off of Russian fossil fuels before a massive military conflict and also have helped to provide the country with a green off-ramp so it didn’t feel backed into a corner. It's not like we don't work with other unstable dictatorships (see Saudia Arabia). As things stand right now, we have the fourth largest polluter in the world, now ambivalent and maybe even doubling down on fossil fuels with no seeming end point in sight.

That seems to be the strategy for a lot of countries these days.

A catastrophic conclusion

From China to Germany to the United States, I see a lot of far-off pledges and no immediate steps to radically half current emissions, and certainly none to engage in strategies that reduce consumption such as Degrowth. Everyone else is just banking on being able to switch their energy grids over “in time,” which, even disregarding that electrification still has a carbon cost (see the manufacturing of lithium batteries), this strategy assumes that the pollution made to get to that point won't be enough to wreck our environment.

This strategy is insane because it is one where we are effectively abandoning staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and settling for somewhere below or at 2, an environment that will be pretty hellish. At such an increase, we will move from 14% of the world being exposed to extreme heat waves to almost 40%. Droughts will be even more common, impacting tens of millions of more people annually. Water will become less scarce. More species will die. The list goes on.

Furthermore, achieving this hellscape (and not an even higher extreme) is assuming these countries can deliver on these longer-term transitions and won't double back on their commitments as the globalized economy destabilizes from geopolitical conflicts. The way many European countries were willing to turn back on coal power plants during the Ukraine War (if only temporarily) makes me think that even this tenuous resolve to tackle climate change can dissipate.

You should be angry over your leader's cowardice. You should not accept the lie that going "faster" is unreasonable or that methane or even coal is an acceptable transitionary tool. What is unreasonable is their hesitance: their insane holding pattern with the fossil fuel industry as they march us confidently into a more unstable world. We need to operate under the assumption that our leaders, the ones who built the system now choking us to death, are wrong. That they will need to be fought against. That we will need to march, protest, block infrastructure, as well as engage in other, more direct actions that make them uncomfortable.

The era of denialism is over, and in its place is the era of lukewarm commitments, where leaders pledge to build up solar, wind, and other renewables while simultaneously preserving fossil fuels painful, dying breathes well into the next decade, if not beyond. The question becomes, what will we do about it? For my part, I have started creating a list of those I consider responsible for this mess (entirely for satirical purposes, of course). You should check it out and do with this information what you will.

It's only when our leaders are uncomfortable and forced to listen (or even removed from power entirely) that true change can occur.

The Successful Troll Behind the Print-To-Order Company “Sticker Mule”

Photo by George Potter on Unsplash

Sticker Mule was founded in 2010. It is a private company specializing in selling custom stickers and other products. It is comparable to other print-on-demand services such as Red Bubble or Zazzle, albeit with an admittedly smaller inventory of potential products to print onto.

If you have heard anything about the company, it's probably because of the shenanigans of CEO Anthony Constantino, a person who supports Donald Trump (he gave $500 in 2016 to Trump's campaign), has done a myriad of promotional stunts, and is currently trying to jumpstart a career as a professional boxer.

And yet, before entering the limelight for his antics, he was a privileged man from upstate New York who would sink his family's company only to build back a newer, stronger one in his own image: a fascinating story that reveals how to make a fortune as an Internet troll.

The Fall of a Business

Something to note from the get-go is that Sticker Mule's origins take a lot of work to parse. More modern retellings talk about how cofounder Anthony Constantino was down on his luck because his family business faced bankruptcy when he received an angel investment from an unnamed family friend. As we learn from an April 2023 episode of The Pozcast: "He started building Sticker Mule as he was stabilizing his father's company, and once Sticker Mule was growing, he ended up acquiring that company and transferring over all the employees as well as the location."

Yet when we go back into the record, we hear about a brother, Nick, being one of the co-founders (who has since moved away from the business), and the Anthony brought up is not Constantino but Thomas, which is possibly a typo. As written by Alyson Button Stone in Social Media Today in 2011, one year after the alleged founding:

“[Sticker Mule] involves two brothers and a family friend who’s their sole angel investor. That investor is also their 70-year-old godfather, a long-retired executive eager to tackle a new project. Without even knowing what the business would be, the small team assembled funding, began development of a website, fleshed out their business plan, and staffed their company-in that order.”

Seeing as Social Media Today provides content marketing, and this blog post reads as advertising copy, it's possible this was a paid promotion purchased by Sticker Mule itself, though that is speculation.

Right away, this article provides us not only some interesting questions on the nature of Anthony's benefactor, but these origins also paint the picture of a very privileged person. Anthony not only inherited a business but was able to start another one without a business plan due to the generosity of an unstated "family friend." He could then roll his old family business into the new one: that is not a “working from the bottom” narrative.

According to The Pozcast, that initial family business was called Noteworthy, founded in 1954 in Amsterdam, NY, by Tom Constantino. It was a business that emphasized being a supplier of plastic and paper promotional products — so very similar to Sticker Mule, if we are honest. Tom died in 1989, and his wife, Carol Constantino, succeeded him as CEO. Anthony had to be a young child at the time (around 6 to 9 years old).

Noteworthy was, by all accounts, a decent company. Tom's claim to fame was that he invented the "litterbag," a bag motorists could use to dispose of their trash, which is not the worst thing a company could be known for. Noteworthy's community values in 2010 were focused on things like "fair wages" and "Eco-friendly manufacturing." In fact, the one donation I found for Carol on the FEC database was for Democratic progressive Paul Tonko. It almost seems strange that this family would give birth to a son who would later donate to Donald Trump's campaign.

By 2007, Anthony would take on the role of the Chief Operating Officer for Noteworthy after attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (he alleges that he did not graduate), with him being groomed by his mother to be CEO, saying in an interview: "I don't think he's had the luxury of trying other venues that could be outside the company. When you have a family business, very often the family is drawn in like a magnet."

Yet the company would start to have money problems almost immediately upon him joining leadership. According to Anthony, a significant part of their business was from the photo packaging industry. The move away from in-person photo development, coupled with the 2008 recession, totaled their profits. It's possible that his being a very green executive contributed to that decline, but regardless of the reason, by April 2018, Noteworthy, after 64 years of being in business, would cease all operations.

The Rise of Sticker Mule

While these financial problems for Noteworthy were happening, Anthony was secretly setting up a new company, which was initially called Print Bear (that we would later know as Sticker Mule). "We didn't tell any of our employees that we were setting up a separate company…that I was setting up a separate company," he tells The Pozcast. "Because I was dual managing both, and I didn't want to scare them if the one company was going to fail."

You might naturally ask: How did he have enough money to create another company while his old one was cratering into obscurity?

This brings us to Anthony's angel investor, his brother Nick's Godfather, Tom Cummings. Anthony would later describe Cummings as a parental figure and a "math genius" who liked to bet on horses. Anthony allegedly pitched Cummings the idea for Sticker Mule after the man received his first-ever computer. The story fluctuates on how much money he gave Anthony — it seems to be at least $100,000, but in later years, the amount would increase to them dropping money on lawyers and other such applications.

Not much is known about Tom Cummings besides he is from the Schenectady area in New York and was once an executive for a large company, as Anthony tends to keep his relationship with him private (even learning about his name was difficult to find). He was born in 1941 and, if still alive, would be in his 80s. Tom was involved in the business in 2010, but at some point, he has since stepped away— his name dropped from the record as the years went by.

However, the story of an out-of-luck businessman receiving funding from a technologically illiterate family friend is a good one when looking at it from a distance. If Anthony Constantino is good at one thing, it's branding. The differences between Noteworthy and Sticker Mule are more about aesthetics and customer experience than product. Sticker Mule is self-described as the Internet's most "kick-ass" brand, and Anthony would spend a lot of his time over the years doing stunts to up his business's brand awareness. He would donate 100K to a park for Veterans, 50K for a concession stand, establish a free burger day, and give out $1,000 Christmas Bonuses in 2019. According to The Daily Gazette, in its reporting on the latter stunt, at the time, the company was spending about $250,000 annually on such stunts in trying to up its recruitment and name recognition.

In 2019, a hot sauce — first used for their Free Burger Day — won the best mild hot sauce award in Zest Fest's Fiery Food Challenge (it would go on to win it in successive years as well). The company has since used the publicity of that award to make their hot sauce a "thing," sending it to customers for “free” with Sticker Mule orders, as well as donating over 1,000 bottles to a local food bank. This success has allowed them to sometimes cheekily brand themselves as the "Internet's best hot sauce company" as both a joke and a serious thing you can do (you can buy Mule Sauce on their online store for $8 a bottle).

This sort of half-joking mentality appeals to a particular type of personality on the Internet: the troll, the person who loves to claim they are joking even when they are quite serious. It will not surprise you that Anthony Constantino, who speaks often about the "hustle," regularly retweets Elon Musk, another man who lives for making "jokes" on the Internet. Sticker Mule's official Twitter account reposts Musk as well. It also posted an anti-vax-adjacent post during the height of the pandemic questioning the seriousness of COVID, reading: “Covid infection rates are going crazy in NYC! 😱 But wait, the fatality rate is almost zero! 🤯”

Captured from Wayback Machine

Anything to grab attention.

This stunt-based mindset would culminate in the launch of the social media site Stimulus in 2022, a website self-labeled the "happy social network." The goal was to swap out the advertising model behind many businesses with a giveaway model. In essence, through Stimulus, Anthony is replicating the gimmick he has used for publicity his entire career. Brands would be able to gain attention by attaching giveaways to their posts. As Anthony told the site, the Label & Narrow Web:

“Twitter and Facebook are making the world a darker place. We want to live on a happy planet and that requires fixing social media to make the world better rather than worse. Stimulus aims to show the world what is possible when your mission is to increase human happiness. Twitter was designed to provoke mob rage. Stimulus is designed to invoke generosity and happiness.”

It's too early to say whether Stimulus will succeed in this goal. It's a project within Sticker Mule itself, with its headquarters inside Sticker Mule's main building in Amsterdam, NY, so this might be yet another one of Anthony's feel-good publicity stunts. As of September 11th, the website claims that $237,205 has been given in total. The Sticker Mule account has given $236,100 of that, or 99%. A direct check might have been more efficient.

Anthony hasn’t talked about Stimulus much in the last year. He is focusing on his social media career by starring in podcast episodes on how to run a successful business. He also has had an emerging boxing career, winning a match in Mexico City, which seems to be what a lot of rightwing influencers are doing these days, so it's possible his interest in Stimulus may fall to the wayside like Noteworthy. He may talk a big game about changing the culture of the Internet, and maybe he does believe this in an abstract sense, but ultimately, this stunt seems to be more about building his company’s brand.

Unfortunately, underneath the curated social media image Anthony claims to despise, Sticker Mule has received more criticism over the years. While these criticisms are tame compared to the abuses larger companies commit, they have still started to hurt the company's image.

The Souring of a Brand

In 2020, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Tierra Bonefort and dozens of other plaintiffs, who alleged that the company did not pay the proper overtime rate, violating the law in the process. The general counsel for Sticker Mule would later call this payroll error an honest mistake, and company staff would claim to start rectifying the issue by paying people what they were owed.

This case was settled out of court in 2022. I am not sure there was ever a “there” there regarding the abuses mentioned (we will most likely never know), but its mere existence brought more scrutiny to the company. People began more publically commenting on the conservatism of founder Constantino, resharing his campaign contributions to Donald Trump as well as his donations to Republican politician George A. Amedore Jr.

In 2023, there would be a minor controversy when a user alleged that they ordered a shirt for “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Awareness,” and the proof they got was for a separate design with the phrase "Liberal Moron." Like many such assertions on the Internet, it was difficult to verify the veracity of this claim. However, coupled with what was known of Anthony Constantino himself, this was seen by some critics as another extension of his (and the company’s) conservatism.

From my perspective, this was more likely a genuine error and not a purposeful dig at the user. The print-to-order market is littered with such mistakes, and Sticker Mule has mixed results with customer satisfaction. They come highly regarded on sites like Yelp, but the company has received a 2.67 out of 5 rating, or an F, from the Better Business Bureau. For context, competitor Zazzle fairs much higher with a 4.66, and the comments in the BBB allude to sketchy business practices from Sticker Mule. As one user puts it:

“Garbage quality. The worst customer service. Ripped off and left with a defective product This is the worst custom t shirt experience I have ever had. I ordered a proof t shirt before placing a bulk order for my team. The shirt arrived defective due to a sewing error on the sleeve. The shirt also runs small. Almost an entire size small.”

And so, again, the idea that such a mixup might happen in the case of the "Liberal Moron" example is not unbelievable. I wouldn't attribute it to malice, where textbook corporate incompetence can suffice.

This remains true for another major criticism concerning IP usage. Some online commenters have asserted that Sticker Mule's Terms of Service are different from other print-to-order services, allowing the company to modify and sublicense a user's image without their ongoing consent.

However, such open-ended agreements are pretty standard for print-to-order companies. Zazzle, for example, has a ToS that states that: "Each collaborator hereby grants to [Zazzle] a nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide, sublicensable, and transferable right and license to use, copy, reproduce, prepare derivative works of, modify, publicly display, perform, and distribute assets as contained in the collaborative content on the site."

The ability for one of these sites to use your content without telling you for things like promotion is quite common. It seems doubtful that Sticker Mule is maliciously trying to steal everyone's content, and much more likely that this company that memed its way to success is just using the same tactics every other company does. Constantino started Sticker Mule without a business plan. Why would his site's Terms of Service be any different?

You'll notice that there is no "smoking gun" to this story: no sexy tidbit that condemns the CEO and his efforts. If Constantino has truly abhorrent thoughts, he has kept them to himself, channeling the meme culture of the Internet more for profit than outrage. If Sticker Mule has conducted union-busting or has some problems with its supply chain, I could not find it.

Constantino may be an Internet Troll, but he isn't a fool, and he seems to have every intention of riding his success to the end.

A sticky conclusion

From a bird's eye view of Anthony Constantino's career, I see a man who created a successful brand using the cheeky humor of the Internet for fun and profit. He started out as a privileged person who inherited and then crashed into the ground a family-owned business before starting up a new one that remains to this day.

It's not that Constantino is a saint — though the amount he has given to the community of Amsterdam, New York, may cause many to sing his praises. A regular fan of Elon Musk and hustle culture, he remains a profoundly conservative man, but again, his public persona seems, as of right now, relatively clean.

Maybe he will pivot soon to being more outwardly bigoted, as that tends to be what many conservatives do nowadays to increase the public’s awareness of their personal brands. Maybe not. People are multifaceted, and they do change, so I am not going to make any definitive statements on what his future will be.

The Internet's most kickass brand may not have much more than an edgy sense of humor behind it, but for some, that's enough to keep talking about it.

Spider-Man wants to change: Will Hollywood let it?

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

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is about Miles Morales, from Earth-42, as he attempts to balance his responsibilities as a superhero with his obligations to his school and family. Should he reach for the potential his parents have fought and sacrificed for, take on the mantle of hero, or struggle to obtain both?

It's also about Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy trying to hide her secret identity from her father. It's about Spider-Punk Hobie navigating an increasingly centralized authority. It's about a more "traditional" Spider-Man raising a child. The Spider-Verse is really about the idea of Spider-Man, as every iteration deals with a meta-thread connecting all of their stories.

A central tension, perhaps the central tension of this movie, is whether Spider-Man can change due to the companies that rule the world. Do we continue rehashing the same stories over and over again, with minor aesthetic tweaks, or do we challenge the core narrative structures underbidding them all?

Can Spider-Man Change?

Across the Spider-Verse is the second film in the Spider-Verse trilogy, a property owned by Sony. It seems almost strange that it's not a product of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the massive media property that has, until very recently, dominated the box office for the last decade. Its presence in media and pop culture has seemed almost inescapable. If there is a superhero story of note, its brand is usually on it — well, until now.

Worse, many modern-day superhero properties are the textbook version of formulaic, usually riffing on Joseph Campbell's Momomyth from The Hero of a Thousand Faces. A hero stumbles into a journey, embraces the call, and then, through a series of trials and tribulations, overcomes a central problem or figure to bring back knowledge to their community.

Take Spider-Man, for example. The story almost always has an inciting incident that gives our hero superpowers, usually being bitten by a radioactive spider. Every Spider-Man has an uncle who dies tragically, followed by a first love and a captain of some sort — though the who and how can be remixed and changed at will. These sacrifices are a core part of what makes Spider-Man, as they learn that they must give up a part of themselves for the greater good. It's this basic framework that has been superimposed on most Spider-Man narratives throughout the last three decades.

That dominance, this new Spider-Verse movie suggests, is part of the problem. Within the movie, it's learned that these narrative beats are what connect every iteration of Spider-People together into one Arachno-Humanoid Poly-Multiverse (aka the Spider-Verse). These "canon events," as they are referred to in-universe (a not-so-subtle reference to the way IP is policed between valid and not-valid stories based on who owns it), are in the story policed by a Spider-Society, iterations of Spider-Man who want to protect this universal fabric. And implicitly, to protect the basic storytelling structure that has dominated Hollywood for decades.

And from what we know, the people in the Spider-Society protecting these canon events have a seemingly good reason for doing so. They are headed by the authoritarian-adjacent Spider-Man Miguel from Nueva York, who learned of the devastating results going against canon can lead to after slipping into a universe where his loved ones didn't die. This led to that universe blinking out of existence.

On a meta-level, we can view Miguel as the Hollywood system's vanguard, afraid to deviate from the Campbellian formula they believe is at the heart of their success. The way some Hollywood executives talk about the Hero's Journey, you might be left thinking that the universe would fall apart if writers try something new. As Disney story analyst Christopher Vogler wrote in an influential internal memo: “The ideas Campbell presents in this and other books are an excellent set of analytical tools. With them you can almost always determine what’s wrong with a story that’s floundering; and you can find a better solution [to] almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the book.”

In the context of this story, the fear of upsetting the cosmic fabric has Miguel wanting to preserve canon at whatever cost, even if that means excluding Miles from the Spider-Society due to him being given powers from a radioactive spider outside his universe. In essence, Miles is a glitch in the very canon Miguel adheres to, whose mere existence challenges the social fabric (side note: I know I am looking at this through the lens of storytelling, but unsurprisingly, race theory would also work quite well here).

As Across the Spider-Verse ends on a cliffhanger, we do not know how this tension will resolve, but we, as the viewers, although empathetic toward Miguel's reasons for preserving the status quo, are ultimately not on his side. The central characters, including Miles, Gwen, and the ever-lovable Hobie, resign from the Spider-Society near the end of the film, believing that the growing authoritarian impulses of Miguel have crossed a line.

Miles is set to face two villains in the third film, both natural reactions to canon. On the one side, we have Miguel, who will fight for everything to return to the status quo. He wants to fix Spider-Man and, on a meta-level, all intellectual property to the canon set by the creators of such works. His conception of storytelling is possessive and rigid, much like the studio executives littering Hollywood.

On the other side, we have The Spot, a sort of anti-canon figure. He is a resentful scientist who was caught in the collider accident from the first movie. He now has the power to travel between dimensions and eat the fabric of reality. He doesn't want to create things as much as tear everything apart, ripping the Spider-Verse to shreds. Unless you want to give doomers on Reddit way too much power, there isn't a real-life analog for him, as he’s more of a metaphor for nihilistic destruction.

I suspect Miles will have to defeat both of these villains, with one or both being converted to the “good” side or receiving a redemption-equals-death trope because both of them have a point, albeit one taken too far in one extreme. Change, to people like Miguel, can feel like the ending of everything, and the status quo to The Spot probably does feel so oppressive that tearing it all down feels like the only option.

The central tension behind Across The Spider-Verse is a good one. The way we think about storytelling needs to change, and in reality, it's not only our storytelling structure that needs to be adjusted but also the forces keeping the Spider-Verse together in the first place.

A Canonical Conclusion

In the real world, it's essential to recognize that there are no world eaters that threaten to swallow our universe if we deviate from the norms of storytelling. The force protecting the Campbellian formula isn't physics but the violence of the law. Canon is as much a legal invention as it is a narrative one. Companies like Disney and Sony jealously guard IP from others' hands, with IP like Spider-Man not likely to enter the public domain until well after many of us enter old age or are dead.

Spider-Man's recent inclusion into the MCU through works like No Way Home is an excellent example of how many of these forces are corporate, not artistic. The character is owned by Sony, which, after the conclusion of Sam Raimi's early 2000s Spider-Man trilogy, attempted to restart a new extended universe in the wake of the MCU's success. These movies never quite hit it off, and the project was scrapped in favor of a financial and legal partnership between Disney and Sony that has allowed the property to be included in the MCU and vice versa for MCU characters in standalone Spider-Man films.

And yet, all of that backstory has more to do with capitalist contracts than it does with the stories behind them because that's how IP is seen by the forces that own it: investment vehicles. The Campbell formula is popular because it allows storytelling to be condensed into, well, a formula, a comforting thought for studio executives when they are pumping millions of dollars into these projects (and expect even more in return).

However, this way of thinking constrains storytelling. Not only because only certain types of stories are seen as profitable but because only certain types of people are allowed to work on these stories at all— i.e., the ones rich people permit to work on them.

In a way, even the Spider-Verse trilogy fits this pattern. Not only is it an officially sanctioned story, but it's not telling a radically new Spider-Man story as much as it's telling a story about the idea of telling a new story. Miles still lost his uncle and has fallen for Gwen, although hopefully, we will see changes by the time the third movie comes to a close. Capitalist imagination has such a stranglehold on what popular stories are being told that the best the Spider-Verse can do now is open a window for the future.

Spider-Man wants to change — to tell new narrative beats and radically different stories, but it's too soon to see if the Spider-Verse trilogy will permit us to walk through that door. Hollywood tends to learn the wrong lessons from its successes (see all the toy movies greenlit in the wake of the feminist movie Barbie's success). And in the meantime, stories in general, not just the Spider-Verse, are becoming as tightly spun and rigid as a spider's web.

How to Talk about Ariel and 'The Little Mermaid' Without Being Terrible

Photo by reza hoque on Unsplash

The moment it was announced that Disney cast the talented singer Halle Bailey in the role of Ariel, the hate from the conservative commentator circuit was disproportionate and unending. The mere fact that she was a Black woman, never mind her years of singing experience, was enough for many to claim that "their childhoods were ruined" and cry "wokeism."

When this racism happens (and it is racism), there is a tendency for some people to want to defend such products by "voting with their dollars" and sharing positive reviews. Some even go so far as to say that we shouldn't criticize the movie at all because that will play into the hands of online reactionaries.

While the movie has earned a hefty penny (over $500 million), The Little Mermaid remake, unfortunately, is just okay: not good, not bad, just okay. You may disagree (and that's fine), but to me, the pacing was uneven, the new songs were atrocious, and a lot of unnecessary padding was added to solve plot holes that never needed to be addressed. You are allowed to talk about how bad some of the elements in the film are, as well as to discuss some of its other more problematic parts — in other words, to criticize it like you would any other work — and doing so doesn't make you problematic or add to existing hatred.

In fact, not being honest about this movie's undeniable flaws adds to a paternalistic relationship that is not helpful when talking about art that is attempting to be inclusive.

Popping the bubble

Before we get into the specifics of this movie, yes, Ariel being Black has become a wedge issue in the culture wars. Not only are men like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro throwing all sorts of dog whistles out there, but Halle Bailey has been unfairly harassed for the "sin" of being in a movie. It doesn't behoove anyone to ignore this reality, even if it's uncomfortable and frustrating.

Again, there is a type of thinking in the wake of such racism and misogyny to want to rally behind the targeted cultural product to stick it to these terrible people. When the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot came out, which featured an all-female cast, there was a desire from people to defend not only actors like Leslie Jones who were being doxxed but also the movie itself. As Jen Stayrook argued in The Work Print: "…even if the movie had received bad reviews, I still would have gone to see it opening night. I still would have supported a female-led film because that's how we make things better. There's a reason why women voted in droves to improve Ghostbusters' abysmal IMDB score. We want to see heroes in movies we can relate to."

We could say the same for Barbie, Captain Marvel, and any movie or cultural product that decided to cast a nonwhite person, or even a nonwhite man, in a role that "originally" had one, and we are seeing the same thing with this movie. The desire to "defend" this film not only applies to right-leaning criticism but criticism on "the left" as well. In her essay “I'm begging people to be normal about The Little Mermaid,” Nylah Burton not only takes to task the racist men and women engaging in the harassment we have talked about (rightly so, in my opinion) but also Marcus Ryder, a man who has committed his career to increasing diversity in media, for his criticism of the movie not mentioning slavery. For context, the film appears to be set in the 18th century in the Caribbean during the height of chattel slavery. As she writes in her criticism of his review:

“…what would possess someone to think that just because Bailey is Black, that this movie must include slavery? That is profoundly unfair to all the little Black kids going to see the film, thinking they can get the same uncomplicated plot and instead being faced with generational trauma. It’s especially gross of Ryder to say this knowing all the racist abuse Bailey has suffered, to imply that the movie shouldn’t have just been a light romance, but a story exploring slavery.”

Yet, this criticism feels disingenuous. It bears mentioning that Marcus Ryder is correct, as a Caribbean monarch like the Queen in this movie (played by the peerless Noma Dumezweni) would have most likely been instrumental in the slave trade or, at the very least, impacted by it. And so, it's strange that Disney placed so much emphasis on its setting while ignoring this instrumental part of that history. It is also problematic for Burton to paternalistically ask us to sidestep such criticism for an imagined concept of fairness. People have always criticized the simplistic nature of Disney fairytales (including The Princess and the Frog for its colorblind handling of Jim Crow), and that shouldn't stop now just because a bunch of other people hate the movie for having a Black lead.

In truth, there is a lot to criticize here with this film. Being less serious for a moment, there is an entire scene where Awkwafina raps (see The Scuttlebutt), and it's frankly not a good song, even by "so good its bad" standards. When Ariel threw a blanket over Awkwafina's character's head, I was incredibly thankful for the song's end. This movie had so many profound problems: the CGI hair felt wrong; the introduction of Ariel's sisters felt unnecessary from a plot perspective and purely toy-driven; and yes, they decided to include a Caribbean setting without mentioning slavery.

There is a world where the live-action remake was a critical darling that managed to thread the needle on modern sensibilities and tell a fantastic story, and we could all feel cathartic in its success. It has some of the ingredients. Halle Bailey's singing talent is transcendent in the song Part of Your World, and Melissa McCarthy's Ursula is delightfully wicked. I am saddened that the rest of the movie doesn't match their energy, not only because it's unfair to their craft but because, in the wake of the cultural backlash surrounding it, I am not inclined to "defend it" with either my dollars or time.

Yet I wonder if I would be even if the film were fantastic. After all, we are talking about the success of a mega-conglomerate that holds billions of dollars and a stranglehold on the popular imagination. It also has a racist and sexist history of its own; it needs to account for. This is the same company that attempted to trademark phrases such as dias los Muertos and Hakuna Matata. It doesn't need our support here.

A "voiceless" conclusion

This entire framing to defend The Little Mermaid is one that benefits Disney's bottom line more than it is one that meaningfully advances racial equity. We are talking about a movie here — not reparations or prison abolition. At best, The Little Mermaid can make marginalized people feel seen and cause privileged people to analyze their biases, which is why criticizing a movie's failures is so crucial because complacent media can sometimes be just as damaging as bad or ignorant media. As Marcus Ryder writes in their review:

“I do not need every story and movie that my 6-year-old consumes to be historically accurate….But the total erasure and rewriting of one of the most painful and important parts of African diasporic history, is borderline dangerous, especially when it is consumed unquestioningly by children. I do not want my child to think that the Caribbean in the 18th century was a time of racial harmony, any more than I suspect a Jewish father wants his child to think 1940 Germany was a time of religious tolerance, however much we might both wish they were.”

In this case, I would argue that refusing to state honestly how "middle-of-the-road" and sometimes even "problematic" this product can be is a problem in and of itself. There is something quite insidious in stripping Halle Bailey's personhood and defending the idea of her blackness without analyzing the context at play. We need to engage with the text. The BIPOC people in this film deserve honest criticism for their efforts, not paternalism, from people who are so invested in defending a product that they have lost sight of the material ways we can build a multiracial, working-class coalition.

A movie, racial justice, is not.

The Denialist PR Group Selling False Hope (ft. Natural Allies)

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those with a morbid fascination with collapse, where we note the locations that significantly impacted species 947's destruction (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the physical, digital, and emotionally exhausting 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 Natural Allies, a gas industry PR group that tried to convince puny humans that the substances leading to irreparable damage to their atmosphere were not causing irreparable damage to their atmosphere. Founded by the Resource Monger, the Williams Companies, which specialized in the selling of death chemicals, as well as at least five other similar Resource Mongers called "companies" [kuhm·puh·neez], it poured millions of subsistence tokens into trying to change the minds of people within an empire known as the United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh].

If you have been on previous tours, you will be familiar with the story. Humans were governed by an economic system known as "capitalism" [ka·puh·tuh·li·zm], where those who held subsistence tokens were entitled to essential resources while everyone else died. Elderly oligarchs who had acquired vast numbers of tokens by selling these death chemicals did not want to dismantle their companies — either because they thought they would be dead before the atmosphere went kaput or merely because they liked being mean — and so they paid liars a fraction of the tokens they had hoarded to lie to everyone else that things were fine (see Kessler Robox's "little shit" paradox).

The particular death chemicals in contention here were called, by the propaganda of the time, "natural" gas, which more intelligent humans might call fossil fuels for being made of dead plants and animals from millions of years ago, including terrifying reptiles with tiny hands. This fossil fuel was a gaseous mixture of hydrocarbons — predominantly methane — that less intelligent beings might think to burn for cooking, heating, and electricity.

Humans, I am afraid to say, were those less intelligent beings, and when this happened, it ended up polluting everything, especially since the piping used to transport the liquified version of the gas would constantly leak, impacting the local region's wildlife, water, and also, far less importantly, its humans. Like other death chemicals or fossil fuels, it also went into the atmosphere, exacerbating the warming of the planet and causing the severe environmental degradation we are here to observe.

Natural Allies tried to convince people that this substance, the burning and transporting of which contributed to pollution and even some cancers among fragile humans, would not be that bad because it could be used instead of other substances that were even worse for the environment, such as coal. It was the type of argument that would make sense if you did not realize that renewables such as solar and wind had even fewer emissions and also if you had never received formal training in logic (see Ro'burt Gaer's Compendium of Civilizations That Aren't Quite With It).

Unlike other denialist "think" tanks we have covered, the target for these lies was different from your usual denialist audience. Natural Allies attempted to appeal to younger members of the population as well as people with darker skin pigments, the latter of which in the US were arbitrarily discriminated against. This denialist group attempted to do this by having young actors at the bottom of the United States racialized caste system appear in "ads" and speak these lies instead of those at the top of it (note: an ad was something companies paid tokens for, which would be played in between more enjoyable content, in an attempt to brainwash viewers into buying their products or messaging).

Natural Allies hoped that this manipulation would generate sympathy for their "methane is not too bad" argument. The end goal was to prevent cities from banning these fossil fuels inside homes (yes, humans had it in their homes) as well as to allow the companies behind this effort to lay more pipes so they could transport even more fossil fuels and accelerate the decline of the atmosphere.

For our temporal visitors, visitation is a mixed bag. Natural Allies was a front for Natural Allies Inc., itself a front for a conglomeration of companies. It unfortunately used a nondescript PO Box for its tax records and did not list its Texas-based address (probably somewhere around Houston) anywhere online. Natural Allies Executive Director Susan Waller had perhaps made the wise decision to hide its location from an increasingly angry public.

Susan Waller: The Girl Boss of the Wastelands

However, the organization did list a DC office in the Department of Labor’s annual Labor Organization report (You have to love bureaucracy)! The address, which was 555 13TH STREET NW WASHINGTON DC 20004, also called Columbia Square, was a 13-story office building that, according to something referred to as a "developer," was covered in a brilliant facade of "rose and light gray granite with windows of dual-pane gray glass." It was right off the Washington, DC Metro Center Station (the human’s primitive public transportation system) for ease of access. For those lucky enough to find a way inside, on top of interacting with individuals key to humanity’s downfall, you will also find a towering 13-story atrium "accented by 30-foot-high columns that support cantilevered offices overlooking the open space."

Keep in mind that all office buildings were quite concerned with privacy and security and would pay humans called "Security Guards [suh·kyur·uh·tee gaards] a meager amount of subsistence tokens to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering the building. Cloaking technology would be advised in these situations, as well as your handy dandy raygun.

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.

Should the Public Trust Approval Voting?

Art by Christina Davies

This article was originally posted on The Washington Socialist.

The American voting system has traditionally been first-past-the-post (i.e., the first candidate that meets a certain threshold wins). This system has disincentivized political alternatives. Votes for less-popular candidates tend to be viewed as wasted (see the “spoiler effect”), and so many voters choose the more popular party that is closest to their preferences, ultimately narrowing the political window to two options — in our case, red and blue — which ultimately hurts the more leftist candidates our movement tends to support.

Many academics and activists have been debating voting alternatives. Ranked choice voting (RCV), for example, has increased in popularity with advocates such as Fairvote.org.

For context, RCV is a system where voters have the option to rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference (see a further breakdown here). There are complexities to what happens once your first candidate meets the threshold for victory or is eliminated, but generally, if your first-ranked candidate is eliminated from the running, your vote will go to your second-ranked candidate instead or your third-ranked candidate, and so on. This outcome is suggested to avoid the spoiler effect: something all socialists should be concerned about if we want our candidates to be competitive.

But RCV isn’t the only alternative being considered to replace America’s traditional first-past-the-post system. Other options have emerged as well, such as score voting or the two-round runoff. One alternative system, though, has been ringing alarm bells: approval voting.

Approval voting receives significant backing from tech billionaires

Under approval voting, all nominees are placed on a ballot, and voters can vote for as many or as few candidates as they approve of. The candidate or candidates with the most votes will win. There is a certain appeal to its simplicity, but it’s hard to anticipate the pitfalls of a practical application of this system because, historically speaking, it’s very new. There are only a handful of localities in the US that use this system.

If we look at the people who have been advocating for approval voting in government elections, we see a technocratic bunch. “When I tell you that engineers, entrepreneurs, and other bright minds are throwing support behind approval voting, know that it’s far from the last time you’ll hear about it,” self-proclaimed engineer Felix Sargent asserts in Roll Call.

For context, Sargent is on the board of directors at the Center for Election Science, a group that has explicitly pushed for approval voting. In 2022, there was a push for approval voting in Seattle for its council and mayoral elections. The group Seattle Approves received $300,000 from Sargent’s group, which has deep pockets with Silicon Valley funders (more on them later). The initiative also received $135,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried, who you may be familiar with from the FTX collapse (the funding provided to Seattle Approves may have been diverted illegally).

The financial source of these initiatives is not the only cause for concern, but also why they are pushing for the initiative. The main argument that is used by supporters when advocating for this system is that it will allow voters to express their preferences more honestly. “With approval voting, you can vote for all the candidates you want. The candidate with the most votes wins. It’s as simple as that!” touts the Center for Election Science on its website.

Yet there is another argument, used less frequently, that might be more alarming to those on the left. The system’s supporters tend to perceive it as benefiting the political “middle.” Nick Beckstead, who was at the time president of Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation, told The Daily Beast they supported approval voting in part because it reduced “polarization.” The Center for Election Science’s co-founder Clay Shentrup is a wealthy engineer, and he is on the record in a Reddit post saying: “These systems also seem inherently somewhat neoliberal in the sense that they tend toward centrism.”

Until very recently, there have been only two polities that have passed Approval Voting: St. Louis, MO, and Fargo, ND, and the Center for Election Science devoted resources to push for the approval voting campaigns in both.

When we follow where the money came from, we learn that the Center for Election Science received a large chunk of funding for these initiatives from the organization Open Philanthropy in 2017. In its grant investigation, Open Philanthropy noted that the funds would be going to build public education and grassroots support for approval voting. Open Philanthropy’s biggest funders are spouses Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, the latter of whom is one of the co-founders of Facebook (now Meta) and Asana.

Moskovitz is a billionaire who has spent years focused on funneling his wealth to charity causes using the philosophy of “effective altruism” — he’s one of the biggest funders of the Effective Altruism Forum and the Centre for Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism is the idea that “evidence and reason” should be used to determine how to help others…though the definition of the term has been hotly debated, as well as the merits of the philosophy as a whole.

One of the major criticisms of Effective Altruism is its tendency to devolve into “longtermism” or “the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.” Longtermism has often been criticized for prioritizing vague “future people” over the material needs of people alive today and the systems that harm them (see Christine Emba’s essay on the topic). This philosophy is one that the Effective Altruism community has been linked to since its beginning. As Mollie Gleiberman writes in Effective Altruism and the strategic ambiguity of ‘doing good’:

“…from the formal inception of EA in 2012, the key figures and intellectual architects of the EA movement were intensely focused on promoting the suite of causes that now fly under the banner of ‘longtermism’, particularly AI-safety, x-risk/global catastrophic risk reduction, and other components of the transhumanist agenda such as human enhancement, mind uploading, space colonization, prediction and forecasting markets, and life extension biotechnologies.”

Moskovitz has routinely supported the longtermist ideology, specifically the Center for Effective Altruism’s Longtermist Incubator. Through his work with the philanthropic foundation Good Ventures, he may be considered by some as one of the “good” billionaires, but he’s still advancing positions from his class perspective, which prioritizes abstract future existential risks over structural issues that may be more immediately risky to the wealth billionaires like Moskovitz currently hold onto.

A not-so-simple system

Support from billionaires and technocrats doesn’t make approval voting a terrible proposition on its own. But in observing the effects and dynamics introduced by the system, we will see that it’s hardly a change from the status quo faults of our current systems.

The strategic voting mentality we see with first-past-the-post doesn’t disappear with approval. Under approval, there is a tactical advantage in voting for fewer people, so electoral campaigns emphasize “bullet voting,” or encouraging a voter to only focus on a single candidate.

In the mayoral race of Fargo, for example, multiple candidates included “vote for one” in their messaging based on their understanding of bullet voting. Mayoral candidate Tim Mahoney said of the system: “I would probably bet that every candidate says just vote once because that has more power as a vote.”

Approval voting can also lead to surprisingly undemocratic results because what constitutes “approval” varies widely by the voter. As stated in The Urbanist of a proposed change to Approval Voting in Seattle: “Critically, though, voters wouldn’t be able to distinguish between candidates. Your votes for your favorite candidate and the one you would begrudgingly tolerate would be counted at the same time and have equal weight.”

It’s very possible that a candidate preferred by a higher majority of voters still loses because of a combination of strategic voting and, in a large bloc, a base supporting a candidate in a bloc that in a first-past-the-post or ranked-choice system would be ranked far lower. This infamously happened with Dartmouth College’s alumni association, which rolled back approval voting because they found it empowered a vocal minority.

This system encourages duplicity where only naive voters will vote “honestly” for as many preferred candidates as possible, while seasoned voters recognize that such an action dilutes their vote’s power. The spoiler effect doesn’t go away. As highlighted by the org FairVote: “Bottom-line: the insiders will be trying “to get the memo” to their backers to bullet vote while outwardly pretending to be inclusive in order to draw approval votes from backers of other candidates.”

This reality defeats one of the primary arguments of being able to vote honestly for as many people as you approve of doing so only hurts your preferred candidate. Why not just have first-past-the-post, then? At least that is open about favoring political insiders.

Can voters trust a system this susceptible to strategic asymmetry?

Approval voting is a system that sounds simple: vote for whomever you want as much as you want. Yet, as we know from first-past-the-post, and capitalism itself, just because something sounds simple doesn’t mean it won’t have unintended consequences.

There is asymmetrical knowledge among voters. Skilled ones know that selecting multiple preferences dilutes their vote’s power, while bullet voting (i.e., constraining voting to a single candidate or slate) places their preference in a stronger position. This reality undercuts a primary argument that approval voting allows voters to express their preferences honestly.

Worse, the support for approval voting has clearly been seeded by the longtermist billionaire Dustin Moskovitz and, to a lesser extent Sam Bankman-Fried. This doesn’t automatically make the voting system bad, but it is a yellow flag and, coupled with the other issues we have mentioned, should give leftists pause.

Approval voting is favored by billionaires. Should we be among them?

The Rich Shouldn't Be Trusted To Make Decisions

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

As a society, we are constantly pushing many politicians to treat the government as a business. "The government should be run like a great American company," politician Fiorello La Guardia remarked as mayor in 1938. This trend has continued to the present day, with survey after survey indicating that Americans have more trust in businesses than the government or the media.

For some, this perception has been shattered by the election of Donald Trump, a wealthy businessperson of unscrupulous disposition who has since been indicted. Our first CEO president didn't lead us to a Golden Age but a recession. As Sean Illing writes in Vox of Trump’s first term: "Trump's background in business could not have prepared him less for the job he has now….Even when he built casinos, the only person he was ever able to serve was himself. He made a profit, he paid himself enormous consulting fees, even as his shareholders were taken to the cleaners. It's not hard to see how this approach would be a disaster when applied to the presidency."

More and more people are coming around to the idea that a good businessman does not necessarily make a good leader. Yet, for those still clinging to the notion that the wealthy make better decisions, I want to make the case for why this couldn't be farther from the truth. When it comes down to it, the rich are terrible at making decisions and should be placed as far away from positions of power as possible.

The rich cannot be trusted

There has been much research about how rich people act more selfishly. A famous example brought up whenever people discuss this topic is the more than decade-old monopoly study conducted by Paul Piff, where monopoly games were rigged to give certain players advantages to access the impact on their behavior (e.g., more money at the start, more money when passing GO, etc.). Players with these advantages became more confident and were more likely to attribute their success to effort. The initial findings were not published but have since been replicated with similar results.

Another example published by Paul Piff and researcher Dacher Keltner is the famous car study, where they noted that people with more expensive cars were more likely to ignore the rules of the road. The replication of this study has been mixed, with some indicating that luxury cars are not a good indicator for the wealthy and others unable to replicate the results at all. However, as recently as 2020, a similar study noted that the cost of a car was a significant predictor of a driver yielding, with odds of yielding decreasing 3% per $1000 increase in the worth of the vehicle.

The truth is that even on a basic level, the rich lack the ability to assess their decisions. The fact that they have power gives many wealthy people an over-inflated perspective that impairs even the most inconsequential of decisions. In the 2009 paper Power And The Illusion Of Control, researchers ran a series of experiments where they concluded that “…power led to perceived control over outcomes that were uncontrollable or unrelated to the power." One of the outcomes was that those who held a power position were less likely to let others roll dice for them — a truly random action where the holder did not make a difference in the outcome. Rich people feeling a greater sense of control has been routinely noted in the literature for over a decade.

And worryingly, it is not just the rich making individual decisions that overvalue their interests that we should be concerned about, but how they relate to their fellow man. There is a lack of compassion among the wealthy, which is worrying. One study by Stellar, J. E., Manzo, V. M., Kraus, M. W., & Keltner, D. notes a compassion gap between the poor and the wealthy. In one test, participants were asked to fill out self-reported data on compassion. In another, participants were shown videos meant to induce distress. In both examples, those with worse material conditions reported higher levels of compassion.

Inversely, individuals in another study who were classified as "high-ranking" were shown a picture of "rising economic inequality between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of society." These individuals, according to researcher Michael Kraus, ended up blaming this trend on things such as "hard work," "talent," and "skill differences."

Of course, this has more significant, real-world implications than just how people conduct themselves during games of Monopoly or traffic. According to ProPublica, the ultra-wealthy pay fewer taxes using legal and illegal means, having a true tax rate of around 3.4%, which is far less than what your average American pays proportionally. This avoidance leads to a situation where the wealthiest 5% of Americans choose not to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes yearly.

The rich also don't make up for that gap in charitable giving. The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted in 2014 that: "The wealthiest Americans are giving a smaller share of their income to charity, while poor and middle-income people are digging deeper into their wallets." As written in the Philanthropy Roundtable: “If instead of the average percentage of income given away by wealthy households, we look at the median percentage (meaning that half gave more than this amount, and half gave less), the wealthy appear less magnanimous. From 2007–2011, the median wealthy household (having annual income of $200,000+ or assets of $1 million+) gave away 3.4 percent of its income.”

This lack of proportional giving gets even more depressing once one realizes that many modern-day philanthropic endeavors are a combination of tax-avoidant and reputation-laundering schemes. These people, who manipulate their books to avoid paying taxes, then set up massive charities and foundations so that they can spend billions of tax-exempt dollars on efforts that will further lower their tax bills.

Once one peers past the facade, the harm caused by the rich is obvious. For example, the rich are more likely to steal from their employees. Wage theft is the largest type of theft in the US. The FBI reports over $10 billion in property theft every year. Compare that to the $50 billion the Economic Policy Institute estimates are being stolen from workers every year. The wealthy's decision to place their needs and preferences above everyone else's negatively impacts workers nationwide.

We also need to recognize that the rich often make their wealth through the harm they cause to our society. Most businesses are built on some combination of pollution, slavery, labor exploitation, wage theft, regulatory arbitrage, and more. These harms are then massaged away either by setting up denialist think tanks and propaganda, creating massive foundations and other philanthropic endeavors, or both.

Intuitively, you probably know this distorted sense of self from the rich to be true. From Elon Musk botching the takeover of Twitter (or now X) to Donald Trump failing to run America like a business, our recent history is filled with rich people making the most foolish decisions possible. A billionaire died recently inside a deep sea submarine that experts decried as unsafe. Should we be surprised that the rich, so insulated from the effects of their actions, make terrible decisions?

And why would one want such people anywhere near a position of authority?

A rich conclusion

We are a country that often glorifies the decision-making of the rich. We hold them to this almost mythical standard where their opinions and beliefs are seen as "better" than everyone else's merely because they happen to have more subsistence tokens in their bank account.

Some will argue that it isn't the rich’s fault that they are more selfish and cruel but that they are responding to incentives. As scholars argue in the Observer: "Our conclusion is that incentives are the biggest determinants of pro-social behavior and that neither the rich nor the poor are inherently kinder or more selfish — in the end, all of us are susceptible to behaving this way."

However, this counter ignores the point. Regardless of the individual morality of the person being criticized, if such wealth corrodes your decision-making, it calls into question not only that class of people being trusted to make decisions but also having such a class at all. It seems dangerous to tolerate the existence of an economic class of people guaranteed to misbehave and have impaired judgment, regardless of their starting ethics, especially when all you have to do to avoid such a hazard is to take away their money through vehicles like higher taxation and property redistribution.

Maybe the best answer to the sociopathy of the rich is not to have any rich people whatsoever.

Yennefer Was Wrong

Credit: Netflix

The Witcher series is about the eponymous Witcher Geralt of Rivia, a half-human mutant with supernatural powers he uses to hunt and kill monsters. Geralt lives in a medieval-seeming land called the Continent (another name is never given). Due to his code of neutrality called "The Path," he can serve polities on many different sides of a great conflict, as he initially provides his services to all sides with enough coin.

This neutrality is challenged when he finds himself the guardian of ward Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, a runaway princess from the fallen kingdom of Cintra whose blood gives her powers that could potentially turn the tide of a war between the Empire of Nilfegaard and the kingdoms of the North. Geralt and his spouse, Yennefer of Vengerberg, find themselves constantly fleeing from the various factions who wish to possess Ciri, making the Witcher's stated neutrality a critical component of this chase. He could theoretically abandon the chase by choosing a side but instead sticks to his values and continues to walk The Path.

This tension over "picking a side" comes to a head in season 3 of The Witcher when Yennefer tries to use her position and authority within the Brotherhood of Sorcerers to stop a war from coming to a head. Her efforts all come crashing down during an important political summit, and I am glad that they do.

Yennefer of Vengerberg, the savior of Sodden, tries and ultimately fails to save the Continent, and she is wrong for doing so.

Power in the Witcher Series

Before we go into the specifics of why Yennefer was wrong, we have to talk about how this show handles the notion of power in the first place. If I had to sum up the theme of this season in a single word, it would be power — how to yield it, how to take it, and how to handle it ethically.

For example, the elven mage Francesca Findabair spends much of this season struggling to find power for both herself and her people. For context, the elves in this world have been denied their ancestral homeland and are now pushed to the margins of society. Francesca has decided to commit her military force called the Scoia'tael to fight on behalf of Nilfegaard, the upstart Empire to the South that is on the verge of conquering all of the North.

She is doing so under the promise of an elven homeland, an uneasy gamble since it is quite clear that Nilfegaard Emperor Emhyr does not care about elven independence. He uses Francesca's elven militia as meat shields in his conquest of the North. As Francesca's ally says of the tenuousness of this plan: "Francesca, you can't take a deal from a plan that was never real…Emhyr is brutal."

Francesca struggles to gain power that she does not possess, and it provides an interesting tension of what to do when you are under the boot of an oppressor. Do you struggle with neutrality like Geralt, a path that places you indefinitely at the margins, or do you make a longshot play for power? Francesca has little wiggle room, as one wrong move can have genocidal outcomes for her people.

We could also look at Philippa Eilhart and her ally and friend, spymaster Sigismund Dijkstra. She has political power as the magical adviser to the King of Redania, Vizimir II, who rules the largest kingdom in the North. Philippa makes a play against the Brotherhood and loses against Nilfegaard. Vizimir II consequently demands someone's head, which pushes her to secretly assassinate the king to preserve her life. She has power but is also forced to use it to preserve her own existence, showing how power is not only something that someone has but shapes them as well.

Throughout this season, Ciri, Yennefer's ward, struggles to find a position between this dichotomy. She is a powerful magical user, probably the strongest in the world (though her training is lacking), but she has not yet committed to a "side" in the Great conflict on the Continent. She does not have a code like Geralt in how to use that power, debating and receiving counsel from all sides.

For example, a vision from the spirit of the tyrant Falka tells her to, like Philippa Eilhart, give in to her power and let her feelings guide her. "I wanted the freedom to feel my rage," the Spirit Falka says. "To stop shaming myself for what I could not control. You want to change the system, Princess Cirilla? Burn it to the ground?"

On the other hand, her mother, Yennefer, believes (at least this season) that going "ape shit" is a terrible thing to do, advising her daughter to work within the system instead. As she tells Ciri: "You want to be a great leader? You want to change the world? Well, guess what? The day-to-day of leading is dealing with a lot of vapid, power-hungry assholes."

And yet, Yennefer, who has resigned herself to dealing with these assholes, ultimately fails, and it's this worldview that I argue ultimately leads to her undoing.

Yennefer's vision of unity was doomed from the start

What Yennefer tried to do, what many leaders try to do when a political situation worsens, is host a summit. In this case, a unifying conference among mages to get everyone on the same page. As she told the governing body of the Brotherhood:

“We must set our differences aside to create a stronghold between Verden, Kaedwen, Temeria, Aesirn, Lyria, and Redania…If we are to unite the continent, and let me be clear, we have to, we must first agree. No more division. No more secrets. We can all be our best selves. For the Brotherhood.”

Her intentions for peace are not inherently wrong here — admirable even. We should want a world that is not constantly teetering on the brink of war. But while Yennefer believes that she has "evolved," she has naively flipped to the other end of the spectrum. As we know from previous seasons, Yennefer tried going against the grain by setting a prisoner free, and it had disastrous consequences by setting the entire North against the Brotherhood. It's this trauma that she is now overcorrecting for by trying to sweep all divisions under the rug so the Brotherhood can retain its former position.

While I can empathize with this impulse, it's naive to assume that the differences that divide the mages can be smoothed over with a talk. Mages like Philippa and even Francesca (although being elven means she was not invited) have different ideas on how the world should be, and words of “unity and peace” will not change that unless they are seriously addressed.

Division is actually healthy because it's an inevitable part of people having different opinions, and you have to reconcile those differences openly to form a stable consensus. At the extreme end of the spectrum, it actually can be pretty fascistic to squash all opinions for the sake of political unity, as the citizens living under Nilfegaard can undoubtedly attest to. I doubt Emhyr tolerates disunity.

Indeed, her refusal to tackle those problems meant that the conclave was never more than talk anyway. Before the conclave even started, it devolved into fighting, as political factions on both sides of the war seized the concentration of mages as an opportunity to get an edge over their opponents. Redania attacked Aretuza to round up the mages, and then through the Scoia'tael, so did Nilfegaard.

Yennefer assumed that the peace of the Brotherhood, the peace she partially blames herself for disrupting, was itself good and needed to be returned to when many people were already moving beyond it. Her solution of unity closed off critiques of that old status quo rather than listening to them. I wouldn't say I like the Kingdom of Redania or the Empire of Nilfegaard — they are both fascistic empires clinging to control — but the stale hegemony under the Brotherhood was also quite nasty.

Yennefer's foundational assumption was that the Brotherhood was a force of good when we know that it is itself a monument to colonialism. Humans took over the Continent, kicked the elves out of Aretuza, and founded the Brotherhood. Its existence is unethical, and as a battle emerged following the summit ball, it was hard to take seriously mage Tissaia's statements of "defending her home" against the elven forces fighting against her.

Francesca, the Scoia'tael, and the elves in general also have a claim to Aretuza, arguably a stronger one, and it is one the Brotherhood needed to acknowledge if it wanted a more stable consensus. There is an alternate world where Francesca and other elven mages were brought into the Brotherhood rather than segregated from it, and Nilfegaard could never bring the Scoia’tael into its fold.

However, this world can not happen as long as people like Yennefer are content with reigniting this institution's past power, trying to preserve the imagined glory of a decaying organization.

Yennefer was wrong to try to snap the world back to the old status quo simply because challenging it caused people to get hurt. She chooses to fight for a negative peace rather than a positive one where people are free, and that impulse deserves to be pushed back against.

A Magical Conclusion

All in all, I liked this season; there were a lot of touching moments. For all the crosses and double-crosses, the heart of this season was probably Yennefer, Geralt, Ciri, and Dandelion (who acts more like a brother figure) growing closer together as a family (small note: I almost called this review the Witcher Family Power Hour).

For example, there was one touching scene where Yennefer and Geralt reconnect after being separated. Ciri and Dandelion mime what they think their parental figures are saying from afar as a brother and sister might. It's a small scene that adds levity to their reunion, highlighting how close this chosen family unit has grown.

It was heartbreaking to see this family constantly torn apart as various figures in the Continent sought to use them, particularly Ciri, for their own ends. I can't say I agreed with Yennefer's choices this season, but I empathize with her trying to create a more stable world for her daughter. Even as we critique people's choices, we must recognize the heart behind them.

Yennefer was wrong. She fought for the negative peace of the Brotherhood and was in the wrong for doing so, but her intentions were in the right place, and I can't wait to see what the Savior of Sodden does next.

The Messy And Incoherent Philosophy of Diablo 4's Lilith

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

Diablo 4 was released this year. For the uninitiated, Diablo's universe revolves around the perpetual struggle between the forces of Heaven and Hell. Humanity is caught in the middle of this Eternal Conflict, often manipulated and used as pawns by these greater beings. Sanctuary, the world where humans reside, was co-created by Lilith, the daughter of hatred, who, in Diablo 4, returns from hell with a grand plan that supposedly revolves around aiding humanity against the forces of evil.

This much-awaited sequel has rich graphics, intense battles, and a sprawling, if sometimes empty open world. There was a lot I liked (and didn't like) about this grimdark fantasy world. It was fun to revisit the world of Sanctuary, even if the combat could get repetitive, and the item system was a chore.

However, many players might agree that it leaves quite a bit to be desired when it comes to the storytelling department. One of the most glaring issues when we dive into the game's narrative is the underlying philosophy of the main antagonist, Lilith, and how little sense her plan appears to make.

Lilith's Muddled Philosophy

As you progress in the game, you will find that the storyline often swerves into realms of inconsistency. An excellent example is a quest where the player seeks the guidance of the "Tree of Whispers" only to come out empty-handed. The Tree of Whispers is built up as this seemingly all-knowing entity that is beyond even the world of Sanctuary. Yet, it conveniently is powerless to do more than point the player forward (see the "your princess is another castle" trope).

Another inconsistency is the much-hyped threat of a "Lesser Evil" named Andariel. The arc in the mid-game was Lilith's lieutenant Elias trying to summon and bind this Lesser Evil to give her forces an edge against hell. Your companion Lorath asserts "that a lesser could wipe out the continent." And yet, we neutralize Andariel in a single encounter that shows up somewhat randomly. The same thing happens for Lesser Evil Duriel, who appears without any buildup in an underground cavern (probably to reference the second game). "Lorath spoke of Lesser Evils beyond Andariel. Could that thing have been one?" our protagonist says, unsure.

Such events, while individually engaging, leave players scratching their heads when trying to piece together the overarching plot and message of the game. It feels like a collage of events rather than a smooth storyline. Diablo 1 and 2 (we don't speak of 3) never had complex storytelling, but at least you understood what was happening. The hunt in those games involved chasing one person or going further downward into the pits of hell. Here, we have a character chasing Lilith and then abandoning that chase for Elias, who you catch, only to go after Lilith again, who is now driven by a completely different motivation. The plot of this game was a mess, with large parts of it having been better off if they were cut.

Lilith's characterization is at the epicenter of this narrative inconsistency. Being the mother of humanity and co-creator of Sanctuary alongside the angel Inarius, one would assume that her motivations and actions would be the focus of this game. Even if the plan is solely about concentrating power around herself, we should understand what she's trying to do.

However, Lilith's philosophy is elusive at best. She preaches a form of Social Darwinism, advocating for the survival of the fittest. "I have not come to save," she tells her follower Elias, "but to empower. In my shadow, the strong will oppose the might of hell itself. Let the weak fend for themselves."

Yet, her plan and its execution do not seem to align. Under her brief rule, several empires crumble, and the world of Sanctuary deteriorates. Instead of uniting humanity's strongmen against the Prime Evils like Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal, Lilith seems to cause more chaos and destruction in her wake. We do not see armies raised to martial against the forces of hell: she enters hell alone, slaughtering many of her followers to get there. All resources seem devoted to summoning demons and making herself more powerful. Her ultimate ambition is revealed to be absorbing the powers of her father, Mephisto, Lord of Hatred, to become a Prime Evil, which is more about extending her power than aiding humanity.

Characters such as antagonist Kerrigan Queen of Blades from Starcraft (another Blizzard property) also had their arc be about accumulating power, and that plot was straightforward and easy to follow. There is nothing wrong with going in the direction of a villain’s motivation to simply be self-enrichment, but this game seems torn between wanting Lilith to be an "unapologetic badass who is in it just for herself" and wanting to "save" the people she birthed into the world. It makes the overall plot and message of Diablo 4 confusing.

To provide a clearer perspective on what it looks like when a villain's philosophy drives the narrative, let's look at another pop culture villain: Thanos from the Avenger's Infinity Saga. Thanos gathered a bunch of McGuffins called the Infinity Stones so he could snap his fingers and wipe out half of all life: he's doing one simple thing, and at least initially, he succeeds.

Though his methods were undoubtedly monstrous, Thanos operated on a neo-Malthusian philosophy. He believed that the universe's resources were finite and that overpopulation led to suffering. Hence, in his twisted way, wiping out half of all life was, to him, a 'necessary' act to restore balance and make a better galaxy. It's a heinous act, but from a storytelling perspective, his philosophy is consistent both within the narrative and to the viewer.

On the contrary, Lilith's motivations swing like a pendulum. One moment, she wishes for the protagonist to lead, and the next, she wants to seize power for herself. The following second, she preaches Social Darwinism as a means of uplifting humanity. She speaks of breaking the cycle and freeing humanity from the Eternal Conflict. Still, her actions invariably lead to more chaos, making her seem like just another power-hungry autocrat rather than a complex antagonist with a coherent vision.

It would have been refreshing if this hypocrisy was the point of the narrative. There were the bones of an interesting story here that could have focused on how the paternalism of savior figures ultimately can corrupt even the purest of motivations. Lilith, the person who spurned hell to create something new, is a deeply sympathetic character. She cares for her "children" but is also paternalistic, claiming that humanity is lost without a "shepherd to guide them." Without her.

I wanted to see that hypocrisy picked at a little more, but the game is unwilling to have this conversation. Near the end of the last act, our protagonist converses with Lilith in a mind palace. She begs us to join her and lead humanity by her side, and our character rejects it without much commentary. "I will never take your hand," they say, but we aren't given a reason, and the entire conversation on free will and paternalism is sidestepped.

A fiery conclusion

Despite her captivating presence and potential, Lilith falls prey to inconsistency after inconsistency in Diablo 4. It's clear from the ideas presented that the game wanted to have a nuanced conversation about free will, the nature of good and evil, and much more, but it doesn’t quite go far enough to tell a cohesive story around these themes.

It would have been interesting to see Lilith create some political structure around her grand vision of Social Darwinism. We noticed that briefly with Brol and his cannibal city-state. Perhaps the entire game could have focused more on that angle, as Lilith seeks to create stronger and stronger humans, no matter the cost. Her bid to absorb Mephisto's power could have been recontextualized as her wanting to transfer that power into humanity itself: all of us taking ownership of the forces that seek to destroy us.

There were many things the game could have done to accentuate the themes of Social Darwinism and free will better. However, instead of being the game’s driving philosophical force, Lilith ends up a puzzling enigma, leaving players not in awe of her grand design but rather questioning its very foundation.

One can only hope future installments or expansions might shed more light on her motivations and provide the depth she truly deserves.

Climate Change is a Bigger Existential Threat Than AI

Photo by Li-An Lim on Unsplash

It's been the year of fretting about AI. While there are many ethical considerations with AI, the issue of labor being one of the primary ones (see The Work of Art in the Age of AI), what AI evangelists talk about is often rooted in "Longtermist" concerns such as the end of human civilization as we know it. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," reads a statement signed on by CEOS, academics, and other members of the business elite.

This framing has always been precarious, not only because it overstates the current level of this technology (AI is nowhere near Skynet levels) but because it undercuts the actual existential threat we are currently facing — i.e., climate change. Over the next few years, our society will be shaken to its core, not by AI but by our warming world, and any conversation that is not grounded in dealing with these concerns is fundamentally not serious and a red herring.

Existential Concerns about AI are a fantasy

Some concerns about AI are again valid. Like with most things under capitalism, technology over the last decade has been used not to help society as a whole but to extract wealth into narrower and narrower hands. From ridesharing apps to social media, the pattern has been clear: disruption is, in actuality, the practice of using regulatory arbitrage (i.e., taking advantage of regulatory gaps in government policy) to increase profitability.

This economic reality is not what people, like the AI alarmists who signed onto that statement, are referencing when they speak about the existential threat of AI. Signatory Geoffrey Hinton, for example, the infamous "father of modern AI," is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Longtermism, or the idea that influencing future outcomes is a key moral priority. He warned The New York Times that although immediately he was worried it could inflame job insecurity and misinformation, AI becoming more intelligent than humans was a considerable concern.

This type of rhetoric is common among Longtermist adherents. A common existential fear brought up with AI is the "paper clip dilemma." In short, this involves a massive, interconnected AI being instructed to produce as many paperclips as possible and, in the process, converting all of humanity, maybe even all organic matter, into paperclips.

It sounds scary, and the paper clip problem is an interesting thought exercise worthy of being written about in science fiction (and it has), but here, in reality, we are nowhere close to this scenario unfolding. Some experts have described current AI as merely a Stochastic Parrot. It simply cannot do what this scenario suggests: it might never.

The modern economy still requires the labor of real people, and even with the integration of more AI, that will still be the case for the foreseeable future. We are not at risk of turning everyone into paperclips because that would require real people to make those decisions, and that happening would result from a much bigger problem than AI.

Furthermore, Longtermism has been criticized for being quite vague, as what constitutes a "future good" is not as clear-cut as they often argue. At its more extreme, this philosophy can lead to a hyper-utilitarian outlook, allowing those in power to focus on far-off problems rather than the systems of harm they directly benefit from. As Parmy Olson writes in Bloomberg:

“ Silicon Valley technologists…certainly mean well. But following their moral math to the extreme ultimately leads to neglecting current human suffering and an erosion of that other very human feature — empathy.”

Instead of causing a techno-apocalypse, what we are in danger of from AI is uncritically implementing this technology so that a couple of rich people can continue the era of wealth extraction that began with Web 2.0 and, in the process, exacerbate preexisting discrimination on a massive scale. Because AI is trained on datasets produced by people, it has recreated the same systemic biases of people. We have seen problems, such as facial recognition and hiring software discriminating against people of color, that should give us pause.

These are the actual dangers we have to worry about when it comes to AI. We need not fret about AI becoming Skynet, GLaDOS, or Hal-9000, but rather that algorithms will continue to be used to discriminate against marginalized identities and classes. The solution is not to ward off or prohibit AI, “deep learning”, or whatever you want to call it, but to place these resources in the hands of the public so that they may be properly audited and changed. As several AI academics note:

“We should be building machines that work for us, instead of “adapting” society to be machine readable and writable. The current race towards ever larger “AI experiments” is not a preordained path where our only choice is how fast to run, but rather a set of decisions driven by the profit motive. The actions and choices of corporations must be shaped by regulation which protects the rights and interests of people.”

However, such a solution would mean denying Silicon Valley its latest toy. So, instead, we get monologues about science fiction that move the debate away from these more sensible actions. Silicon Valley executives and founders get to frame themselves as Pandoras, benevolently warning us in advance of the boxes they had to open.

And while these leaders overinflate the significance of AI, fearmongering about how it could upend all of human civilization in the next five years, climate change threatens us all, not simply in the future, but right now.

Unlike GLaDOS and Skynet, Climate Change is Real

It cannot be overstated how existentially of a risk climate change is to our overall security as a species. Even being conservative, the projected effects of the carbon we have already signed for can potentially change everything we take for granted.

The rise in sea levels is the most common example brought up. Current estimates place the level of rise at 1 foot (30 cm) by 2050 (that's less than 30 years from now) and an additional 2 feet by the end of the century, but this will fluctuate more or less by region. 2 feet may not sound like a lot, but it will have a devastating effect on coastal regions across the world. Cities like Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Shanghai will just be gone.

In America, the East and the Gulf Coasts are expected to be hit far worse on average. According to research from the group Climate Central, if pollution remains completely unchecked, the coastline of Louisiana — New Orleans included — will be unlikely to make the transition. Florida, from Miami to Jacksonville, will come to know devasting floods as a routine part of life. In fact, from Savannah to Boston, few major cities on the East Coast will be spared from the effects of sea rise, with Boston probably sharing New Orleans and Miami's fate of being one of those cities that doesn't make it.

We could spend the rest of the article analyzing the effects of these changes alone — of what happens when hundreds of millions of people are forced to move inland. There are hundreds of thousands of people in Boston alone: Where do they go, and how will they be treated once they move? In her 2021 essay for The Intercept titled A Climate Dystopia In Northern California, Naomi Klein described how the material stresses of the California wildfires pushed the liberal college town of Chico to move to the right (a situation that does not appear to have improved). As she writes in the article:

“Today, Chico, with its brutal crackdown on unhoused people in the grips of a deadly pandemic and in the midst of serial wildfire disasters, does not demonstrate community “resilience.” It demonstrates something else entirely: what it looks like when the climate crisis slams headlong into a high-end real estate bubble and social infrastructure starved by decades of austerity. It also shows what happens when locally developed climate justice plans are denied the federal and state financing that they need to rapidly turn into a lived reality.”

Imagine Chico on a country-wide, even global scale. We are already experiencing a surge of xenophobia and far-right fascism from the beginning effects of climate change. By 2050, the instability from what has been estimated might be over 1 billion climate change refugees will have taken its toll. I can't predict what that kind of world will look like, but it will be utterly unrecognizable from today.

Part of the reason for this xenophobia is that we will be working with fewer resources overall. We know that an increase of 1.5 degrees celsius, which is all but inevitable given current pollution levels, will have major impacts on crop production. Some crops, such as corn, could see a marked decline. At the same time, wheat's growing range could be expanded. However, even in optimistic scenarios, climate change will increase the likelihood of "killing-degree days" where crops cannot grow at all and possibly even die off. These drawbacks will require immense shifts in production that will need to be addressed if we want to continue producing food at our same levels (so people don't, you know, starve to death).

Another primary concern is water. Something that often gets lost on people is that the water cycle (i.e., the continuous movement of water in the atmosphere) is based on a very delicate balance. While it is technically renewable, parts of it are stored in processes that are replenished very slowly. Canada, for example, claims to have 20% of the world's freshwater, but only 7% of that is "renewable," meaning that it only cycles regularly in a particular area and time at that rate. The rest is stored in lakes, underground aquifers, and glaciers that will not necessarily be replenished quickly in human terms if tapped out, adding an element of scarcity that most people need to consider when it comes to water.

And so, as we add further stress to the water cycle through human consumption and rising temperatures, we will have some regions that have less water overall. One only needs to look at the situation unfolding with communities dependent on the Colorado River to understand this problem. Nearly a century of overuse has led to a situation where the Southwest is now faced with significant water shortages.

Overall, there will be less food, less water, and less land, and that will create a toxic sociopolitical cocktail that has the potential to push us toward a more authoritarian world. That is the problem affecting us in this decade, not some weird sci-fi BS that might never come to pass.

Yet, we are not seeing the investments needed to do much about it. Joe Biden may have signed the "largest environmental bill" in US history (a low bar given how bad our country has been in this area), but this $375 billion investment over a decade (37.5 billion roughly a year) is inadequate compared to what is needed to prevent some of the scenarios I have pointed out coming to pass. Its passage also came at the expense of increasing the number of oil and gas permits being approved, which makes this entire matter tenuous. We don't have much time to dick around here. Increased investment in the green economy cannot come at the expense of new emissions if we want to enjoy future luxuries such as the city of Boston still existing.

We should treat climate change as a crisis, forcing companies to pay the cost of transitioning to a more ecologically stable world upfront. Instead, we are watching billions being sunk into AI (several billion coming from the federal government): a technology that is costly to train, both financially and ecologically, and does nothing to solve the problem at hand.

It feels like a strange distraction. If AI causes the apocalypse, it will be because of neglect, not a robotic hivemind nuking humanity into oblivion.

A Warming Conclusion

It cannot be emphasized enough how frustrating this conversation on AI is because it entertains the runaway fantasies of the rich at the expense of the present. AI does have drawbacks we have to worry about. It perpetuates the systemic biases of current society and risks creating a culture where racial and class-based inequalities are exacerbated in the name of "progress."

Yet even these worrying problems pale in comparison to the threat of climate change, which is an existential threat to human civilization in the here and now. If we do not start making serious investments in our climate and paradoxically divestments from our capitalist system, then many of us will not survive the chaos of this next decade.

Most of us do not have a New Zealand or Mars compound to retreat to. We need to focus on the problems we face, not the paranoid ramblings of rich people's imaginations.

The Dad Joke Was A Long Time Coming

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My favorite Dad Joke comes from the video game Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. Your player character is at a barbecue, and in one dialogue option, you and a cadre of other dads fire off a stream of dad jokes. "He's un-grill-ievable," they begin. Their children boo and plead for the dads to stop.

These types of puns have been around for a long time. A famous one comes from the Greek text the Odyssey, where our protagonist Odysseus tells a Cyclops that his name is "no man." Odysseus then stabs the creature, and when the Cyclops calls out for help, they say (roughly), "No man is attacking me." The other cyclops assume he is ill and fail to come to his aid (talk about a flawed medical system).

The "dad joke" is a sub-type of these puns. Wholesome and insufferable, they are all about inflicting mild humiliation and suffering onto a father's children or family. What we will be exploring today, or “Internet Exploring” for the dads out there, is how these jokes specifically got associated with masculinity and fatherhood and what that says about our larger society.

So strap in your seat belts as we drive into this bumpy subject.

The classical origins of Daddom (“da-dum,” if you will)

The concept of fathers having an entitlement to use wholesome puns to tease their children (as opposed to mothers who, in the modern era, are stereotypically portrayed as humorless) has more to do with current norms of masculinity and patriarchy. A dad's close relationship with their children, so much so that they can tease them with "dad jokes," hasn't always been a thing.

The thing we have to grapple with when analyzing this topic is what it means to be a father: and please keep your Hollywood monologues at the door. Child rearing has varied dramatically throughout history. In ancient Rome, for example, the head of household, or paterfamilias, was not necessarily the male parent but the oldest living male citizen in the home. He had absolute power and could sell, disown, or sometimes even kill his children if they slighted him (so sort of like Florida).

Back then, humor could run from poking at banalities of the day (e.g., bad breath, hernias, etc.) to reflecting the cruel realities of Roman life. In one example, a member of the aristocracy purchases an enslaved person, who dies shortly afterward. When the enslaver complains to the trafficker, he is told: "He didn't die when I owned him."

Dad jokes certainly existed. We see a contemporary-seeming dad joke in one example written in the Philogelos, one of the oldest surviving jokebooks (translation courtesy of

Mike Fontaine

). A father asks his son: "Should I call you my hope or my salvation, Pseudolus?" His son Pseudolus replies, "Both!" To which another father cheekily jumps in and says: "Hi, Both!" (I hope you don’t strain your eyes too much because we have only just started).

Yet this humor was not solely associated with fathers. In the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero, we have an example of a soldier kicking a ball around at night, and in his play, he's suspected of breaking important statues. When it is asked why he hasn't shown up for his platoon's morning workout routine, peer Terentius Vespa quips, "Oh, it's okay — he said he broke an arm," in reference to the statue he broke the following evening (because nothing helps a joke more than explaining it in academic detail).

Humans have always seemed to love their puns. Yet, Ancient Rome is a valuable jumping-off point in this conversation, not just because it had dad jokes galore, but because its conception of fatherhood would impact the very roots of American society, and if you live in America, you know that's not necessarily a good thing.

Colonial Dads (”It’s my lawn now”)

We brought up the role of paterfamilias because it would remain alive and well into the American Colonial Period (1639 CE to 1789 CE). Though, I want to emphasize that these expectations could vary widely by race, class, and religious denomination. As John B. Kamp begins in their fantastic essay Patriarchy and Gender Law in Ancient Rome and Colonial America:

“In Colonial American society…women saw their rights restricted on the patriarchal basis of a woman’s “natural” role as pious homemaker. Roman and Colonial American gender law share a common misogyny; one rests in the patria potestas and the other in European patriarchal culture. There existed, between Roman antiquity and Colonial America, a similar legal and social discrimination on the basis of sex.”

Men mostly controlled the legal and financial rights of their spouses. Fathers also had more of a say in their children's lives, often winning custody in the case of divorce (so pretty much the modern-day Republican platform). The relationship between an individual child and a father might involve their schooling and teaching them how to do a craft. Depending on the community, communal expectations were higher, with the Puritans in the 1600s having selectmen who would inspect if children were being educated "in the right way." Children would be expected to take on economic roles far sooner, and it was not uncommon for working-class parents to contract their children out for forced labor to another family.

Of course, this dynamic assumes the child had a parental figure. In the 1600s, there were examples of street children being shipped to the Americas as indentured servants. There was also a large percentage of the child population that was enslaved, and access to parental figures would depend highly on whether their families were separated from them, which is nothing to joke about (I’ve tried).

The extent parents played and joked with their children is difficult to ascertain. We know through letters and other historical writing that some parents certainly indulged their children, but others, such as the Puritans, as theorized by Morgan in The Puritan Family, overall tried to limit it, sending their children to other families so affection would not get in the way of better manners: no one quite did social shame like the Puritans. Child play was inevitable in the early colonial days, but a father regularly joking with their kids and participating in that play seems unlikely in many colonial communities.

When we look at jokes during the early American period, while what we would know as "dad jokes" certainly existed, these did not seem explicitly tied to fatherhood like today. Take the following pun from Joe Miller's Jests, first compiled in 1739:

“The same gentleman, as he had the character of a great punster, was desired one night in company, by a gentleman, to make a pun extempore. Upon what subject? said Daniel. The King, answered the other. The king, sir, said he, is no subject.”

It's a typical "dad joke," a pun on how the word subject can be about both a topic and a reference to someone's relationship to a monarch, but it has nothing automatically to do with fatherhood or embarrassing one's children. A punster was just someone known for their puns.

Another joke from that book that might fit the traditional mold better goes as follows:

“A rich farmer’s son, who had been bred at the University, coming home to visit his father and mother, they being one night at supper on a couple of fowls, he told them, that by Logic and Arithmetic, he could prove those two fowls to be three. Well, let us hear, said the old man. Why this, cried the scholar, is one, and this, continued he, is two; two and one, you know, make three. Since you have made it out so well, answered the old man, your mother shall have the first fowl, I will have the second, and the third you may keep yourself for your great learning.”

We can see the cultural framework for the "dad joke" present. There is wholesome wit being applied here, but it's not exactly a pithy word pun, and again these puns were not associated with fatherhood. Given the radically different norms of the time concerning play with children, these puns would not be readily used on young children in the same way. Of course, every family was different, and the breaking of norms had to happen.

Industrial Dads (“Get to work, kiddo”)

Skipping forward, from industrialization onwards (starting roughly in the mid-19th century ), we see a new norm with households developing. The work of crafts, once the lifeblood of households, started to become the domain of factories, stores, and other firms, as the family moved from a unit of production to consumption. In something right out of DeSanti's presidential platform, the idealized expectations became that women keep up the home and men go to work — again, this expectation was both racialized and classist and not followed by everyone.

This shift had an understandable effect on childrearing. A more romanticized version of maternity (see the cult of domesticity), coupled with an emerging conception of childhood innocence (see child labor laws), led to the distancing of fathers from some childrearing activities. This change created a stereotype of fathers during this period, especially among middle-class white fathers, of stern patriarchs.

However, it is important to stress that the reality, like my sex life, is always more complicated. As Stephen M. Frank writes of 19th-century fatherhood in Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North: "Beyond the idiosyncrasies of particular families and events, however, enough fathers occupied places toward the affectionate end of the emotional spectrum to refute stereotypes of the starched Victorian patriarch, self-contained and presiding remotely over his family.”

And indeed, poorer households could struggle to adhere to this standard as unemployed fathers might have to tend to the home as their children and wives worked. As Stephen M. Frank notes, "the family man" was primarily a middle-class invention. It was an ideal all fathers should strive toward, but not all could, and some even patently resisted.

And so, what was the record of play and joking during this period?

When we look at how fathers were sometimes depicted in literature, humor is sometimes there. In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), which was technically released during the first Industrial Revolution, the father figure, Mr. Bennet, is famous for his wit. He jests in the novel: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" It is a very funny line, but it's not very punny, and it was hard to find the latter in many of literature's more famous fathers of the time.

Like every era, magazines, newspapers, and the like were packed with puns. Victorian Scholar Lee Jackson reminisces this dark gem in History Today: "Why is a dog like a tree? Because they both lose their bark once they're dead." Another goes: "Who is the greatest chicken-killer in Shakespeare? Macbeth, because he did murder most foul." While these puns were highly enjoyed, it does not seem to have been the norm for these to be linked with dads in particular.

However, as we continue into the modern era, the joking dad becomes not just a fringe example but one seen by everyone, whether their children like it or not, including on the Silver Screen.

TV Dads (“Father puns best”)

The gender and family trends of the Second Industrial Revolution would solidify during the 1900s, as the standardized expectation (though not always the reality) for white, middle-class men became that men went to work, and women managed the household.

When we look at media in the early to mid-1900s, radio and later television, this role is personified by media patriarchs. For example, the 1930s radio sitcom The Aldrich Family was about the teenager Henry and his antics. Henry was the person who played the "funny man" or comic, and his parents reacted to it as the comedic foils. In the episode Henry's Blind Date, Henry talks about giving a class pin to his crush. The crush did not like it, and when asked what the pin was, Henry explains: "All it says is 'Vote the Democratic Ticket.'" The bit escalates further as Henry tries to get his father's fraternity pin to no avail.

In a family or marital dynamic, men, particularly fathers, were the comedic foils in a double act, which was a carryover from Vaudeville where one character would be nonsensical and zany, and the other would try to poke holes and unsuccessfully bring the bit back down to earth (sort of like every group project ever). In the 1930s radio show and later 1950s TV show sitcom the Burns and Allen Show, for example, the ditzy Gracie Allen is the comic to George Burns's foil.

Several decades later, titles such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best would replicate this dynamic. Children and sometimes spouses (looking at you, I Love Lucy) would do zany things, and the man would react to them as a cool "patriarch" with a sense of reason. If this archetype sounds familiar, it’s pretty much the ideal conservatives have been latching onto for the last century, like a leech on a leg.

For example, in the episode of Leave it to Beaver called Beaver's House Guest, Wally tries to get his brother's friend Chopper to get him a new pair of football shoes. Their father tells Wally not to mooch off their brother's friends, to which Wally says: "Yeah, I guess you're right, Dad. I got friends of my own." The kids were constantly pushing against the father's common sense (which could seem quite archaic by today's standards—well, some people’s anyway), and that's where the humor lay.

As we got to the era of second-wave feminism (starting roughly in the 60s), the family would shift with the slow liberation of women in politics and economics (an ongoing project). The household, while still a unit of consumption, would see gender norms evolve. It was suddenly more socially acceptable for white women to take on a job or political office (note: poorer women, particularly poorer Black and Brown women in America, always had to work on the side, and even white women's emancipation was far from equal).

The dads in media would change as well. The Andy Griffith Show is an excellent example of this reality. It started in 1960, and in the first episode, his kid Opie is zany as can all be (objecting to his maid's wedding and everything), but the father has a wit about him. Andy Taylor, joking with Opie about their new maid, who raised Andy, saying:: "She used to squeeze me so hard I'd turn all colors. That's right. I was the most loved purple baby you ever saw."

The Andy Griffith Show is a great transition as we have both a "family man" archetype, a single father no less (at least initially), but also one who has no problem cracking jokes with their kid. The era of the dad joke was upon us!

The Dad Joke comes of age

By the time we get to the 1980s, there are still gendered divisions in labor and childrearing, but the rigid patriarchal barrier where fathers do not interact with their kids had lessened. A 1987 article by Jim Kalbaugh, credited by some as thee originator of the dad joke, shared the sentiment that dads should joke with their kids. Titled Don't ban the "Dad" jokes; preserve and revere them in the Gettysburg Times on June 20th — the day before Father's Day, it argues on behalf of dad humor.

Gettysburg Times, June 20th, 1987

One of the first things you will notice is that we see some of the more stereotypical dad joke humor noted in this article. "Why do they have a fence around a cemetery? Because people are dying to get in there?" Kalbaugh jokes, referencing the familiar dynamic of the recipients of the joke being uncomfortable. "'Oh no,' someone, not a visitor, moans," Kalbaugh writes of the typical reaction to the dad joke.

It's also worth noting that Kalbaugh explicitly links these jokes to masculinity, particularly a stereotypical, often whiter aspect of fatherhood. "The 'Dad' Joke is one reliable aspect of fatherhood," he writes. "It's what children and Moms can count on from a 'Dad.' It's as sure as three meals a day at home." This perspective shows us something interesting because the "right" for a father to humiliate their children playfully is patriarchal.

Another thing of note is that this article is by no means the originator. In the first paragraph, Kalbaugh is reacting to a "young joke teller, freshly certified by a comedy workshop [who] who recently made his debut on network television," doing a set about how all Dad jokes should be banned. Dad jokes were popular enough in 1987 for someone to hate, though given that the word dad is in quotation marks in the title of Kalbaugh's article, the phenomenon may have preceded the phrase (though this is merely speculation).

As the decades rolled out, dads would only get zanier and punnier with their kids. Homer Simpson of The Simpsons was filled with puns: "English?" he jests in one episode, "Who needs that? I'm never going to England." Hal, the father from Malcolm In The Middle, mentions his love of puns directly, saying: "Hey have you seen my pun file? It's in a box marked laughter thoughts."

And yet these puns were still not automatically associated with dads. In 2004 the book Dad This Joke's For You: The Best Dad Jokes from the Funniest Comedians was released by Judy Brown, and here we see that although "dads' joking with their kids" is depicted as the norm, it's still not necessarily punny. Most of the humor in this book is quotes from famous standup comedians, and they are anything but wholesome. "These kids are nuts today. I got a kid myself, ten years old. He's going to be eleven, if I let him," goes a quote from Kenny Youngman (father of the year right there).

We would have to jump to the mid-2010s before we started seeing the wholesome puns being explicitly linked to dads. One of the first things I started doing for this project was to Google the term, tracing back the dad joke as far as the Internet would allow. I immediately found a 2013 Facebook post from the drink company Innocent, approximately a decade ago, writing: "Dad Joke time: Why do you never see elephants hiding in trees? Because they're very good at it."

Captured on Facebook (June 26, 2023)

The mid-2010s was when dad jokes started to pick up in the zeitgeist. Google Trends clearly shows it gathering favor, and we can see this emerging popularity in accompanying media. Buzzfeed, for example, published an article retreading posts from the subreddit DadJokes (founded 2011), titled 27 Cringe-Worthy Dad Jokes You Can't Help But Laugh At. The dad joke's fashionableness would increase so much so that three years later then-President Obama would tell such jokes in his final Turkey pardon in 2016.

Captured on Google Trend (June 26, 2023)

Going forward, the dad joke would solidify into the humor we know today. We would see dad jokes in sitcoms, movies, and even video games.

A punny conclusion

The pithy pun has always been around. We started this article referencing puns in ancient Rome that are thousands of years old. They have most likely been around far earlier, and Gaia-willing will be around much longer.

What has been far more difficult to ascertain is when this type of humor became explicitly linked to fatherhood. The archetype of the inoffensive, overbearing jokester father started in the mid-1900s but did not really take shape until the 1980s and has only been dominant since the 2010s.

The evolution of the dad joke illustrates how endearing certain practices can be while also highlighting how quickly their contexts can change. If you ask me, that fact is punquestionably a good thing.

Queer People Shouldn’t Have To Suffer To Be Taken Seriously

For the longest time, you were more likely to know a trans person because they had died than lived. The names of dead trans women, men, and enbys have hung in the air for my entire adult life. People like Venus Xtravaganza, Brandon Teena, and Islan Nettles have been a part of my community’s history: a reminder of what this society does to people that go against the grain.

These people deserve to be remembered — I am thankful to know their names, even though it's painful — but there is something that has always bothered me about how we use their names as a shield against attack. We point to these people who our anti-queer society has harmed as an argument for our own autonomy. “You hurt us,” I hear us say. “Acknowledge our pain.”

And as the years progressed, I have found it frustrating that queer pain is the first and sometimes last line of defense against those who hurt us.

Queer Pain

My most popular article on Medium is titled Dear Ted Cruz: I Do Regret My Transition. It’s a direct letter to Senator Ted Cruz, about how harmful his anti-transness is to my community and to me specifically. I get very personal about how, for years, anti-trans rhetoric stunted my personal growth and contributed to suicidal ideation.

In many ways, the article is a microcosm of what I have seen throughout the years, where trans pain is the opening salvo in the war for our rights. If you have followed this discourse (and given that we exist during an anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic, I’ll wager that the likelihood you have is high), then the trend of trans suicides has probably come up. The argument, and reality, is that anti-trans rhetoric and legislation are terrible for trans peoples’ mental health, and contribute to suicidal ideation and, well, suicides.

There has been an almost clinical approach to the defense of trans adults and youth. Studies are trotted out that show that when our identities are affirmed, our mental health improves (see this somewhat limited meta study here), and when they are not, it deteriorates (see another limited study here).

As Carrie Davis (she/her), Chief Community Officer at The Trevor Project said of a recent survey the group did of almost 34,000 Trans youths across the country:

…“these findings underscore the disparities in access to mental health care and systems of support among LGBTQ youth, a group consistently found to be at significantly increased risk for suicide due to the anti-LGBTQ victimization they face, and how they are mistreated in society at large.”

This same argument is made against “conversion therapy”; the practice of trying to remove someone's queer orientation or gender identity using pseudo-scientific or religious practices. When a child is forced to suppress their sexuality or gender because of the wishes of their family and community, it’s detrimental to their mental health.

And it’s primarily this argument about health that we use to combat the latest anti-queer panic. Many of the articles and debates we see right now are about whether discriminating against a particular group makes their mental health worse: this medico-scientific framing is at the forefront of a lot of discourse.

A few trans activists have questioned this overreliance on the medical community. Quite a few psychologists and psychiatrists have historically been very discriminatory towards the queer community, and this has led to a lot of tensions, even among LGBTQ+ people themselves.

For example, the argument between “trans-medicalists” (those who believe that only trans people with diagnosed gender dysphoria are valid) and everyone else in the trans community is caused by friction over whether the medical community should be the ultimate arbiter when it comes to accessing gender-affirming care.

It’s argued by some that this emphasis on needing validation from medical professionals to be considered trans has lead to pathologization and gatekeeping. Many within the medical community (and outside of it) are now actively campaigning for an informed-consent model that tries to lessen the input such practitioners have in denying trans people access to care.

As Henri Feola argues in Scientific American:

The gatekeeping endorsed by WPATH and other institutions is a product of attempting to fit the infinite array of human gender diversity into a convenient box. It pathologizes trans people and dismisses our suffering and our survival. It punishes us for our anger, our hurt, and our coping mechanisms, and refuses to listen when we say we know what we need.

I believe that the suicide debate in the trans community should be seen through this lens of autonomy. Even if the medical community had always been a beacon of progressivism, the overreliance on trans pain as our primary argument would still make me uncomfortable because it relies on our pain being seen by medical professionals (as well as everyone else) for our autonomy to be recognized.

Queer Autonomy

Ultimately, my argument comes down to the following: I shouldn’t have to be suicidal, and I certainly shouldn’t have to broadcast it, for people to develop empathy for the fact that my autonomy, as well as the autonomy of my queer comrades, is being stripped away.

At the core of the matter, I should have rights because I am a person. We are a society that believes people are entitled to do things to their bodies, and by arguing against that, you are arguing against my personhood (see also: abortion rights).

There is nothing else to be argued or debated; you either respect bodily autonomy or you do not.

Even if transitioning is harmful (and it isn’t), we let people do harmful things to themselves all the time. Excessive alcohol consumption can at the higher end shave years off your life. Modern video games have gambling mechanics that prey on addictive personalities, and we put those in the hands of children. Most contemporary social media was built from the ground up to build internal triggers so that you are compulsively addicted to it. Autonomy means that you forfeit the right to stop people from doing harmful things to their own bodies.

And it must be emphasized that transitioning is essentially not harmful. Most people do not even engage in medical transition (such as the use of hormones or surgeries). They change their pronouns and gender presentation (the clothing, spaces, and mannerisms attached to their gender). These changes have no cost, other than how other people might treat the individual. By pushing against those changes, you rob people of their autonomy and deny them freedom.

Those that do rely on hormones and surgeries (which, by the way are vastly different things) find that these interventions have negligible drawbacks, if any at all, when administered safely.

I use hormones legally, and my endocrinologist requires routine bloodwork. I am probably more in touch with my bodily health than most people, and that sense of safety goes away if I have to get hormones “under the table” without that regular monitoring. Yet regardless of the perceived harm, it's still my choice to do this, and I find it hypocritical that the Republication Party, the supposed “Party of Freedom,” would paternalistically stop me from exercising said freedom.

Some will argue that children do not have rights to their own autonomy. That parents have a right to deny their children the free expression of their identities. These are people who loudly proclaim that their children will have the gender expression and orientation that they choose.

And to that, I say, being abusive to your own children is not the trump card you thinks it is. Parents deny autonomy to their children initially because the child lacks the basic faculties to do things such as walking, eating, decision-making and reasoning. You make decisions for your infant child because they cannot do so rationally. In this sense, a young child’s lack of autonomy, and absolute parental authority, are justified.

However, as children develop more personhood, being a good parent means ceding them more autonomy. If your child expresses an action related to their body, and it isn’t harmful (and again, transitioning isn’t, except in a minority of edge cases), then denying them that freedom is abusive.

I’m not interested in going back and forth with someone who does not realize the fundamental fact that being a good parent means learning to let go. That is what we all must do in the end: you either learn to see people as people who can make their own damn choices, or you hold on ever tighter, trying in vain to control the actions of others.

A Declaration of Freedom

I do not want another decade of trans pain. I do not want to argue over statistics and queer deaths. I regret engaging in the tedious online fights over biology and definitions of gender. I regret being open and vulnerable, only for miserable people to discredit my pain.

It’s a fight which relies on the oppressors recognizing the suffering of those they harm, and it's not one I am convinced is very effective.

Hate activists, such as Matt Walsh, routinely call trans people “selfish” for having suicidal thoughts. At best, this argument about suicidal ideation has given us tenuous acceptance, dependent on the medical community’s current understanding of the science; at worse, we are performing for people who nonetheless shut their ears and close their hearts to our suffering.

We can go around in circles disproving what these people believe (I know I have), but this back-and-forth leads to debates that are, ultimately, beside the point.

Queer people deserve rights because we are people and we are entitled to liberty and freedom: we should have autonomy over our own bodies, even if it makes others uncomfortable.

"Ōoku: The Inner Chambers" Is A Fascinating Deconstruction of Gender

Captured: Netflix

In today's pop culture lexicon, deconstructions of gender are everywhere. The dystopian TV series Handmaid's Tale, based on the book of the same name, is about what happens when theocratic Christian patriarchy dominates all aspects of the United States. And, of course, Amazonian mythology has been rehashed in everything from Xena Warrior Princess to Wonder Woman.

Netflix's Ōoku: The Inner Chambers is among these stories, as it dared to push boundaries and challenge conventional norms around gender. As an adaptation of a manga series, this show delicately positions itself in a socio-historical context, the Edo or Tokugawa period, when Japan remained insular, shutting its doors to foreign interventions. However, there's an imaginative twist: this self-imposed isolation is due to the devastation of Red-face smallpox, slashing the male populace to a mere fourth of that of women.

This premise allows the series to say many fascinating things about gender while remaining grounded in its historical roots and world-building.

A brief history of plagues

Historically, gender-plague tales have been a mirror to the societal tensions and anxieties surrounding gender politics. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 creation Herland, envisioned a society that, following a volcano eruption, thrived in the absence of men. Gilman was impacted by the racist underpinnings of first-wave feminism, and her "ideal" society would not be considered great by today's standards. Gilman was a eugenicist, and her narrative explicitly references Aryan superiority, with women refusing to have children with "undesirable traits."

The gender plague stories written following second-wave feminism (roughly starting in the 1960s) tended likewise to be utopian, but the source of that perfection was different. Many characters had progressive ideologies that celebrated diversity, queerness, and polyamory. Unlike in Herland, where society reproduces asexually, Joanna Russ's The Female Man introduces a utopian world called Whileaway, where the women are focused on same-sex relationships and engage in activities such as duels that we would have once considered masculine. It's also a world that writer Sandra Newman notes was created from the genocide of men, alluding to the same eugenicist strand first seen in Herland.

In the current era, many stories no longer relegate male absences to a remote past but thrust them into the throes of the present. The story Y: the Last Man, for example, is not focused on the rebuilding of a post-man world but on the pain that happens immediately during and after the plague, as things are collapsing. As Sandra Newman insightfully notes in The Guardian:

“The 21st-century revival is a very different animal. First, instead of being a dimly remembered political event, the mass death comes now. It has no good aspects. Men die horribly in front of us. Women are plunged into collective grief. Technological society falls apart for lack of skilled workers, and the world goes into decline. Women, meanwhile, are just as violent as men, and no more cooperative or empathic. The only result of generations of indoctrination into female roles is that girls are crap at engineering.”

Newman's commentary here is incisive. Gender plague stories have, until quite recently, created gender-essentialist narratives that turn society into a utopia because the violence of men is no longer present. Even if men disappearing is not an act of God but purposeful, such as in The Female Man, their removal allegedly paints the way for a better tomorrow.

However, this type of thinking can get dicey quite quickly. While, on average, there are many stark differences between men and women, these roles aren't inherently linked to gender and are more about societal conditioning. Women aren't genetically predisposed to make less money at their jobs or be less timid. It's about what we train people to do, and there are people of male sex with feminine traits, and vice versa. Some people fit neither inverse. The premise that you can target maleness or femaleness has historically led to narratives that exclude transgender and nonbinary people at best and malign us at worst. We cannot be blind to this context when we examine such works.

Yet that doesn't mean that gender plague novels should be discarded entirely. There is starting to be more self-aware commentary in this area. Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, for example, has received much praise for being a gender plague novel written from a trans perspective, and I argue that the complexity of The Ooku: The Inner Chambers is also a text that is a little bit more nuanced in how it deconstructs gender.

Gender Plague in Japan

This brings us to Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, a harmonious blend of past and present storytelling tropes. Initially set 80 years into the matriarchal reign of female Shōguns, in particular, the Shōgun Yoshimune; it paints a world where women dominate every sector of society spanning from trade to households to politics.

The show's title alludes to the Shōgun's harem, the Ōoku, which by Yoshimune's time has a whopping 800 men meant to dot on her reverence — a testament to her formidable power and influence. Originally only some of the men in the Ōoku were meant for the Shōgun's sexual gratification. Most were brought to Edo Castle as a protective, military force to guard the Tokugawa lineage in the wake of potential political instability brought on by the Red Face Smallpox pandemic. When the male heir to the line dies, however, the Ōoku gradually transforms into a harem so that the surviving female heir of the Tokugawa line, Chie, can produce a son.

It's these initial steps to protect the patriarchal control of the Shōgunate that become its undoing. Slowly over time, norms change so that women control more and more of society, and men become decorative playthings for the wealthy. One way to see this is with clothing. Men in the Ōoku initially wear the sparser clothing of the samurai but slowly start to adorn themselves in extravagant attire, in essence, peacocking to appeal to the Shōgun. By Yoshimune's era, although these men still practice the art of the sword, it was largely a ceremonial act. Their real battles are now confined to courtly politics and intrigue.

Yet, this show isn't a mere gender-reversal act that we see in texts such as I Am Not An Easy Man, where women occupy and do all the same things men do now. The narrative is more mature and discerning than that, as the story seems to argue that even the preexistence of patriarchy affects the society that emerges after it. The roots of this matriarchy trace back to the initial years of the Red Face Smallpox. The transfer of power to women was an extended emergency decree, with the underlying premise that it might eventually revert back to patriarchy.

In essence, even while men were dying off, the ascendant female ruling class still had to make the patriarchal men around them feel comfortable.

This appeasement also applied to some women as well. In fact, one of the biggest upholders of the patriarchy in the series is Lady Kasuga, the wet nurse of the male shōgun Iemitsu. Kasuga initially abducted a female child Iemitsu sired out of wedlock named Chie with the purpose of producing a son to extend the Tokugawa line. She wants to restore the patriarchy, not upend it. Chie, who would eventually take on the name of her late father, Iemitsu, cannot initiate the emergency decree to put women in power until after Lady Kasuga's death. Kasuga is so intent on puppeting men from the shadows (as she was trained to do) that she becomes one of the last barriers to the show's ascendant matriarchy.

This is all to say that the shift from patriarchy to uneasy matriarchy wasn't abrupt. It was a gradual process. Women donned male roles, leading to a compelling interplay of gender presentations. Many male heads of noble households exacerbated this shift by pressuring their daughters to secretly take on the role of heir by presenting as men. These female heirs were, in a way, "socialized" as men and many of them found that they preferred the status of men much more than that of women.

Even in the show's current era, women in power are identified by male names, a practice hinting at the vestiges of patriarchy. The character arc of Shogun Yoshimune exemplifies this duality. She's so entrenched in the matriarchal fabric that she's initially oblivious to why she's officially referred to by a male name.

Unsurprisingly, the condition of men 80 years into this alternate future is far from enviable. Reduced to mere carriers of the seed, many are pampered to the point of being infantilized, while others are commodified into sexual servitude. Those in the rural areas, who are no longer sexually viable, are often abandoned in the wilderness.

But notably, it’s still not a complete reversal. The reins of the household, alongside the rest of society, remain firmly in female hands. Men are too precious to tire out and risk getting sick. A combination of history and biology pushes the narrative away from a one-to-one swap with gender, and that is refreshing in an era of lazy gender plague stories.

A viral conclusion

Gender plague stories have been around for over a century. At their best, they provide us with a lens through which to deconstruct gender, but at their worst, they resort to gender essentialism and anti-transness. We often get boring stories that vacillate between the absence of men being depicted as a utopia or a dystopia rather than diving into the messy complexities of what such a disruption would look like.

Ōoku: The Inner Chambers is not just another gender-plague tale but a profound exploration of power dynamics, societal norms, and the intricate weaving and remixing of gender. It challenges, educates, and entertains, making it a shining exemplar of how pop culture can both mirror and mold society's perceptions.

Barbenheimer: A Surprising Battle of Messaging and Framing

This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 520713.

Barbenheimer emerged as a meme to talk about the joint release of Greta Gerwig's pink and feminine metacommentary Barbie and Christopher Nolan's brooding and masculine Oppenheimer. Soon the Internet was ablaze with talks of double features, promotional deals, and fans coming to the theaters dressed to the nines in pink.

And so, given that these two films have been paired as a viewing experience, it seems only natural to compare them critically. When we do that, we come across contrasts in not only how they talk about gender but also these films contrasting messages, which nevertheless intersect well with one another.

Barbie: great framing, mixed messaging

Barbie is about "Stereotypical Barbie," as well as all her other iterations, both old and new, in the fictional dimension of Barbieland. This is a land of imagination powered by all the children who play with these dolls. From Mermaid Barbie to a Barbie President, Barbieland is a feminist matriarchy where people there believe all the problems of patriarchy in the real world have been solved through the representational politics of the Mattel Corporation (more on this later).

Yet when a tear opens up in our two realities, Stereotypical Barbie quickly learns that "representational politics'" conquest of patriarchy is a lie. She goes on a fabulous journey of self-discovery to the "real world," which, coupled with her naivete, allows the film to have a frank conversation about gender and the patriarchy that rules our world.

From a very blunt takedown of the ruling Citizens United to a plot-essential bit making fun of mansplaining, everything we see in the film is meant to deconstruct patriarchy, and it's pretty cathartic for the viewer. America Ferrera's Gloria gives a brilliant monologue on the paradoxical rules of womanhood, saying:

“It is literally impossible to be a woman….You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”

When I finished watching this speech, the audience was in tears. The whole point of this monologue was to name, as Gloria calls it, "the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy" and provide the viewer catharsis that their feelings are valid.

This film is very aware of how it is being perceived and how it frames things to the viewer, all to aid in that catharsis. For example, there is a throwaway line where Stereotypical Barbie, who Margot Robbie plays, is talking about how she doesn't perceive herself as beautiful. The narrator jumps in, joking that Margot Robbie was the wrong actor to cast in this role to make that point. This narrative technique being used here is referred to as "lampshading," or bringing to the viewer's attention a narrative problem and then moving on. It's not only a result of this film's overly meta approach but of wanting to reassure the viewer that, yes, "it gets them" and is "in on the joke."

Yet, while I loved most of what this film does, there was something unsettling with its concluding message. Throughout the film, there is a bumbling Mattel CEO character, played by Will Ferrell, who just doesn't get how out of touch he is. He gets defensive and abuses his power, but he is never portrayed as anything more than oblivious. I found it a strange choice to make, especially since, narratively, nothing happens to his character other than him referencing silly suggestions and "tickling retreats."

We can go around in circles on whether this framing was appropriate, but what bothered me is that toward the end, after the chief tension of the film has been resolved, Gloria proposes to him to create an "Ordinary Barbie" that will not succumb to the exceptionalist narrative the Barbie doll has traditionally adhered to (note: someone outside Mattel has made this). The CEO initially rejects this idea, but after he's told it will make money, he quickly agrees. We have here not a refutation of Mattel's power to set cultural norms but a plea for it to change its priorities. It's an argument of finding incremental change through the marketplace, and given how badly this company has messed up our norms in the first place; it's one I am wary of.

We see this incrementalism further in how the Barbies take back power from the Kens after the latter had done a coup. The Barbies ultimately shun the more "masculine" violence of the Kens (who pantomime war in the best musical number of the movie) and vote their matriarchy back into power. It was a narrative move that felt very strange given the dire straights Gloria's daughter Sasha depicted society being in in the first half of the movie. She says Barbie represents "sexualized capitalism," "rampant consumerism," and "fascism." Is voting harder supposed to be the solution here?

Furthermore, are we supposed to approve of this returning to the status quo? The film ends with the Kens still being oppressed under the Barbieland matriarchy but given a token lower-end court position by President Barbie to symbolically represent the disproportionate amount of power that women have in the real world. The film denies us a tidy resolution, which I am torn on. On the one hand, patriarchy isn't resolved in the real world. Why should the matriarchy be abolished in Barbieland?

On the other hand, the problem comes with the solutions they have pushed for in this film: market forces and voting, which, although they cannot be ignored (I have a long history of encouraging people to vote), are inadequate on their own. If voting harder and buying more ethically were viable solutions to "rampant consumerism" and "fascism," we would have done it already.

Barbie ends with a delightful text that frames the problems women face under patriarchy beautifully but leaves the viewer with a mixed message on how to fight it. In many ways, this film is a fascinating counterpart to its more "masculine" twin: Oppenheimer, which has a tighter message but fails in my perspective in how it frames its characters.

Oppenheimer: great message, terrible framing

Oppenheimer is inevitably about masculinity. The thing about "male" movies is they often don’t have to be explicitly framed as conversations about masculinity because male is the current default (particularly white, straight, cisgendered men). Yet considering this is a biopic about a Great Man of History, the implication is clear.

Oppenheimer is a story about quantum mechanics physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer who would go on to be a key figure in the Manhattan Project, notably Project Trinity: the codename for the first atomic bombs. The weapons he would help build, named Little Boy and Fat Man, would be dropped over the municipalities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing at least one hundred thousand people. These actions were initially heralded as ending the war with Japan, but in more recent times, have been criticized as needless posturing used to establish US hegemony and ignite the Cold War with the USSR.

There are many messages you can tease from this 3-hour film spread across three separate timelines (a small note I have is that it was way too long), but one is that the development of nuclear weapons was a mistake. Dr. Oppenheimer later rejects the argument that dropping the bomb was necessary, and we, as the viewer, are given no evidence that he's wrong. The film ends with him nihilistically talking to Einstein about how the development of nuclear weaponry "destroyed the world," referencing the cataclysmic nature of what he has released.

Another message is that the men pushing for this "great" development are spiteful and short-sighted. There is a brilliant scene where Oppenheimer is talking to President Truman about how the dropping of the bombs has made him feel guilty, and the president perceives it as a sleight against his greatness. In real life, Truman allegedly called Oppenheimer a "crybaby scientist."

We see this pettiness further highlighted in a key plot point involving a series of political hearings: one for Oppenheimer's security clearance after the war; and another, much later, for Lewis Strauss's confirmation hearing in the Senate for Secretary of Commerce. Strauss was another key figure during the Manhattan Project and later the Atomic Energy Commission. Oppenheimer and Strauss should have been friends (or at the very least begrudging allies), but because Oppenheimer has a mild conversation with Albert Einstein that causes the man not to register Strauss's presence, he assumes, incorrectly, that Oppenheimer is turning Einstein against him. It's this nonexistent sleight that pushes Strauss to work secretly to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance and eliminate his influence.

This pettiness applies to Oppenheimer himself, who works on the bomb (despite being told by many that it's a mistake) because of his ego. Oppenheimer perceives himself as one of the few that can pull it off and chooses to let himself get wrapped up in nationalistic propaganda, not seeing through this jingoism until after the damage has been done. It's hard to see any of these great men of history as truly great, and that's the whole point: one I enjoyed immensely. When you zoom in on the posturing and petty fights, the shine of their greatness dims.

The problem I had with the film (besides, again, it being too long) was how it framed many of its characters, particularly its women. Despite the text criticizing the men in the film ruthlessly, few prominent women are involved in the narrative that Oppenheimer isn't f@cking directly, and even these characters are severely neglected in the movie. His first partner, Jean Tatlock, was a reporter for the Communist Publication the Western Worker and probably a queer woman. However, she is depicted in the film as deeply unhappy that she and Oppenheimer have separated and kills herself shortly after he calls off their relationship. Still, in reality, the situation is more complicated. The pathologization of homosexuality is argued by some to be a factor in her suicide — a fact the film glosses over.

Similarly, Oppenheimer's wife, Katherine, or "Kitty," also has an arc, but it feels almost lazy. Her transformation from disillusioned housewife to battle-worn politico feels sudden and unearned. We simply didn't see that happen in the film (though I would have loved to), and it speaks to how uninterested Nolan was in developing his female characters.

The only women characters Oppenheimer isn’t f@cking that receive notable screen time are during the Operation Trinity flashbacks. These include engineer Lilli Hornig, whose inclusion is very relegated to the margins, and scientific librarian Charlotte Serber, who, in a bit of sexist revisionism, is depicted as Oppenheimer’s secretary. In real life, Project Trinity had many women scientists involved in it, making their absence in this film notable. This absence (as well as the others we have discussed) is more about Nolan neglecting this history than anything willfully malicious.

When discussing how women characters are often ignored in period films, particularly in those surrounding “Great Men,” there is a tendency to bring up that period’s misogyny as a defense. "That era was misogynistic," goes the argument, "so wouldn’t these women be ignored and belittled?" And yes, they would (and were, and are), but that’s speaking past the point. We are not discussing history here but how women characters are framed in this fictional narrative. In a story, you can have female characters that exist in the past, who experience hardships and discrimination, and still have a proper arc and character development. They can even be somewhat empowering (see Carol, Hidden Figures, etc.).

The same point can be brought up with the indigenous tribe that occupied some of the grounds in Los Almos before the military seized the land for the project. Several times in the film, it’s brought up that the land was used by this unnamed tribe, including during a tense conversation with President Truman, but we aren’t given any more details than that, and we really should have. Historically, there was an indigenous woman who worked on Project Trinity, hematologist Floy Agnes “Naranjo Stroud” Leea, whose point of view in the film could have made that conversation more impactful.

Looking from a birdseye view, I enjoyed the message of Oppenheimer, but how it framed its characters could have used more work. It is a criticism of Great Man Theory that still slips into it every once and a while. His genius is brought up repeatedly in the film in a way that feels gratuitous, and centering on the other intelligent women in his life may have been helpful to counterbalance that. My advice for this text about how "Great Men" are petty and exclusive would have been to include maybe the characters it thought these men were marginalizing.

An Explosively Pink Conclusion

All in all, I enjoyed the Barbenheimer phenomenon. These films are so different, yet core themes tie them together, which I suspect was part of the reason this trend happened in the first place. Oppenheimer is gritty, slow, and grounded in the "real world." It's also very, very male. Barbie was fun, irreverent, and very very into talking about patriarchy.

There were undoubtedly drawbacks in how these films broached these subjects. Barbie had tight humor and framing but lacked a message to go with its cathartic conclusion. Oppenheimer was tight in what it was trying to say but could have benefited from a more intersectional approach to framing its marginalized characters during this contentious period of history.

Regardless, Barbenheimer was a fun treat in the hellscape known as the 2020s. Pretty in Pink never felt so dark and foreboding.

The Show Steven Universe’s Terrible Approach to Fascism

Steven Universe is about a boy called Steven who is half human, half alien. He lives on Earth, in a picturesque beachside town, and on the side, he goes on heroic missions with the alien freedom fighters, the Crystal Gems. As the series progresses, Steven learns more and more about his lineage and a thousand-year-old Civil War, which still has effects on the present.

From its vibrant animation to its deeply relatable characters and masterful storytelling, Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar, has earned its place in the hearts of millions worldwide. The series, hailed for its celebration of diversity, its inclusive, queer-driven narrative, and its willingness to delve into complex themes, does an excellent job when viewed through the lens of LGBTQ+ families.

However, when it comes to handling the weighty issue of fascism (i.e., to simplify, when power is concentrated into a narrow set of hands, and a mythology around those figures is created) there is a problem. The aliens (i.e. the Gems) that Steven shares his biology with are ruled by a fascist government called the Diamond Authority. The show's approach to this subject often oversimplifies the painful reality of this creed in favor of a problematic “kill them with kindness” approach.

And so, let’s grab our guitars and take a deep dive into the brilliantly animated world of music, friendship, and interstellar, genocidal space rocks.

A metaphor for estranged family

To begin with, it is necessary to recognize how Steven Universe wonderfully portrays dealing with estranged conservative family members. A recurring motif in the series is the protagonist, Steven’s ability to reach out to those harboring misguided views, offering compassion, patience, and open dialogue to change their perspectives. This approach, though tedious, is often (though not exclusively) an accurate depiction of the slow, painful work required to bridge ideological gaps within families.

A striking example is how the show handles the character Peridot, a cog in the Diamond Authority who came to Earth to destroy it by activating a McGuffin called “the Cluster.” Steven and the Crystal Gems are able to not only foil this plan but deradicalize Peridot to the point where she rejects The Diamond Authority and joins them on Earth.

Another example of this is the episode “Gem Harvest,” where Steven meets his estranged cousin, Andy DeMayo. Despite initial misunderstandings and Andy’s xenophobia, presented through a thinly veiled metaphor as he rants against “illegal aliens,” the episode ends on a hopeful note. Steven and his Gem family’s persistent efforts to connect with Andy successfully break through his prejudices. It is portrayed as a heartwarming narrative that champions the transformative power of empathy and dialogue.

However, the success of this approach in such a context reads largely as fan fiction for how liberals want to convert their conservative family members during Thanksgiving. Deradicalization is a painful process that can take months or years, if at all. As I write in You’re Delusional if You Think Queer People Are Responsible for This Moral Panic:

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

This deradicalization also doesn’t translate to larger, more systemic issues, especially when the series ventures into the domain of fascism. The show’s portrayal of the Gem Homeworld, a civilization steeped in hierarchy and domination, is one that cannot be defeated through kindness. This society, with its preordained roles and worth assigned based on gem classes, effectively embodies the strict hierarchy fascism relies on. The “Diamonds,” leaders of this society, are dictators that have perpetrated countless atrocities against those they deem “lesser.”

Here’s where the series starts grappling with its approach to handling this heavy theme. While there are snippets of these brutalities, as well as remnants littered throughout the Earth of the Gem Rebellion or the “Gem War,” Steven Universe often opts for a softened representation. The Diamonds, despite their oppressive reign, are humanized excessively. Episodes are devoted to their long and profound sadness of the loss of their sister Pink Diamond, including the fabulous song What’s the Use of Feeling (Blue)? sung by Patti LuPone.

This humanization kicks into overdrive after we learn that Steven’s mother, the leader and cause of the Gem Rebellion, was Pink Diamond. She was a member of that fascist Diamond Authority, and so this makes the entire plot of dealing with this empire a familial one first and a political one second.

This is not to argue against the character depth of awful people, even that of genocidal ones, but the sympathetic portrayal of these dictators often overshadows the horrors of their actions. They’re seen grappling with guilt, loneliness, and emotional turmoil, inviting the audience to empathize with their plights. However, the same time is not devoted to the active horrors they committed.

The Fascism Ignored

The genocides the Diamond Authority has committed are only seen in retrospect and are very brief. Since Steven has some of the memories of his mother (Gem biology is complicated), we see a Pink Diamond flashback where her family member Yellow Diamond is engaging in a planetary terraforming operation that will wipe out all organic life on the surface. This terraforming process is, in fact, how Diamonds reproduce, as planets, irrespective of whether they have organic life on them, are hollowed out for the inorganic Gem life to emerge.

We are led to believe that the Diamonds have done this process dozens if not hundreds of times across the galaxy, and yet we do not have moving songs devoted to the victims. There are no pieces about the cruelties that were inflicted. Everything is done through the perspective of the Gems. The closest we get to an under caste being represented is “illegal fusions” living in the underbelly of the Gem Homeworld (note — Gems can fuse with each other to create a unique entity, but it's a taboo to fuse with another type of Gem). These are people within the Empire being oppressed, not outside of it.

Furthermore, the show’s resolution to the Diamonds’ fascist regime is concerning. Steven manages to dismantle their rule, not through collective resistance or military action, but through personal dialogue and emotional understanding. He makes White Diamond laugh by telling a joke, and her facade of control breaks.

This plot beat is where the series, while maintaining its theme of love and acceptance, strays into problematic territory. In the real world, such systemic issues are rarely, if ever, dismantled through dialogue alone. They require collective action, resistance, and significant sacrifices. We didn’t defeat the Nazis with humor, and kindness and understanding have done little to chip away at America’s own brand of fascism.

By excluding these elements from its narrative, Steven Universe risks giving an overly idealistic and naive perspective on combating fascism. It’s essential to question the potential implications of such a portrayal, especially on younger audiences, who might walk away with an oversimplified understanding of societal change.

Moreover, the narrative’s failure to hold the Diamonds accountable for their actions is another significant misstep. After centuries of oppressive reign, and biological and cultural exterminations, their only real consequences are self-imposed. The Diamonds inverse their powers to have positive effects on the population, and they turn Gem Homeworld into a Democracy. There are no Nuremberg Trials. No conversations about ceding over land or paying reparations. The Diamonds give up power, and then the show skips ahead five years when everything is better, avoiding the messiness of dismantling such regimes.

This lack of repercussions feels inappropriate and dilutes the severity of the Diamond's actions. In this context, the show’s broad narrative themes of redemption and change can be misleading. Instead of focusing on the Diamonds’ path toward change, the narrative should have given equal weight to justice and reparations for their numerous victims.

Going back to the episode “Gem Harvest,” we see a similar pattern. Andy’s xenophobic views are resolved neatly within the confines of a single episode. While this quick resolution aligns with the show’s positive themes of conversation changing people’s minds, unfortunately, it also presents an overly simplified view of tackling deep-seated prejudices. Just as with the portrayal of the Diamonds, the series fails to acknowledge both the harm such figures enact as well as the systemic efforts needed to address the issue of xenophobia.

The painful reality is that some people will never be won over by such conversations, a point Steven is unable to acknowledge until the show's epilogue (see Steven Universe Futures), well after the battle against fascism has been won.

Conclusion

The natural rejoinder to all this will be something along the lines of “Who cares? It's just a kids' show.” This logic feels strange given that we are currently undergoing a moral panic where people are claiming to be very concerned about the content children are watching. It's also important to note that no one made Rebecca Sugar talk about fascism in a kid's show. It's a serious theme, and it being handled respectfully is even more important when your audience is younger and less able to pick up on the nuances of certain arguments.

Steven Universe, while a gem in the realm of animation for its explorations of diversity, inclusivity, and complex themes, falls short in its portrayal of fascism. Its approach, although beautiful in the context of personal relationships and bridging ideological differences within families, fails to translate into larger systemic issues. Its portrayal of fascist leaders as redeemable figures who face minimal consequences for their actions is deeply problematic, as is the idea that these oppressive regimes can be dismantled through dialogue alone.

While it’s important to remember that Steven Universe is a children’s show, and certain elements are simplified for this demographic, this doesn’t absolve it of its responsibility to address these themes accurately. Ultimately, while we celebrate the series for its positive impact and narrative brilliance, it’s also crucial to critique its shortcomings. Such discussions, after all, pave the way for more nuanced and responsible storytelling in the future.

A24's ‘Beef ’— A Story of False Class Consciousness

Captured on Netflix

Beef is the story of two Asian Americans and their ensuing feud after a road rage incident. Danny Cho and Amy Lau come to loath one another as we watch them stalk, manipulate, and sabotage each other’s prospects, setting them on a path of mutually-assured destruction.

Yet Beef is more than merely two people pettily taking each other down. It’s a discussion about class and success and how people that should be united against their oppressors often redirect their anger onto easy targets just above or below them.

Everyone is miserable

As we watch Beef, the sad reality is that both of our main characters have more in common than they would like to admit. They are people alienated by the capitalist system that surrounds them, but they are so wrapped up in their own suffering they end up bringing others down with them.

For Danny, it comes in the way of poverty and societal expectations. A working-class contractor, he not only has to struggle to pay the bills but live up to the idea that he will one day provide for his parents in Korea. He is on the verge of contemplating suicide when we first meet him, one he only avoids at the last second. However, he doesn't work on his shit (insisting that “Western therapy doesn't work on Eastern minds” throughout the season) and, instead, projects his anger onto others. He, for example, escalates a minor sign of disrespect from Amy as the chance to engage in a heated road rage incident: the starting trigger for the show's eponymous beef.

For Amy, who is on the cusp of becoming a capitalist when the show begins, it's the orbit of the capitalist class's expectations that constrain her. There is a CEO character, an insufferable white woman named Jordan Forster, who often forces Amy to pervert her values and ethics to maintain a deal that will solidify Amy’s financial status. Jordan will make ridiculous demands of Amy, leading to a deeply uncomfortable series of exchanges. It’s evident from watching the show that Amy latches on to the road rage incident and later Danny himself (going as far as to extensively stalk him) because it gives her a sense of control.

These characters lack a sense of control and feel overwhelmed, and this pattern of behavior isn't sudden. They both grew up poorer and had childhoods where economic stresses were common. Amy's parents come to resent the economic burden that a kid placed on them, having loud arguments that made Amy feel thoroughly unwanted. Danny was not only routinely bullied as a kid, but one of the few flashbacks we see of their parents is them fretting about losing their motel business to a larger chain. An event we know comes to pass because, in the present, they have failed and moved back to Korea. Economic precarity was and continues to shape their psychologies, and it has led to resentment, projection, and deep depression.

Yet even the rich, “successful” characters in the show are deeply unhappy. Amy’s mother-in-law Fumi Nakai, after enjoying a lifetime of financial security, is teetering on economic ruin. Naomi, another side character, is financially healthy but does not seem to have many friends. She is not in the inner circle of Forster until the very end of the show (despite initially being married to Jordan Forster’s brother). When stressed Naomi routinely cuts out the world by zipping herself in a sleeping bag and then using a sock puppet account to anonymously harass close acquaintances.

Whether we are looking at the upper class, the working class, or the ascendant professional-managerial class, everyone in the show seems miserable. All of these characters suffer under the current system, but none of them seem to cooperate with each other, instead holding onto belief systems that prevent them from making connections and forming community.

Toxic Mentalities

There are many toxic mentalities that get in these characters' ways. Danny has held onto the belief that you have to both work hard to succeed (i.e. “meritocracy”) and stand by your family (i.e. “paternalism”). This has caused him to generate resentment for those that he perceives as taking shortcuts. He, for example, believes his younger brother Paul Cho's investment in crypto is gambling (which, fair enough) and doesn't like how he disrespects their cousin, so he demands access to Paul’s crypto wallet and changes his passwords. He is quite literally being paternalistic there because his hustle is not the “right” type of hustle.

Amy likewise also believes that hard work is paramount, telling Paul when he asks for money that becoming rich “takes a lot more work than good intentions” and that she has busted her ass for years. Amy monologues: “I’ve sacrificed my well-being, the wellbeing of my family. It’s not millionaire in no time.”

For her, at least initially, this trade-off is worth it. She chooses to let herself be strung along by billionaire Jordan of the Forster company because she is enamored by the possibility of becoming a wealthy capitalist. Amy becomes more and more toxic the longer she is in Jordan’s orbit and eventually gives a Ted Talk-esque monologue about how “You can have it all.”

Likewise, Danny’s brother Paul is not entering into solidarity with anyone. He invests in crypto in the hope of “getting rich quick.” Rather than engage in the meritocracy of his brother — one he believes is stupid — he has devoted himself to “hustle culture,” even though it's sort of clear that it's one he's not really welcome in. There is a very telling scene in episode five where Paul is hanging out with his fellow crypto bros, and the only white one is “pretending to be poor” for rhetorical cred, but it's clear that only Paul knows what poverty is actually like.

In a different vein entirely, both Fumi and Naomi cling not to wealth (they already have it) but to celebrity. Naomi is obsessed with being in an article listing some of the “most successful people” and is deeply resentful that this achievement is not recognized by those around her. She does whatever she can to cling to the recognition she thinks she deserves, eventually partnering Jordan Forster in a very hollow relationship.

Fumi wants to maintain her status in the art world, holding onto the legacy of her dead husband even though her finances are severely at risk. She could have at any moment sold a high-value work of art or confided in Amy about her deteriorating wealth, but instead, she pushed her daughter-in-law to pay for elaborate and unnecessary renovations: all for the prestige of how a wealthy, cultured family should look.

When we take a step back, we see a bunch of stressed, lonely people pointing the finger at everyone but the ones responsible: the capitalist system that alienates all of them from truly building solidarity.

Conclusion

Meritocracy. Hustle culture. Celebrity. Prestige. None of these characters are able to collaborate with each other because they are all reaching for a type of success that alienates and pits them against one another.

What all these characters lack is class consciousness or an awareness of where one's place is in the class hierarchy. Regardless of whether you are working class or middle class, if you have to use your labor in order to subsist, then you are a worker, at odds with the capitalists who own the world. It’s telling that our one billionaire character in Beef is unceremoniously killed by the door of their own panic room, a signal to the audience of who we should really be placing our ire on.

Yet all of these characters are so convinced that they will become successful that they do not do this work. It's only when Danny and Amy perceive having lost everything, are trapped in the wilderness, and are forced to talk to each other that these separations give way.

Hopefully, the viewers of Beef will not need to make such an extreme sacrifice to learn the same lesson.

Nimona: Fictional Discrimination At Its Finest

Captured: Netflix's Nimona

Nimona is a futuristic fantasy story set in an alternate world where technology has surpassed modern-day heights, but the society we see has not moved beyond the politics and aesthetics of the medieval era. The movie is called Nimona, after the shape-shifting persona of the same name that volunteers to be the sidekick of fallen knight Ballister Boldheart. Along the way, these two outcasts not only become great friends but change everything they know about the society they live in.

The story is not the most original. If you are familiar with basic adventure story tropes, you will see most twists and betrayals well in advance. I was not surprised by how this story ended. Though, predictability does not in and of itself make a piece of media bad.

And indeed, even if its basic plot beats remained unchanged from your standard adventuring story, what Nimona does well is subverting expectations on how the portrayal of discrimination should work in a fantasy setting.

Fictional Discrimination

There is a common complaint with metaphorical -isms, where a type of discrimination meant to be a stand-in for racism, anti-queerness, and the like is depicted as impacting white cisgendered, straight characters. We watch or read about people who, in real life, are near the top of the hierarchy monologue about systemic oppression, and in the process, often undercut their story's message.

The superhero genre is full of these arcs, where overpowered white people face intense discrimination by the government for being superpowered. These characters fight against this discrimination while not only having immense privileges within the text (i.e., their superpowers) but are typically played on film by traditionally privileged people: think Captain America in MCU’s Civil War.

Nimona doesn't fall into this trap. It may use the discrimination this society has against monsters as a metaphor for queerness and, more specifically, transness (e.g., Nimona describing how shifting feels natural, her general gender fluidity, etc.), but it also ensures that it's textually queer. There is a queer romance in the story, with a central tension for one of the duo being whether they should have more loyalty to the state or each other. Many characters are also played by queer actors and actresses, including Nimona herself, who Chloë Grace Moretz voices.

There's also how oppression is shown within the film. Normally, texts like this will have a TROT character (i.e., that racists over there) as the main antagonist, who will explicitly show their discrimination for all to observe (see Bryce Dallas Howard's character in The Help). Nimona has a TROT in the form of Knight Thoddeus "Todd" Sureblade. He is someone who hates commoners (another type of discrimination in this medieval society), but he is importantly not the Big Bad. Todd is merely a cog in the machine, following his social conditioning.

Like in real life, this discrimination is far more subtle than what we often see in film and TV. Nimona constantly shows how this society's hatred for monsters is learned through ingrained messaging. From the games and advertising children see on TV to the transmissions they observe from political leaders, thousands of societal forces teach them from a young age to hate monsters. As Nimona monologues: "They grow up believing they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different. And I'm the monster?"

As we touched on briefly, another type of metaphorical discrimination is against commoners. This medieval society doesn't let non-nobles participate in prestigious roles such as Knighthood. At the film's start, co-protagonist Ballister Boldheart is "one of the good commoners" who has risen from the ranks to break this "glass ceiling.” Through media segments, we see the public debating this marginal improvement, with demonizations of Ballister coming via social media posts and TV punditry.

In a more traditional piece of media, this "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative would have been played seriously. Ballister’s main point would have been to prove the TROTs and naysayers wrong. We would have observed Ballister struggle to gain acceptance in this system before finally proving himself to those on top and then finding his place there.

Take the animated Disney film Mulan, where the protagonist of the same name lies about her gender to join the army. She is shunned once her secret is revealed and only gains acceptance as a woman once she proves herself useful — in this case, stopping the Hun army from killing the emperor. Mulan (the film, not the person) doesn't create systemic reform or textually challenge the oppressiveness of these gender norms in anything more than blithe comments.

In the end, Mulan can only carve out a tenuous, individual acceptance for herself because she is so exceptional: a Savior of China — not a new mold that will liberate others. The film concludes with her conforming to the traditional female gender role of the 90s. She finds a partner, the exact thing she shunned at the beginning, ensuring the movie’s contemporary audience is not too challenged by the subversion they originally witnessed.

Nimona isn't interested in upholding such exceptionalism and, in fact, lambastes it. It's pretty clear from the start of the film that the Queen is using Ballister as a token. She does not want to reform the system but is rather desegregating Knighthood to guard against more radical change. "…starting today, any of you should be able to hold the sword if you want it. If you earn it," the Queen tells her people. She is pretending that meritocracy is enough to combat classism. The Queen is making the case that overcoming the systemic oppression commoners face in this fictional society— barriers she, as monarch, directly reinforces and benefits from — are as simple as using individual willpower.

This is a very insidious type of politics we don't see critiqued too often in children’s media. By placing what would normally be the entire arc of a movie at its start, we get an entire run time to deconstruct why this sort of representational politics doesn’t work.

As we soon see, even this token reform is too much for those in power. The Queen is assassinated for pushing this milquetoast change, and Ballister is framed for it in an attempt to stop desegregation from coming to pass. All of Ballister's knightly peers instantly turn on him, and he is forced to go underground, where he meets and befriends the titular Nimona. If he truly were accepted, his peers would believe him even during hard times, not merely when he's doing well: a point this text highlights at every turn.

As an example, Ballister becomes convinced that if he simply removes the person who wronged him— i.e., the Director of the Institute that oversees monster-slaying knights — then everything can go back to how it was before. "I don't know why she framed me," Ballister says upon seeing a video of the Director sabotaging his gear before his botched knighting ceremony, "but the Instiute's not the problem. The Director is."

Yet this text is explicit that Ballister is being naive here. As Nimona rebuts seconds later: "They brainwashed you good. You think this stops with the Director? You should be questioning everything right now. The will of Gloreth, the institute, the wall."

And indeed, all of those concepts she rails against are proven to be false, but that doesn't stop the public from being anti-monster. Even releasing a clip of the Director's confession to the assassination isn't enough to sway the public. She lies and blames it on Nimona's shapeshifting abilities. Only after the Director threatens to blow up half the city using its anti-monster defenses (and Nimona sacrifices herself in plain sight of thousands) do some people change their minds about the nature of monsters.

When it comes to fighting discrimination, it's not as simple as taking out the Big Bad. You have to assume the system will not be there to save you and engage in a very public struggle to win "hearts and minds." Nimona and Ballister didn't go about things the “right way.” They broke property, spied on people, and leaked state secrets to the public: the opposite of the bootstrapping narrative this film rejects in its first act.

A monstrous conclusion

It's evident from the start that this film doesn't want to follow the traditional narrative of metaphorical discrimination being solely the result of a Big Bad's opinions and viewpoints. The text has a very sophisticated conversation (for a children's movie, anyway) about the nature of social conditioning and how we come to hate and marginalize certain groups.

Now there are criticisms to be made that this narrative doesn't quite go far enough in its rebuttal of the TROT trope. After all, even as they criticize "the removing of the villain to drive social change" story structure, they still succumb to it in part. When the Director is killed, their society does begin to change, albeit because of a very narrow set of circumstances.

There is also the whole nature of policing in the film. We are shown a horrifying police state throughout its runtime, with the government directly spying on its citizens to “protect them from monsters.” Yet Ballister is still wearing his Shield badge in the final scene (an equivalent to a cop badge), and we see a knight playfully interact with a child as a sign that the institution is getting better. This futuristic, medieval society may have started questioning things, but the old, oppressive systems are still very much in place.

Yet these criticism feel very nitpicky, and the nature of societal reform seems like a lot of pressure to put on a 138-minute children's movie. While Nimona may not be the most innovative narrative, it still brought to the table themes and conversations that most children's movies cannot even dream to have, and what can be more metal than that?