Baldur's Gate 3 Is Very Anxious About Automation

Larian Studios

The videogame Baldur's Gate 3 earned accolades the moment it launched, dominating nominations for the 2023 Game Awards and being well-received by gamers and critics alike. The game takes place in the world of Faerûn (a common Dungeons & Dragons setting). The plot involves an invasion of Mindflayer parasites secretly influencing the minds of more and more hosts in a bid to take over the continent and perhaps all of existence.

Yet something is not typical with this resurgence of mindflayers. Not only is your character infected and not being turned into a tentacled monster, but the hivemind that usually controls such hosts is silent. In its place is the Absolute, a mysterious force your player must uncover the motivations of as you race to find a cure for your infection.

Although bugs were frequent, I found this game to be a treat to play, especially its narrative. There are many nuggets that one could deconstruct from this work: its unapologetic queerness as every other NPC casually slips in references to a same-sex partner or lover; the way it breaks down how innocent people can get indoctrinated into cults; the way player creation allows for transness in a way I haven't seen in a while.

Perhaps the most interesting is this fantasy work's take on security and Artificial Intelligence. Autonomous defense units, parallels of which are being deployed in the real world as we speak, are not depicted in the game as vehicles of safety but harbingers of fascism — an intriguing criticism as our world gears up to connect everyone and everything in the name of productivity and safety.

Fascist, fantasy robots

Automation may seem an unlikely topic in a fantasy game, where much of the population still lives in Medieval-going-on-Enlightenment-style housing. And yet, the techno-magic of Dungeons & Dragons allows for a wide assortment of flying machines, steampunk underwater bases, and, for our purposes, security robots called Steel Watchers.

Players (most likely) first hear about the Steel Watch, an autonomous defense formation meant to uphold the city's laws, from Counsellor Florrick. The politician sings the praises of Enver Gortash, the man credited with creating the Steel Watch. Depending on your companion selections, we know that Gortash is a bad guy because one of our companions, Karlach, was sold into servitude due to his backstabbing. But at this point in the game, we have yet to determine the extent of his plans and how it relates to the Steel Watch.

It takes us two-thirds of the game to reach Baldur's Gate. We have been fighting the Cult of the Absolute, trying and failing to stop their armies from making it to the outskirts of the city. When we finally get there, we are greeted by a metropolis that has been heavily militarized in response to these attacks. Massive Steel Watcher automatons patrol most of the city, checkpoints are frequent, the newspaper is being actively censored, and refugees and other displaced persons from the war have become heavily stigmatized. "We got to kick 'em out," young child Rhett says of refugees, mimicking her father's words.

The city-state of Baldur's Gate is succumbing to fascism, a loose term meant to describe authority centralizing on one figure or entity, often by relying on myth-making and violence, with heavy buy-in from a select portion of the public. Many of its habitants have willfully chosen a "tough on crime" mentality to pursue a sense of safety from both the army outside and the "threats" within. "Fear not friend, the days of proper Baulderians fearing walking the streets are over," remarks noble Saer Manzarde, glad that stigmatized people will be dealt with, out of sight by the Watch.

Fascism requires not only a fear of human difference and an exploitation of social frustrations but often the worship of a central figure for it to operate, what Umberto Eco called a "selective populism." Leaders become interpreters of the people's will, calling all of them to serve the majority, which, of course, only they alone can divine.

In this story, we have Gortash, a man who has created a cult of personality around himself as the savior of Baldur's Gate. NPCs everywhere in the city chat about how he will save their city, both physically from the Absolute and spiritually from the city's underclass. We first have a chance to speak with Gortash at his coronation, where he has a very paternalistic version of the public he "speaks" for. "…people are cattle," he lectures, "obedient until panicked."

The Steel Watch represents the security state that Gortash has built to tighten his hold on the city, one that he's candid about when you two meet. As he tells you moments before he's coronated: "…people crave strong leaders. Leaders that bring law, order, and protection. Leaders like me, Bane's unyielding hand, author of justice."

Gortash may publicly claim to have built this security apparatus in response to an emerging threat, but in much the same way fascists have historically relied on scapegoats such as Jewish people or communists to drum up fear, the Absolute threat was very much engineered. In a surprising twist, we learn that the Cult of the Absolute was a lie constructed by Gortash and other allies to create fear within Baldur's Gate so that enough of the populace would willfully accept his solution of the Steel Watch and the authoritarianism he wished to usher in.

You may think our population would never do such a thing, but the real world is rife with such examples. Following 9/11, our government adopted all sorts of security measures to provide the illusion of safety, including a massive surveillance network that is currently spying on hundreds of thousands of people via Section 702 (a provision set to expire this year, if not renewed). And because programs such as PRISM and Upstream have never disclosed a tally of American citizens being spied on, the actual number is most likely much higher. Several US cities are likewise now literally introducing robotic police dogs for the stated purpose of enhancing security. Minus the magic, the impulse to trade freedom for safety is genuine. It's easy to imagine such a tradeoff being made because, in many ways, it already has.

Furthermore, something is chilling about how Baldur's Gate 3 depicts the construction of these automatons, which relates directly to how automation works in the real world. Unlike the many fantasy golems that are animated via techno-magic alone — meaning we, as the player or viewer, don't have to think about how they move about — the Steel Watch is intimately tied to exploited sentient labor. It was, in fact, built by enslaved people, the Gondians, as well as your companion Karlach, who was enslaved for the purpose of prototyping the infernal engine foundational to a Steel Watchers design. More to the point, a Steel Watcher has biomechanical components with mindflayer brains used to pilot each and every one.

The Steel Watch, in essence, is not separate from biological sentient labor but very much intertwined with it, and this remains true of the AI of our world as well. Training deep learning models, which we know as AI, still requires human labor. For example, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, outsourced to Kenyan laborers (earning less than $2 per hour) to train some toxic behaviors out of its model. This labor is critical to how such models work. And yet, these companies often try to obscure this frequently exploitative, underpaid labor that is increasingly vital to our automated world, pretending that automation just happens.

Returning to the game, there is a social and moral cost that came with the Steel Watches construction. Gondians, out of sight from the eyes of the Baldurian public, were brutally enslaved in the Steel Watch Fondry to make these automatons. NPCs may glowingly speak in awe about the efficiency of a Steel Watcher and how it keeps them "safe," but we, as the player, come to learn that these imposing machines are not only intimately tied to exploitative sentient labor but actively help prop up a fascist government.

An automated conclusion

Like many open-ended games, we, as the player, decide what to do with the Steel Watch and the foundry used to build it. We can either destroy it or side with Gortash and let his Steel Watch protect us (at least initially).

But like with many karma-based systems, this agency doesn't make the Steel Watch benevolent. The Steel Watch is the creation of Gortash, an antagonist of the game and the Champion of the God of Tyranny, Hate, and Strife. These were devices built by enslaved people and piloted by the organs of brainwashed and murdered abductees. Everything about them, from their dark origins to imposing frames, is unsettling. There is nothing good about the Steel Watch — a message that the game hammers home at every opportunity.

Art often reflects what is happening in the real world, and as anxiety about automation increases, we will see more and more pieces like this one. Baldur's Gate 3 is very anxious about automation and how it can be used to prop up fascism. And as authoritarianism emerges all over the globe — it's not the worst moral for a game to focus on.

Biden Might Lose 2024 If He Doesn’t Back A Ceasefire

Photo by Ömer Yıldız on Unsplash

I want to preface this by saying that I have a long history of encouraging people to vote. One of my most popular articles is Pop Culture Has Never Understood Politics And Voting, where I break down what, at the time, I argued was a simplistic binary between total optimism in the system and blind pessimism. Shortly after I published that piece, I made the argument that elites historically have tried to prevent many people from voting (see Elites Don't Want You To Vote).

In 2021, I published an article directed toward my fellow leftists, arguing that electoral politics was not a failed project and that we should still engage in the Democratic process (see Why You Should Still Vote, Even If You Hate The Democratic Party). I provided three justifications for engaging in electoralism: harm reduction, the potential for radicalization, and successful elections making on-the-ground activism easier. As I wrote in that piece:

“You might not be able to get a single-payer law passed or to create a lasting autonomous zone successfully, but you can convert people to your cause and fight for small changes on the local level. Those tangible victories can galvanize people to support your cause and funnel them toward the types of activism you consider more effective.”

I still believe in democracy, and I am not encouraging people not to vote. That being said, many of the arguments I advanced in that piece simply do not apply to the situation in Gaza. The argument of harm reduction has truly gone out the window now that Biden has rejected the policy of a ceasefire and said some genuinely abhorrent language in defense of a regime many consider to be genocidal. The same can be said for elections "making on-the-ground activism easier," as many of the candidate's leftists have backed recently, including Senator Bernie Sanders, are not engaging with calls for a ceasefire, instead kicking out activists who once supported them from their offices.

As things currently stand, many Democrats will not support Biden going into the 2024 election, and perhaps any candidate who refuses to back a ceasefire against genocide as well. If the Democratic Party cannot meet these criticisms, it will most likely lose significant ground in the year ahead.

The reason why people are upset

Some say that progressives and leftists should “suck it up,” as any dissent will lead to the election of a Republican candidate such as Donald Trump. As micro influencer Karen Piper commented: "A vote against Biden is a vote for Trump. Period. I'm discouraged by leftist voices thinking otherwise because of a problem in Gaza. It will pass, and then we'll have a stupid dictator in charge."

Yet you have to understand that many are coming from this perspective from a moral angle, believing that they should not be linking our rejection of genocide to an election. In the words of another micro-influencer: “…if you can’t vote for either party, then don’t! Vote for the people who are actively pushing for a ceasefire, who best represent the average American experience, and aren’t maintaining the status quo.”

And make no mistake, what is happening in Gaza is genocide. The Israeli government is bombing hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. Over ten thousand are confirmed dead (a number estimated to be much higher), including over four thousand children. Entire bloodlines have been culled. As legal and political scholars from prestigious schools all over the world asserted in a letter on October 15th:

“Israel’s current military offensive on the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, however, is unprecedented in scale and severity, and consequently in its ramifications for the population of Gaza….huge swathes of neighbourhoods and entire families across Gaza have been obliterated. Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water and other essential necessities. This terminology itself indicates an intensification of an already illegal, potentially genocidal siege to an outright destructive assault.”

Israel has long maintained a settler-colonial project against the Palestinian people. Hundreds of thousands were expelled from their homes following the partition of Palestine by the UN (and the ensuing war in the late 1940s) and then crammed into the world's largest open-air prison. In the words of the United Nation's website describing this history:

“The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, with the end of the British Mandate and the departure of British forces, the declaration of independence of the State of Israel and the entry of neighbouring Arab armies. The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive. The result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.

As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugee return, property restitution and compensation (resolution 194 (II)). However, 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinians continue to be denied.”

These actions have been (and are currently being) funded directly by the United States. From 1951 to as recently as this year, hundreds of billions of dollars have been funneled to the Israeli government, many of which have been used to fund the military and its apartheid regime against Palestine.

That is the framing many leftists and progressives now hold. They do not believe we should play the “accept genocide for political convenience” game and are withholding their vote because they consider it morally correct. As one person remarked: “…why Biden lost my vote…I am making this statement not because it will change anything in this country. I am making it so the country won’t change me. I am making this statement so they don’t [rob] me of my humanity. I won’t support this race to the bottom. I cannot support genocide or rationalize it.”

If Biden is not willing to be on the right side of history here, the argument goes, then he is a bad leader unworthy of the presidency.

The political implications

The fact that so many people are now staking their vote to Palestinian Liberation is a bad sign for Biden going into 2024. Biden won partly because of young voters — a demographic that increased their turnout by 11 points from 2016 to 2020. One NBC exit poll suggested, "…that 65% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for Biden."

Younger people are also more likely to support Palestinian liberation and a ceasefire. What Biden’s supporters are accomplishing by shaming those angry with this administration's anti-Palestine stance is creating a rift between them and this crucial bloc of voters. It signals to all those paying attention that such naysayers have no intention of listening to this vital demographic, and this willful blindness makes it more likely that young voters will check out in 2024. As the political director for the Sunrise Movement, Michele Weindling told The Rolling Stone:

“Biden has the opportunity to listen to the majority of people in this country that are calling for him to call for a ceasefire, and an end to unconditional support to the Israeli military. And we are seeing an immense risk around whether or not young people will feel alienated ahead of the 2024 election and risk staying home.”

The same can be said of many groups in America, such as American Muslims, whose support for Biden has plummeted. The same might also be true for Black Americans, whose support has likewise dipped. In general, Biden's approval now sits at just under 40%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, and he has lost significant ground in a hypothetical pairing with Republican contender Donald Trump.

Supporting a ceasefire would ensure that that hemorrhaging does not continue. If Biden were smart, he would budge here on demanding a ceasefire and then change nothing else (i.e., still provide funding to Israel). It's a move that would piss off leftists who believe we must stop funding the Israeli war machine but would appease those on the more liberal end of the spectrum and prevent mass disengagement.

Instead, he's denying the existence of a genocide, and the world is watching him do it. Forget morals for a second; this is bad politics — the thing Biden is supposed to be good at. Democrats need massive support to win the 2024 election, in some cases in margins in only the tens of thousands, and he's willing to gamble that margin away to support a genocide.

If you want to guarantee that he loses swing states, then by all means, shame these constituencies into disengagement. Watch as Biden loses states such as Michigan, which is home to over 200,000 Muslim voters, and Georgia (and really much of the South), where young voters were a deciding factor in the 2020 election.

Because the message coming out of the Palestine Liberation Movement is quite clear: no ceasefire, no votes. As Nihad Awad, the national director at the Council on American–Islamic Relations, said in a speech during the pro-Palestine march on Washington, DC: "The language that President Biden and his party understands is the language of votes in the 2023 elections, and our message is: no ceasefire, no votes….No votes in Michigan, no votes in Arizona, no votes in Georgia, no votes in Nevada, no votes in Wisconsin, no votes in Pennsylvania."

The Biden administration ignores this ultimatum at their peril.

Biden’s flawed gambit

There is a certain cynicism that is related to the genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip. With the election about a year away, the Biden Administration is gambling that the voting public will stop caring about this issue by the time they go to the polls.

And yet, moments like this are formative ones for the electorate. In the same way, the George Floyd Uprising shifted how many (though not all) talk about race in America, countless on the Left are educated about Palestine liberation in a way they simply weren’t four months ago. We might not be talking about this issue in six months in the same way (that depends on the extent of the campaign in Gaza and the West Bank), but that doesn’t mean voters won’t remember.

It only takes tens of thousands of votes to swing an election in a state one way or the other. Biden is already an unpopular candidate (so too is Trump, for that matter), and Genocide Joe is a much worse nickname than Sleepy Joe. This baggage will stick with him if he doesn’t get ahead of it because, unlike four months ago, the world is more aware of the situation in Gaza, and many don’t like what they see.

“They Cloned Tyrone” Eviscerates the Black Professional Managerial Class

Sourced: Captured, Netflix

The satire They Cloned Tyrone is an absolute delight. It's essentially about a group of Blaxploitation archetypes (i.e., a portmanteau of Black and exploitation describing films that perpetuate offensive stereotypes about the Black community) as they are brought together in the wake of an unusual murder. Along the way, they uncover a conspiratorial plot in their community of Glen that cuts to the core of white supremacy in America.

There are many lenses from which to deconstruct this film. The most obvious is perhaps how it humanizes stereotypical archetypes — "the pimp," "the thug," "the ho" — that have been the butt of our white supremacist society’s jokes for years. These characters use skills they have learned in their lives to correct injustices, expanding the viewer’s empathy and providing a bit of excellent catharsis along the way. (As a personal note, I loved how Yo-Yo used her passion for Nancy Drew books to help solve this mystery).

One thing I want to narrow in on is how this movie treats the Black Professional Managerial Class (i.e., a term used to describe people who control production processes not through the owning of capital but via their high places in management). The film sees them not as a vanguard for liberation but rather as barriers at best and, at worst, tools of the Black working class's obliteration.

White Supremacist capitalism

To cut to the chase of what the plot of this movie is, a white supremacist organization with ties to "those in power" is experimenting on the community of Glen and communities all over the world to learn how to control people of color.

This movie could have personalized this conspiracy through individual actors, as has been standard in many Hollywood films where racism is the product of one particular individual's bigotry (see Hilly in The Help), but instead, it's more amorphous. We don't even get to meet the big bad at the very top of this conspiracy. As one minor antagonist says when asked if he's in charge: "No, everyone's got a boss. Mine's a real hardass." There is no simple villain we can point to to blame everything on.

Rather, the film places its ire on a system, and not just any system, but that of white supremacist capitalism. Black people are not being controlled overtly but subtly through consumption. The conspiracy, in particular, is doing so through items of consumption closely associated with Black culture — fried chicken, grape juice, club music, etc. These products literally have components meant to distract, subdue, and pacify those in the community of Glen.

We see this in the real world, too. Fast food, for example, may not be direct mind control, but it has long been studied that these foods take advantage of quirks in human biology to make them as addicting as possible. Fast food companies then place their stores (which, again, have psychologically addicting products) in Blacker and Browner neighborhoods, taking advantage of these groups and furthering a sense of dependence on their products.

On average, this is compounded by the fact that Black people in America earn less than their white counterparts, have less wealth, and own less property. We may have moved past direct bondage (at least partially — see the prison system). However, groups at the bottom of our racialized caste system are still systemically denied the means to access high-end resources. This reality means that many must rely on subpar food, housing, and the like, which, on average, reduces Black people’s overall standard of living: a fact the film satirizes at every turn.

Tyrone & The Black Professional Managerial Class

Knowing this, one might think that when this film reaches its climax, we would have to hear a monologue from some white CEO or political figure running the facility below Glen about how white people are "superior," but They Cloned Tyrone is far more nuanced than offering a simple binary condemnation. It instead places its contempt, symbolically at least, at the Black Professional Managerial Class and how they often collaborate with that system to stifle actual change.

A central conceit of this film is cloning, and one of the main characters, Fontaine, has been cloned many times. A minor antagonist Fontaine has to "face off" against is a wordless clone of himself called Chester. Dressed in a suit ("professional attire"), Chester is forced to obey the orders of his superiors, a very telling and somewhat sad portrayal of what the Black Professional Managerial Class must become to obtain power. While Fontaine uses that lack of agency to ultimately free himself from capture, Chester is not redeemed following Fontaine’s triumph. Instead, he is left motionless, no longer having any orders to follow.

Furthermore, when we meet the manager of the facility beneath Glen, it's Fontaine, well, at least the original Fontaine, a brilliant scientist who perfected the cloning program. Original Fontaine is working for this white supremacist organization partly because he wants to resurrect his dead brother (a nod to how many Black professionals serve large companies and organizations that actively harm their communities for personal gain) but also because of his philosophical outlook. As he monologues to cloned Fontaine:

“… It's not enough to think the same. We have to be the same. My work in the cloning initiative helped me track 378 unique genes that separate you, and your ghettos, from your counterparts in the suburbs…Once I sequenced them all, I approached my superiors with an addendum, and I'm sure you’re aware of our first test subjects… [the managers], not complete successes, but they pass…

… We have since perfected the process….this won’t happen overnight Fontaine. It’ll happen over generations. And now we are at the precipice of our true national rollout. Assimilation is better than annihilation.”

Original Fontaine essentially wants Black people to be white, to cling to whiteness so hard their Blackness, impossibly, disappears. There has been a long historical tradition of Black intellectuals arguing over how best to tackle White Supremacy, and not all of them have been revolutionary, but like original Fontaine, assimilationists, albeit not as heightened as in the movie. Booker T. Washington— a man around during the mid-1800s to the early 1900s — notoriously argued for this viewpoint, saying in a speech in 1895:

“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.”

Washington here is essentially advocating for Black Americans to ignore discrimination and instead focus on material prosperity. Others have pointed out that this viewpoint concedes political power for vague promises of future acceptance. In the words of W.E.B DuBois in a widely cited essay in 1903: "Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission…Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things, — First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth…"

Indeed, there is much to believe the film would be more in line with DuBois than Washington. When you take a step back, Original Fontaine's plan is actual annihilation. He intends to use breeding to slowly replace the Black population over the course of generations until everyone is the same. He may think he's serving the community, however, everything he is doing hurts the community of Glen. Not only does he hold internally racist viewpoints, such as believing the differences between races (a social construct) are genetic, but he is willing to condemn his people to a slow withering away in the name of "progress."

They Cloned Tyrone is decidedly not in the pro-assimilationist camp. It's telling that Cloned Fontaine has to kill off this professional version of himself. There is no redemption for the Black Assimilationist, it seems.

A Fringe Conclusion

Ultimately, freedom for Glen doesn't come from the top — and it certainly doesn't come from the middle — but below. The people that society thinks are worthless — those who "keep the rents" down so that the conspiracy can conduct its experiment — are who ultimately raid the facility and bring its abhorrent behavior to light.

Throughout the movie, we are shown over and over again that "forgotten" people have more insight and power than our society gives them credit for. Whether it is the man in front of the liquor store who knows precisely "what's going on" or the gang members willing to go to bat, violently if necessary, for their community — it's the people below, the movie suggests, who have the power to bring our white supremacist society to its knees.

And in an age of rampant inequalities, that is a lesson worth considering.

A Brief Look at Death Cannons

Photo by Taylor R on Unsplash

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those thrill seekers out there who want to see some things that are downright insane. We note the problematic locations, tools, and, in this case, weapons that contributed to species 947's (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]) entirely predictable end on a tiny, weeny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at death cannons, known to the natives there as "guns" [guhnz]. These were metal tubes that could propel even smaller pieces of metal or plastic for the purpose of penetrating the flesh sacs of humans. In the words of xeno-anthropologist Qe're'witz Sod: "The simplicity of the tool implies that humans were aggressive creatures. And also stupid."

Every known sentient species at one point or another has developed tools of murder — the mutant flies of Omegar, the supremely terrifying radioactive ice cream of Bastian VI. Humans from the Empire known as the United States of America were unique in believing that carrying such weapons was a divine right. Their country's constitution had enshrined "the right to bear arms," which constituencies such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) had convinced this empire's corrupt government that people should be able to carry and worship unrestricted from the forces of the law. As then-executive vice president of the NRA Wayne LaPierre once noted, presumably before kissing his death cannon, "Our Second Amendment is freedom's most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea."

Unsurprisingly, this led to a situation where these death cannons were used quite frequently. Disgruntled individuals, mainly on the fascistic end of the human political spectrum, would employ such weapons to execute people who frustrated them, especially social minorities they erroneously believed were inferior. In the human year 2022, the country had nearly 650 "mass shootings" [mas shoo·tuhngz], defined as a situation where at least four or more humans were injured or killed.

Sadly, this trend applied even to younglings called "children" [chil·druhn], with 51 of those mass shootings in the year 2022 occurring in places of learning known as schools [skoolz]. The specter of school shootings became an unavoidable aspect of these fragile human lives. Schools often had to practice drills to prepare younglings for the statistically significant likelihood someone with a death cannon would assault them. The only parallel I can draw is to the ritual sacrifices of younglings on Sticklit Prime, but seeing as that species is immortal, such sacrifices are primarily for show. Again returning to the words of xeno-anthropologist Qe're'witz Sod describing school shootings: "That shits f@cked up."

This situation not only indicated deep social dysfunction at the heart of the US Empire's political structure but also had a direct environmental cost on society. Death cannons emitted many death chemicals (what humans may have referred to as greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide). The firing of Death cannons (as well as the improper disposal of their ammunition) could release toxic metals such as copper, antimony, mercury, and lead as particulate matter, or most terrifyingly, potentially sink into the soil and sometimes leach into groundwater and surface water. This could have detrimental effects on the fragile human body.

This pollution was something that scaled depending on the ammunition and death cannons used, the ventilation at the time of firing, and, perhaps most importantly, the scale of the conflict. For example, a prolonged military conflict in the early 2020s known as "the War in Ukraine" between the fascist oligarchy known as "Russia" and an economic vassal of the United States called Ukraine led to the usage of many death cannons, including more mobile varieties known as "tanks" [tangks]. While capturing an accurate figure is complex, some estimates placed it at 33 million tons of greenhouse gases by November 2022. That number grew to over an estimated 120 million tons in the first twelve months of the war as the country's death chemical industries were damaged in the ensuing months.

Albeit much less than the cost of war (a high bar), there were also the death chemicals that came with the direct production of these items, especially from the production of their corresponding ammo — emmissions that had a long history of ending up in human waterways. As Jeffrey F. Hall-Gale wrote in one of humanity's pathetic academic journals: "…gun and ammunition manufacturers have been identified as some of the worst polluters in the country. The United States Department of Defense's (DOD) Radford Army Ammunition Plant (RAAP) in Virginia, for example, was the second largest polluter among all facilities discharging chemicals in 2010 due to its release of 12,006,602 pounds of toxic chemicals."

Even as these firms allegedly attempted to reduce the death chemicals emitted in their production by creating energy-efficient products such as lasers, there was also all the excessive heat that such goods produced. Like all human goods, the production of death cannons required, according to Glorb's Universal Law of Entropy, that "the total quality of energy not be conserved." This meant that while humans used low-entropy energy to do the work of "making stuff," it inevitably led to high-entropy wastes that were unavailable for further use or degraded, which, when released into their environment, exacerbated the destruction of 947's atmosphere. Even if partially recaptured, it was impossible for death cannon production (and again, all goods) not to emit some heat waste, a fact their modern economy often tried to ignore through an ancient practice known as "lying" [lai·uhng].

As humans continued to experience the worsening effects of climate change, their thinking became more and more detached from the fundamental laws of entropy and thermodynamics, hoping some magical technology would come along to break the laws of the universe and somehow reduce all waste in the process.

In the meantime, there were always death cannons for sale.

A deadly conclusion

Death cannons are a great item to review when analyzing humanity's destruction because they were items that were both socially and environmentally destructive. People used them to kill others, instilling a paralyzing culture of fear and paranoia, while their production and usage released waste that furthered the destruction of humanity's environment.

Many humans did not like the status quo of gun production in America, often calling on leaders to pass legislation that would limit the production or ownership of such weapons. However, there were not many attempts to sabotage production, as humans were very self-conscious of property ownership, believing that those who claimed possession of the land had, within the reason of the law, the right to make whatever they wanted — the social and environmental consequences of that production be damned.

Increasingly, however, death cannon manufacturers were deemed significantly responsible for the costs they had on US society. As fragile human theorist Thomas Metcalf argued in their paper Gun Violence as Industrial Pollution in Public Affairs Quarterly:

“…the prevalence and possibility of gun violence increase the demand for guns, since some buyers want to use the guns violently, and others want to use them for self-defense…

…gun manufacturers are in a position to know the general statistics about the prevalence of gun violence, since these data are presumably helpful to their marketing, public relations, and legal strategies…[the manufacturer] at least foresees that some innocent victims will be victimized by people using those guns….

…Presumably, if anyone is morally responsible for anything, then [the gun manufacturer] is morally responsible for manufacturing and distributing [them]…”

Sadly, not enough humans adopted this mentality, as their species produced death cannons to the end.

For our temporal visitors, see how many of these death cannons you can find in the wild. We have provided a list of the largest Death cannon factories in the US so you can observe them at your leisure.

• 2100 Roosevelt Ave, Springfield, MA 01104 (Smith & Wesson)

• 1852 Proffitt Springs Rd, Maryville, TN 37801 (Smith & Wesson)

• 271 Cardwell Rd, Mayodan, NC 27027 (Ruger)

• 1 Lacey Pl, Southport, CT 06890 (Ruger)

• 18 Industrial Dr, Exeter, NH 03833 (Sig Sauer)

• 129 Broadway, Dover, NH 03820 (Sig Sauer)

• 7 Amarosa Dr, Rochester, NH 03868 (Sig Sauer)

• 100 Springdale Rd, Westfield, MA 01085 (Savage Arms)

• 1 Lawton St, Yonkers, NY 10705 (Kimber Manufacturing Inc.)

• 200 Industrial Blvd, Troy, AL 36081 (Kimber Manufacturing Inc.)

• 30 Lower Valley Rd, Kalispell, MT 59901 (Kimber Manufacturing Inc,)

Remember that death cannons were quite lethal, as they were intended to murder other humans. Gun wielders were also very uppity about the different names of death cannons and would chastise anyone criticizing gun ownership for not knowing them. It's advised that you approach all such people with caution. Set your energy shields to their highest safety 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:

The Pirate Show 'One Piece' & the Cyclical Nature of Oppression

Netflix, ep 6 "The Chef And The Chore Boy"

The live-action One Piece, based on the manga and anime of the same name, is about a pirate named Monkey D. Luffy and his crew as they search for the infamous treasure, The One Piece, hidden somewhere on the Grand Line. This world is one made of island chains (and one large, inaccessible continent), making shipbuilding and piracy a fact of life. Throw in some zany characters and an even campier aesthetic, and the viewer is undoubtedly guaranteed a treat.

There is always difficulty that comes when adapting between mediums. With its long-drawn-out fight scenes, Shounen anime is not well suited for the budget constraints of live-action TV. The Netflix adaptation had to be heavily slimmed down episodes-wise because of this. For example, the arc where Luffy defeats the pirate Buggy the Clown (see the Orange Town Arc) takes about five episodes to resolve in the anime and only two in the live-action show.

Therefore, for such adaptations, there is always a concern that some magic would get lost in this trimming. And while the show rearranged some things — character motivations are revealed way sooner, and some are axed entirely— mostly, I believe that the series captures the essence of the anime and manga quite well (see Trent Cannon's essay to see the significant differences between the show and the manga).

However, there is one key difference that deserves more analysis, and it's that of Arlong, the sharky Fish-man who wants to dominate humanity as an act of vengeance for his people's previous enslavement. Yet rather than tie into an old, problematic trope of the oppressed becoming just as bad as the oppressor, his violence is rooted in how those in power preserve the status quo — a refreshing take not seen as much in pop culture.

Fictional revolutionaries

The show, perhaps to tie into the zeitgeist, has retooled the motivations of Arlong. In the manga, he is merely dismissive of humans because he believes they are physically weaker — physiology that is more or less the same in the anime, the manga, and the live-action show. However, Arlong hates humanity in the latter because humans enslaved and later segregated fish-people. As he says to a marine: "…the leaders of the organization you so proudly represent saw fit to disparage and enslave my people…[and] your prejudice remains."

Let's not beat around the bush here. Metaphorically, we are meant to draw a line between the treatment of fish-people by humans in this land and Black people in the real world, who were also enslaved and discriminated against. This subtextual reading is made more explicit by casting a Black man (the talented McKinley Belcher III) in the role of Arlong, which wonderfully rebukes a tendency in media to have “metaphorical racism” narratives where white people play the oppressed group (see Star-Crossed, Zootopia, and many more).

And what does Arlong want to do in response to that mistreatment?

He wants to enslave and conquer humanity. "Fish-men are the rightful rulers of the seas," he monologues to his crew. "And the humans know it, too. They fear our power, so they bound us with chains. They loath our presence, so they banned us from their cities…But we broke those chains and built our own cities. Now the time has come to restore the natural order of this world…we will teach each and every human their rightful place."

Arlong was oppressed, and so he wants to replicate this dynamic with his oppressors. We see this tendency on a smaller micro scale when he enslaves the main character, Nami, as a child, chaining her up in a small room to take advantage of her cartography skills. He is contributing to a cycle of abuse.

As the saying goes, "hurt people hurt people." It's a trend we can see in the real world with abuse. While most survivors of abuse do not become abusive, it can correlate in some instances. One study found that "…adults who had records of abuse or neglect as children were twice as likely to have been reported to [Child Protective Services] because of child maltreatment" (note — there were limitations to these findings, and it's important not to walk away with the erroneous conclusion that an abused person will automatically go on to perpetuate abuse).

We can see this on the state level as well. At the risk of being controversial, the state of Israel was founded on the collective trauma of the European Genocide against the Jewish people, and that new state, in turn, used that hurt to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands (see the Nakba). Israel has since arguably constructed an apartheid regime in the Gaza Strip. Trauma was weaponized to justify harm on a massive scale — and we have no reason to believe that the world Arlong wants to build will be any different.

There is a tendency to believe that this cycle of abuse is inescapable. This belief is especially prominent in pop culture where, except for maybe in Star Wars, oppressed groups who try to free themselves often become just as oppressive as the group they broke free from. Erik Killmonger from Black Panther; Marco Inaros from The Expanse; Daisy Fitzroy from Bioshock: Infinite; Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones; the hosts from Westworld— we could spend the rest of this article just listing examples of this happening in media.

And yet, just because it can (and does) happen doesn't mean that that regime is inevitable. When I look at Haiti, for example, the revolts that led to independence may have been violent for those enslaved people's oppressors (arguably rightfully so), but the country didn't create a regime that was just as oppressive as what came before, where white people were now in chains. Haiti forswore imperialism and reimagined race (on paper). Although many problems existed afterward — some perpetuated by imperialist powers, others by the newly emerging governments toward their own peasantry — there wasn't a role reversal where white Haitians were suddenly enslaved.

Our history is ripe with counter-examples of oppressed groups freeing themselves from oppressive regimes and then not becoming just as bad as what came before. Still, somehow, our media is bereft of these examples. I believe it is partly a defense mechanism from our institutions, which do not want to recognize the initial harm done by colonizers for fear that it will lead to even worse reprisals. As I argue in Westworld and the Limits of White Imagination:

“…the trope we have discussed above hints that, white society, by which I mean white supremacist, capitalist colonialist patriarchy, has never moved on from this fear that oppressed people will call for their pound of flesh when the time comes. It’s not a coincidence that most stories we see today of oppressed people violently rebelling against their oppressors devolve so quickly into an even worse status quo.”

For its part, One Piece has a more nuanced conversation about why this happens. Arlong was not lifted to power because his violence was inevitable but rather because his type of instability is what the World Government (that's what the centralized authority is called in the show) prefers. They brokered an agreement with dangerous pirates called the Warlords of the Sea to let the status quo remain, and Arlong has an ongoing "agreement" (bribe) with Marine Captain Nezumi for his operations in the East Blue to be ignored.

Tellingly, the World Government supports violent extremists rather than transformative revolutionaries like our main character, Luffy, because the prior is perceived as less of a threat to the status quo. As Vice Admiral Garp lectures to a subordinate: "…the world is no simple place. The same set of laws do not apply to everyone… but you have to decide if you can live with that…[because] the marines are all that are standing between order and anarchy." Garp doesn't care about changing the system, merely preserving his sense of order. He wants to keep everything the same, fearing that change will devolve into chaos. And if that means funneling revolutionary frustrations toward tyrants like Arlong and the even more powerful Warlords of the Sea, well, that's an acceptable risk to him.

That take is refreshing compared to such authoritarianism constantly being depicted in media as “inevitable” whenever oppressed people dare use violence against their oppressors. And in fact, this aligns more closely with our lived reality anyway. In the real world, many extremist groups are funded by imperialist superpowers. The US funded, sometimes indirectly, other times quite directly, the predecessors to Al-Qaeda, the Contras in Nicaragua, ISIS, Al-Qaeda again, and many more. Israel has backed the group Hamas. These countries often fund rogue insurgent groups to combat an immediate enemy, only for it to tragically blow up in their faces years or decades later.

Whether we are talking about the World Government of One Piece or the governments of the here and now, such violence is very much engineered (partly) by those in power.

A drowning conclusion

The richness of this commentary owes much to the source material. Eiichiro Oda's manga has constantly been called anti-imperialist, and you can see those influences bleed into the live-action show. The World Government was arguably more corrupt in the manga and anime, but I am glad that corruption is still a central component in the Netflix adaptation.

However, this doesn't mean that the manga was perfect. Eiichiro Oda's handling of race left much to be desired. The character Usopp's chief trait was that he always lied, and for a long time, he was the one Black lead on the show. In a years-old interview, while Oda could list where every other character's fictional counterpart would be from in the real world (Luffy would be from Brazil, Zoro from Japan, Nami from Sweden, etc.), Usopp was the only one he claimed, based on appearance, was from "Africa," contributing to the tired trope of flattening the continent to only one place. Usopp also had exaggerated facial features in the manga and anime that some fans considered problematic.

A lot has changed in the years since, and the live-action show (while keeping many things in place) has updated the material's sensibilities on race. Usopp's features were not exaggerated for the show, and many more Black and Brown characters were included to make a more well-rounded story.

We can also see this transformation in how Arlong was handled. He may be authoritarian, but because of the anti-imperialist themes of the story, we get a departure from the usual moral that radical revolutionaries are no different from the oppressors they fight against. Arlong is not a symbolic extension of what happens when the oppressed use violence in the name of freedom, but a rogue militia tacitly supported by the very government he is allegedly fighting.

Because while oppression may not be inevitable, it certainly can be enforced and funded by the status quo.

What Israel Is Doing In the Gaza Strip Is Not "Defense"

Photo by mohammed al bardawil on Unsplash

The word “defend” originates from a combination of the Latin word de, meaning “from or away,” and fendere, meaning “to strike, hit, or push.” It is a word about resisting attack from others, literally pushing a force away. At some point, the need for defense ends. The attacker is repelled, and if successful, you, as the defender, have the upper hand.

A question naturally arises of when the defense ends, one that is saliently linked to the current issue in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Over the past few days, a narrative has emerged that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, which tragically killed over 1,300 civilians, Israel has every right to “defend itself.” As President Biden remarked shortly after the attack: “ISo, in this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel….And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”

The Israeli government has military superiority and appears to be leveling Gaza City as we speak, but curiously, this language of defense has been front and center. Attack and defense are moral positions as much as they are definitional ones. A defender is largely considered to be in the right, while an attacker is deemed the opposite. If an attacker is killed during their attack, the defender is morally considered not to be in “the wrong” for such an action: they were merely “defending” themselves.

Therefore, parties are incentivized to label their actions as defensive. Whether we are talking about an individual or, as in the case of Israel, an entire country, those who are defending themselves generally “win” in the court of public opinion, and that’s what we are seeing with this current media campaign.

And yet, when we focus on the actual word “defend”, we find this framing is inaccurate and manipulative. Political figures are ultimately perpetuating propaganda to justify harm on a massive scale and duplicitously branding it as harm prevention, twisting the very nature of language in the process.

War is not defense

This problem is not new. There has been a type of Orwellian “doublespeak” (e.g., deliberately obscuring or distorting the meaning of words) over the last few decades where Departments and Agencies of War have been rebranded as Departments of Defense.

For example, the most prominent defensive force within the United States is the National Guard: individual militias overseen by each state and territorial governorship, though the Office of the President can also direct them. It is part of the National Guard Bureau, a venture that can feed into the Army and the Air Force Reserves, but is not technically a Branch or Department of the Department of Defense (DoD). It is one of the few security institutions, besides the Coast Guard, one could safely say is devoted to defending US citizens, though even here, these assets are also used abroad.

The Department of Defense, on the other hand, is a little different. While it does position troops in the US — there are military reserves stationed in practically every state — mostly, it is not preparing defensive efforts but is in charge of what it describes as “deterring war.” The DoD does this by engaging in acts of violence abroad. DoD assets have constantly used drones or planes to bomb other countries. We are also providing other regimes with hardware to fight for our interests more directly, including Israel.

While the DoD may frame these actions as “defensive” or related to “peacekeeping,” much of its time is spent meddling in other nations’ affairs. “Proactively defending yourself” is the same as saying you will attack someone. It is a polite way to dress up violence as peace. In other words, the Department of Defense is really a Department of War.

It’s the same language game with the Gaza Strip situation. When Hamas attacked Israel in the infamously dubbed Al-Aqsa Flood — an operation that tragically took the lives of at least 1,300 Israeli civilians — it initially defended itself against Hamas, taking back all the land they lost in the engagement. This was not surprising as Israel has one of the best militaries in the world (funded by the US, owner of an even stronger one), and except for a hundred or so hostages, its military curtailed the potential for violence at a massive scale against its citizens within that initial engagement.

None of Israel’s succeeding actions have been “defense” but rather “attack.” When you cut off the water and electricity of a territory and brace for a ground invasion, that is not “defending yourself”; it is conducting (and augmenting) a siege. Israel has already repelled or pushed away Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. It is now attacking another polity and rationalizing the harm done to its nation as a pretext to perpetuate even worse harm. Israel is the historical aggressor here, and since they have long been found subjugating civilians of the Gaza Strip, conducting an apartheid regime according to many human rights groups, and in some cases even violating International Law (see white phosphorus attack), the idea that this attack is somehow defensive is quite preposterous.

Furthermore, there was a disturbing development on October 13th when the Israeli government demanded that over one million people relocate from Northern Gaza, its most heavily populated area, to the South within 24 hours. It is onerous to relocate people, depending on your age or disability status, impossible even, and such an action condemned many to their deaths as they ran out of time and the bombing campaign intensified. Over one thousand children have died as the Israeli government bombed hospitals, schools, and other essential infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

But even if everyone could magically relocate within that period, the forced relocation of a population might be classified as a war crime or even an act of genocide. As genocide scholar Raz Segal wrote in Jewish Currents of Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s orders to impose a siege: “Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.”

A sobering conclusion

It’s tragic that so many Israeli civilians died in the initial operation. I want to stress that the violence committed against those Israeli civilians during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was horrific, and I am heartbroken over it. I do not think we should blame a country’s citizens for the harm their country commits, harms they may disagree with and have even resisted. I do not take glee in the fact that many people were mowed down during a music festival.

Yet we cannot let that heartbreak close our souls to the innocent people on the other side of this conflict, people who also had no say in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood because the Gaza Strip has not had an election since 2006, and about half of whom are inside it are 18 years old or younger. We are being told it’s OK that this predominantly young population, trapped inside an open-air prison for their entire lives, is being bombed into oblivion because Israel has “a right to defend itself.”

I find this justification abhorrent. Words mean something, and to call what Israel is doing now “defense” warps that word so far away from its original meaning that it genuinely becomes Orwellian. You might as well call the bombs dropping on Gaza “love droplets” and the lives lost to them “voluntary transfers.” If we are making up things for the sake of our comfort, why acknowledge the conflict at all? Just say no one lives there and never did.

At this moment, the government of Israel is not a shield defending its people from harm but a hammer crashing down on others for the sake of its own comfort, and it is calling itself a savior for doing so — if anything is farthest from the word defense, it is this.

Being Trans Isn't Just One Thing

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

One of the most frustrating things about the public discourse around trans issues is how low the floor is regarding what people know. The way some describe "transgender ideology" is so disconnected from reality that from this rhetoric, you could easily confuse a transgender person for some demonic harpy from the Pits of Tartus. According to these hate influencers, we are all groomers who take pleasure in not only "cutting up" our own bodies but "convincing" children to do the same.

All of this is, of course, nonsense, and while we could spend this time debunking these claims (which I have already done repeatedly), fundamentally, it just seems like these people don't understand what being transgender even is. Many Americans, especially older ones, believe that the pace "of change around issues of gender identity" is going too quickly, with a plurality believing that gender is determined by someone's sex assigned at birth. Many people don't seem to understand sex and gender at all, parroting gender essentialist tropes that often equate transness to some absurd parody.

And so, at the risk of sounding redundant, I want to stress that there is no single type of trans people and that many's definitions of gender and transitioning are painfully inaccurate.

Gender, sex, and all the many shades of trans

Part of the confusion is generational. According to texts such as the DSM–III, which was put out by American Psychiatric Association in 1980, "transgenderism" or "transsexualism" used to be considered a mental disorder. Transsexualism was defined as "…a persistent discomfort and sense of inappropriateness about one's assigned sex in a person who has reached puberty."

Definitionally, the stated "goal" of transexuals was to use a combination of "gender presentation" (i.e., clothing, speech, mannerisms, etc.), "gender identity" (how someone identifies via pronouns, naming conventions, and other gender markers), and "medical interventions" (i.e., hormones, surgeries, etc.) to "pass" as another binary gender. Or, as the DSM-III put it, "…getting rid of one's primary and secondary sex characteristics and acquiring the sex characteristics of the other sex."

This was and still is a perfectly fine goal in isolation, but as a totalizing definition, it excluded everyone who wanted a different path and was quite transphobic in its framing. The DSM-III insisted that people could always clock a transgender person, or in its own words, "the alert observer can recognize [a transexual]," which is just demeaning and untrue. There are plenty of trans people no one can identify until they self-id — it's sadly part of the reason some react violently to such revelations, claiming that a trans person has "trapped" them.

This archaic definition continues to have ripple effects to this day. The way even some transgender people talk is that if you aren't trying to fit into one end of the gender spectrum, you are not valid as a trans person. The prominent trans man Buck Angel is notorious for insisting that he continues to be a biological woman and often reshares prominent transphobic figures such as JK Rowling, Blaire White, and more, tweeting this year: "I said I am a female who made my appearance look male so I can walk the world without Dysphoria."

This framing was never great as there were always people in the margins who didn't fit inside of the gender binary or didn't want to. Many trans people don't have dysphoria and don't feel it's necessary, and nowadays, the medical community is largely transitioning (pun very much intended) away from this mindset. The DSM-V explicitly states now that the presence of gender variance is not itself a pathology but rather any accompanying dysphoria a trans person might have. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 no longer classifies gender identity as a mental health disorder, and what we might classify as dysphoria has been relabeled "gender incongruence" and has likewise been reframed as a non-mental health issue — the organization claiming that framing it as the latter had added to social stigma.

As things have progressed, people have started to use the word transgender to describe anyone who doesn't fit inside the classic gender binary of man and woman. As recapped by WebMd, of all places: "Not everyone's sex at birth lines up with their gender identity. That identity is how you see yourself and what you call yourself — he, she, they, or neither."

In essence, trans is an umbrella term meaning anything that is not "cisgender" (i.e., Latin for "on this side," it just means a person who has a gender identity that matches the sex registered for them at birth). Trans is not a definition that describes specific things within it, and more describes a person who, for whatever reason, does not want to align with the gender binary. Trans is a word defined in reaction to something: a word essentially describing what you are not, as much as what you are.

And so — and this is the part that throws a lot of people for a loop when we only focus on puberty blockers and surgeries — the people who decide to undergo medical intervention are only one slice of the trans community. Many trans people are only interested in experimenting with gender presentation and gender identity and will never engage in medical interventions. Not because of stigma— although that is a factor too for some people — but because they don't want to. They want to wear what they want to wear and identify how they want to identify, and that's the end of it. Again, transgender people are just those who have rejected the gender binary. There are no requirements one has to check off to do this — it simply is what someone identifies as.

In fact, there are some trans people who only engage in medical interventions such as hormones and do not vary their presentation at all. I sometimes meet this threshold. I am currently doing several medical interventions, and while I will occasionally experiment with my dress and appearance, I mostly do not. I am nonbinary, not seeking to fit either side of the gender binary, and so depending on how I present, I come across as an effeminate man with tits. Many nonbinary people can say the same. As one Redditor responded to a question on whether a Trans(MtF) person was allowed to wear typically masculine clothing: "Gender has nothing to do with clothing or makeup. Tomboys are for sure a thing. But honestly, clothes are clothes 💙."

Even when it comes to the subject of medical interventions, there are infinite combinations. There are puberty blockers (i.e., medication that lowers testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone) and hormones that increase things in the opposite direction. Electrolysis to remove hair on the body. Breast augmentation. Surgeries to change bone structure and to sculpt or remove genitals. Are all people who have opted for one or some of these surgeries the same kind of trans person? Where do you draw the line between puberty blockers, the effects of which are easily reversible, and things like genital reconstructive or "bottom" surgery, which can take months to recover from?

You can't, really, and that's my point — being trans isn't one thing.

Furthermore, many transgender people engage in neither nonnormative gender presentation nor medical interventions; they simply identify as transgender. There are buff, bearded people going by she/they pronouns, and they are still trans. There are femme, lipstick-wearing people who identify as men, and they are also still trans. Presentation is a component that can be added or discarded at will, and it doesn’t change someone’s gender.

To understand this complexity, one has to realize that there is a difference between sex (i.e., a label based on the genitals you're born with and the chromosomes you have) and gender (the presentation and identity we show to the world). Societally speaking, we do not use genitals in our day-to-day to determine if someone is a man or woman, but again, gender identity and gender presentation. We look at how they present, hear how they identify, and go from there. It's the reason why many trans people change their pronouns and names because identity is one of the primary ways we recognize someone's gender, and pronouns and other such gender markers are how that happens.

Now, if you are still following me here, this mutability with gender presentation does not mean that someone is automatically transgender for experimenting with it. You are not necessarily trans because you crossdress for a Halloween costume or even if you engage in a subversive activity such as drag. Identity is an essential component of being transgender — it is perhaps the only one — and there are plenty of cisgender people experimenting with nonnormative gender presentation and are still cisgender, including, perhaps most famously, half the cast of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Adding to this thought, there are plenty of effeminate men out there who are very much still cisgender. Gay men are classically stereotyped as effeminate, and that doesn't make them trans. There are even heterosexual effeminate men (gasps), including the fabulous TikToker James Carrington, who went viral not too long ago for being in a relationship with a masc-presenting straight woman.

To claim that gender is merely about biology not only ignores how gender has been redefined throughout human history (see Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality) but also ignores the reality of the modern trans experience. Transgender people are pretty aware of their biology — it's the reason some of us engage in medical interventions in the first place. If willpower alone could give you tits (or remove them), a trans person would have done it already.

We are aware that there is a difference between sex and gender. It's the reason why there are so many different flavors to the trans community in the first place, as deciding whether or not to engage in medical interventions (the many that exist) is one of the many choices a trans person can make.

Conclusively trans

All of this is to say that the totalizing framing of trans people as those trying to undergo one set of circumstances is limiting and untrue. Transness is so many things that cannot be narrowly placed inside a box or rubric.

Furthermore, you cannot stop trans people for this very reason because you cannot stop people experimenting with gender presentation and identity. There is no way to stop a person assigned male at birth from wearing a dress, changing their name informally, or using different pronouns. These are social constructs that are inherently fluid, and people have been experimenting with them for as long as there has been the concept of gender.

Hell, you probably can't even stop people from buying hormones and receiving illegal surgeries. Trans people injected with smuggled hormones and got under-the-table bottoms surgeries during periods with far less acceptance. I am sure they can manage it again in the Internet age — though, like with the case of abortions, their quality will be much worse.

The only option is to criminalize public acceptance of those things and, consequently, increase stigma against them so that a combination of shame and outward brutality stifle human expression. You make that expression more dangerous, as trans people face violence for being themselves and, in the case of medical interventions, experience harm from unregulated drugs and procedures.

The beauty of humanity is its diversity, and that applies to gender. Transness is a part of gender diversity, and its boundaries are murky. It's like a river, forever shifting, and its edges will never stay still for long, even by those petulantly splashing on its surface.

Why Aren't There More Lawyers in Space?

Source: Paramount Plus

In 2023, the second season of the Star Trek show Strange New Worlds, the prequel spin-off to the original series, had a legal episode where the civil rights attorney Neera defended the genetic modifications of Lt Cmdr Una Chin-Riley. The Federation, despite being a socialist polity, still has biases, and one of them has been its despicable treatment of genetically modified species like the Illyrians, who have faced systemic discrimination.

The episode was not only a great conclusion to Una's arc on her secret Illyrian identity but also an excellent metaphor for the difficulties of the immigration process and the nature of citizenship, something that many viewers might be able to relate to. Illyrians may not exist, but people's ethnicities are discriminated against all the time, and it was, in this viewer's humble opinion, an excellent way to tackle these sorts of questions.

Many people hailed the episode on social media, and it got me thinking: why are there not more lawyers in science fiction shows? Law procedurals are one of the most common types of television shows after law and medical ones. This year alone, we have on the air True Detective, Shetland, Fargo, and many more.

The sci-fi lawyer seems like a natural extension of our obsession with the legal system, and today, we are going to examine the state of this genre.

A brief history of space lawyers on TV

The sci-fi legal episode has been a quintessential aspect of TV science fiction for decades, especially in Star Trek. A famous example is The Next Generation episode The Measure Of A Man, where the character Data, an Android, has his Captain, Picard, argue for the recognition of his own humanity. You could also point to The Original Series episode Court Martial, where Captain Kirk has to defend himself against a computer that never lies, and The Menagerie, where a trial is the framing device for the entire episode.

It's not merely Star Trek, however. Babylon 5, the space opera about a diplomatic space station, was filled with episodes where delegates for various species had to defend their positions. Characters had to give impassioned monologues, including in perhaps the emotional height (or low) of the series where a desperate Narn ambassador, G'Kar, pleads in vain for the galactic community to step in as the Centaurians try to reenslave his species.

We could look at the interplay of the delegates in Battlestar Galactica, where the character Baltar is put on trial in Crossroads, Part I, for his leadership of New Caprica during the Cylon occupation. It's a cathartic moment, albeit a short-lived one as he is ultimately deemed not guilty, because this is the man who unknowingly betrayed the human race by leaking information to the robotic Cylons. This act would ultimately trigger a vicious genocide of humanity in the process.

There are also many successful book series centered on sci-fi lawyers. For example, Robert J. Sawyer's novel Illegal Alien is all about aliens landing on Earth for emergency repairs, only for one of them to be suspected of murder. A trial ensues as the world watches what happens when another species is put on trial.

Clearly, there is an audience for these types of stories. With TV specifically, the debating of the law is something that science fiction shows have naturally gravitated toward, given enough time. So why has a popular sci-fi procedural yet to come out that centers on the law entirely?

There have been plenty of other aspects of the science fiction legal system. Syfy cops are practically their own genre. We have the robot cops of Robocop and Almost Human. The time-traveling cops of Continuum, TimeCop, and Minority Report. The fringe science of the X-Files and, well, Fringe. The hammer of the law is very well represented on TV, even in space and time.

And yet, when I search for sci-fi legal procedures, I can find only one example: a failed, one-season series called Century City that dropped in 2004 and only aired four episodes before being canceled due to low ratings. The writing for the show wasn't bad, and it had an excellent cast with the likes of Viola Davis and Héctor Elizondo, but it was during the same time slot as American Idol, a ratings darling at the time, and I suspect it could not compete.

It seems strange that this nearly two-decade-old property is the only contender in this subgenre. I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that the failure of this TV show, which is mostly coincidental, has become a reason why this subgenre has not been tried more. Studio executives like a "sure thing," and they are not going to greenlight another sci-fi lawyer entry if the last one was a failure.

Unfortunately for us, that means the closest we will get to the sci-fi lawyer is one-off episodes of Star Trek.

In conclusion, your honor

Unlike police shows, which currently have countless police sci-fi shows on the air — the Beforeigners, Mrs. Davis, The Ark, and even Andor, if you consider that The Imperial Security Bureau is an intelligence agency — there are no other law science fiction procedurals in the wings. The closest is an Apple TV+ movie called Dolly that is not out yet, about a robotic "companion doll" charged with killing its owner only to claim it is not guilty, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, an MCU property on Disney+ that is more about satirizing the superhero genre than using technology to discuss modern-day problems.

And that's unfortunate because unlike cop shows, which are all about preserving the status quo, legal shows are, at least on the surface, about challenging it, providing us a window on how things could be. As one character monologues in Century City: "…[the law is about] the way things run. What society looks like. Whether this little boy lives or dies."

Law shows are at their best when they are making direct commentaries on society, serving as mini debates on the pressing issues of our time. Science fiction can heighten that premise by using technology to exaggerate the problems that come with current beliefs. These two genres fit so well together. The pilot of Century City, for example, was all about using cloning technology to skewer the pro-life argument, and it didn't feel strange or out of place.

Technology has advanced so much since 2004: this area is ripe for so many new stories coming to you, one case at a time.

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.