Alex Has Opinions 10/14/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/14/21

America is the Squid Game

We are all playing a deadly game to survive

The hit Netflix series Squid Game is a serialized drama about contestants participating in a deadly series of challenges. In the same vein as works like Battle Royale (2000) and Alice in Borderland (2020), the players participate in childlike games for the chance at fortune. The losers die, often brutally so, and the winner is offered an obscene amount of money.

However, it's more than merely a kitschy excuse to have people play deadly childhood games. The Squid Game is having a pretty extensive conversation about class and the lengths people will go to pay off their debts and secure a financial future. The game is an on-the-nose metaphor for the predatory nature of our current financial system.

The show has shot to the top of the charts in America, quickly becoming one of the most top-watched shows in Netflix history. This success is not only because of the compelling acting and the brilliantly surreal cinematography but because most counties, including America, have many of the elements of the Squid Game. The poverty and desperation among the show's characters are not just a grounded premise, but an emotional reality that we feel in our day-to-day lives.

All of the contestants are in this game because they "technically" chose to be there. All of them have racked up a substantial amount of debt for various reasons (e.g., gambling addiction, bad bets on the stock market, medical costs, etc.) in our capitalist society. They need the game's prize money— over 45.4 billion won (or roughly 37.9 million dollars) — to pay off their financial obligations. "Every person standing here in this room is living on the brink of financial ruin," lectures one of the faceless workers of the Squid Game.

Even after the murderous stakes are revealed to the contestants, and they temporarily decide via majority vote to leave, the bulk of them decide to come back anyway because this money to them is a matter of life and death. "Yeah, what they say is true," says one of the alleged contestants on his reason for wanting to go back to the games, "Out here, the torture is worse."

This level of debt is not fictional to many people in our capitalist society. According to one analysis from Money Geek, the average US household has more than $155,000 in debt, with about 76% of all households having some kind of debt. We know from other sources that the number of bankruptcies filed has steadily increased over the years, and most of them are coming from individuals, not businesses, usually due to some kind of medical issue. The Money Geek study didn't analyze medical debt, but one analysis coming out of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research claimed that medical debt exceeded all other forms of debt, writing in a takeaway:

“Between 2009 and 2020, total medical debt in collections decreased less than reductions in nonmedical debt. By 2020, individuals had more medical debt in collections than they had in debt in collections from all other sources combined, including credit cards, phone bills, and utilities.”

When characters like Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) fret about being unable to pay for their mother's diabetes treatment, it's coming from a place that many Americans know all too well. Many of us are drowning in financial burdens that will not be paid off in our lifetimes — certainly not with new debts being cumulatively added every year. This precarious situation leaves people just as desperate as the contestants in the show.

Sometimes that desperation manifests into the get-quick-rich schemes that have proliferated the Internet in recent years. Every year, millions of Americans fall for scams, legal or otherwise, because they are desperate for money. There is no shortage of people taking how-to-get-rich-quick classes that promise to make them independently wealthy, or in some cases, investing in actual Ponzi schemes and other financial fraud in the hopes that that will lead to a more secure future. However, these efforts are far more likely to only enrich the pockets of the scammers selling these offers.

We also see this desperation in how many Americans claw at any chance for fame. Millions contribute free content to sites like YouTube or TikTok in an attempt to translate that potential social capital into cash, but most users will never see a return in investment on their work. As Todd C. Frankel writes in The Washington Post of one 2018 study: "…the odds of striking it rich on YouTube — or even making a modest living — are small. Reaching the top 3.5 percent of YouTube's most-viewed channels — which means at least 1 million video views a month — is worth only about $12,000 to $16,000 a year in advertising revenue." People are fighting for a fraction of a diminishing pie, and in exchange, they are giving away much of their work for free.

This trend also applies to reality TV. Thousands every year sign up for reality shows so they can be rich and famous. Yet, these shows are often just effective vehicles to help producers get around union regulations. For example, the show RuPaul's Drag Race infamously required that their contestants do all the things actors do (e.g., reshoot scenes, enter the contestant's home or place of business to position cameras, participate in sponsorships, etc.), while also having fewer benefits, reduced pay, and having to provide their own food.

Most reality shows operate like this. They hire amateur actors who willingly sign up for labor exploitation in exchange for a slim chance at greater wealth and fame. It's in many ways the same dynamic in Squid Games, only not so much death. As former reality contestant Leonie McSorley says of their experience on the MTV show Ex on the Beach: "They basically sell you a dream and say you're going to be famous and it's going to be great, but they don't really emphasise enough how that's a slim chance."

Sometimes the things people are doing to get ahead are not even that glamorous. Its well-documented that Amazon warehouses are not great places to work. The benefits are mediocre, the labor is excruciating, and you can be fired at any time for not meeting increasingly difficult quotas. At $18 an hour for full-time workers, however, they pay people well more than many competitors in their profession, and that's incentive enough. When I visited the Baltimore Fulfillment Center years ago, more people were trying to sign up for work than those looking to inspect the facility. It's not that workers didn't know they were being exploited (though some were undoubtedly in denial). Many knew what type of economic system they were in, and we're trying to make the best of it.

The majority of us have an underlying level of desperation within our current economic system, which makes most of us disposable to those in power. At any moment, we can be swapped in for another, more pliant person who doesn't ask pointed questions about the status quo. In the past couple of decades, corporations have been more than willing to fire disgruntled workers en masse who try to unionize or protest.

This disposability is something Squid Game captures rather poignantly in nearly every frame. Not only are the contestant's disposal, marching to their deaths for the amusement of unseen VIPs, but so are the workers maintaining the facility. We learn halfway through the first season that the masked workers doing the labor to run the games are also treated indifferently by upper management. They are also called numbers and don't even have the privilege of taking off their masks or speaking with their superiors unless given permission to do so, or they risk being gunned down. "It's a huge problem when a player goes missing, but when it's a soldier, no one cares," says one worker to a player.

It's not simply an us vs. them dynamic within the Squid Game, but a system of oppression that traps most everyone to varying degrees. Some may be better off, as the workers in the Squid Game are compared to the players, but the moment someone takes off their mask, they receive a similar fate — they are discarded. They cannot reject their role any more than the players can.

This reality is the same in our world. If you are a middle-class worker making your money off the exploitation of the lower classes, you cannot stop showing up to work. Sure, you may "choose" to go someplace else, in the same way, the players were free to stop playing the game, but eventually, you will have to play someone else's game. Very few of us will ever get the money to check out. It is an illusory aim that many of us will die before reaching. Refusing to participate in American capitalism may not always be as quick as in the Squid Game, but it's death nonetheless.

The most ironic part of this series is that the person overseeing the Squid game, the mysterious Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), thinks this game is fair. When one of the workers assists another player in episode five, A Fair World, he monologues about how these actions interfered with the integrity of the games, saying: "you ruined the most important aspect of this place. Equality. Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, every player gets to play a fair game under the same conditions. These people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we're giving them one last chance to fight fair and win."

But the game isn't fair. It's an emotionally manipulative mess that purposefully hides its rules and objectives, so only the most manipulative and lucky players get ahead. It's a game that biases physical mobility, strength, and emotional sociopathy. Its essentially creating the perfect conditions to replicate the worldview of those in power — one that claims that people are inherently bad and that our system rightfully rewards those who embrace that component of human nature.

When the game's mysterious VIPs come to watch the final game in person, they are almost all rich, white businessmen who are there because they are bored. There is no greater purpose here, only terrible people rationalizing their own cruelty. The Front Man hasn't stumbled into a meritocracy but is merely facilitating a ruthless game arranged for the enjoyment of the very rich.

America is like this in many ways. We are not the only country that struggles with wealth inequality, but we have exacerbated it. We lack the protections of many developed countries (paid paternity/maternity leave, a livable wage, universal healthcare, etc.), and so many people are desperate, struggling to gain a foothold in a country that doesn't want to give it to them. Like in the Squid Game, many workers are so focused on hustling and figuring out their next steps that, out of survival, they ignore the fact that most of us will not win the game of capitalism, and far more will die trying.

In the meantime, the rich get to do whatever the hell they want. It doesn't matter if their desires are as absurd as restarting civilization 244.57 million miles away on a dead world, discovering immortality, or in the case of the Squid Game, having the poor kill themselves for entertainment, the rich have the right to do it. They can do whatever they want — the needs and wants of the many be damned.

And all the while, we rationalize this inequity by claiming that the system is fair — that anyone can get ahead if they truly work at it. We are a deeply unequal country that tricks itself into believing the game we play is meritocratic, ignoring that this fact is simply untrue.

But hey, at least you get to choose the unfair game that you play.

Alex Has Opinions 10/10/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/10/21

I'm So Sick of Stories Blaming Humanity for The End of the World

If the world ends tomorrow, it will not be because of all of us.

For as long as I can remember, movies have been telling me that the world was going to end. I saw it in disaster movies where the planet was wiped clean by storms and earthquakes. I witnessed it in alien invasion movies where cities and countries were leveled to the ground. I watched as zombie hordes consumed all of civilization. Over and over again, the world was destroyed, and I saw it happen.

It's not hard to understand where this angst is coming from — the planet is dying. Terrible people have been running things for a long time, and they have constructed systems of power that are f@cking everything up. Our feelings of hopelessness are externalized in films where we can revel in the end we feel coming. For the briefest of moments, we watch as brave protagonists triumph against it (or cathartically end up dead).

In recent years, some disaster and post-apocalyptic movies have used this premise to come to a startling conclusion. The inherent problem in many (though certainly not all) of these films is that they often blame the source of that disaster on humanity itself. It's a message that equalizes the blame, making it a component of human nature, rather than the narrow set of elite actors who actually cause disasters.

This takeaway ultimately fosters a form of detached nihilism that is unhelpful for combatting climate change, wealth inequality, and the other deadly problems plaguing our world.

The disaster movie comes in many forms. The quintessential one is that of a natural disaster leveling entire towns, countries, and even the world. Los Angelos is a favorite target for screenwriters, wherein films such as San Andreas (2015) and Volcano (1997), wipe Tinsel Town off the map. Worldwide disasters usually show up at iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramids, and in some cases just as cataclysmic fireballs rippling across the face of the Earth.

Amongst the carnage and CGI horror, humanity is blamed for these disasters. "For years," begins President Raymond Becker (Kenneth Welsh), after superstorms caused by global warming have devastated the developed countries of the world in the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), "we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet's natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong."

While The Day After Tomorrow, does a great job of highlighting some of the institutional barriers that prevent reform from taking place (e.g. politicians more interested in short-term gains, over long-term threats), this speech at the end places the moral blame on all US citizens. Never mind that most Americans are trapped in an economic system that provides them little opportunity to cut emissions while obtaining the resources they need to survive. Becker moralizes to viewers about the need to take climate change seriously, flattening the issue's complexities into a "we are all in this together" mentality. The world ended because developed nations as a whole let it die.

This theme of blaming segments of humanity, or in some cases all of humanity, for disaster, comes up a lot. Human war destroys the Earth in the original Mad Max series (1979–1985). Our wasteful ways make it uninhabitable in flicks like WALL-E (2008). Pollution cause plants to turn on us in The Happening (2008). And of course, our arrogance and destructive nature lead our robotic children to try to cull us in movies like the Terminator (1984) franchise.

Even when humanity is not blamed as the source of the cataclysm, they are often viewed as a distraction — a mob waiting to happen. "Telling the public we might all be dead in eighteen days achieves nothing but panic," says the president (Stanley Anderson) in Armageddon (1998) shortly before he instructs our protagonists to board a spaceship to blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. He keeps the information secret until it cannot possibly be hidden from the public.

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." says the character Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men In Black (1997) as his justification for why their secretive organization doesn't share the existence of aliens with the public. During this series, aliens threaten to annihilate the entire Earth several times, and the public is never told. "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet," quips Agent Kay. "And the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!"

In both of these situations, the public might have benefitted from this information, especially in Armageddon, where bits of the asteroid break off and end up decimating cities. The people in charge might have also benefited from the collective brainpower of the human race. However, the fear of public unrest was seen as a higher priority than harm reduction or innovation. Humanity is depicted as a detriment to the work that our protagonist must do. We are a burden, not a resource that can be used.

This distrust in people especially applies to the fall of society, once those "mobs" have taken over. In post-apocalyptic flicks, people are depicted as more harmful than the cataclysmic incidents themselves. For example, the biggest threats to our protagonists in The Walking Dead series (2010–2021) aren't the zombies (called "Walkers" here), but dictators such as Negan, Alpha, and the Governor. The protagonists in the series Sweet Tooth have to contend with the speciesism of General Abbot (Neil Sandilands). And of course, in media like The Road (2009) and The Last of Us (2013), human bandits can be far more destructive than radioactive fallout or zombie terrors.

That cynicism in humanity often morphs into full-blown misanthropy, where humanity's end is depicted as a good thing. "Nature doesn't want us back," explains Aimee Eden (Dania Ramirez) in the post-apocalyptic TV show Sweet Tooth (2021 — present) on why humanity should accept its obsolescence following a devastating virus. "We never gave her a good reason to keep us around in the first place," she continues. "If you look at the whole life of the planet, we, you know, man has only been around for a few blinks of an eye," lectures Sergeant Farrell (Stuart McQuarrie) in the zombie film 28 Days Later, "So, if the infection wipes us all out… that is a return to normality." "The Earth is evil," calmly states Justine (Kirsten Dunst) in the wake of our planet's impending destruction in Melancholia (2011), "we don't need to grieve for it. Nobody would miss it."

More than any cataclysm or super virus, humanity is the true villain on the Silver Screen. They are the harbingers of our destruction, or, at the very least, the people who make the aftermath that much worse. We are a toxic force that protagonists must struggle against — the barrier to be overcome. Our society has a very bleak outlook of the collective in media, and unfortunately, these pop culture stories are merely a reflection of our greater culture.

When we talk about real-world threats such as climate change, humanity as a whole is often blamed for them. On the Internet, this sometimes comes in the way of a Matrix (1999) quote by the character Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). "Human beings are a disease," he laments, "a cancer of this planet. You're a plague, and we are the cure." It's a meme shared all over the Internet. Wherein the movie, this perspective comes from a robotic overseer who paternalistically thinks that humans must be contained and culled; the people on the Internet are saying that about themselves.

Another place in the cultural zeitgeist we see this logic resurface is the "Thanos was right" hashtag on Twitter. Thanos was the galactic tyrant in the MCU who decided to genocide half of all sentient life. Some fans of the series viewed him not as the villain but as a person who had a point. As JV Chamary writes in Forbes:

“Fewer people ought to mean more food and less hunger, and might lower the risk of an epidemic when overcrowding enables the spread of disease. Human activity is driving a loss of biodiversity, with about 25% of animals and plants now threatened with extinction, so halving the population would help other species. As a consequence, you could conclude that by eliminating 50% of all humans, Thanos did the Earth a huge favor.”

These perspectives are looking at recent problems like industrial carbon emissions and claiming they are intrinsic to the human condition — something that we cannot help but do because pollution and overconsumption are how we operate. "Wow…Earth is recovering," remarks one infamous tweet that received over 200,000 likes during the early days of the pandemic. "Air pollution is slowing down. Water pollution is clearing up. Natural wildlife returning home. Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We're the virus." This misanthropic outlook is everywhere in our culture. The disgust for humans as a collective doesn't start and end with tweets and poorly-reasoned articles, but can translate into disastrous policy during real-life disasters.

For example, the response effort to Hurricane Katrina (2005) has been largely decried as an instance of political leaders placing property rights over preserving human lives. The image initially portrayed by those in power was a dire situation of uncontrolled mayhem, depicting a scene of over ten thousand dead. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously went on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011) and claimed that evacuees were hurting each other within the Superdome (the place refugees from the storm were being housed). Mayor Nagin said: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

This statement would later be deemed an untruthful exaggeration, but this perception of "looters" negatively impacted the response effort. The private security force company Xe (now merged with Triple Canopy, and formerly Blackwater) was contracted out immediately by the federal government to "secure the city." As if during wartime, they were armed with automatic rifles and deputized by the Governor of Louisana to make arrests. The number of armed forces occupying the city would only increase as the National Guard, as well as private security forces hired by the wealthy, entered the fray. According to ProPublica, the police were also given orders to shoot looters on sight, and by many accounts, they did.

These private forces were an active detriment to the relief efforts in the days and weeks following the storm. Officers detained and, in some cases, harassed citizens distributing supplies. Vital space on boats and helicopters was often reserved for armed escorts. Very early into the recovery, the Mayor ordered the police to deemphasize search and rescue efforts to prioritize an end to the “looting.” The Mayor would later admit that reports of looting were exaggerated (and years later would eventually be convicted of corruption for an unrelated kickback scheme), but that initial perception of “mobs” cost lives.

Many leaders still treat people this way during disasters. When Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans this year, the police were very quick to assemble an anti-looting task force, yet not nearly enough effort was placed into recovery efforts. As one activist told the publication Grist: "I'm really pissed off that the most visible recovery 'effort' I have seen is a bunch of army boots with machine guns sitting in front of stores. They couldn't bring us food and water yet, but they have guns."

When we treat people as an intrinsic threat — like a virus, a plague, or simply as evil — rather than as human beings, it impairs our ability to develop proper solutions. During disasters, the real threat to people often comes down to breaks in supply chains (e.g., a lack of water, plumbing, heating, health care, shelter, and food). These are the services that need to be resumed if you want to stop people from "looting." On a wider societal level, they are also the services needed to help mitigate crime in general.

The idea that people are viruses needlessly consuming resources not only strips people of the context for why they need those resources in the first place (i.e., to survive), but it's ultimately ahistorical. Humans existed in a better equilibrium with nature for thousands of years before industrialization. And some, such as many indigenous groups, continue to do so now. The "humanity is a virus excuse" is convenient for those who don't want to think too deeply about how maybe our systems, rather than humanity itself, are what's making our Earth unlivable.

Indeed there are countless positive examples of "humanity" doing more than simply consuming resources. Hurricane Katrina was filled with acts of mutual aid. In one example, a group of activists and healthcare practitioners came together to form the Common Ground Collective, which formed a makeshift medical clinic and distributed food and other supplies to thousands of residents. In another, a makeshift flotilla of boats dubbed "the Cajun Navy" rescued thousands of people from their stranded rooftops. We see this reality also in films in the way survivors start to band together to rebuild San Francisco in San Andreas, or how workers and the rich come together in the film 2012 (2009) to rebuild society.

Both in film and real life, a competing narrative certainly exists, but it doesn't seem to be the dominant one. We are a society stuck in a rudimentary debate over whether people are "good" or "bad," and life is more nuanced than that. The people in the "humanity is a virus" camp use this simplistic logic to demonize everyone so they can sidestep the necessary work of examining our society's systemic problems (e.g. wealth inequality, patriarchy, systemic racism, capitalism, etc.).

If the world ends tomorrow, it will not be because of all of us. Most people are just doing their best to survive. There are monsters, to be sure (and some disasters movies do reflect that reality), but this trend of laying the blame for disasters — both systemic and immediate — on all of us is unhelpful. It reflects a culture that has not done the work to root out those people and organizations who are truly at fault. For its easier to blame everyone than to start holding those who maintain oppressive systems accountable.

The world ends all the time in media, sometimes wonderfully so, but if we want to avert our own apocalypse, we need to stop blaming humanity as a whole for its potential fall. Now more than ever, we need stories that focus less on misanthropy and more on modeling genuine accountability and justice. Ones that lay the blame where it needs to be (i.e., on the institutions preventing change) and show their viewers a potential path forward, away from disaster.

For in truth, the virus isn't humanity. It never was, and it's only through our collective humanity that we can indeed save the world.

Alex Has Opinions 10/4/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/4/21

Rumble Is Still Where The Right Goes To Play

The platform continues to be a bastion for conservative conspiracy theories

Image; Photo by David Guliciuc on Unsplash

There has been a narrative about the alternative video streaming platform Rumble that it's a place where conservatives spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. "Fact-Checked on Facebook and Twitter, Conservatives Switch Their Apps" goes one title for the New York Times. "The rise of Rumble, the conservative alternative to YouTube," read another title for Deseret News.

Recently the company has attempted to "diversify" its content by reaching out to alternative influencers such as Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald, but this has had very little impact on the platform. Rumble still is a site where conservatives spread misinformation, and that's not something ancillary to the company's goals but strikes at the heart of how it operates.

Rumble has a reputation as the conservative YouTube. While this is something they foster directly through content moderation (or a lack thereof), they also try to be a site about more than simply conservatives ranting about politics. The Editors Pick section is usually of light content, such as a cockatiel not letting their owner use their laptop or of a dog performing ninja rolls.

Their CEO Chris Pavlovski went on record on FOX Business in April of 2021, emphasizing that the platform is focused more on "fairness" than on regulating their content. "We're not interested in taking any position on any type of content," Pavlovski said, "we just want to be a platform, and I believe that's why we've seen so much growth."

We see this strategy of trying to distance the platform from the conservative brand with the company contracting out alternative content creators such as Glenn Greenwald, who is allegedly being paid somewhere in the midrange of "six figures." As influencer Greenwald tweeted recently:

"One key person who moved to Rumble with me: Tulsi Gabbard. A 4-term Dem Congresswoman from Hawaii & a vegan. She quit as DNC Vice Chair to support Bernie in 2016. She endorsed Biden over Trump in 2020. Yet they still claim she's right-wing & Rumble is an alt-right site? How?"

Yet, despite these protests, it's hard not to escape the conservative bent on the website. As of writing this article, the Top Video, which appears at the literal top of the desktop version, is a live stream for a Steven Crowder video "debunking" a John Oliver segment about Voter ID laws being racist. Crowder is a popular, conservative content creator, not just on Rumble but all over the Internet. He appeared on the front page multiple times while I prepared research for this article.

This preference for conservative content is everywhere. For example, if you go over to the News section, one of the few traditional outlets you will find is Reuters. The closest thing after that is the center-left site Newsy. These channels provide more "traditional" news stories that you would see in any mainstream paper or program, and in fact, Reuters seems to be reposting videos from their YouTube channel.

Everything else ranges from the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post to the conservative Canadian rag The Post Millennial to Sean Hannity. The "stories" from these news channels fit the mold you would expect. "White liberal in gorilla mask attacks Larry Elder with egg," reads the title for one salacious clip from The Post Millenial. "Democrats hell-bent on hiking taxes, imperiling economy," reads the Devin Nunes Press, a channel simply rebranding all of the representatives' television appearances and public statements as "news."

Even tamer content is often backed by conservative influencers. The Entertainment section may have some stereotypical content from the likes of Page Six, but the section also has an exposé criticizing AOC's MET Gala dress from Glenn Greenwald as well as a skit about leftism being a virus from influencer Awaken With JP. "It begins to infect the brain by a process called Marxism," the influencer jokes in their video Beware of the Tyrant Variant!.

Most of the main sections under the front page, except for the Viral section, are like this: the Sports section has content like "Vaccine Lunacy: Passports and Packed Stadiums" from the OutKick; the Finance section has a video from Tim Pool lamenting that the entire Global Economy will meltdown because of Biden's bad job report; the Podcast and Battle Leaderboard sections are almost exclusively filled with conservative influencers from the likes of Dan Bongino and Matt Walsh.

Image; Rumble captured 9/29/21 at 12:09 pm.

And, of course, so far, we have been talking around the edges of the problem. If even the tamest content has a far-right conservative bent to it, then imagine what the "actual" content focuses on.

You can find pretty much every mainstream conservative influencer here, from Tim Pool to Ben Shapiro to even former 45th President Donald J. Trump. These actors engage in the usual culture wars content that has proliferated on the Internet since the early 2010s. There are countless videos about Antifa (e.g., anti-fascism), Black Lives Matter, or whatever social issue of the day happens to be the focus of the feed, but it doesn't just stop and end with anti-social justice warrior monologues. Many of these actors also spread a lot of misinformation (more on this later).

Rumble is not the only one that struggles with this problem. YouTube has long been cited as a major distributor of misinformation. Facebook still grapples with an array of issues, from anti-vaccine groups to white supremacist comics. Its subsidiary Instagram also struggles with this problem. A recent Washington Post article highlighted wellness advocates using Instagram to advocate against vaccine usage. Even now, several of the users they profiled still have much of their original content up.

Image; captured on Instagram on 9/28/21 3:06 pm

Even if they are not always successful, these companies have tried to compensate for these gaps. YouTube, for example, has removed millions of COVID-related videos for spreading misinformation and regularly auto-flags creators who use the word vaccine. The influencer nappyheadedjojoba recently did a video about vaccine hesitancy, and she had to use the word "vacuum" to get around the censor. There will most likely always be people like this finding creative ways around the blocks, but it signals that these companies are at least trying to mitigate the risk of disinformation (even if its taken them years to reach this point)

Rumble's hands-off approach, however, means that misinformation proliferates more quickly. It's long been reported that Rumble is rampant with COVID vaccine conspiracies, which remains true to this day. A quick search will reveal pages upon pages of information critical of the vaccine. The site is a hotbed of people advocating against it. It's easy to find videos with a veneer of credibility, which has the potential to confuse viewers uneducated in science literacy.

Image; Rumble, captured 9/29/21 at 10:38 pm.

For example, one recently published video, titled 33 Doctors Say DON'T TAKE THE VACCINE, has 33 alleged doctors claiming that the vaccine is unsafe for human use. "I would like to say," remarks one speaker, "that the new COVID-19 vaccine is not safe and that there is no global medical pandemic." This video first circulated in 2020 across social media, and all of its claims have been thoroughly debunked, but while it has been taken down on sites like Instagram, it remains on Rumble. Just one of the hundreds, possibly thousands of anti-COVID vaccine videos making the rounds on the site.

COVID misinformation is not the only unregulated area of content. It's also possible to find videos discussing the Deep State (a conspiracy theory about a secret, unauthorized network independently running things behind the scenes) or how Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election was a lie. In no particular order, I also found videos taking the Illuminati seriously, ones claiming that many famous people are, in fact, clones, videos about a mysterious New World Order controlling things, ones endorsing the idea that the Earth is flat, and many more.

YouTube also has Flat Earthers on the platform, but they are usually hidden from search results. If you type in the keyword "flat earth" into search results, you will get many videos debunking flat earth ideology. The one hit on the first page that appeared to be the opposite, 5 Facts That Prove The Earth Is Flat, ended up being a joke video making fun of the ideology. To find Flat Earther influencers on YouTube, you will have to search for their channel directly.

Yet on Rumble, all you have to do is search.

Image; YouTube/Rumble captured on 9/29/21 at 10:50 am

As for hate speech, in general, Rumble doesn't permit overtly discriminatory language. You won't easily find videos throwing around the N-word, endorsing the KKK, or telling trans people that they should kill themselves. The way discrimination occurs here is usually far more indirect. The majority of videos that do exist are discriminatory in how they frame marginalized groups and leftist issues. If you type in the acronym "LGBT," outside of reporting from Reuters, you will get hits about "LGBT mobs" and the "LGBT agenda." If you type in "Black Lives Matter," you will see videos about "abuses" from protesters. These videos aren't calling for active discrimination, but the Rumble community is systemically framing marginalized people as an other.

The site is not content-neutral because there is very clearly a conservative bias. This preferential treatment has a chilling effect as leftist users do not use it because it's not for them. It is geared towards far-right conservatives who face no accountability unless they are hateful in the most overt ways. I have spent a lot of time searching for leftist users on Rumble, and I have not found anyone outside of Tulsi Gabbard who has a very touch-and-go relationship with the Leftist movement. There is no reason to believe that Rumble will diversify its user base anytime soon.

This doesn't mean other more mainstream sites are free from discrimination. In fact, many of the most prolific people on Rumble, from Ben Shapiro to Steven Crowder, still have a presence on sites like YouTube. This framing problem exists on those platforms too, but at least they have made an effort to diversify their audience. Why would you leave YouTube, a site that at least has some leftist communities, to use a site you are not welcome in? A site with worse UI and an even worse atmosphere.

In trying not to take "any position on any type of content," Rumble has created an environment where the most conservative and often detached voices have a home. When CEO Chris Pavlovski speaks of "fairness," they are using a dog whistle prevalent in conservative circles, harkening all the way back to Fox News' original slogan, "Fair and Balanced." This alleged fairness is not about accepting all voices but allowing the most hateful a safe space not to be criticized.

Chris Pavlovski is not a neutral actor. His site was operating on a shoe-string budget before it received interest from the right. Following the rights’ alleged purge from more mainstream spaces, Rumble has now received funding from conservatives like Peter Thiel and Darren Blanton. Pavlovski has a material interest in not pissing off his site's conservative demographic because that's where the money is, and it shows in how they let quite frankly harmful information proliferate there.

The truth that we have learned in the modern era is that there is no such thing as not taking a position on content moderation. Platforms are so complex that the mere act of weighting selections and curating lists is a reflection of values, even if we are not always consciously aware of what those values are. All platforms inherently select certain voices while choosing not to center others. By seeming to focus on the right, Rumble has created a platform where conspiracy theories abound, and hatred festers.

Rumble is still where the right goes to play, and it's a powder keg waiting to happen.

Alex Has Opinions 10/3/21 Alex Has Opinions 10/3/21

How Do You Critique A Cry For Help? ('Introvert: A Teenage Simulator')

The indie game that leaves you left wondering if the developer is okay

Sometimes I stumble across a topic that I think will be perfect, only to start researching it and realizing that I have hit something far darker than I initially realized. This was the situation I found myself in while reviewing the indie game Introvert: A Teenage Simulator — a visual novel about a depressed, mute teenager navigating life in school within a poor town.

The trailer instantly told me that this was going to be a difficult piece. The central premise is that you are a new kid who meets someone at school named Chris, a socially awkward teenager who wants friends. Chris tells you that he will shoot up the school if he doesn't make friends in 5 days. I assumed that the game would be a perfect jumping-off point to deconstruct toxic masculinity, but instead, I found an earnest developer trying to tackle worthy topics but just not quite having the expertise to pull them off.

However, the developer, who goes by the name Faris, didn't just make a controversial game but attempted to pull the viewer in and listen to their pain. He wanted to connect with his players, not simply emotionally, but in the real world. That decision not only complicated the artist-viewer relationship but forced us to question if his work was harming the very people he set out to help.

Firstly, I want to say that I don't think it's fair to judge this game by professional standards. Faris was allegedly 19 years old when he made it, so I am not going to nitpick its gameplay elements. I have some minor quibbles with how the UI works, and some sections are simply confusing or unplayable, but I do not doubt that Faris will get better over time. The game is currently free on Steam, so these problems didn't cost me anything but my time.

The main issue I have with this game is how it presents mental health and depression. Throughout its very short runtime, you are given a series of choices to try to "help" Chris, but they basically amount to joining in on bullying him or leaving him alone. It's not a game trying to understand depression or figure out how to give someone the tools or resources to mitigate it, but it seems to be more a manifestation of someone reveling in that dark place.

Introvert: A Teenage Simulator is about focusing on how awful everything is for teenagers nowadays. There is a sense of hopelessness that permeates the entire work. The authority figures are all portrayed as cruel and incompetent. The aesthetic is gray and constantly on the verge of glitching out. There is disturbing imagery like dead insects everywhere you turn. Not only does the game culminate in a potential shooting, but there is a side quest where you are forced to shoot some entity, and, as far as I can tell, you cannot leave the space you are in until you do.

For a game this short, it certainly puts you through the wringer in terms of the number of disturbing sights and situations that you will have to witness. A more skilled developer may have been able to synthesize these elements into something more cohesive. Again, Faris is a developing artist, and there is nothing wrong with that, but given the raw pain and sadness in this work, I am left concerned for his emotional stability. Faris worked through a lot of pain when he made this game, and it shows. As they write in the game's description:

“I made this game cause I was sad so it took a while to be finished, cause you know… It’s hard to work on something when you’re sad.”

Introvert: A Teenage Simulator already seemed like a cry for help to me. It was a way for the artist to project their disappointment into the world and see if anyone would listen. There were a lot of concerning elements already in my first playthrough, and then the developer went the extra mile and pleaded for the player to contact them in real life. If you take your character to the furthest left point in the game, outside of HappyVille, Faris will start talking to you directly:

“Hey you, yes you. Shh, it's going to be okay. Wipe your tears. Take a deep breath. You've been strong for too long. It's time to let everything go. I'm here for you. I'm Faris, the game developer. I'm 19. If you need to talk about anything, just DM me on Twitter and we’ll talk:) here's the link. Ill reply.”

To be frank, it's very common for emotionally vulnerable people to position themselves as authority figures so that they can have an excuse to work on their own issues. For example, psychology research is often jokingly referred to as "me-search" because there is a perception that many enter the field to understand their own mental health concerns. This statement is an exaggeration, but with 81% of psychologists in one study having a diagnosable psychiatric disorder (most of them mild), the stereotype does come from a grain of truth.

Faris seems to be doing the very same thing here, though, unlike therapists who are receiving the training to genuinely help people, he doesn't have the capacity to do this. I have been to Faris' Twitter. He is an overworked young person struggling to handle game design and school at the same time. He doesn't have the resources to therapize depressed, random strangers on the Internet, and he doesn't have the tools for it either. It's a very nice thought, and I applaud him for his intentions, but bad therapy can do a lot of damage, and his decision to do this warrants criticism.

If you want to help people (a worthy goal), you need to ask yourself if the "help" you are providing is actually doing good. Performativity helps no one. Many organizations dealing with mental health issues need money and volunteers. They will give people training and support to handle these issues (see Mental Health Affiliates, Crisis Counselors, Suicide Prevention, etc.). There are also mental health professionals that would be more than willing to collaborate with game developers to create a game to help destigmatize mental disorders and illnesses.

However, if you are hurting, don't confuse your need to get help with a desire to assist others. It doesn't benefit anyone and can do a lot of damage. Intentions are all well and good, but when someone puts out a "cry for help" under the guise of supporting others, we have to be careful in how we handle it. We should be empathetic — as I have attempted to do in this review — but, intentions aside, we shouldn't pretend like the work being put forth is helpful for others suffering from serious mental health problems.

It might be cathartic to wallow in the darkness, but it's not the best for addressing the themes presented in this work. As one Steam reviewer put it: "I'm not sure I can "truly" recommend this game to anyone. It's bleak, depressing, and is a great allegory all in one. This is a great representation of what it is like to be a depressed teen in a small podunk-ass town who isn't popular. I've yet to play it all the way through.…right now, I'm just trying to keep my own positive vibe going…."

This has been a difficult review to write. Faris unquestionably is trying to do some good, and they also, at least from my perspective, seem to be hurting. I hesitated to publish this review at all, thinking it might be better if they churned out more work until they reached a better emotional equilibrium.

Yet that hesitation is valuing Faris' good intentions over the harm they are doing to others by putting this game out in the first place. Introvert: A Teenage Simulator is not an insignificant title. It has received hundreds of reviews on the Steam store (and they have been overwhelmingly positive), so I figured there needed to be some counterbalancing force to give a fair critique, especially since this game has somewhat of an appeal towards depressed people.

While Faris shows great promise as a game developer, I don't think the message in this story is particularly helpful for anyone. It's a dark, messy piece that aimlessly wanders in the wilderness and threatens to pull other people down with it. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so, good intentions or not.

Alex Has Opinions 9/24/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/24/21

'Voting With Your Dollars' Isn't Democratic

Deconstructing the myth that you can push for change in the marketplace

If you spend enough time in any debate about the actions of corporations, a certain reply will almost always resurface: that you need to vote with your dollars. That we, as consumers, need to reflect our disappointment in the products and services that we buy by choosing something else. In the words of the business-friendly environmental group Grow Ensemble: "Is the provider of this thing I am buying creating, producing, and delivering it in a way that is good for the planet and the people on it? If not, is there another provider who does? Opt for them."

From a certain viewpoint, this advice makes a kind of intuitive sense. If you believe that the marketplace is a free exchange of goods and services, then it would naturally follow that only the products that consumers believe in dominate. Why would a customer purposefully invest in something they know to be fraught, both financially and ethically? "When you vote daily in the supermarket," Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in 1980, "you get precisely what you voted for, and so does everyone else.

This perspective, however, fundamentally misconstrues how capitalism works. The free market has nothing to do with democracy — some have even argued that these two forces are incompatible. Our current economy creates an environment where choice is not only limited, but that limitation is actively encouraged, making the "vote with your dollars" argument ultimately anti-democratic.

A Lack Of Choices

The marketplace does not operate like a ballot box where consumers have a free range of goods and services to choose from. The current economic paradigm is one of extreme consolidation. For example, a report from The Guardian found that in the US, "four firms or fewer controlled more than 40% of the market share" for the foods we buy, and that number gets higher depending on what goods we are talking about. If you wanted to buy a carbonated drink, three companies (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr. Pepper) own 92% of the market. Want to buy a dip? Pepsico controls 87.5% alone.

If you truly wished to boycott one of the companies above, it could be very difficult depending on how much of the market they control, not only with that one good or service but with all the ones they own. Pepsico, for example, doesn't just own Pepsi, but Aquafina, Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker Oats, and hundreds more. Since these companies have so many brands underneath them, you might not have the time to research all the goods or services they have, and even then, there might not be a true alternative with your local grocery store or delivery service.

Our current market is designed to make true choice very difficult. You might cut the cord with, say, Amazon by canceling your Prime Membership, but you could still be purchasing from them indirectly via services like Ring, Twitch, IMDB, Goodreads, Audible, Zappos, and many others. Some businesses are just so large that finding a real alternative in your area can be quite challenging.

Of course, this all presumes you have the privilege to cut from that initial service at all. Take, for example, insulin, a medication used to manage the conditions of diabetes. It costs somewhere between $63 to nearly $400 per vial or pen to pay out of pocket, more than any other country in the developed world. Diabetic Americans spend on average thousands of dollars on Insulin annually, and it's not because of "consumer" choice but aggressive patent law and market consolidation.

While insulin medication only costs around $2 to $4 to produce per vial and was initially developed around a hundred years ago, companies in the US have aggressively fought to keep prices high. Three companies — Novo Nordisk, Sanofi-Aventis, and Eli Lilly — control most of the market share. There is no national regulatory framework to cap prices, which means they are incentivized to price it at the highest level that will not spur regulation.

And in the meantime, customers will pay whatever they have to because delayed treatments can lead to deadly complications such as diabetic ketoacidosis. This complication is when your body begins to break down fat (instead of sugar) as fuel, leading to diabetic coma (i.e., passing out for a long time) or even death. Desperation locks in these customers because the alternative could be death.

This reality can be seen with any product or service where need prevents people from opting out. Whether we are talking about the sky-high costs of HIV/AIDS medication or the ridiculous price point of chemotherapy, a person cannot "vote with their dollars" for a service that they require for the sake of their health. Some services are so vital that you will pay for them no matter the cost or die trying.

This logic also applies to major infrastructure services like housing, water, medical care, and even the Internet, where someone needs to use them, either urgently or in their day-to-day life, to exist in society, or even to exist at all. Over 40% of Americans live 5 miles or more from their nearest hospital. Around 64% of Americans have two potential Internet providers or less, with several million not having any option at all. Even fewer options typically exist for energy and water. You have a limited amount of options, and that's it. You aren't going to move your home overnight, or take your failing body five miles over, to shop around for prices.

The idea that you have the option to purchase any product that aligns with your values is naive, especially a vital service where your negotiating power as an individual is next to nothing. Our system likes to expound upon how much choice we as individual consumers have, but as we have just covered, that choice is often an illusion. The large market share of our biggest companies, in combination with aggressive IP law, prevents citizens from truly choosing ethical alternatives in the marketplace.

And believe it or not, this lack of choice is the smallest issue with the "voting with your dollars" argument. When it comes to this line of reasoning, it's not simply the options that hinder people, but the alleged "voting" as well.

Inequality Impairs Democracy

In a democracy, one person's vote isn't supposed to be vastly different from any others. Your vote for one candidate should equal the same as anyone else's.

This ideal has not always been realized in the US. The way the Senate and the Electoral College work means that citizens in certain states have a disproportionate say in elections like the presidency, compared to citizens in more populous states. Many people living here have also been denied their rights as citizens or the right to be considered a citizen at all.

In theory, however, these inequities are simply quirks of our system, ones that are highly controversial and debated, and are not "supposed" to be the norm. Few argue openly that a minority of citizens should be able to vote more or have their votes weighted higher than other eligible citizens. They frame it much differently than that because saying that some votes should matter more would go against the core principles of our democracy. And that would not be a good look.

Again in a democracy, every citizen's vote is supposed to be counted more or less the same. This is why the saying "one person, one vote" has become the rallying call in the fight against anti-democratic measures like voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and removing suffrage for prisoners. These movements are trying to align the ideal of American democracy with its inequitable and often harsh reality.

The Supreme Court Ruling Citizens United v. v. FEC (i.e., the ruling that allowed corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections) was so controversial because it upset the idea that everyone's vote should be counted equally. Money doesn't operate on a principle of equality, but rather inequality. The more money you have, the more you can buy, and in the case of political donations, the more influence you can obtain. As William Horncastle wrote in one of The London School of Economics blogs:

“The impact of Citizens United has had a significant impact on democracy, eroding the foundations of the political finance and disclosure system in US politics. While the future is unknown, it is likely to involve increased spending, reduced transparency, and increased cleavages of political power.”

This problem is even more pronounced in the marketplace, where there are indeed fewer constraints imposed on how much influence you can buy as an individual. The whole purpose of capitalism is that, barring any regulations, people can buy as many goods and services as they want and can afford. It's a system tied to the individual liberties of a few rather than the collective decision-making of the many.

A thousand people could decide they want something, but it makes no difference if they lack the capital to invest in it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about the cure to cancer or magical pills that increase crop yields. No matter how good an idea it is, it simply will not see the light of day. Something contributing to the common good doesn't mean it will succeed in our current marketplace. If anything, we have just seen how capitalists benefit from constraining innovation and overcharging people for essential services.

Conversely, if one wealthy person wants a product or service to exist in the world, no matter how harmful or wasteful that product or service may be, they will most likely succeed. Think of the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch. They made their initial fortunes on oil refining and chemicals and didn't like the threat that acknowledging climate change would have to their bottom line. And so, they spent millions funding (and founding) think-tanks as well as donating to climate-denying politicians to cast doubt onto this reality. They weren't the sole contributors to this skepticism (see ExxonMobil), but they were a major one. We are now facing a ticking clock because a couple of individuals choose this fate for everyone else.

And this is just one example. We could talk about how Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are spending billions of dollars to restart civilization on Mars, a dead world, all while contributing mightily to carbon emissions in the process that make it difficult for this planet to survive. We could also talk about how Bill Gates used his Foundation to keep the COVID vaccine in private hands, contributing to its slow rollout for countries around the world over. And the list goes on.

When you create a society where people are allowed to "vote with their dollars," you are essentially creating a tyranny of the dollar. It's a situation where someone can vote many more times than their peers because of the disparity in wealth between them.

Conclusion

From this lens, capitalism isn't democratic. It's about maximizing the disparities between people. Our economic system naturally conflicts with our current system of governance. Democracy is where every citizen, regardless of their wealth, is ideally (though often not in reality) supposed to be permitted an equal say in how we run things. Capitalism is where some people matter more.

When people use the "vote with your dollars" argument, they are appropriating the language of democracy to give an undemocratic institution a veneer of democratic credibility. They are asking people to avoid the realm of politics (e.g., fighting for greater regulation, breaking up companies, unionization, etc.) and, instead, telling them to stick to capitalism, where people overall have less say in how things are organized. This argument simply does not hold up. It's bad logic that, at best, is a defense mechanism that someone uses to not think too deeply about how power works, and at worst, is gaslighting used to discourage political organizing that is genuinely effective.

We do not need people to "vote with their dollars" in the marketplace. We need them to vote — not just in the ballot box, but in the streets, for their union, at their local grassroots meeting. And yes, we need them to vote with their checkbook too, but not for a product they have very little control over, but for people and organizations fighting in the realm of actual politics: groups advocating for political reform; mutual aid funds giving resources to people who need them; and the few politicians fighting to change things.

That's voting worth rooting for.

Alex Has Opinions 9/23/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/23/21

Disney Has A Problem With Depicting Power

How one animated short explains Disney’s problem with talking about power, change, and political revolution.

The sci-fi short Smash and Grab (2019) is not one of Disney’s most well-known works. It came out in 2019 alongside other shorts such as Kitbull and Out, collectively called Sparkshorts, a program within Pixar that allegedly allows its members to take creative risks with techniques and narratives that would have a hard sell as a feature film.

This particular short is about a duo of robot laborers revolting from their assigned positions — one could argue from their class — to make a break for freedom. Smash and Grab has a rather radical message considering that the company hosting it is an entity as conservative as Disney. Consequently, it immediately caught my attention when I streamed it on Disney Plus. Robot laborers revolting would normally be the plot of a horror tale, not a feel-good buddy story.

However, how these two robots go about achieving this brief revolt says something pretty fundamental about how Disney perceives social change — mainly that it’s something that an individual or a group of individuals can enact on their own. All it takes to revolt against the establishment is for one or two people to decide to do so.

This theory of politics is naive, and it's prevalent throughout Disney’s entire filmography. We see this message come up time and time again, not simply in older works, but more recent ones as well. It’s an implicit value that deserves scrutiny not just in this work but in all others that reflect it.

Smash and Grab is only eight minutes long, but it manages to pack a lot into such a short amount of time. We have two robots, which I will be calling Smash and Grab, respectively. They are chained inside a train compartment, forced to mine a glowing, cyan ore. The two robots are not allowed to touch one another. The cord that powers them is positioned in a way that makes physical interaction impossible. They are stuck inside a repetitive loop as Smash breaks apart the ore and gives it to Grab to place it inside some sort of smelter.

Smash eventually realizes that the ore they are mining gets refined into a dark blue power source for a group of robotic beings living in floating mega structures above the clouds. It’s a pretty on-the-nose narrative for what could be seen as a class struggle. Robots like Smash and Grab, under the threat of violence, mine the resources those in the literal upper class enjoy. They put in all the work, and as far as we can tell, the upper class enjoys the products of that labor.

Smash pretty quickly deduces that this is the same power source used to power them via a cord. Smash breaks free of this constraint to track down one of these mobile power sources and returns with two so that Grab can run away with them. This breakout results in a brief chase scene as flying drones with machine guns fire at the two fleeing robots. Smash and Grab are forced to use a technique they learned while goofing off on the job to disable the drones. They succeed but not without both getting badly injured. The short ends with the two chained together as they walk into the sunset towards one of the planets towering megastructures.

There is a lot here, and it's surprising how much of a class-based commentary can be read in a Disney property, period.

Yet while the text definitely could support this reading, it’s not the only one you can take from it. Smash and Grab director Brian Larsen allegedly wrote this work while in a creative rut, saying: “It was during a time when I felt tethered to things that I couldn’t fully crack at that moment in time in my life, things I couldn’t quite accomplish. Doing SparkShorts allowed me to break free, and it fulfilled me.”

And so you could also view the workers in Smash and Grab from the lens of someone eager to escape the monotony of routine. The repetitive nature of the two robots conveys an emotional reality more than it is grounded in a material analysis of class struggle. They are cogs in a machine wanting to work on more fulfilling endeavors, something we see in how the two turn their job of processing ore into a game.

This lens makes more practical sense because the “freedom” Smash and Grab have won for themselves by the end of the short film isn’t very practical. They are injured and alone in a desert wasteland, attached to a dwindling power source, and walking towards a building housed by the people responsible for their enslavement. That walk into the sunset isn’t forever. They are either on the road to becoming outlaws or headed towards their deaths. This Catch-22 is because Smash and Grab have not freed themselves permanently from the system that enslaved them. It’s, at best, a reprieve.

To be permanently freed, these robots would need an ongoing supply of energy — one they would have to most likely, wrangle from the people controlling the machinegun drones — which would involve systemic reform. The two would have to form a resistance, maybe even a violent one, with the other workers of this world against the people and institutions currently oppressing them.

However, the creative forces behind this short don’t want to get into that murky territory. And that’s fine. No one is required to tell the story of how revolutions happen. This project happened on a tight deadline, and director Larsen probably didn’t have the time to expand on the story any more than they did here.

Still, as we shall soon see, this issue I have cited pops up in more places than this one short. It’s a trend. Disney creators consistently bring up complex power dynamics in their works and then refuse to look at the systemic issues surrounding them.

One example very close to Smash and Grab is the movie WALL-E (2008) — a sci-fi epic about a trash-collecting robot of the same name trying to save his love interest EVE from a tyrannical AI named AUTO. The pilot AI doesn’t want the pair to inform humanity that plant life can grow on Earth again due to an old order from the company Buy-N-Large’s last president. They resort to jettisoning the proof (e.g., a plant) into the void of space as well as declaring EVE and WALL-E outlaws. AUTO is the big bad of the film, and much of the climax is spent by our pair trying to get the last vestiges of humanity to resist him.

Humanity in this movie is depicted as “lazy” and fat. They are so immobile that they live their entire lives in floating hover chairs, drinking most of their food from plastic cups. Anti-fatness is used to signal to the viewer that humanity has become docile. We are meant to view their enslavement to Buy-N-Large as a series of personal choices made by consumers. The moment people start to get more active (e.g., splashing in pools, unplugging from their virtual identities, taking an interest in Earth, etc.), the entire system comes crashing down. The human passenger's revolt against AUTO and decide to head back to Earth to begin rebuilding anew. The last few minutes show human passengers taking their first steps on the now fertile soil.

In reality, things would be a bit more complicated on the Axiom spaceship. Most of the passengers had been indoctrinated from childhood to place trust in this corporation from birth. “B is for Buy-N-large. Your very best friend,” we see a robot teacher lecture to a group of toddlers. The idea that a system can just be reformed through a series of quick individual actions, when most people are thoroughly invested in said system, disregards the effort and time political organizing takes. It also ignores all the disproportionate blame that lies with the institutions responsible for causing this mess — in this case, the Walmart-like corporation Buy-N-Large.

“Just get rid of the big bad, and we then have ourselves a revolution,” the movie seems to argue.

WALL-E is not the only film to rely on the trope of the big bad being responsible for all of society's ills. The movie Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil (2019) is all about how the evil Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) uses her position to turn her people against the dark fairy Maleficent. As the narrator says at the beginning of the film: “…it was Maleficent's love which broke that very same curse. But that detail was somehow mysteriously forgotten. For as the tale was told over and again throughout the kingdom, Maleficent became the villain once more.”

The evil queen then wages a secret war against the fey folk, employing her son's marriage to Maleficient’s daughter Aurora (Elle Fanning) as a trap to attempt to massacre the fey. Despite Ingrith needing many accomplices to put forth this campaign, we are expected to believe that she is solely responsible for this plan and the speciesism underpinning it. The King and Prince Phillip are utterly clueless to her machinations, and once Ingrith is dealt with, relationships with Fey and humans resume almost immediately. “Ulstead will never attack the Moors again,” Phillip proclaims after the climactic battle in the film.

All that it takes to end years, possibly centuries of speciesism, is removing one bad person, and even this person does not despise the fey out of some widespread cultural bias. Ingrith hates the fey folk because she blames them for not assisting her people during one particularly harsh winter. Her hatred is contextual rather than cultural — that initial trauma shaping her thinking so much that she rejects any ideas of equality between humans and fey as foolhardy. We are told that tensions between humans and fey exist (the dark fey claim they have been hunted for centuries), but once Ingrith is removed, those alleged barriers don’t seem to matter a whole lot.

We also see this trope of oversimplifying racism (in this case, metaphorical racism) in the Pixar-Disney film Luca (2021), where the main characters manage to integrate sea monsters and humans in a single evening. This happens in a town that has glorified the hunting of sea monsters for centuries. The town square is littered with statues and mosaics of humans killing sea monsters, and a single sighting prompts the town's fishermen to form raiding parties to hunt them.

Yet the main characters Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), who are sea monsters, bypass centuries of ingrained hatred by winning the local Triathlon and publically rebuffing the film’s antagonist. There are some lingering animosities, but these resentments are mollified from a stern look of one buff fisherman whom the pair befriended earlier in the movie. The integration of humans and sea monsters didn’t require laws and political organization to overcome, but warm, endearing conversations and the removal of the villain. “It’s over, the reign of terror. It’s over,” one character says of the antagonist being humiliated, which happens around the same time the town begrudgingly accepts our main characters.

The status quo is seldom challenged in Disney films, except in the most superficial ways, and worse, it is sometimes actively reinforced. For example, take the 2019 live-action remake of the animated movie Aladdin. The character Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is portrayed as a fiercely independent woman campaigning for social justice. Early on, there is a scene where she gives several children pieces of bread from a merchant’s stall. Enraged, the merchant asks her to pay for the items she stole. She refuses, telling him that their need is greater. “Those children were hungry,” she responds indignantly.

Jasmine, however, doesn’t spend her vast financial and political power as a princess fighting for redistributed policies. Her political power is spent campaigning to be named the first female Sultan — a position most likely built upon depriving those very children of the resources they need to eat. She could give some of her food or riches to feed those children, but instead, she takes it from a merchant. She expresses no qualms with the monarchy she wants to rule (and maybe placing that power into more decentralized hands). The film positions her ascendency to leadership as a chance for change when we see no indication that it will be different for the people beneath her.

Instead, the movie sidesteps this dilemma to focus on the villain, the Grand Vizier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), who briefly becomes the Sultan after wishing for it from a genie. We are meant to think his leadership is wrong because he is duplicitous and wants to invade a neighboring kingdom, but he is merely using the power of his office. Sultans have absolute power in this world. They can change the kingdom's laws on a whim, and as the Sultan, Jafar can pretty much do whatever he wants. Just as Jasmine can do whatever she wants as Sultan by the time the film ends. We are given no material reason for why his leadership would be worse for the citizens of Agrabah, many of which were living in poverty before his short rule even started.

After Jafar’s defeat, Jasmine’s ascendancy to the throne is portrayed as a good thing. Yet, other than the gender change, the power dynamic between the royalty and the peasantry remains unaltered. Jasmine's one adjustment to the laws involves allowing Aladdin to marry her. It’s all about her and has nothing to do with her citizens' poverty or property rights.

Throughout these examples, characters make overtures to changing systems without actually changing them. The blame is not laid at the company Buy-N-large in WALL-E, the monarchy in Aladdin or Maleficent II, or the nameless citizens in the floating cities of Smash and Grab, but instead remains in the realm of individual actors and choices.

Disney films seem to be deeply confused about how power works. They often have characters fighting to individually free themselves from systems of oppression without recognizing that it takes collective action to dismantle them. They also introduce serious issues like racism and sexism without diving into the complexities that make those problems worth discussing.

Again, I don’t think Disney is required to tell stories of political change. They could remain in the realm of compelling emotional arcs and hero’s journeys. It’s a niche they are very good at (see Frozen, Moana, etc.), and they are by no means required to tell stories that focus on overcoming discrimination or fighting against oppression.

Yet, if they want to enter the realm of politics (as they increasingly seem wont to do), then I think their theory of political change should make sense. Because right now, they are creating films and shows with the aesthetic of political change and revolution, without putting in the effort to have anything coherent to say beyond looks.

We need stories that focus on what happens after characters decide to resist. I want to know what happens after the robots walk into the sunset at the end of Smash and Grab. Do they die in the desert? Do they have to continually raid the train system, braving death each time from far superior forces until one day they break down? Or most optimistically of all, do they organize with the other workers on the train system to create freedom for more than just themselves?

Disney is so dead set on creating the aesthetic of political change that they never examine what that means for their characters or worlds. Political change always comes swiftly and suddenly in a film’s closing moments. Even more so than the sci-fi ships and magic carpets, that’s probably the most unbelievable elements in their stories thus far.

Alex Has Opinions 9/16/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/16/21

The Harmful Way Mental Health is Framed in Disney’s ‘Cruella’

Unpacking the presentation of Dissociative Identity Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the hit Disney flick.

Many elements in Disney’s Cruella (2021) shouldn’t work. It had to not only establish an empathetic backstory for the classic Disney villain and turn her into a likable anti-hero but create an entertaining enough plot for viewers to watch. It also had to center this villain while not offending the Mickey Mouse Corporations' conservative sensibilities. And on top of all of these constraints, the movie had to create the space for a potential sequel.

It’s a surprise, frankly, that we got a movie as fun and workable as we did. Some of Cruella’s elements really are fun and exciting: the costumes and set pieces are simply to die for, darling; Emma Stone, though using a somewhat questionable accent, is having the time of her life playing Cruella, and we are here for it; there are also many memeable moments that I am sure will fill text threads and messaging groups for years to come.

Unfortunately, what doesn't quite work is how mental health is framed in this film. The film tries to humanize the dog-skinning protagonist by defining her as someone just a bit different. She is an eccentric who can’t help but stir trouble, leaving us with a portrayal that is far more harmful than edifying when it comes to mental health. It uses her “craziness” as a prop to cause drama rather than to reflect on what having mental health issues means to someone existing in a time period as regressive as the 1970s.

For those unaware, Cruella is a reimagining of the 101 Dalmatians’ villain. It’s about a young petty criminal named Estella Miller (Emma Stone) trying to break into the fashion industry in 1970s London. Her initial job as a designer and personal assistant for Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson) blossoms into a secret rivalry, as Estella dons the persona Cruella to go head-to-head with the Baroness.

The film is of two minds when it comes to discussing mental health. On the one hand, it wants the viewer to think that there is something off-kilter with Estella. We see her referring to herself as “as a little bit mad,” and we know that there is a long history of her acting this way. There is a scene midway through the film where Cruella is trying to recruit an old friend, Anita Darling (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), into reporting on her antics. The way she presents herself to Anita causes the friend to recognize old patterns. “You know that glint in your eye,” Anita says cooly, “…I'm starting to remember that you have a bit of an extreme side.”

Cruella clearly has some unaddressed condition; however, the text doesn’t bother to dive into the specifics of what that illness or disorder is. There is no direct reference to a particular set of symptoms. The closest we come to is several mentions of her having two split selves (i.e., the nice, people-pleasing Estella and the dominant, vindictive Cruella), going all the way back to early childhood when her mother asked her to suppress all aspects of Cruella. This could be a reference to Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder), which requires that someone have multiple distinct personalities, but there is no way for us to know for sure because there are gaps in the characterization that make a diagnosis impossible.

Some might argue that this gap in knowledge can partially be explained by the time period. The 1970s existed well before our current understanding of mental health. Multiple Personality Disorder only became a widespread term in 1980 with the publication of the DSM III, years after Cruella was set. Although there were diagnoses for similar disorders going back centuries (see possessions, hysteria, Hystero-Epilepsy, etc.), it’s not surprising that Estella/Cruella and her companions might lack the vocabulary to describe her mental health issues.

Yet this mainly reads as an excuse. The point of frustration here is not the lack of knowledge the characters have but how those characterizations are presented to the viewer. The film didn’t need modern-day labels to depict symptoms of DID accurately. It could have simply depicted them in a way that was accurate, regardless of whether or not the characters understood them. For example, the film could have shown clear signs of ongoing amnesia, as is common for DID. If the film intended Estella/Cruella to have some other disorder such as Borderline Personality Disorder, it could have shown us chronic feelings of emptiness, dissociation, or one of the other symptoms (see the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for an example that does this right).

Despite clearly referencing some mental health problems in Cruella’s past, the film is not interested in diving into this issue in a way that’s fleshed out. It’s played out more as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation, as Cruella slowly takes over the once-dominant Estella personality. It’s a dramatized conception of two imagined selves (symbolized by her natural hair color of black and white split down the middle) battling it out for control, rather than anything resembling our current conceptions of mental disorders.

This feels all very ableist. These references I have made to DID are subtextual. Unless you are trained to see them, it's doubtful that the typical viewer will walk away thinking the character Estella/Cruella is anything more than “a little bit mad” — a harmful generalization when mental disorders are already understood so poorly by the typical viewer.

Say what you want about Todd Phillips’ Joker (a film Cruella has been compared to extensively), but that at least put a lot of effort into making it clear that the Joker had some disorder (although it is also poorly explained). The film conveyed to the viewer how hard life was for the main character in a society (i.e., 1970s New York City) that didn’t give a flying f@ck about people with mental health issues. He faced stigma that made it difficult for him to interact with people and hold down a job.

Estella/Cruella does have problems, but these appear to be largely situational. She is on the run because she was framed for her adopted mother Catherine's murder, not because her disorder made it difficult to make friends or hold down a job. Her raw talent leads to an unsolicited job offer, and she obtains a found family within days of losing her adopted one.

In fact, the movie often conflates Estella/Cruella’s potential mental health problems with her genius. It frames her challenges to authority not as systemic abuses but rather because these authority figures cannot appreciate her exceptionalism. “And might I say,” remarks Estella’s mother (Emily Beecham) in response to her child getting expelled, “your school seems to turn out horrible children with no creativity or compassion.” “…or genius,” Estella adds mirthfully. “Being a genius is one thing,” Emma Stone narrates several scenes later, “Raising a genius does come with its challenges.”

A more self-aware movie may have made these comments a component of her delusion — a bubble waiting to be popped in the narrative — but the text never challenges these assumptions because Estella/Cruella is by all accounts a genius. She is able to start her own underground fashion label in the span of what seems like five minutes. We have no reason to believe that she’s anything less than exceptional, and it's that alleged genius that brings her more strife than her poorly defined mental disorder.

The writing very clearly wanted to have the aesthetic of someone “mad” without putting in the work to make that characterization well-rounded. This isn't the only area of the movie that relies on appropriating aesthetics without diving into their proper context either. The punk scene of the 70s is referenced to ad nauseum in this film, with Cruella even putting on a punk-inspired runway at one point. And yet, despite a musical soundtrack of over 30 songs, very little punk music is in the actual movie, and there is likewise little connection to punk's political roots. As NPR music contributor Cyrena Touros says in a review segment of the movie:

“…yes, these are songs from the ’70s. But these aren’t punk songs. There was one punk song, which — I don’t know if it’s a spoiler to say — is used in a big high-fashion show moment. And it’s a Stooges song. I think you can guess what it is…And it’s, like, way overproduced. I was like, you took the one punk song in this film, and you did the opposite of what punk is. And you overproduced it.”

The movie also appropriates the facade of queerness with the character Artie (John McCrea), who was lauded as the first openly gay character in a live-action Disney film. However, he is never textually revealed to be queer. He is coded as such in lines like “I like to say that ‘normal’ is the cruelest insult of them all,” his androgynous wardrobe, as well as his David Bowie-inspired eyeliner, but these, are again, merely aesthetics divorced from representation. This queerbaiting is a problem that has shown up in over half a dozen films at this point (see also The Rise of Skywalker, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Cruise, etc.), and, unsurprisingly, it has shown up again in Cruella.

Given Disney’s tendency to appropriate other aesthetics, both historically and in this very movie, it would not be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt here with Estella/Cruella’s portrayal of mental health. We have no evidence to suggest that they tried to tell a three-dimensional story about someone who has a mental disorder. Instead, they appear to be using the veneer of “craziness” to tell an “edgy” story about how exceptional women don’t have to be nice.

Worse, when diving a little deeper, we see that the portrayal of mental disorders in this film is actually pretty harmful.

Cruella's inaccurate depiction of mental health not only comes off as ill-informed, but because this is a major film, it means that that misinformation is going to impact how people see mental health, especially for something as misunderstood as Dissociative Identity Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder.

A major component of DID is that people develop two or more distinct personalities (referred to as “dissociated parts” or “alters”), which we see in the movie in the way of Estella and Cruella, respectively. A person may experience passive influence where a part exerts indirect authority (i.e., alien thoughts, emotions, feelings, preferences, etc.) or a full dissociated intrusion, where one part takes control of the body at the expense of another part. There is no cure for DID, and treatments and diagnoses remain controversial to this day. Generally, psychotherapy is used to integrate various parts, so dissociation is unnecessary or, conversely, to achieve a harmony between the various identities where they come to a cooperative arrangement.

Cruella, however, takes the opposite approach. The Cruella part kills the Estella part, and this is portrayed as a positive thing. “[Estella] was with her mother now,” Cruella says after killing off the Estella part. “But Cruella was alive…And I call that a happy ending.” This representation is a somewhat terrifying stance because it goes against the established consensus of how this disorder should be treated. As Therapist Alyssa Cotten says in her own review of the movie:

“What ends up happening at the very end of the movie is very disturbing because, in the DID [community] we do not endorse this at all…we do not encourage, we do not support the death or killing of your parts, your alters, because all of them hold different memories and experiences and its important that we love all the parts that are present.”

The death of Estella at the end of Cruella not only flies in the face of established mental health consensus, but if someone with DID, who did not currently have a stable support network, took the advice in this movie, it could lead to some unsettling outcomes. It’s not a “happy ending” for anyone to kill off a part of themselves, and the fact the Cruella has the viewer walk away with this message is an unsettling take.

Another harmful element in this work is how it weirdly essentializes Cruella’s “craziness” as an inherent component of her nature. “I'm Cruella, born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” she tells the viewer after learning that her mother is the evil Baroness, a narcissistic woman (more on this later) seen berating and torturing her staff the entire movie. The film recontextualizes Cruella’s badness in this scene, something we have seen her have since early childhood, as a component of that legacy. She’s born bad, it's heavily implied, as a result of her genetic heritage.

Yet, while there may be a genetic component to disorders such as DID, it is not as readily inheritable in the same way the disorders schizophrenia or major depression are. It’s also not clear that someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder can genetically pass on the completely separate Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is not only an ableist assumption that this “crazy” is interchangeable with all others, but it is also weirdly sexist for a movie trying so hard to be a white, feminist power ballad to assume that the “craziness” of the mother could be passed on at all.

These disorders are complex, and our understanding of them is constantly evolving, but what we do know is that environment is a huge factor in how they develop. Childhood trauma, in fact, is overwhelmingly cited as a cause of DID, which means that if you are going to “blame” anyone, Estella’s mother would be the far better candidate because the Baroness never interacted with Estella/Cruella until adulthood. The film briefly addresses this possibility when Cruella monologues to her dead mother about how she always tried to control her, saying: “I guess you were always scared, weren’t you? That I’d be a psycho like my real mum?”

There is an argument to be made here that her adopted mother Catherine did instill real trauma onto Estella to avoid her adopted daughter developing the Baroness’ perceived evilness. She actively tried to suppress Cruella (something we know shouldn't be done with parts), but the movie ultimately doesn’t blame her as the source of that “badness” because this is the same monologue where Cruella tells the viewer that she was “born bad.” The film Cruella erases the complicated reality of how people get dissociative disorders like DID — most likely because telling a story about child abuse would probably be too dark for an edgy Disney movie — and instead tries to essentialize these mental disorders as a part of Cruella and the Baroness's badness.

We see this essentialization, not only with the titular character, but also with the Baroness, who is portrayed as a truly despicable figure in the movie. She takes pleasure in hurting others, has no qualms about killing off her competition, and is literally called evil in the film’s closing monologue. The explanation for why she is like this is because of her alleged disorder, one of her henchmen, saying: “The Baroness, on the other hand, she’s a true narcissist.” Narcissistic Personality Disorder, however, is defined by someone having at least five of nine characteristics listed in the DSM ( e.g., a grandiose sense of self-importance; preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success; belief that they are “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people, etc.) and has nothing to do with people taking pleasure in hurting others or being inherently evil.

This characterization in Cruella is quite ableist as it ties into a long history of people equating narcissists to flat-out monsters. We need to only look at cinemas' classic antagonists to know this to be true. Most Disney villains, from Gaston (Richard White) in Beauty and The Beast to Scar (Jeremy Irons) in The Lion King to Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) in Enchanted, portray narcists as evil. The protagonist in American Psycho, the homicidal Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is so narcissistic that, at one point, he admires his own reflection while having sex. The serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) in Se7en has an overinflated sense of self. The MCU is likewise littered with narcists from Thanos (Josh Brolin) to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to Ego (Kurt Russell) in Guardians of the Galaxy.

It’s possible to list pages upon pages of narcissistic villains in pop culture, but the same cannot be said for heroes, especially outside the realm of comedy where narcists are comedic punchlines (see Emperor Kuzco (David Spade) in The Emperor’s New Groove, Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) in Arrested Development, etc.). In fact, narcissistic characters given the hero moniker usually have their “badness” massaged to make them likable. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in Iron Man may have a high ego at the start of the film, but he ends the movie caring so much about humanity that he stops his company from producing weapons. Loki starts the MCU as a “megalomaniac,” but by the time he gets his own series, his ego is deflated so much that he realizes his personal failing on his own. Their narcissism is effectively dropped for them to become protagonists.

We see a similar trend with DID. There are some empathetic, albeit sensationalized portrayals in pop culture (see Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) in The United States of Tara, Charlotte Wells (Sophie Okonedo) in Ratched. etc.), but a lot of people with DID are often depicted as vessels for evil. The character Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) in Split and later in Glass has a literal monster part called The Beast. The character Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in The Dark Knight is left disfigured from an accident — his psyche split in two, so torn that he often leaves violence up to the flip of a coin. The movie Fight Club ends with the reveal that violent mastermind Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a part of the narrator character (Edward Norton). A similar plot can be seen in the hacker thriller Mr. Robot.

Just as in Cruella, depictions of DID often fall into the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde trope with a “good” side and a “bad” side fighting for control. The movie Black Swan is about the protagonist Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), splitting back and forth between the orderly white swan and the chaotic black one. The cruel Skeksis and peace-loving urRu in The Dark Crystal are the good and evil parts of the urSkeks race. Split personalities are also frequently a Horror movie trope. The twist of many is that the homicidal part perpetuating the murders is being concealed by a more banal part (see Dr. Elliott in Dressed to Kill, Axel Palmer in My Bloody Valentine, Dr. David Callaway in Hide and Seek, etc.)

However, people who have these disorders are not any more predisposed to “evil” than neurotypical people. One well-regarded study found that when you consider other factors such as substance abuse and poverty, people with mental disorders do not seem to be any more violent than others. As one of the authors remarks: “a great deal of what is responsible for violence among people with mental illness may be the same factors that are responsible for violence among people without mental illness.” In fact, someone with DID is far more likely to commit suicide than they are to engage in Machiavellian plots and serial killer sprees.

This trend of sensationalizing these mental disorders, often quite inaccurately, as this film shows, creates a stigma that prevents people with mental disorders from getting the help they need — for who would willfully admit that they are a “monster.” Millions of Americans go both undiagnosed and untreated, and dangerous framings like this do not help this matter.

Ultimately Cruella doesn’t separate itself from this dangerous throughline in cinema but adds to it. The film creates a story where someone is evil because of their disorder. We don’t walk away thinking mental illness is something that makes life more difficult for Cruella, but at best, it is padding for her eccentricities, and at worst, something that makes that badness predetermined.

Disney’s Cruella relies on some pretty terrible cliches to ground its anti-hero and villain in. It creates this paradigm where mental illness is used to justify why someone behaves immorally, and as we have briefly covered, that ties into a long, problematic history.

There were plenty of ways to make Cruella a lovable protagonist, even one as vindictive as a puppy murder, that would not have played into these problematic tropes. They could have made her motivation about trying to win the estate from the Baroness from the beginning. They could have had the Baroness’ “evil” rooted in a personal philosophy rather than her mental health. Hell, they could have even had narcism and DID play a central role. The goal here is not to preclude villains from ever having a mental disorder or for these disorders always to be a main part of the text, but rather to depict these disorders respectfully. To do that, though, this film would have had to involve far more research and care than shown presently.

Telling a lukewarm conversation about mental health was a landmine they chose to step into. No one asked for them to do this, and, sadly, this has not garnered more attention in the conversation surrounding the film, though there is no doubt it will be perceived less favorably as the years roll on ahead.

All of this being said, I still had fun watching this movie. I loved the costumes and one-liners, and unlike other films I have reviewed, analyzing it was not a chore. There is a tendency for people to criticize critics for ruining their fun or being moralists, but criticizing the things we enjoy doesn’t mean we have to cast them aside. It's just a matter of recognizing the problematic elements in them to make space for future works to do better.

As a society, we have been stuck with these harmful tropes with mental health for a while, and there's nothing fashionable or cool about that.

Alex Has Opinions 9/7/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/7/21

Yes, Evicting Your Tenants Is Bad Actually

I can’t believe I have to stress this during a pandemic

We are in the middle of a god damn pandemic, and some landlords want us not to criticize them for denying their tenants housing. “Not all landlords are rolling in money,” writes Jacqueline A in a Medium article explaining why she is evicting her tenants. “Some are just normal individuals trying to make ends meet. In the same way, we have good and bad tenants; we also have good and bad landlords. In the same way, tenants don’t want to be homeless; landlords don’t want to be in debt due to their tenants.”

Before we proceed, it should be noted that being unhoused is not equal to being in debt. The former is far worse. However, it does speak to the priorities of not only Jacqueline A but many landlords out there. They want to prevent people from demonizing their right to deny an individual in their care housing while simultaneously critiquing anything that prevents them from getting their money.

These criticisms have existed for centuries, but the recently axed eviction moratorium had many landlords up in arms over a temporary loss of profits. (Note that the moratorium excluded many scenarios and did not prevent landlords from getting their money eventually, but a lot were frustrated by a gap in rents anyway). “The eviction moratorium is killing small landlords, not the pandemic.” Dean Hunter, CEO of the Small Multifamily Owners Association, told NBC back in June of 2021. The argument being that landlords would have to sell their property if they did not receive financial aid, or implicitly left unsaid, could return to the previous era of evicting their tenants.

Now that that eviction moratorium has been removed on the national level, we are seeing that cold reality play out in real-time. Hundreds of thousands risk losing their homes by the end of the year. These landlords wanted sympathy from us for “having” to evict tenants from their homes so that they can preserve their economic entitlements (i.e., rents), but they were not nearly as concerned with all the negative repercussions that that decision entails (i.e., financial hardships, homelessness, and even death for their tenants).

They asked us to prioritize their monetary losses over our empathy for their tenants — a group that is overall more disadvantaged economically — and we should question the ethicality of this tactic and what it says of us as a people overall.

When we have this conversation, it's very easy to get bogged down in the specifics of the investment and the philosophical nature of owning property (and we will get to that), but before we even jump into those turbulent waters, we should first talk about what’s at stake. When we discuss housing, we are inherently talking about the right for people to live a good life or even to live at all. The decision to deny someone housing makes their lives materially more difficult, and that action could harm them physically, not simply financially.

Housing is expensive in the United States. There are a lot of factors that are too much to cover in-depth here: the purchasing of a good home outright requires over 100K in all states, a high number for most working Americans who make a median wage of $19.33 an hour; millions of renters also spend over 50% of their income on rent, making saving difficult; there is also a dwindling supply of low-cost rentals and homes to buy. And of course, these problems fall along existing lines of inequity, with browner Americans far more likely to rent than own. All of these factors taken together mean that when someone is denied housing in an inequitable market such as ours, especially a lower-income person, they will struggle to find an alternative.

It’s difficult to find national data on the eviction-to-homelessness pipeline because we don’t have good figures on the total number of unhoused people in the US period, let alone all the contributing factors. However, we know from many studies that a link between eviction and being unhoused is credible. For example, Scholars Robert Collinson and Davin Reed combed through over a decade of housing court cases and other administrative programs in New York City, and they found that evictions increase the “probability of [lower income households] applying to homeless shelter[s] by 14 percentage points.” In the words of one anti-homelessness advocate on their experience with this phenomenon:

“Seven, eight years ago here in this neighborhood, my family and I were evicted. This memory comes back to me, it's like a moment of rejection…we weren't worthy to be in the place that we live at…My mom was a hardworking person and she worked multiple jobs. This was during my Senior year. I didn’t know what we were going to do next and neither did my siblings…We decide to just head into a shelter.”

There is a clear link between evicting someone and homelessness — a statement that should sound obvious when uttered aloud — and that's not the only issue. Losing your home comes with it a bevy of health problems. Unhoused people have a shorter life span — 17.5 years shorter than the general population, according to one estimate. They suffer from treatable problems such as wound and skin infections, malnutrition, and substance abuse, as well as mental health problems — all of which would be easier to deal with with a roof over their heads.

Landlords love to share anecdotes of tenant horror stories where people refuse to cooperate, dragging proceedings in courts for years, as a justification for why they must evict. The web is filled with listicles of these stories, usually taken from only the landlord's perspective. These stories aim for the viewer to gawk at all the problems landlords allegedly have to deal with. “…landlords have a tough job,” writes Jasmin Suknanan in BuzzFeed. “But their jobs become *extra* tough when dealing with people and situations who just make the experience a living hell.” These “problem cases,” however, are a statistical minority. We are in the middle of a pandemic that has wrecked the earning potential of millions of Americans, and the number of Americans who are behind on rent sits somewhere at 12% nationally.

Given the repercussions we just talked about — the poverty and death that follow from an eviction — is preventing one or two people from skipping out on rent truly worth risking the physical and mental health of millions of people? And should someone's personality really dictate whether or not they have a right to housing?

Any empathetic person should answer no.

If you are complaining about a poor return when your actions hurt and possibly even kill people, you might understand for a moment why it's hard for others to take your concerns over a bad investment seriously. Because that’s what housing is for most people who rent out property — an investment, a way to accumulate wealth over time.

According to a 2018 Rental Housing Finance Survey, nearly 45% of all rental units are owned by for-profit businesses, which own a disproportionate amount of properties with 25 or more rental units. It's true that individual investors own the remaining units (55%), but this doesn’t make the majority of these investors poor. Owners make up a small number of Americans, and they tend to have a larger income than the average citizen.

Now, if some of these individuals are over-leveraged (i.e., have taken on too much debt) and make a bad investment, they could stand to lose a great deal, as the standard of living they have mapped out for themselves disappears. When comparing this loss to the loss of tenants, however, who are far more likely to face starvation and death, you can see how people think these complaints come off as heartless.

Despite what people like Jacqueline A may have us believe, debt is not the same thing as being unhoused. One group of people losses the future they thought they were entitled to but still most likely has a roof over their heads, while the other loses everything.

To the commenters already typing away links and articles about landlords losing wealth because of bad tenants, losing your economic future is indeed unfair, but that’s how our capitalist system works. You are not entitled to a return on investment, any more than a restaurant owner would be entitled to a profit if patrons stopped going to their restaurant or an investor is to a certain stock price if the stock plummets. Our system is unfair, and if you are unable to make money, you are only allowed access to a patchwork of safety net programs to survive.

We should want to change this dreadful state of affairs. It seems strange to me, however, that many landlords demand sympathy for them over a loss of profits but will disregard the lives of tenants, who are almost always in a materially worse off situation. It speaks to an utter lack of empathy. They want all of the upsides of capitalism for themselves, with none of the downsides, while expecting others to weather both.

Why should housing be different from any other investment? It seems strange that property owners feel like they deserve special treatment over other investors when sudden economic downturns are part of the risk they take on when entering this sector of the economy. There is always the risk that tenants will default on their rents — that’s part of the reason rents are so high in the first place.

Rather than realize that our housing system is unfair for all (and maybe should be radically changed), many landlords will often complain that the law is interfering with their ability to turn a profit. “Preventing all evictions, for any reason (as some local ordinances effectively do),” opines Tony Francois in The Hill in May of 2020 of the now axed eviction moratorium. “While doing nothing to shield property owners, is a dangerous over-reaction to the scope of the problems posed by the current emergency.” Francois goes on to explain that the moratorium may not even be necessary and that if implemented, it will ruin many small-time property owners. He’s, in essence, complaining that the law is unfair because it will impact the earning potential of landlords.

Yet again, this is a willful misrepresentation of how capitalism works. The law has always affected how wealth is made or lost. In fact, gaps in the law are how most entrepreneurial people make their money in the modern era. Gaps in contracting law allowed companies like Uber to break into the taxi business. They reclassified drivers as independent contractors rather than employees to avoid paying out healthcare and overtime entitlements. Gaps in how cryptocurrencies are classified have allowed speculative investing to skyrocket. Going back even further, Robber Barons such as Rockefeller could amass so much wealth because there was no regulatory framework to challenge them.

Large returns on investment almost always come from the exploitation of inequity, and landlords are no different. Housing is not like other products and services where someone can skip one month if they can’t afford it. It’s an essential service that, as we have already covered, materially impacts someone's physical and psychological health. Someone will pay for this service if they can, which is why many devote such a significant portion of their income to even suboptimal housing.

For many, there is no alternative, but the streets.

People would not rent if they had any opportunity to own property, and it’s this necessity that landlords are profiting off of. Take a moment to consider what renting even is. You get the temporary ability to live somewhere, and in exchange, you pay off a landlord’s mortgage and give them equity. Your wealth stagnates or even decreases in this arrangement, while their wealth increases over time. This is all to pay for a service that you must have if you wish to live at all.

It’s inherently exploitative, and as with any exploitative investment, the risk underpinning these high rewards is that the political order will change at any moment. Many people, for example, currently use Airbnb to rent out (or sublease) their spaces, often circumventing local tax and safety regulations on vacation rentals and apartments. In an attempt to get some of that potential tax revenue, governments all over the country are now cracking down, passing laws that make it less profitable for people to rent out their residences with booking platforms like Airbnb. It was (and to a certain extent still is) that gap that made the platform desirable in the first place.

The law is always shifting people’s access to vital services such as housing, leading to high returns and sudden downsides. One of the reasons there is a gap in affordable housing right now is because the federal government has not prioritized it. There have been consistent cuts over the last three decades, going all the way back to Nixon. Public housing is pretty much only built now to replace existing units. Rental vouchers are the preferred method of choice in the current era. Even these have long waitlists as only about a fourth of people who qualify receive them (landlords also often discriminate against voucher holders).

If our government were to increase its funding toward affordable housing, housing would not be nearly as profitable of an investment for landlords as it is today because they benefit from this discrepancy. As scholars Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers write in a paper published in the American Journal of Sociology:

“In poor neighborhoods…landlords are betting on today. These landlords see much higher monthly profit margins per housing unit. This short-term investment strategy does not rely on future equity, a risky proposition in distressed communities, but on the simple fact that in poor neighborhoods mortgage and property tax payments are significantly lower than in nonpoor neighborhoods but rents are not.”

Our current policy regime prioritizes homeownership while not reducing costs for renters. This creates a climate where those who have the resources to purchase property can do so and then charge renters, especially poorer ones, a premium for that service.

While the money is running high, it may seem to landlords like these entitlements to high rents will go on forever, but that’s not the case. There is nothing inherent about your return on investment, in the same way, that there is nothing inherent about people having to set aside a portion of their wealth in rents. These are temporary arrangements built on policies that could change at any moment. The expectation that landlords should not weather any risk (or losses) goes against how our capitalist system operates.

It is troublesome that many landlords would rather stubbornly hold onto their perceived entitlement to rents rather than work towards building a world where neither party has to worry about housing on an ongoing basis. It seems to be more about the preservation of power than about the economy. We should question why we prioritize someone’s right to exploit others over providing everyone equitable housing.

Again, all of this is unfair. It's unfair that housing is so hard for most people to obtain and keep. It's also unfair that exploiting other people is the easiest way to build a safe future for yourself. It creates a situation where to get ahead; you have to take advantage of others — a win-lose scenario.

We should be working towards a world where housing is not a zero-sum game. How we get there is another article (or book series) in its own right. If you are interested in solutions that work towards that future, check out the Urban Institute, the Coalition for the Homeless, and the Housing Partnership Network as places to start. You might also want to research nonprofits and grassroots campaigns in your area working on this problem on a local level.

When it comes to housing, we can create a win-win solution, but to be frank, it will mean shifting our empathy towards the plight of the exploited rather than the lost wealth of the exploiters. Landlords will have to let go, either willing or through force, the idea that they are entitled to profits built on the backs of others' misfortune.

I am not asking to rewrite the economic order overnight, but when it comes to this debate, we need landlords to stop taking up the conversation with housing. Stop writing op-eds and articles bemoaning your loss of profits, and focus on the structural inequities within this system. Uplift and donate to voices trying to reform housing for the better (not simply your bottom line) and spend political power on their preferred solutions.

Also, if you are a landlord, see what you can do with your tenants to make your relationship with them more equitable. One solution worth looking into is rent-to-own contracts. These vary depending on the specifics of the contract. Generally, though, they create an arrangement where the renter sets aside money every month to purchase the property and has first rights to purchase it when it's sold. This opens up a path for homeownership and provides you, the landlord, with an offer to purchase the property, rather than having to pay fees to a realtor to find one.

In exchange for taking small steps like the ones above, all of us will be working towards a world where we don’t have to worry about exploitation, to have a roof over our heads—a world where housing is a right rather than an asset enjoyed by the few.

Alex Has Opinions 9/4/21 Alex Has Opinions 9/4/21

You Couldn't Make ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ Today

Revisiting the 2006 hit, and what it says about the state of work in America.

The movie The Devil Wears Prada lingers in the public consciousness, even fifteen years after it first aired in 2006. We still see Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in memes, as people quote gifs of her oneliners, such as “You have no sense of fashion” or “By all means move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me” to their friends in threads. The fanbase has remained active to this day, with the official page still maintaining over 2 million followers on Facebook.

It’s an IP constantly being tapped into and remade. The original author of the novel has published two sequels: Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns and When Life Gives You Lululemons. There will be a musical adaptation released in 2022, and there have been talks over the years from various studios trying to remake it — though none of these have come to fruition so far.

However, when we revisit the movie that sparked the phenomenon, the story is almost chilling in retrospect. It is not as light and fun as we remember but rather depicts an abusive boss, revered for her cruelty. Miranda is, quite frankly, a terrible person, and our glorification of her as an icon speaks to our society’s unhealthy norms regarding work.

Norms which, thankfully, might be changing for the better.

For those of you unaware, the movie is about a young twenty-something named Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) who wants to be a journalist. Andrea, or Andy as she likes to be called, lands a job as the second personal assistant for fashion icon Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor of Runway Magazine. Miranda is sometimes believed to be loosely modeled after Vogue editor Anna Wintour in the books. The movie, and the book from which it is based, follow Andy through a year as Miranda's personal assistant and the ups and downs that that entails.

Watching the 2006 movie is disconcerting, to say the least. Miranda, and in fact, the entire work culture she fosters, is exceedingly cruel. She openly berates her staff, telling her employees that they are “incompetent,” “inadequate,” or “disappointing.” She does not take constructive feedback and often refuses to be questioned at all. Her leadership style is dictatorial, and she exercises that control in the pettiest of ways.

There is a scene early on where Miranda enters an elevator occupied by another woman at the company. This woman apologizes to her and immediately leaves the elevator so Miranda can ride it alone. The implication seems to be clear. She is a boss who does not care to interact with her subordinates, yet they must assume her whims and desires without her uttering a word. Throughout, the film Andy spends most of her time trying to guess the desires of Miranda, who does not expound upon her wants and treats failure with hurtful words and impossible demands.

This meanspiritedness filters down to everyone in the corporate hierarchy. The barbs' Runway staff members say to each other are likewise cruel, often replicating the worst aspects of the fashion industry. “Who is that sad little person? Are we doing a before and after piece I don’t know about?” the character Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) says upon seeing Andy for the first time. Andy faces repeated bullying throughout the film from nearly all of her peers. These comments are mean for the sake of it, and workers have taken their lives for far less.

The workplace of Runway is not just psychologically tortuous, however, but also physically dangerous. We learn early on in the movie that the phones must be answered at all times, which should take priority even over going to the bathroom. It should be noted that doing so is unsafe, as holding in human waste can lead to medical problems over time, such as weakening your bladder muscles or an increase in urinary tract and bladder infections. It’s generally not life-threatening, but it's not pleasant.

The movie doubles down on the alleged hilarity of this premise and has Miranda’s first assistant Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), tell us a story about how one time an assistant left the desk because she sliced her hand open with a letter opener. This resulted in Miranda missing an important call, which, Emily implies, led to the assistant's termination and blocklisting. “She now works at TV Guide,” Emily lectures, treating a chilling incident as frivolous.

Speaking of Emily, halfway through the film, she gets sick. In a scene that has aged very poorly in the age of COVID, she is required to not only keep working but attend a benefit with hundreds of people. It was difficult to watch Emily touch things and whisper into Miranda’s ear, as it's hard not to imagine all the people she was infecting. It reflects a not too distant time period when the expectation was for workers to work through sickness. One we have not entirely shed, even now, during the middle of a pandemic.

Miranda constantly uses her leverage over her workers as a cudgel to get them to do morally questionable things. When she decides to take Andy to Paris over her assistant Emily, she uses the possibility of blocklisting to get her to comply. “If you don’t go,” she says cooly, “I’ll assume you’re not serious about your future at Runway or any other publication. The decisions yours.” Miranda frames this decision as one of choice (a theme that comes up repeatedly in the film), but that framing ignores the power dynamics happening in this scene. One of the most powerful women in publishing is telling a young twenty-something she must do something or never work again in her preferred industry — there is no choice there.

In the original book, all the actions mentioned so far paint Miranda as the villain. Andy ends up losing her job during the book's climax because she feels like she can’t visit her friend, who is in a coma in the hospital, without getting fired. She tells Miranda, “F@ck You” in public after she is given the impossible task of renewing her daughter's passport in only 12 hours. Miranda fires her then and there on the spot.

In the movie, however, there is no friend in a coma. Her objections are more philosophical than personal. Andy politely leaves Miranda by going out the other door of a limo. She then throws her phone into a fountain, cutting her ties with her boss in a nicer and less confrontational way than in the book. Miranda ends up giving Andy a reference, and we finish the film with her smiling about Andy, something we are told she rarely does.

The context of Miranda’s abuse is, if not erased, massaged to give us the impression that she is not that bad. We are meant to view her actions as a necessary component of her success and the success of her employees.

Miranda is an abusive boss, but we as the viewer don’t walk away thinking that because of how work is framed in the movie (i.e., film speak for the intended message meant to be conveyed to the viewer). The film spends a lot of time validating the perspective that work should be totalizing and difficult. The main character is chastised several times for not taking her position seriously. She is told over three times that her job is one that a million girls would “kill for.” At one point, she goes to Art Director Nigel to complain about how hard of a time she is having, and rather than sympathize, he condescends to her about how she does not appreciate the job enough:

“…this place, where so many people would die to work, you only deign to work. And you want to know why she doesn’t kiss you on the forehead and give you a gold star on your homework at the end of the day. Wake up, sweetheart.”

Although Andy ultimately leaves this toxic work environment, the film is all about glorifying her hustle. We are meant to respect her learning the ropes in this grueling industry and think of her story as to how things are supposed to be done. After a lot of hard work, Andy gets a reference from Miranda and moves toward her dream job as a journalist. She lands a position working for a mid-tier newspaper, getting her that much closer to The New Yorker. She may not like Miranda, but she begrudgingly respects her, waving her an appreciative goodbye near the film's end.

Of course, in real life, abusive bosses do not always lead to career breaks. Many people give a lot of time to their work, only for them to be left with nothing. The source material recognizes this reality by having Miranda blocklist Andy after her breakdown in Paris. Andy suffers material consequences for resisting the whims of her boss and has to essentially restart her career, albeit in a very expedited fashion.

This has a real-life parallel to Anna Wintour, who has a long, whispered history about retaliating against those she has perceived as wronging her. The creators of The Devil Wear Prada film, in fact, had trouble getting designers to provide clothes or feedback for fear of angering Anna Wintour. They even had trouble securing New York apartment buildings as filming locations for Miranda's house for the same reason. “…the co-op boards wouldn’t let us in,” Director David Frankel said in an interview. “We went for weeks being unable to secure locations!”

The film doesn’t want to recreate that ugly reality, not only because it would have been a liability for them during filming but also because the main creative forces behind this film perceive the abuse we have talked about as a necessary component of creation. As the film Director David Frankel says of the original book: “Miranda was a witch, and Andy’s motivation was to get her revenge. There was a lot of conflict that ended with Miranda being humiliated. I felt that wasn’t satisfying. My view was that we should be grateful for excellence. Why do the excellent people have to be nice?”

It’s a position that ends up glorifying successful people regardless of the abuse they cause. This viewpoint means that the film has a near reverence for Miranda as a character. It frames her as a necessary force that gets things done. This is perfectly encapsulated in the infamous cerulean monologue where Miranda lectures Andy on how important fashion, and by extension, her directorship, is to the world at large:

“…that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room….”

This monologue was added at the insistence of Meryl Streep herself, who wanted to make the character more empathetic — a desire that perfectly fits director Frankel's vision to have Miranda be the heroine. Miranda may be tough, the film seems to argue, but she is making the world turn.

Since Miranda is a villain in the original work, however, that meant having to downplay and change many of the more critical elements in the book. For example, Andy’s friend Lily is a successful artist in the movie, whose critical of Andy for not spending enough time with her and her boyfriend. Her jabs come off as self-centered rather than empathetic because Andy is only doing this position for a year as a stepping stone to get her dream job: something you would think a true friend would understand.

In the book, however, Lily is Andy's roommate, and she has a worsening alcohol problem due to buckling under the strain of graduate school. Andy feels progressively guiltier for not being able to help due to her jampacked work schedule. Lily’s alcoholism culminates in a car crash that places her in a coma. Lily’s position in the narrative is a lesson in how “hustle culture” not only can harm ourselves but those we care about. It makes us withdrawn and forces us to rely on bad coping mechanisms to get through the day.

Likewise, in the movie, Andy’s boyfriend, Nate Cooper (Adrian Grenier), is a chef who comes off as spoiled and entitled to many viewers for his insistence that Andy spends less time at work. As Sana Schwartz writes in Entertainment Weekly: “…[Nate] is kind of the worst. He mocks [Andy] for her new interest in fashion, he trivializes the magazine she works at, and dismisses her hard work. And, perhaps most egregiously, he tantrums about Andy missing his birthday dinner because she had to work an important gala — a major step up for her at her job.”

However, in the book, her boyfriend Alex Fineman has an equally demanding job of his own. He’s a teacher in the Bronx working for Teach for America, which is often a very stressful position in its own right. His concern for Andy comes not from a lack of understanding over hard work but because she stops prioritizing him in the relationship. The event he throws a “tantrum over” in the books is not a birthday dinner, but Andy going to Paris last minute instead of going to homecoming with him. He had already booked hotel rooms for this event on a teacher's salary and moved around his schedule. It was the last straw in a year of hasty cancellations.

The film pulls these punches because it doesn’t want the viewer to think too deeply about the harm Miranda has placed on her workers. Her abuse doesn’t simply inflict emotional harm on her subordinates but has ripple effects that lead to physical and psychological harm. It's hard to think about these plot beats as merely trivial complaints when you center your empathy on beleaguered workers, rather than bosses who rule the world of fashion with an iron fist.

The Devil Wears Prada is a relic of a time when work was everything, and over the years, we have started to question the problems that can come from this type of glorification.

Two years after The Devil Wears Prada was released, the US economy tanked due to a collapse in the housing market in what would almost immediately be labeled the “Great Recession.” This happened because of the greed of certain financiers, many of which faced no penalties, as they inflated the housing market with toxic subprime mortgages.

The Great Recession was the beginning of a popular reckoning with the wealthy. We saw the emergence of Occupy Wallstreet, a protest movement against economic inequality that was the genesis for many modern-day movements, from the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America to the presidential run of Bernie Sanders.

One year later, during the middle of the recession, Confessions of a Shopaholic was released in theaters. It was a film about a woman with a shopping addiction who aspired to work for the fashion magazine Alette — an almost inverse of The Devil Wears Prada. The film’s producers agonized over the release as they reshot its ending to be more mindful of America's new economic woes, but it did little to quell critics. It was still panned in theaters as being insensitive. “This sickening ode to consumerist greed comes just in time for the recession,” quipped Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

In many ways, that anger has not gone away. Wealth inequality has only increased, metastasizing into a hustle culture that is not just necessary to get ahead in your career but to pay the bills at all. The rich are more hated than ever. The winners of film awards now appear to be class-conscious titles such as Parasite that skewer the rich. While billionaire Tony Stark launched the MCU over a decade ago, now our heroes are poor hustlers like Sokovian refuge Wanda Maximoff in Wandavision, orphan scavenger Rey in Star Wars, and more.

When I say you couldn't make The Devil Wears Prada, I don’t mean a remake of the property couldn't technically happen, but that the norms it embodied would not fly today. We are increasingly coming to question the idea that the alleged genius of the powerful justifies the cruelty toward those they command. The rich and powerful still have their blind followers, but they also must struggle against an emerging ecosystem of people who hate them.

It was a given that you didn’t question the abuse of your bosses in the 2000s, but today, the fashionable thing is to question why that abuse is even necessary in the first place.

Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21

There Are No Billionaires In Star Trek’s Federation

The rich would not be allowed into Star Trek’s utopia

The first time I considered that work could be different than it is today came from watching an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999). The protagonist, Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), was talking to his father, Joseph Sisko (Brock Peters), who I learned ran a Creole restaurant back on Earth in the 2370s. Joseph found it hectic to manage it, but he didn’t work because he had to pay bills or get health insurance. In fact, his chosen profession was technically obsolete. No one had needed to make food by hand in hundreds of years, thanks to protein resequencers and later replicators.

The citizens of the Federation did not need to work for subsistence. They lived in a post-scarcity, arguably socialist society where people performed labor simply because they enjoyed it. It was a conception of work that was a radical departure from everything I had ever known. All other discussions of work before this moment had been about how I could make money for others. My family spent my early years encouraging me to be a lawyer, accountant, or any position that made significant sums of money. Enjoyment was always an ancillary concern.

Star Trek showed me a world where I could produce labor free from the constraints of others. It is a source of inspiration for millions of people, and strangely enough, that often includes billionaires who are many times the ones dictating the constraints of our labor.

If we want to make the vision of this show a more tangible reality, however, we will have to create a world where they no longer exist.

It cannot be overstated how some of the most popular billionaires on the planet love Star Trek. Bezos allegedly once considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com after the catchphrase of Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard (Bezos also made a cameo as an alien in Star Trek Beyond (2016)). Elon Musk once said in an interview that he wants to make “Starfleet happen.” Bill Gates once dressed up as the character Spock to market a Windows launch.

However, in the universe of Star Trek, these men would not have the power and influence they have in our world. The Federation does not permit concentration of wealth among its citizens, a point stated explicitly in the Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) episode The Neutral Zone, where the crew of the USS Enterprise-D unfreezes three individuals from the late 20th century. One of them is a financier, who is horrified to hear that not only do his financial assets no longer exist but that all of society has shifted away from capitalism. “A lot has changed in the last 300 years,” Picard quips at the financier after the latter demands to speak to his lawyer so he can get ahold of his bank accounts.

In fact, the races that do still engage in capitalism in the series are often depicted as barbaric and backward. The Ferengi, a group of short, orangish brown, lobed-eared aliens, are not only capitalistic but also incredibly sexist. They keep their women in a state of slavery. Ferengi women are barred from wearing clothes, traveling without a male escort, or earning a profit. As the Ferengi Quark remarks to Benjamin Sisko: “The way I see it, Humans used to be a lot like Ferengi: greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We’re a constant reminder of a part of your past you’d like to forget.”

Humanity has abandoned capitalism and moved towards a socialist government where people work towards what they want rather than being driven by scarcity. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things,” Picard continues in his speech to the financier. “We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.” Citizens engage in work they desire, free from the limitations of the old world, and this radical vision is something we don’t see advocated for much in pop culture or society at large.

Billionaires will often ignore this message and instead point to the show's technology as a way to get to this future. Star Trek, after all, has technology like replicators and transporters that play with the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The argument goes that we need to expand our technological capacity and move out into space to achieve that futuristic standard of living. When asked to defend his space venture Blue Origin at the Living Legends of Aviation awards ceremony in 2019, Billionaire Jeff Bezos remarked:

“What sounds like freedom to me is moving out into the solar system, where we have, for all practical purposes, unlimited energy, unlimited resources. We’d have a trillion humans in the solar system, and then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. That’s the world I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.”

However, this point of view is not how the idealistic future in the show came to be. The origin of the Federation began before the emergence of replicators and transporters, to the very beginning of warp drive. The inventor of it, Zephram Cochrane, made First Contact with the alien race the Vulcans and chose to extend an arm out towards them in peace. That peaceful intention is the real basis for the Federation, as unchecked technological growth in the show had decades earlier culminated in a devastating third World War that decimated the Earth's population.

The Federation grew over the years because of a philosophy of valuing peace, multiculturalism, and equality. Admission into the Federation does not just require the development of advanced technology (i.e., warp drive) but also a level of political unity, equal rights, and the removal of a caste system. When, for example, the Bajorans in the season 4 episode of Deep Space Nine, Accession, revive their ancient caste system of D’jarras, it causes the Federation to doubt their candidacy for admission. “You realize,” Captain Sisko lectures the new Bajoran Emissary, “That caste-based discrimination goes against the Federation Charter. If Bajor returns to the D’jarra system, I have no doubt that its petition to join the Federation will be rejected.”

Our world would not qualify for admission into the Federation either, and not simply because of a lack of warp drive, but because we also maintain a rigid caste system of our own. We have inequality structured through the accumulation of capital rather than by religion, with upper-class people at the top and lower-class people at the bottom. It would be considered barbaric by the future humanity of the show.

The majority of this planet's inhabitants have very little, while a few can dream of conquering the stars, which goes against the spirit of equality valued by Federation worlds.

Our current caste system exists not because we lack the resources to provide for our population but because we choose to allocate them elsewhere. Over the last couple of decades, the rate of food production has increased faster than population growth, but people still go hungry. Most food scarcity, in fact, involves a level of human complicity, where human organization, whether it be because of the disruption of war or economic deterioration, determines if something will develop into a full-blown famine. The scholar Amartya Sen published a famous work to this effect in 1981 titled Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. He outlined how “entitlements” (e.g., labor, property, or cash, etc.) give people access to food, not necessarily the production of food itself. If these entitlements are not widely available, as what tends to happen during periods of disruption, then people starve.

We see this same gap with housing. While America has an alleged housing shortage, this is not because we do not have the technological capacity or the resources to building affordable housing. Much of our approach to housing is devoted to palliative care, such as providing shelters for the unhoused or incarcerating unhoused people who interfere (or inconvenience) property holders. If housing were a priority, however, we could solve it rather effectively, something we see in pilot programs that purchase homes for the unhoused with great results (see Permanent Supportive Housing programs), which are not only more ethical but end up being cheaper than jailing unhoused people.

The same can be said of healthcare. At 17.7 percent of our GDP, the US spends more on healthcare than any other country, but that spending does not lead to greater outcomes. We proportionally have some of the highest numbers of preventable deaths in the developed world, and Americans likewise spend more on healthcare to obtain these frankly subpar results. This gap is because, unlike other developed nations, our government has not begun the administrative steps to regulate the costs of drugs and procedures. We have largely left it up to a hodge-podge of uncoordinated and sometimes unscrupulous actors.

This inequality is a political decision. We have developed impressive technologies, but our caste system prevents us from distributing them equally. Our institutions and leaders value preserving wealth inequality over solving the manageable logistical hurdles that would provide everyone with an adequate standard of living. If we were to expand our technological capacity to the levels of the Federation but did not change our policies, there is no reason to believe that it would push us towards a post-scarcity society — after all; it didn’t change how the Ferengi did things. It would just mean that some rich people would have replicators while others are still toiling away merely to survive.

This caste system impacts our ability to have citizens produce the type of labor seen in Star Trek. We know from numerous studies that a baseline of resources helps people be more productive, happier citizens. People have better outcomes when they have greater access to housing, food, and healthcare. When you don’t deny people resources, like food and a home, it frees them from the drudgery of surviving and lets them do other, more advanced forms of labor. This isn’t controversial, except maybe to the people who want to work against the spirit of the Federation and ignore scientific reality to maintain their power.

Imagine what you would do if the artificial scarcity of our world did not constrain you. If you knew with certainty that your very subsistence would not be threatened if you stopped selling your labor to another, what would you do? Imagine the projects you could start; the people that you could care for; the discoveries that you could make. The advocates of our caste system like to point to the innovation and jobs they have created, but the sad reality is that their hoarding has actually stifled generations of advancement. The potential of the many has been constrained so that a few bad men can go into space.

The Federation is not the world envisioned by men like Jeff Bezos. He is not fighting for greater equality but rather for a thousand or more lucky people to get to be successful because of economies of scale.

The Federation is a reality where everyone can work towards whatever form of labor that they wish, even if it's to work on a craft centuries obsolete. It is a world where we are all Mozarts and Einsteins, not simply a few, because the artificial scarcity of today does not exist.

It’s easy to call this vision utopian, but the barriers we face are logistical rather than technological or fantastical in many ways. As we have already covered, our society already has an impressive technological capacity. We have the ability to split atoms, fly through the void of space, modify our food, and soon even our DNA.

This is not reinventing the wheel. We have been perfecting the craft of agriculture, housing, and healthcare for thousands of years. There is nothing utopian about providing everyone a baseline standard of living on a planet that evolved to provide us with such things. Yet, there is something weirdly dystopian about claiming we do not have the resources for such efforts but can somehow simultaneously jumpstart a new, perfect civilization from scratch 244.05 million miles away.

In truth, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk do not want to build the Federation, but rather a new Ferengi Empire, where we are not free to labor for anyone but them. A world that prioritizes the comfort of the few over the safety and happiness of the many, and if there's one thing a Star Trek fan should be appalled by, it's that.

Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/24/21

How Society Colonizes Our Mind Space

We don’t have the mental space to do things that matter.

I spend so much of my time on numbers. I worry about how much I am spending. I fret over bills and filing taxes and whether or not I can meet a healthcare deductible. I look at my retirement accounts and chart out the thin red line on my computer screen, looking at a date decades into the future when I might not have to worry as much about money.

I then am pulled to the present and worry about the numbers for my job. I pore over click rates and read times. I study SEO optimizations and organic marketing strategies. I keep spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of application deadlines, hoping that this next listing will push me over the edge for that day, month, or year.

On my groggiest days, I do not have much mental and emotional space left. If I have time, I will watch a TV Show, send a quick meme to a friend, or play a video game. Sometimes I spend so much of my time thinking about these numbers and dates that I can’t go to sleep. I play them over and over again in my mind until my legs twitch and I struggle to breathe. I pound my fist against my chest, hoping to clear my mind — to push the white noise of facts and obligations outside my body into the world where they belong.

In the process of all this worry, I neglect many things I truly care about: I miss the ability to sit in on meetings for my local city council or activist organization; passion projects wither; birthdays pass me by; plans go by the wayside.

We are taught that this society improves our lives, and in some tangible ways, it does, but more often than not, it demands our time in exchange. We are forced to entertain so many useless endeavors so that we can live, and in the process, all of us lose out on the space not only to work on things that we enjoy but labor that could benefit society as a whole.

Chances are that you worry about the same numbers that I do. In the States, most of us fret about taxes and healthcare costs because not doing so will cost you even more time and money down the line. If you don’t figure out how to optimize your tax bill or spend hours researching healthcare plans, assuming you are even given the privilege to spend this time at all, it can cost you hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in fees and penalties. Millions of Americans owe billions to the IRS in back taxes every year, and even more people struggle to pay medical bills and debts.

These systems, however, are overly complicated by design. It’s been revealed, in part thanks to brilliant reporting by ProPublica, that the corporations Intuit (the maker of TurboTax) and H&R Block have for years lobbied the US government to make filing taxes purposefully obscure. As Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel write in ProPublica:

“For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from [filing our taxes]…The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.””

Many countries around the world prefill your taxes for you, leading to a process that not only takes minutes but is completely free. Yet because of a single company's greed, Americans spend over 15 hours preparing their tax returns. “Americans spend more time every year doing their taxes than playing golf — and golf takes ages,” jokes the website Quartz. We waste space within our minds tabulating numbers and figures so that two predatory companies can turn a profit.

The same can be said of healthcare as well. At 17.7 percent of our GDP, the US spends more on healthcare than any other country, but we do not see this in terms of outcomes. Our system is not only inefficient and expensive (with two-thirds of all bankruptcies citing medical issues as a key contributor), but it leads to a lot of wasted time. According to one study, we spend 45 minutes per health appointment traveling and waiting to be seen.

We then spend an inordinate amount of time navigating insurance companies to figure out what they do and do not cover and arguing for them to cover the medication and procedures that they should. “I consider myself a smart person, and my siblings are smart,” one person told Elemental on their difficulty in selecting an insurance plan, “but it’s just so baffling. So much is at stake. That’s why it’s even more horrible.” Healthcare costs remain frustratingly obtuse in the United States, with the cost insurance providers will cover often not learned about until after a patient has been billed.

Unsurprisingly, this confusing state of affairs is something actively maintained by healthcare companies and organizations. There have been decades of lobbying efforts from the likes of the Federation of American Hospitals and the American Medical Association (AMA), some of which are still ongoing, to kill government alternatives to private health insurance or even just greater regulation on the costs of drugs and services. As Jill Quadagno wrote in 2004:

“From the New Deal of the 1930s to the 1970s, the chief obstacle to national health insurance was organized medicine…Across two-thirds of a century, physicians and their allies lobbied legislators, cultivated sympathetic candidates through large campaign contributions, organized petition drives, created grassroots protests, and developed new “products” whenever government action seemed imminent.”

Once you see this pattern, you find it everywhere. Ever wonder why retirement accounts are so complicated or the fact that you have to buy title deed insurance when buying a home? Actors within those industries lobbied local, state, and federal politicians to make the world slightly more complicated. No one designed our system to be this way. It’s the result of thousands of smaller cuts made over time, forcing us to take in more and more nonsense into the recesses of our minds.

Deductibles. Premiums. 401(k)s. The numbers fill my head a little bit more every year, and the things I want to do seem to get further and further away. It’s like a fog settling into my brain. I begin to see everything through the lens of what numbers I need to give others.

And so far, these are only the problems hanging around the periphery of our lives. Most of us have to fill our minds with far more complicated facts and figures to survive.

The percentage of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, according to one poll, sits at 56%, and often this is after engaging in multiple sources of income. According to the Census Bureau, 7.8% of employed Americans in 2018 took on another job. And we know from other sources, anywhere from 37% to almost half of employed Americans are engaged in a “side hustle,” or an income stream performed in addition to their job. Although some of these side hustles are monetizing things that people love, most are geared towards making money.

These jobs or side hustles require that people absorb additional knowledge and invest more time and energy to keep them afloat. Some of the most popular side hustles, such as e-commerce, coaching, or freelancing, demand that you keep track of multiple contracts and bids to turn a profit. “Welcome to the wonderful world of freelancing :(,” one Reddit poster joked in response to another poster talking about how they had lost the majority of their clients. “These things happen, you cannot expect a steady paycheck every month.”

To be successful with an alternative income source, you have to fill your mind with a whole ecosystem of dates and numbers crammed into an already busy world just to survive, let alone thrive. On top of whatever familial obligations someone might have, these de facto businesses are being started while managing a job or two on the side — that’s literally what a side hustle means. It’s intense, and it leads to immense levels of burnout. “I’m totally overwhelmed at work,” begins another poster. “12 hour days, lots of risk for failure, everyone expects me to be flawless….My energy is sapped, can’t sleep, creativity is in the garbage and I have feelings of guilt for neglecting those in my personal life.”

We glorify the hustle in American culture, but it has morphed into a celebration of the loss of our autonomy. “There is no glory in a grind that wears you all the way down,” cautions Elaine Welteroth from the NY Times, but many Americans continue to grind themselves into nubs anyway — either for the glory of the hustle or simply because economic reality doesn’t leave many options. In the words of Isabella Rosario for NPR:

“The problem is, hustling still isn’t a choice for people who aren’t at the top. There’s a world of difference between staying late at the office to score a promotion and peeing in a bottle to keep your job at an Amazon warehouse.”

The lower you are in America’s racialized caste system, the less the space taken from you is a choice, even if you rationalize it as such inside the prison of your own mind. Many have to overextend their emotional and physical space to survive without ever deluding themselves into thinking they will be millionaires. They take in shift schedules, company rules, SEO targets, and many other useless numbers for the ability to exist and nothing more.

For those that do have the privilege to invest more fully in our capitalist system, it doesn’t always come with less stress. Middle-class “hustlers” may have a temporary reprieve from poverty, but they have to give more and more of themselves over to their schemes for financial independence. The side hustles that are the most profitable, such as renting property or investing in stocks or cryptocurrencies, require a lot of initial liquid capital and knowledge upfront. You not only need the money to invest, but you need the ability to know what to invest in, which is not something someone juggling a second job often has to spare.

The people that do try to enter these fields from outside the upper echelons of our society have to not only save the cash necessary to invest, but they have to spend months if not years of their lives learning about the investment — all to capture the value of a volatile asset that might take everything from them. Many crypto stories involve people liquidating their savings for a chance at wealth, and although some are successful, others are not. Some have lost fortunes to hacks where hundreds of thousands of dollars are transferred out of their wallets. Others have placed their life savings in assets that crash months later. And in the process, investors become hooked on taking all this information in. “[my phone] was cooking my brain,” one investor told The Guardian. “I’d look at it constantly.”

There is also the biggest drain of our time — our jobs. Most of us do not find profound meaning in our work. We see in poll after poll that many jobs do not make us happy. Many people work to get the money necessary to eat and live and are not necessarily doing work that matters to them or society at large. The pandemic proved rather viscerally that many of us are not “essential” employees. We engage in professions that anthropologist David Graeber would classify as “bullshit jobs.” Positions that “which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist.”

Many of us are so focused on capturing whatever profits are available that in the process, we take up these bullshit jobs, which ends up creating an economy that isn’t very valuable. There is a shortage of teachers, social workers, nurses, and other essential positions that are needed to keep society turning; however, there is no shortage of people trying to invest in crypto, selling you get-rich-quick classes online, or plugging vitamin powder at the end of poorly researched videos.

This speaks to our society’s utterly perverted set of incentives. Some of the brightest minds right now aren’t working on improving our lives through greater affordable housing or food security, but rather they are adjusting the UI on predatory retail websites or figuring out how to make some stock numbers go up. “I loved teaching. I loved working with my students to improve their lives. But that wasn’t really my job. No, my job was to meet the common core requirements for reading and writing,” laments one person on why they made the plunge from teaching to programming. I have had so many friends leave nursing or teaching to become coders because they are tired of doing a thankless job for little pay. “Make no mistake: a teacher’s salary is awful,” remarks another poster who left the profession.

We fill our minds with the most useless of things so that we have the chance for a better future, and it's suffocating. We get so little time and space to live our lives, and we have to spend it calculating numbers and times that are not our own. We balance banks accounts, pay bills, invest in stocks and bonds if we are lucky, and take classes to fill our brains with ever more facts and figures.

Imagine all the breakthroughs and developments that did not happen because someone chose to build an app instead; all the teachers and social workers that do not exist because creating a business or being a programmer were considered more lucrative professions; the stories and songs unwritten by artists, who decided to become lawyers or bankers; the cures and machines that could not be tinkered on because they weren’t profitable. Most of all, imagine all the time that has been taken from you because your head is filled with a world of numbers and expectations that are not your own.

Sometimes the thought of how this society has taken my mind overwhelms me with anxiety and dread. I think of all the information still left to be acquired. My breath gets short, and I hyperventilate as I worry about everything I must do to fulfill my obligations. The taxes. The bills. The emails. They feel like they are sliding down my throat, clogging my windpipe so I can’t breathe.

Mostly, though, these expectations make me mad. I am angry that I have lost so much space inside myself that even my dreams are not my own. I dream of amassing wealth, where once I had plans to write novels and make games, and this transformation chills my soul. No to-do list can fix this injustice. No self-help article can reclaim the ever-expanding list of musts that we are required to do to hold onto the dream of a good life, and for many, to even exist at all.

The first thing we must do is notice that the colonization is there. We must take note of the thousands trying to claw away at our space. To trace the line inside our head to the people and institutions that are responsible so that one day we may demand justice.

Alex Has Opinions 8/23/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/23/21

Unpacking the Deadly Politics of Shame

The emotion that has led to the death of millions.

(Note From the Future: While I think this article has a lot of cool research, I do not agree with its conclusions anymore. See Historically, Shame Has (Sometimes) Been A Good Thing to read more about how I think today.)

I want to tell you about the time I almost died because of the shame of others. After a long shift, I was eating dinner at Whole Foods — one of the cheapest venues in the upscale neighborhood where I happened to work. I had taken a seat in the upstairs section amongst the plastic tables and chairs they set aside for shoppers to eat, scarfing down food I had hastily purchased from the hot bar.

I had not eaten lunch that day. I was so incredibly hungry that I swallowed a piece of Mongolian beef whole. It lodged in my throat, and I immediately started to choke. I couldn’t breathe, flailing about in my seat, watching people watch me die. No one approached me to help, and one person I scanned in the crowd was even someone I knew — an ex I had ghosted several weeks ago. I remember him looking at me, and then we both immediately looked away — embarrassed to be seeing an ex. So embarrassed I might die.

I didn’t approach any of these people either. Knowing I would have to vomit the food out, I proceeded to stumble to the bathroom — a thing they advise choking victims never to do. Thousands of people die from choking every year. If I had not been a former alcoholic who knew how to vomit on command, I might have joined them on that Whole Foods floor — too ashamed to inconvenience others with the continuation of my own existence.

As I emerged from the bathroom, I found a woman waiting for me at the door. Like many others, she had noticed something was not right, but she had not checked in on me because I was in the men’s room. It was a social custom she was not willing to circumvent, even if it meant my death, and so she waited by the door, hoping everything would sort itself out.

I told her I had been choking, and she hung her head in shame.

“I almost died,” I shouted to everyone in the room. Most were not even paying attention to me, having been trained to look away after a lifetime of uncomfortable encounters.

Even small social barriers can snowball into another's death. Many pointless social conventions were standing between the crowd and me: the norm to avoid people causing a scene in public; the norm to not inconvenience others; the norm to not cross gender lines; the norm to avoid bothering a lover who has spurned us.

Our society is united in a shared sense of shame, and it leads to a lot of needless death. Or, more succinctly, we use our customs — and the shame they are psychologically rooted in — as a justification for why we do not intervene in, or in some cases, even perpetuate others’ suffering. The politics of shame focuses not on emancipation or accountability but on subjugating a class of people through humiliation.

Like most worthwhile fields in academia, the debate over shame, or the intense embarrassment and humiliation we feel at ourselves for violating a social norm we believe in, is contentious.

Some have put forth the idea that shame is a social construct that is not present at birth and instead takes roots as we, as individuals, gain more self-awareness. This theory proposes that we start with primary emotions (e.g., joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, etc.) and develop exposed emotions (e.g., embarrassment, envy, empathy) and evaluative emotions (e.g., pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, etc.) over time as the rules and standards of society become perceived by us.

Others advocate for the concept that shame is a product of our evolutionary psychology. People in this camp believe that it's an evolved process that happens when certain conditions have been met, such as losing perceived status, which under this branch of thought, we have a natural inclination to obtain. Some scholarship has even argued there may be a link between shame and the base emotion of disgust, casting doubt that we do not have a natural inclination for shame.

Regardless of where you stand on the matter, it’s not really disputed that the source of shame is contextual, from culture to culture and even person to person. The scholar Michael Lewis gives the example of a test, saying that a student's expectations of the results pattern whether or not they feel shame. An 85 may be an excellent grade for one person and suboptimal for another. The level of shame depends on the norms and expectations the individual has internalized.

When discussing my own near-death experience, something that might be brought up is the Bystander Effect, a well-documented concept in psychology claiming that people are less likely to intervene in an incident if others are present. The research on this appears to be holding, though the extent and application of this theory are argued about at length. People do have a desire to resolve conflict — that woman did approach me upon leaving the bathroom — but social customs also limit that intervention. Norms told her that she could not go into the men’s bathroom, which conflicted with her feelings of empathy, telling her to save my life. People feel shame over intervening (or not intervening) in an incident for distinct cultural and personal reasons, and, as we shall soon see, that emotional basis can become deadly.

To bring this point home, I want to examine the incident that caused public interest in the Bystander Effect — the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. Genovese was a woman who was robbed, raped, and then stabbed to death outside her apartment building in Queens. 37 people, the story goes, allegedly watched or listened to the incident and did nothing to stop the attack. 37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police; Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector, went the title for an infamous New York Times story. The reporting at the time earned national attention by intellectualizing this incident as a part of human nature.

In retrospect, however, it's more complicated. The Times relied on an exaggerated police figure for the number of witnesses, and it's doubtful that everyone saw the incident directly. One woman, Sophia Farrar, rushed out of the building, cradling the dead Genovese in her arms, screaming out for someone to call the police. While the attack was on Austin Steet, another man opened his window and screamed at the attacker to ‘’Leave that girl alone!’’ While the Bystander Effect may make it less likely that an individual will intervene, that doesn’t mean that someone in the collective will not intervene in some capacity.

And of those that refused to intervene, it had less to do with human nature and more about the cultural norms preventing them from doing so directly. There was an obvious gendered element that accompanied this murder. Genovese and her murderer could be mistaken for a woman and man fighting at night, and that dynamic, especially during the far more conservative 1960s, was seen as normal. Several people in the Genovese case mentioned that they did not interject themselves into the fight because they thought it was a “lovers’ quarrel.” In the words of Sarah Kaplan in the Washington Post:

“Like some of Genovese’s neighbors, [the police] may have taken the woman’s screams for a lover’s quarrel that didn’t warrant their intervention. In 1964, marital rape was not a crime in New York, and domestic violence cases — in the rare instance where they were prosecuted — were considered in family, rather than criminal, courts. Beating would not become grounds for divorce for another two years.”

From a glance, it’s so easy to label the lack of intervention in the Genovese case as intrinsic to human nature, but the norms that restrained some of these bystanders were contextual. Some people ignored the fight because they were taught to prioritize the privacy of a romantic partnership over the potential harm done within that relationship— the comfort of not having to intervene in other’s affairs over the safety of a potential abuse victim. As Scholar Rebecca Solnit remarks in her essay A Short History of Silence, the same week of the incident, the United Press International ran a story about how a judge in Cleveland thought: “it’s all right for a husband to give his wife a black eye and knock out one of her teeth if she stays out too late.”

We actually see this bystander logic play out a lot in abusive relationships. Whether romantic or platonic, familial or fraternal, we treat partnerships in the United States as atomized spheres that perceived outsiders should not interfere with. How many times have you heard, in response to saying that a relationship is potentially abusive, that “it’s not our place to judge?” often being paraphrased directly from the bible verse “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matt 7:1). “Don’t judge someone’s Relationship…It’s their relationship, not yours,” reads one popular Facebook post. “Don’t tell me how to parent,” goes the title of a ranty mommy blog. The shame being employed by these posters is not to stop potential abusers but rather to keep people out of others' relationships.

Ignoring unhealthy relationships, however, has costs. The CDC estimated in 2015 that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men would face some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Nearly 700,000 children in the US have officially documented cases of mistreatment a year, and the true number is expected to be well higher than that. Atomized relationships are not immune from abuse, and yet there are norms in our society pushing us to ignore potential red flags, which of course, lead to greater harm, and they are rooted in shame.

When you get down to many of the cultural norms we have talked about so far, a lot of them seem to prioritize comfort and inaction over the safety of others: the ability for a shopper to eat unperturbed by another person’s suffering, an onlooker not having to bother themselves with the childrearing of a parent; the building resident comfortably rationalizing why to ignore the screams outside. Shame, in these instances, seems to be propelling people to inaction, or worse, callous disregard, rather than preserving another’s life.

Shame is not always the best motivator for pushing people to action. It can sometimes become toxic, leading to intense self-loathing that is internalized to the point that it alters our self-image. We begin to develop shame-based beliefs that essentialize us as a person (e.g., I'm stupid, I’m a failure, I’m a bad person, etc.). Eventually, these beliefs don’t have to be triggered by an external event and can be brought on by our own thoughts of shame or the fear of experiencing shame.

When organizations have tried to use shame as a basis for intervention, its effects have often been devastating to those on the receiving end. Although we have focused on largely interpersonal dynamics, it should be rather obvious that this emotion can problematically be the foundation of a movement or even an entire society’s politics.

And when that happens, the body count quickly rises.

When I think of the politics of shame, the most obvious example comes from the pop culture hit Game of Thrones (2011— 2019). There is an infamous subplot where the machiavellian character Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) allies with the religious High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), only for him to subvert her control of the Westerosian capital of King’s Landing. He gets the poorer residents to rally behind him, and how he does that is through a combination of populist politics and shame.

Due to Cersei's influence, the High Sparrow, now the High Septon, reinstitutes the Faith Militant — a group of deputized followers under his command who enforce the Faith of the Seven doctrine. The High Sparrow uses his followers to impose the traditional laws of the Faith of the Seven on lowborn and highborn alike, leading to public trials where nobles confess their sins and receive punishment. He creates a government that, at its face, is centered on rooting out sin.

Sin is technically about judging the immorality of an individual's actions. It is not about shame at all but guilt, a similar, though slightly different emotion. As Annette Kämmerer writes in the Scientific American of the difference between guilt and shame:

“People often speak of shame and guilt as if they were the same, but they are not. Like shame, guilt occurs when we transgress moral, ethical or religious norms and criticize ourselves for it. The difference is that when we feel shame, we view ourselves in a negative light (“I did something terrible!”), whereas when we feel guilt, we view a particular action negatively (“I did something terrible!”). We feel guilty because our actions affected someone else, and we feel responsible.”

Yet, these two emotions are not mutually exclusive, with people sometimes experiencing both simultaneously. The High Sparrow, for all his divine intentions, weaponizes both guilt and shame. In one infamous scene, he has Cersei Lannister perform a walk of shame across the city's main street. Her hair is cut short, and a woman rings a bell behind her, yelling the word shame over and over again. The citizens of King’s Landing throw both vegetables and the vilest of profanities at her.

This scene can be seen replicated throughout history. The word shame was yelled repeatedly by anti-Trump protestors during the late 2010s. It can also be heard in the protests against former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in April of 2006, at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for failing to institute a mask mandate, and so much more. It doesn’t even have to make sense or be too serious. Protestors yelled “shame” outside the headquarters of People Magazine for failing to label Ryan Gosling the sexiest man alive back in 2011.

Our very recent history has been one of demonizing political and cultural rivals, not just for their actions (i.e., guilt), but for being bad people (i.e., shame). The politics of shame do not just become the basis for words or inaction, but discriminatory policies that punish people for being intrinsically bad. We need to look no further than the Church of our world.

For example, the Inquisition was a series of institutions during the middle ages through the twentieth century where the Catholic church tried to root out sin, usually heresy — a catchall designation for anything the Church (and those using religiosity for political means) disagreed with. The Inquisition demonized entire swathes of people as much as it focused on any particular sin. Muslims, Roma, and Jewish people were often targeted for their faith, and laws were passed to discriminate and expel those who did not convert from whatever land the Inquisition operated within.

During the later half of the Spanish Inquisition (1478 — 1834 CE), punishments for practicing outside Catholicism were severe, including torture and capital punishment. Executions could often be a public spectacle called auto-da-fé or “act of faith.” These were a combination of religious ceremony and public sentencing that often took place in a main square and were surrounded by much pomp and circumstance. The guilty were often dressed up to represent their alleged sin, as the Inquisition attempted to extract a public confession. Although some autos-da-fé were non-lethal, many ended in ritualized burnings at the stake for all to see.

It was not simply non-Catholics who were affected by the Inquisition, either. To sniff out “fake” moriscos (i.e., former Muslims who had converted to Catholicism under the threat of force) and conversos (i.e., the same, but for former Jewish people), attendance for church and religious events was mandatory. Neighbors were encouraged to spy on each other, and those who did not engage in this activity could face penalties. This focus on ascertaining everyone’s guilt led to a lot of shame, as people wondered if they seemed like “good” Catholics.

Much like Cersei Lannister walking through the streets of King’s Landing, members of the Inquisition legalized this shame as a form of punishment. “Verguenza publica,” or public shamings, happened frequently. The accused was typically sentenced to ride a steed, usually a donkey, through town while their transgressions were read aloud to onlookers. The choice of steed was purposeful as the accused was meant to feel humiliated and ashamed of having to ride an ass through their community. They would also usually have to wear a hat known as a coroza, which were sometimes painted with the sin they had allegedly committed, as well as a garment named a sanbenito that they had to wear as a mark of infamy for a set duration of time.

This impulse to capitalize on shame as a form of punishment has never really gone away, though the target has evolved over the years. We even see this religiosity today in how doxxing (i.e., when someone’s private information is released to the public) or harassment campaigns are used by people online to punish those who have crossed perceived social lines, and are now considered to be morally compromised.

Harassment campaigns can theoretically be used to pressure an abusive person from a position of power or for an entity to adopt certain reforms, but they are often not so targeted. The primary objective of an overwhelming majority of them is to punish people for violating certain social norms, or, if we are being particularly dramatic, for committing certain “sins,” and then dragging the accused through the private-public square that is the Internet so that they feel deep humiliation and shame. Shame is not the byproduct but the goal.

As we saw during the Inquisition, these accusations do not have to target a powerful person or even be true. In one infamous example back in 2010, an 11-year-old was slut-shamed for allegedly having sex with a member of the band Blood on the Dance Floor. Since the band member, Dahvie Vanity, was 25 at the time, this would have constituted statutory rape. Indeed he has been accused by over 20 women of assault and is currently under investigation by the FBI.

Dahvie Vanity, however, was not the target of this Internet mob. Again, the target was an 11-year-old who was his alleged victim. This child, who was prolific online, would go on to make a tearful response video that got interrupted by an angry tirade from her father, who said the much-mocked line “You done goofed.” His tirade only egged on his child's harassers. Much like the equally infamous Leave Britney Alone video, it became an object of mockery and ridicule as harassers shared, memefied, and remixed it.

In the midst of all this harassment, the information of the child and their family was released to the public by trolls. The family endured multiple death threats and other forms of harassment as a result, yet part of the emphasis remained on the inappropriate behavior of the 11-year-old. “Why so much profanity in the videos?” a reporter asks the kid in an ABC exclusive.

Every year millions of people report being victims of online harassment. The major drive behind these behaviors is varied. People join in harassment campaigns because they don’t know how to regulate their own emotions or they are not worried about consequences, but regardless of the individual cause, in most (though not all circumstances), it does not appear to be a desire for justice or reform. The end goal is that the target feels humiliated and ashamed. No objective is met other than that the attacker takes glee in their victim's misfortune.

The weaponization of shame has been a consistent force in the political world. It’s not only used as a pretext for why people turn a blind eye to other’s suffering, but a justification used to discriminate, maim, and kill perceived offenders.

It’s a deadly tool, and we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it?

When I was choking on that bathroom floor, I was deeply ashamed of myself. “Is this really going to be the way I die?” I thought. My self-image was so toxic that I was more worried about the fear of experiencing shame over preserving my own life.

I have almost died several times, and although I retain some blame for my decisions, I have learned to be less and less hard on myself as the years have progressed. Every near-death experience was preceded by hundreds of different eyes looking away in embarrassment and shame: too exhausted to deal with a person emotionally breaking down; too embarrassed to deal with the discomfort of someone suffering in front of them; too ashamed to inconvenience another’s relationship.

The politics of shame are old, and they are centered on a characteristic that is integral to the human experience. Shame is an emotion, like any other, and I don’t believe it's helpful to shame people for having shame. We need to recognize that human beings are inclined to feel this, but that doesn’t mean it is a good basis for politics. In fact, shame seems to be a pretty destructive foundation for political organization. It is an emotion that demands self-flagellation and punishment over accountability and understanding.

Some would argue that it's the source of our shame that is the problem. Rather than building a world where we feel shame for inconveniencing others or violating Christian or conservative norms, we need to create a world where people feel deep shame for racism, sexism, wealth inequality, and the like.

As we have already covered, however, shame is often divorced from empathy. It forces the accused to look inwards rather than focus on how their actions have hurt others, which can be a selfish and paralyzing feeling. It does not necessarily lead to self-improvement where the shamed tries to minimize the reasons for that feeling, but rather to wallow in how bad someone is as a person. That feeling may be great for authoritarian governments who want to immobilize public action against them, but it's not the best for those who want to genuinely improve things.

If we want to build a world where fewer people are dying alone on a cold street or floor, we need to build politics of empathy and understanding over self-flagellation and retribution — and there is nothing shameful about that.

Alex Has Opinions 8/16/21 Alex Has Opinions 8/16/21

The Corporate Propaganda of the Film ‘The Tomorrow War’

Amazon strikes a propaganda goldmine with this flagship offering.

Image; Photo by Chuanchai Pundej on Unsplash

The slick sci-fi romp The Tomorrow War hits all the beats of a major Hollywood action film. With a budget of $200 million, the special effects and set pieces are impressive, though not particularly memorable. Chris Pratt, who earned his action bona fides in the Guardians of The Galaxy franchise and the Jurassic World reboot, manages to be a charming lead who propels the viewer through a dying Earth. It’s a bloated movie, filled with premises that are not particularly well-developed, but if you can turn your brain off for its first hour or so, it manages to be a tolerable ride.

However, underneath all this bluster is an insidious message about how governments would be unable to stop a planet-wide disaster. The proposed solution in the film instead appears to be a combination of rugged individualism and corporate benevolence — a weird irony given that just 100 companies are contributing to 71% of our species total carbon emissions.

The parallels to climate change in this movie are not subtle. Yet, since The Tomorrow War is being syndicated by one of the most powerful corporations on the planet (one that is contributing mightily to climate change), we should forcefully question this story’s message — one that appears to be a pretty intense bout of corporatist propaganda.

The premise of The Tomorrow War is that the planet is dying —in this reality, it’s because an alien presence known as the whitespikes has invaded the future and consumed almost all life. A desperate humanity figures out how to establish a wormhole to the past and convinces all the world's governments to send military forces to the future to replenish the frontlines. It’s this past where our main protagonist Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), finds himself in, as he is hurriedly sent into the future to fight evil aliens.

Much has been written about the inconsistencies in how both time travel and military strategy work in this movie. Yes, none of this makes sense. The act of sending troops to the future completely destroys humanity's ability to prepare against the whitespikes in the present (or past), but we are going to sidestep conversations on plotholes and instead focus on the problematic philosophical elements underpinning this film.

The Tomorrow War is an obvious metaphor for climate change. We see a sense of hopelessness in the air as people lament a future that is all but doomed. Early on, there is a scene where Dan, who's a teacher in his civilian life, is instructing a group of students in a classroom. He can’t get them to focus on anything. They are too despondent, thinking about the future they believe to be already lost. “What’s the point?… School, grades, college — it’s all bullshit,” says one student. “Yeah. We’ve seen the new number projections. We lose, period. The aliens kill us all,” chimes in another.

This very well could have been an actual classroom in the present day talking about carbon emissions rather than survival projections. Our current reality is very dire, and it’s also hard to process. The movie is clearly tapping into this widespread existential dread over the fate of our current planet when it comes to climate change. There is also not subtly a slideshow about climate change in the background as Dan is having this conversation.

Unlike in our world, however, in the movie, the governments of Earth were able to unite over their common threat (i.e., the Whitespikes), and they failed anyway. They could not figure out how to stop these aliens from destroying humanity in the future and are now throwing bodies at the problem in the hopes of stalling the inevitable. When we look at Dan’s present, the United States government has resorted to authoritarian measures to keep the draft going. Dan is informed that his spouse or dependent will take his place if he does not report for duty.

The government, however, does not have a solution that does anything meaningful with these bodies — in fact, the draft is portrayed as utterly incompetent. Soldiers are not trained, often thrown into battle with their civilian clothes still on. Their coordinators are all young twenty-somethings (apparently to avoid time paradoxes) whose leadership is so inept it falls apart under basic questioning. There is one hilarious scene where someone asks why they aren’t given pictures of their alien enemies, and the response (because it would demoralize people) ends up demoralizing all the recruits in the room.

“Look at all the Government will have us sacrifice to avert disaster,” the film seems to scream out, “and it will do us very little good.”

This movie is very clearly anti-government. Multiple characters possess a thorough distrust of governmental authority, including Dan’s father, James Forester (J.K. Simmons). “You have a master's degree in engineering and a general disdain for the US government,” Dan says of his father near the very beginning of the film, describing why the latter helps draft dodgers escape the clutches of the authoritarian US government.

There is a scene near the end where the main characters have figured out a plan to stop the aliens (more on this later), and they briefly consider letting the governments of the world in on the plan, only very it to be dismissed with a shrug. “Absolutely, go tell the UN,” remarks James, “and they can talk about it until we are all dead.” “Yeah,” agrees Charlie, a character we talk about in further detail below. “I hate to agree with conspiracy Santa, but if we get the governments of the world involved, it could turn into a nightmare.” The detest for government action in this scene is so visceral that it borders on a Randian monologue. The viewer is supposed to think that the very idea of involving the “government” is laughable.

Corporate actors are conversely portrayed very positively. The film's comic relief is played by a man named Charlie (Sam Richardson), the director of R&D of a geothermal energy company called Wallace Technology. He describes his company as “the Amazon of earth sciences.” Comic relief characters are supposed to be likable, and Sam Richardson does play Charlie with energetic flair — though the jokes do not always land. It's telling that the most corporatist character in the film is not only insanely likable but someone, as we shall soon learn, whose technical expertise allows him to help locate where the aliens initially landed.

There is also the main character himself — a biology teacher aspiring to be something greater. We start the film with Dan giving an interview for a job. “I found my passion in the Army Research Lab, I used my GI Bill…to go to Cal State, and I’m currently teaching high school biology,” he tells an interviewer over the phone. He is giving this interview while bringing beers to a holiday party, showing the viewer that he is an (overstretched) hustler. His voice deflates when he says “high school biology,” indicating that he looks down on this more public position. A more aware movie might have Dan come to terms with how toxic his worldview is, but as the movie progresses, it's clear we are meant to think of him as someone who is down on his luck and working towards something greater. In this case, saving humanity from aliens.

In the same classroom scene, Dan gives a passionate monologue to his depressed students about how to solve the alien threat (or really any problem) is through the spirit of innovation — a corporate buzzword that is often used synonymously with making products through the marketplace. “If there is one thing the world needs right now, it’s scientists. We cannot stop innovating. That’s how you solve a problem. Science is important.” However, in the film, we don’t see “science” — a globalized institution that involves hundreds, if not thousands of different people coming together to find the truth — but rather a ragtag group of individuals. It’s a corporatized version of science this movie promotes — stripped of its more communal ideals.

This brings us back to stopping the alien threat. The solution to halting the whitespikes is not a coordinated, collectivized approach from the people of the world. Instead, our leads bootstrap an end to the alien menace. Like a group of programmers founding a startup, Dan brings his smart friends and students together, and they brainstorm where to find the location of the alien threat before it arrives on Earth. Dan has learned vital information from the future — and rather than figure out how to get the governments of the world on board (they're just way too difficult)— he works on it privately.

Dan and his friends learn that the whitespikes are in a crashed alien cargo ship in Russia. They are buried underneath ice, which will melt by 2050 due to global warming and unleash them onto the world. We already know Dan refuses to inform the government of this information, which is frustrating even within the film's logic. The whitespikes breed so quickly that one mistake could unleash them onto a severely depleted Earth thirty years earlier than originally expected.

It would be a disaster, but the movie is not interested in taking its premise seriously but instead promoting the rugged individualism seen as the cornerstone of corporate ideology. “I feel like this is my opportunity to give [my daughter] and give this world a second chance,” monologues Dan before heading to the alien spaceship, somehow managing to make the fate of the world all about him. Like Steve Jobs and other tech visionaries before him, this is about what one man can do for the world. The film paints one person’s selfish call for redemption into a hero’s journey.

We should be skeptical of a movie that pushes business-friendly bootstrapping to solve a global problem (like climate change) because it has not been particularly effective in our timeline.

This is not the first time a movie has promoted such an ideology. The Tomorrow War joins a long list of films that depict government agencies or the government itself as an efficient or evil entity that must be defeated through the forces of rugged individualism (see the EPA in Ghostbusters, the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter, etc.). Amazon was not even the original distributor. It was originally scheduled for release in theaters by Paramount Pictures, but then the Covid-19 pandemic happened, and the company pulled it, leaving Amazon to pick up Paramount's sloppy seconds.

The context of this movie is still frustrating, though, especially when being promoted by a company such as Amazon that stands to benefit from trying to convince humanity to trust in its authority over the governments that can regulate it. When it comes to the existential threat of climate change, we don’t need more self-deluded men and businesses thinking that they alone can save the world (that’s what got us into this mess). We need to build narratives that foster genuine cooperation and trust among the members of our species.

Until then, a The Tomorrow War sequel is already in production. We are looking at an age of propaganda where megacorporations realize that the second-best thing to saving the world is convincing everyone else that you can.

Alex Has Opinions 7/29/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/29/21

Practical Steps To Prepare For Climate Change

In between outrage and hopelessness is a plan.

There is a lot of bad advice concerning climate change. Most of it pertains to what you can do on an individual level to reduce your carbon footprint (e.g., recycle, use less plastic, don’t fly, etc.). I even wrote one of these back in the day about urging people to fly less (be gentle).

This advice isn't all bad, but it individualizes a systemic problem. A third of the world's carbon emissions come from just 20 companies. You should still try to recycle, especially if you belong in a country such as the US that contributes to a disproportionate amount of those emissions, but it's madness to assume that consumer choices alone are going to magic this problem away. Climate change is perpetuated by some of the most powerful people on the planet, and stopping it will require removing them from power.

The enormity of this task causes many people to resort to nihilism, but that's not helpful either. We need practical advice, not simply to mitigate future climate change (an increasingly difficult task), but to deal with the number of carbon emissions we have already signed up for as a species.

This short list will not suddenly make the world better, but it might help you sort out some things when it comes to dealing with the catastrophe that is to come.

Know Your Neighbors

The first thing to consider with climate change is that it's a story of failure. Not just the political failure of our government refusing to act, but a failure of infrastructure. It is a power grid collapsing and leaving a household to face a winter storm with nothing but what it can burn to stay warm. It is a fire raging across a state, cutting homes off from firefighters. It is local governments not giving people the resources to start over after a tragedy, leading to a flood of internally displaced persons in towns and cities across America.

There is a chance that you will be impacted by a climate catastrophe over the next few years (if you haven’t already), and when that happens, public infrastructure will fail. At that moment it will help to have some friends. Not someone on the other side of town or the state, but someone on your street or in your building.

Our society has atomized us so much that many of us do not have a sense of local community. A new study out of Harvard claims that 36% of all Americans report serious loneliness. This isolation makes our response to climate change that much worse. Many of us do not have the connections and community bonds necessary to help us overcome massive disruptions, and it shows when disasters strike.

For example, during heat waves, organizations and governments often recommend checking in on vulnerable persons to see if they need assistance (e.g., seeing if their air conditioning is working, offering to drive them somewhere, etc.). The elderly, in particular, have poorer circulation and are hence more vulnerable to our increasingly warming planet, especially those who live alone. A 2012 study from the CDC reported that when it comes to deaths from excessive heat exposure, “most of those who died were unmarried or living alone,” and climate change is causing that number to rise even more.

A lack of human connection impairs people during moments of crisis. It not only prevents us from knowing the valuable information needed to prepare ourselves for disasters, but also prevents us from pooling our resources together to weather the immediate aftermath. People need more than a plan for climate change. They need a community so that a disaster does not have to be a tragedy someone suffers alone.

Get to know your neighbors (and expand your existing bonds with locals in your area if you have them) because these will be the people who you will have to rely on when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Make a plan to introduce yourself to them. If you haven’t already, knock on their door, say hi, and ask about their days.

Get Used To Less

Many times the way that cutting waste is advertised to westerners is reducing our carbon footprint so that we can do our part in stopping climate change. This idea is not terrible — just because our systems of consumption are awful doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to reduce your waste — but as we have already covered, individual consumer choices are not going to solve climate change. They are especially not going to do anything to mitigate the emissions we have already signed up for as a species.

There is another reason you should try to reduce your consumption, though, and it's because you will have to do so anyway. Climate change, at least in the short term, is going to mean fewer resources. It means less space, food, and all the other luxuries of life. I find it amusing that people have been pointing to shortages in things like lumber and asking when the supply chain will “correct itself.” It’s not. These shortages are the new normal, especially when it comes to food. As the United Nations cautioned several years ago:

“There is no doubt in the evidence and conclusions of more than 1,000 global and regional studies, that a temperature rise of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius will generally mean a loss in yield of a number of crop varieties, both in the tropical and the temperate regions. An increase of 3 to 4 degrees later on in this century will have very severe consequences for global food security and supply”

In the short term, we will have fewer resources, and since our economic system is very inequitable, it will mean most people will have to deal with less. It’s going to be far easier for you if you try to adjust to this future reality now, while you have the training wheels of “society” on, than during roving blackouts and water shortages. Try to change your patterns of consumption. Ask yourself if you really have to throw so much away? Are there items and tools that you can purchase, make, or ask for to supplement the things you do buy? The more you transition away from our fragile, global supply chains, the better.

This request is not one to reinvent the wheel. Poor black, brown, and indigenous people have had to deal with these challenges for centuries. I would look to these communities for knowledge. For starters, check out Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black, or Dina Gilo-Whitaker’s As Long As Grass Grows. There are centuries of wisdom in these texts, generously preserved.

This knowledge has been ignored by larger society at our own peril, and now we will need it more than ever.

Participate in Alternative Economies

Many economists and business leaders like to wax poetically about how the market is very good at adjusting to disruptions like climate change, but if anything, this last decade has taught me that capitalism is very fragile. The entire global economy was disrupted recently because a single container ship got clogged in the Suez Canal. The 1300-foot Ever Given prevented the passage of billions of dollars in goods, forcing ships to redirect around the tip of Africa and elsewhere. That was one disruption, and it exacerbated an already stressed supply change. What happens as this system gets pushed more and more to its breaking point?

Capitalism almost always fails in the face of disaster — supply changes get disrupted, power grids go down, and then very few people give a damn how much money is in a bank account that you cannot even access. I am sure there will still be people trading stocks and cryptocurrencies as the world burns, huddled in bunkers deep underground, but most people will not be in such a privileged position. Even if only for a couple of days or weeks, people will have to exist in a world where capitalism (briefly) no longer exists.

It will benefit you to begin engaging in economies that will survive disruption. The most obvious one is the gift economy, where people give and receive items freely without an expectation of exchange. Gift-giving economics are varied in size and scope from competitive ones where people try to out-give each other to charity to mutual aid, where there is a reciprocal exchange of resources and services for a group or communities mutual benefit.

To that last point, mutual aid is the one that most readily emerges in the wake of disasters. We see it time and time and again whenever calamity strikes. The early 20th century was filled with mutual aid groups, particularly from communities of color, trying to fill in the gaps in government services. Mutual aid societies swelled during the influenza pandemic, and we saw an uptick again with the COVID pandemic. When governments fail to provide their citizens with the necessary resources to survive, more often than not neglecting marginalized people in the process, these citizens are usually forced to step up to take care of themselves.

If you are curious, there are plenty of resources to help get you plugged into an alternative economy. You might want to check out Mutual Aid Hub to see if there is a mutual aid group near you, or just Google it. Other groups that might be engaged with such aid are Rotary Clubs, local charities, or even churches. I would also check out your local Buy Nothing Group to access a simple, online gifting economy.

Engage in (local) Politics

As less and less land and resources become available, there will be a strain on resources. Local politics have always been contentious, but they will get even more so as prosperous towns suddenly have to deal with influxes of internally displaced persons and refugees. The Institute for Economics and Peace claims that we will reach one billion internally displaced persons by 2050.

In many ways, this trend has already started. Tens of millions of people have become displaced the world over, including in the United States as well. In her essay A Climate Dystopia In Northern California, author Naomi Klein described how an influx of displaced persons from Californian wildfires (as well as other, slower disasters) had pushed one college town to resort to draconian measures. The town of Chico, California, moved from having a relatively progressive city council to going red. Within an election cycle, they began enforcing more stringent anti-homelessness measures that swept the unhoused out of the public eye. In 2020, an estimated 20 unhoused people died in Chico due to these policies—in essence, one local town’s city council election literally cost lives.

The political decisions happening on the local level will not only decide the resources allocated for refugees and internally displaced persons, but also resources that you will come to rely on in the days and years ahead. Will companies continue to be able to pollute in your local river? Who can access fish in them? Who will be able to pick and grow food on public land? Will your tax dollars go to sustainable infrastructure and renewables or economic developments that line the pockets of a few?

These have always been pressing questions, but as the hunt for resources becomes more heated in the years ahead, they will become matters of life and death for people not used to grappling with these questions in these terms. We are not going to be able to rely on fragile, global supply chains forever. The resources we have in our region are increasingly going to have to sustain us, and the distribution of these resources is under the purvey of mostly local governments. While some of my readers may have had the privilege to remain oblivious to the goings-on of local politics, that will quickly become less advisable in the future.

For example, governments have always leaned on individuals to access resources such as oil and natural gas. There is a long history of local governments weaponizing the power of “Eminent Domain” (i.e., the government seizing private land and converting it to public use) so that they can build pipelines or even private housing developments. We have no reason to think this policy will not be employed in the future for increasingly more scarce resources such as water and arable land.

Though many state governments have passed laws restricting this type of behavior, it’s doubtful this reticence will hold in a resource-starved world. As space becomes more crowded, businesses will feel the need to develop already owned land, and one of the few ways to do that is through the power of Eminent Domain. There will be immense pressure on local governments, both from the business community and activists seeking to increase affordable housing and other public infrastructure, to use this power. Who gets to wield this and other local powers will be something that will directly impact your day-to-day life, and this fight is still very much up in the air.

What do you know about your local government? Is it a city or town council? A county commission? How many members does it have, and which ones do you like? More importantly, what groups and organizations are petitioning these leaders to fight on your behalf? These are the questions you will need to answer in the months and years ahead or risk having your resources divvied up by others.

Don’t Move Alone

This point is not so much an instruction as it is a warning — if you can help it, do not move by yourself. There is a possibility that many of us will do all of the things I have already mentioned — consume less, become enmeshed in our local communities, participate in alternative economies, engage in local politics, etc. — and will still have to move. Climate change is massive. We cannot prepare for some things as individuals: oceans will rise, regions will burn, and some of us will have to pack our bags as a result.

If you have to move — and the possibility is high — do not move by yourself. The previous era of globalization glamorized the idea of traveling to a new part of the world. It made us believe that we could find a home in any city, even if that were only ever a true fantasy for the rich. Travel became so ingrained in pop culture that for many privileged people, it was part of their personality. Peruse any dating website, and you will see “travel” listed as a favorite interest or activity.

We live in a different world now.

If there is one point you get from this article, it’s that at least for the foreseeable future, we will be living in a more tense world. Fights for resources are getting more pronounced, and xenophobia is increasing worldwide, including in the United States. I pray that we will be able to reverse this trend — all is not lost — but it would be foolish not to be apprehensive about how this new world will treat outsiders, even privileged ones with money.

If you have to move, go someplace where you know people.

If you cannot do that, try to move with people that you do know.

Do not fall into the globalist fantasy that anywhere can be your home. You will fare better as a community than as an individual. The lie of the jet-setting citizen of the world has always been difficult to maintain for everyone, and I suspect it’s going to come crashing down in the next couple of years as xenophobic movements continue to push perceived outsiders out of their communities.

Find Joy In The Small Moments

This next decade is going to suck. I don’t think most people have truly processed the level of change and disruption that will happen in the years ahead. So many people are rushing to “get back to normal” or to “build back better.” They don’t realize that normal, such as it was, is not coming back — and there is a good argument to be made that we shouldn’t return to the conditions killing our ecosystem anyway.

2020, in many ways, was a great training period because every year going forward is going to be like these last few months. It will be an era of political instability, rising tides, burning forests, and constant death all around us. There is no escaping this reality, and although we might push towards a better future yet, the battle to get there will be immensely difficult.

Yet life cannot only be a struggle to survive. If the sole thing you are focused on is subsisting, then it will be a sad life. Take as many breaks as your economic circumstances allow: go to a party with a friend and complain about the world; journey to our shrinking beaches and do laps in the warming water; plan board game nights with your neighbors; crack a joke; dance; have so much fun that you briefly forget that we are all dying.

It’s going to be these fragile moments that sustain you through the hard years ahead. Please take advantage of as many of these moments as you can muster because we might not have that many of them left.

This list is not the most optimistic one that exists when it comes to dealing with climate change. The present state of neglect leaves little room for a rosy picture of changing the world through recycling and reducing plane travel. Humanity might eventually rebound and fix the mistakes that brought us here, but in the meantime, we will have to try to be practical. We are going to need to get to know our community, get involved in local politics, learn to do more with less, participate in alternative economies, and make sure we do not move into new communities where we are strangers, easy to be picked off and blamed by other more xenophobic towns and cities.

Notice that none of these bullet points are telling you to give up. Nor are any of these pieces of advice instructing you to hoard resources in underground bunkers. We should not take on the weight of the world by ourselves. It’s only through community that we have any hope of survival.

Climate change is terrifying because it's a word that tells us rather directly that the world we know is moving on to something else. The climate is changing —not only in terms of our ecosystem, but also politically, spiritually, and maybe even economically. That is scary, but change also brings with it the possibility of a better state of affairs, or at the very least, a less shitty one.

We shouldn’t pretend like things aren’t going to be terrible, but hope is there — if we can harness the change on the horizon.

Alex Has Opinions 7/22/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/22/21

The TV Show ‘Loki’ Gets Fascism All Wrong

The Disney+ show sidesteps fascism in its latest Marvel offering

Loki was a show that tried to cover a lot of things in its six-episode run-time: as with any Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) property, it continued the larger cinematic narrative, specifically the fallout following the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019); it introduced the concept of multiverses; forecasted our next big bad; on top of having a philosophical conversation about if free will even exist alongside nonlinear time. There is a ton to parse, here and not all of these concepts play nicely with one another.

Underneath all of this bluster, however, there is a rather interesting conversation about fascism. The main protagonist interacts with a fascist empire that arguably transcends the enemies of the previous films. We are given a rather visceral example of what fascism can look like, at least initially — something that should be applauded in any film representation when done right.

Unfortunately, Loki very problematically has constructed a narrative where fascism is needed to protect the universe from an even larger threat. This creates a story that undercuts its original premise and leaves the audience with an empathetic portrayal of fascism.

Loki is a show about the titular God of Mischief, on the run from a temporal time agency known as the Time Variance Authority (TVA), which is trying to create “order” across the timeline. The show immediately follows the events of Avengers: End Game, where a version of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in 2012 escapes the clutches of the Avengers and teleports away with the Tesseract.

This version of Loki is quickly captured by the TVA, who label him a “variant” to the “Sacred Timeline” (his teleportation was not “supposed” to happen). They threaten to “prune” him from existence if he does not help time agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) track down another, deadlier Loki (Sophia Di Martino) killing time agents across history. This setup leads to many fun shenanigans across time and space, but it also sets up a dynamic where we have a fascist organization employing a fascist to preserve themselves.

Before we go into that contentious claim, a quick aside on fascism, some will erroneously declare that fascism was a political movement that started and ended in the early 20th century. Fascism, however, has evolved over the decades to incorporate different rhetoric and iconography. These movements are varied, but they are generally united in an ideology centered around nationalism and authoritarianism. As fascist scholar Robert Paxton writes in his book Anatomy of Fascism (2004):

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

The Wikipedia-version of that mouthful of words is a nationalistic regime using extreme violence in the name of stopping some threat to kill others and expand their territorial holdings.

In the show Loki, our protagonist, definitely starts out as a leader with fascist aspirations. This version of Loki just finished trying to take over all of humanity in the film Avengers (2012). He is definitely driven by what scholar Umberto Eco describes in their essay Ur-Fascism (1995) as contempt for the weak. Loki believes that sentient human beings are incapable of making correct decisions and that a strong leader like himself is needed to make society right. “The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom, “ he tells agent Mobius. “For nearly every living thing, choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret. There’s a fork in every road, yet the wrong path always taken….”

This sets up an interesting dynamic because Loki is powerless in the high-tech city that the TVA is located inside. We are briefly led to believe that this will be a story of deradicalization as Mobius forces Loki to realize that his worldview is wrong. That deradicalization does happen, but mainly in spite of the TVA rather than because of it. We quickly learn that the TVA is also a fascist-seeming organization, almost a totalitarian one, for it exerts control over nearly all aspects of life. Unlike Loki, though, they are so successful that they actually conquered all of space and time, even if most people are not aware of it.

The TVA is an authoritarian organization steeped in almost religious fervor. It is allegedly ruled by three mythical timekeepers who are immortalized through dogma. The entire hierarchy of this organization flows in one direction, and followers have an unshakeable belief in the mission they serve. “I’m just lucky,” Mobius tells Loki, “that the chaos I emerged into gave me all this…My own glorious purpose. Cause the TVA is my life, and it's real because I believe it's real.” Members of the TVA are true believers. They believe that variants pose a threat that will destroy the sacred timeline, and that they are justified in resorting to drastic methods to preserve their temporal empire (i.e., pruning and resetting).

Members of the TVA are driven by what Umberto Eco would call a “fear of difference.” Their entire organization was created to protect the sacred timeline from any changes whatsoever. They prune all deviations without hesitation. Members of the TVA possess an intense xenophobia for these deviations, which they derogatorily refer to as “variants.” Trials are arranged for variants, but these are sham trials — the accused are not even aware of their offenses until moments before their slated executions.

In fact, the TVA maps over to most of Eco’s famous fourteen points in his essay Ur-Fascism. Members of the TVA are such steadfast traditionalists that they are literally devoted to making sure no changes to the timeline ever happen (i.e., a rejection of modernity). A constant sense of threat governs their lives as they send their soldiers to stop variants that allegedly pose an existential threat to all of reality (i.e., obsession with a plot and life is permanent warfare). They also speak in euphemisms that mask the horrors of what they do on a daily basis: killing someone is referred to as “pruning,” and genociding a timeline is labeled “resetting” it (i.e., Newspeak based off of George Orwell's novel 1984).

Yet, the TVA doesn’t map on to all of Eco’s points. While there are some areas of fascism that the show depicts with pitch-perfect clarity, others are sorely lacking. This absence represents a core problem with how the show treats fascism overall — mostly as an aesthetic divorced from the reality of how fascism actually develops and maintains itself.

The thing about fascism is that it involves buy-in. This blog has referred to it as a “group sport” before because it takes active support from a sizeable portion of the population to pull off. Eco described how fascism relies on an appeal to a collective frustration, usually a frustrated middle class. These are people who do not like their position in life and are urged by the fascist regime to blame a scapegoat that is perceived as powerful but also weak enough to overcome (e.g., the Jews during the Third Reich).

In the show Loki, however, members of the TVA do not hate variants due to some misdirected class, ethnic, or racial resentment. They believe the Time Keepers created them to perform this sole purpose and have unquestioning loyalty in their mission to uphold the sacred timeline. This hatred is logical from their point of view. The TVA is a sort of prefab fascism where a divine power was able to construct it from whole-cloth without having to do any of the manipulation and propaganda that involves bringing over converts to your side.

This setup becomes even more difficult to swallow once we learn that TVA agents were not created by the Time Keepers like we initially thought, but are actually the very variants they fight against. The entire organization was built upon a deception, where thousands of people were “tricked” into being fascists. We can see how this story beat problematically divorces the agents of the TVA from their sickening actions. It’s similar to the myth that the German people were not aware of the horrors that occurred in the concentration camps or that Southerners were oblivious to how slavery operated. It removes their complicity so that we, as the audience, can feel better when they do a turn in the final act.

The revelation that TVA agents are variants in the show leads to a domino effect of dissent once members learn the truth. People like agent Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) almost immediately defect, abandoning eons of propaganda in a very short period of time. “That’s not going to work out the way you think it is,” Mobius tells TVA High Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) when she tries to call guards to her office, indicating that the truth was enough to cause an open revolt among the rank-and-file of the organization.

The only person who remains loyal seems to be Renslayer, telling Mobius in a final confrontation: “I couldn’t let you get in the way of our mission. It can’t have been for nothing. That’s why I had to prune you.” We are supposed to view Renslayer as a bitter holdout, but in real life, most people under fascism act a lot more like Renslayer when exposed to the truth than Mobius and Hunter B-15. We know enough about human psychology at this point to be painfully aware of how set-in people’s ideologies can become. Germans in the Third Reich did not revolt against their government as the truth of the camps disseminated across society. Many supporters of Donald Trump did not abandon him as he mismanaged the response to a pandemic so badly that hundreds of thousands of people died. Fascism as an ideology has a way of distorting the worldview of supporters so much that they ignore reality — you cannot truth bomb your way out of it.

Worse, the show's narrative is constructed in such a way that the fascism of the TVA is portrayed as almost necessary. In another surprise twist, we learn that there aren’t three Time Keepers at all, but one person who sealed this timeline to stave off an interdimensional war from his other variants. This man, referred to as He Who Remains, tells Loki and another Loki variant named Sylvie that they cannot kill him off or it will lead to an incalculable amount of destruction:

“…You came to kill the devil, right? Well, guess what? I keep you safe. And if you think I’m evil, well, just wait till you meet my variants. And that’s the gambit. Stifling order or cataclysmic chaos. You may hate the dictator, but something far worse is gonna fill that void if you depose of him. I’ve lived a million lifetimes. I’ve gone through every scenario. This is the only way. The TVA, it works.”

It’s floated by Sylvie, who has spent her entire life running away from the TVA, that He Who Remains might be lying, but her well-warranted skepticism is proved unfounded. The last scene of the show is of our Loki in another timeline staring at an imposing statue of a He Who Remains variant (probably Kang the Conqueror), setting up this big bad for a future movie. The mechanics of this universe seem to imply that the fascism of He Who Remains was better than the total war that this new invader will bring.

This final twist is frustrating because, despite what the show is trying to claim, we have no idea if this future suffering will be worse than the countless genocides this current regime has already perpetrated. Eons of reset timelines have caused the deaths of an unknowable number of people, and it’s hard to compare that fate with the unknowable number of deaths this invader will bring about. You can’t really compare two limitless infinities. It’s an artificial Catch-22 that exists for no other reason other than to heighten suspense, and as a result, we end up feeling sympathy for the decisions of a malicious fascist.

This judgment call makes a mediocre portrayal of fascism into one that is quite frustrating. When the rules of your story — something that is made up — validate the oppression of an entire plane of reality, it’s fair to scrutinize those creative decisions.

Loki was advertised as a fun romp. There was an expectation that it would be in the vein of Thor Ragnorack (2017) or Ant-Man (2015). No one was expecting a story about fascism and free will, and that ambition is admirable, even if the end product was not very coherent. The fact that the series decided to tackle something darker and edgier was not inherently problematic, but it's very clear that its initial premise of variants struggling against a fascist empire was swept away in the last couple of episodes so that they could set up the franchise’s big bad.

We ended up with a very distorted portrayal of fascism, one where it's depicted as simultaneously both bad and necessary. We are not supposed to like the antics of He Who Remains and Renslayer’s fascism, but in much the same way fans applauded Thanos for his Malthusian ecoterrorism, we understand that there is a cold logic to it that we can empathize with.

It is “rational” fascism.

Fascism, however, is not “logical.” It is often incoherent, defying the utilitarian logic that He Who Remains allegedly represents. Germans did not scapegoat Jews, and Trump supporters did not scapegoat immigrants because such decisions were rational responses to the wealth inequality and white supremacy plaguing their respective countries. They were misdirected resentments egged on by nationalistic and authoritarian movements. Our media does us a disservice when it suggests otherwise. It’s very unsettling that Loki created a narrative that centers on a fascist organization, and yet has that fascism be justified by the “plot.”

Less cowardly media would be willing to tell the viewer that He Who Remains was lying. It would validate Sylvie's well-earned skepticism in the fascist organization that has been hunting her (and murdering countless others) for her entire life, but that would make the fascist sympathizers in the audience uncomfortable.

What does that say about our media when that is considered middle ground?

Alex Has Opinions 7/20/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/20/21

Are You Even A Capitalist, Bro?

A primer about what the words capitalist and capitalism even mean

Bro, if you have ever been in a heated conversation online, you’ve probably had a cringe-worthy debate defining political terms like socialism or capitalism. “[Socialism] Who’s Behind It, Why It’s Evil, and How To Stop It” reads the subheader for Dinesh D’Souza’s 2020 book United States of Socialism. “Socialism is when the government does stuff,” academic Richard D. Wolff infamously said at a talk. People have a lot of opinions on how we should structure our government, and as we can see, they can get very rough.

However, it quickly becomes apparent that most people simply do not know what these words mean. They are relying on a rhetorical boogeyman to blame all the world's problems on the hated ideological framework of their choice. As not chill politician Margaret Thatcher once said, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” Note she said this three years before she became British prime minister and used the powers of her office to implement policies that worsened wealth inequality overall. She was not interested in talking about economic systems as much as she was defining an enemy.

Nowhere does this ignorance become more obvious than with self-described “capitalists” who claim to be so, despite not actually being capitalists at all. Many people seem to be starting fights on the Internet (and in real life) to support a class of people they falsely believe themselves to be a part of, and we need to examine what that says about us as a people.

Now bro, before you scroll down to the bottom of this article to write an epic response, let’s define what capitalist and capitalism even mean. A lot of false definitions of capitalism will define it as trade (i.e., two people or entities engaged in the buying and selling of goods and services). “Capitalism has always existed in one form or another,” one Reddit user posted. “…the concept of ownership and economic markets has always existed even without modern currencies.”

While it’s true that humans have been engaged in trade for thousands (possibly even hundreds of thousands) of years, capitalism is a little more complex than a person hawking their wares at a marketplace. It is an economic system where private individuals, rather than governments or kings, control most of a society’s trade and profits. These private individuals are what we mean when we talk about “capitalists.” These are people who own capital (e.g., machinery, tools, equipment, buildings, railways, and all means of transport and communication, raw materials, people, etc., ), or what based leftists may refer to as “the means of production,” which then are used in the creation of goods and services purchased by consumers.

That’s a lot of jargon that basically means capitalists own the stuff, and people used to make the things that we will buy.

This way of thinking seems like second nature to us now, but capitalism is a very young economic system that has already had several iterations. Some bros will refer to mercantilism (roughly from 1400 CE to the late 1700s), or a country using protectionism and imperialism to maximize their exports and minimize their imports, as the origin of capitalism. Other chill dudes might point to the Dutch Republic (1588 to 1795 CE), more specifically joint-stock companies like the Dutch East India Company, as a proper origin. Many more begin the story in the industrialization of the United Kingdom and the United States (and then the world) starting in the 1800s. Even if we are going by the most conservative estimate here, we are still talking about less than seven hundred years. Not that long when compared to the roughly twelve thousand years of human civilization. Do the math, dude or dudette.

In western Europe, the previous era of economic development was known as feudalism. It was where land was divided up among the nobility and church and given to vassals in exchange for political and military support. Some merchants existed — selling and trading goods in whatever market would fetch the highest price— but most people in these polities were peasants who worked said land in exchange for protection. The virtues of business and financing that we today consider the bedrock of capitalist society were not well-accepted back then. Money-lending, in particular, was viewed quite negatively by some elements of European society. In England, for example, a Church prohibition on “usury” in the 1300s caused many lenders to conceal the interest charged in local loans. It would take centuries for the attitudes of the public to change into what we recognize today.

Now, mate, it also bears noting that we are, of course, speaking in broad strokes here. No place around the world has ever had one unified economic system. There have always been those that live outside the maps drawn by emperors, presidents, generals, monarchs, and High School Football Coaches. We have seen a lot of subsistence farming (i.e., people raising crops for personal consumption rather than trade) throughout history, including within the United States. In fact, subsistence farming continues to the present in all sorts of places around the world.

Even today, there is no purely capitalist economy. The United States is a “Mixed Economy” where the government fully or partially controls many industries such as defense, education, and infrastructure. The line between the private and the public sector is not always very clear-cut either, with many successful capitalists relying on the government for their wealth. According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, Elon Musk’s various companies have drawn upon billions of dollars in government subsidies. He may be a Twitter savant, but he didn’t earn his billions without some help from Uncle Sam. The same can be said for Amazon, Google, and Facebook. In fact, most major US companies have enjoyed government subsidies at one point or another and continue to do so.

You may very well support this system — I don’t judge my bros — but something to make clear is that you are most likely not a capitalist within it. If you do not make the majority of wealth through capital (again, the things and people used to make the stuff we buy), then you are not a capitalist. Truthfully, only a tiny minority of humans in our system will ever be full-fledged capitalists. Class mobility has shrunk dramatically in recent years, and the situation does not seem to be improving.

What are you then, my man or manette?

Well, if you make your money by performing labor for someone else (we non-capitalists know this as a job) or you rely on someone who does (a spouse, child, student, etc.), then you would fall within the working class. Members of the working class are people who must rent out their labor — either to capitalists, other workers, and sometimes both — to subsist. If you or your loved one cannot ever stop renting your labor to others, then you are not a capitalist — you are a worker.

Some workers have to work all their lives. Others live in chill countries that provide a more robust safety net that subsidies their wages (and consequently the wages capitalists have to pay them). Whether you earn a small income or a large one, however, most of us were born into the working-class and, at the risk of sounding like a total bummer, we will most likely die as members of the working-class, especially in America where so many of us work into old age (totally not chill).

The conversation from here usually devolves into whether this divide between workers and capitalists is based or cringe. Capitalists would say that they provide innovation and greater inefficiency. Marxists would claim that capitalists are extracting the full value from the labor of the workers they hire. There is a lot of nuance between these two poles of thought, and they have been discussed in-depth elsewhere. If you want content that doesn’t require too much work to absorb, check out the based Philosophy Tube video Work (or, the 5 jobs I had before YouTube).

I am more concerned, however, with why so many people do not understand what capitalists even are and what that says about us as a society.

Americans have a weird disconnect when it comes to wealth and poverty. America has a deep mythos about meritocracy (e.g., the American Dream, and all that). We basically think hard work makes people successful, and so we tie our ability to earn wealth into our own value as human beings—the exact opposite of taking a chill pill. The divide between capitalists and members of the working class is often obscured by our own shame of not living up to that standard.

Most Americans don’t consider themselves workers, capitalists, lower-class, or upper-class, but middle-class — a mythical, everchanging center that falls between the wealthy and the working-class. A 2015 Pew Research poll found that 9 out of 10 Americans consider themselves middle-class. Another poll in 2018 had that number up at 70%. This perception is weird given how frickin’ unequal everything is in America. Most Americans don’t make a whole lot of money. Nearly half of working Americans work in low-wage jobs that are not enough to pay for their living expenses.

Capitalists also have this problem but in reverse. They don’t think they're in the upper-class and instead will cling to the middle-class label. A 2019 Ameriprise Financial Study, for example, found that a majority of people with one million dollars in assets or more did not consider themselves to be wealthy. As Barry Davret writes in Medium:

“Today, I’m what you’d call a middle-class millionaire. When I add up assets and subtract liabilities, the net balance exceeds the mythical threshold, but you’d never know it from my lifestyle. My house looks like a generic old home you’d find in Anytown, USA…The rest of my life mirrors common middle-class challenges: paying a mortgage, worrying about college for my kids, and nervously peeking at my credit card and bank account balances once a week.”

Barry Davret is calling himself middle-class based on an aesthetic, and not so much on comparing himself to the material conditions of the rest of America. He is an influencer with tens of thousands of followers who also invests in stock and other financial assets. Most “middle-class” people cannot generate that type of capital at the scale he is talking about. In fact, one comparison from Pew Research places anyone who makes $145,500 or higher (plus or minus regional differences in cost of living) in the upper class. Barry, middle class, you are not, bro.

As we can see, Americans are weird with the concept of class and wealth. In fact, as a general rule, Americans are uncomfortable with disclosing how much they make, and this bites many of us in the keister when it comes to things like salary negotiations. One contributing factor for why salary discrepancies exist in this country, particularly racial and gendered ones, is because people are not actively aware of how much their peers make. We don’t talk about it because money makes many Americans uncomfortable, and then we don’t know what to ask for (and capitalists don’t tell us) when selling our labor.

This taboo, however, is by no means universal everywhere. The writer Joe Pinsker gave one entertaining example in The Atlantic about how some cultures can be refreshingly direct, writing:

“Kimberly Chong, an anthropology lecturer at University College London, told me that when she studied the office of an American consulting firm in China, the mostly Chinese consultants “freely shared information about how much they earned with each other and also felt emboldened to ask senior executives how much they earned.” To the frustration of management, this made it difficult to sustain the pay differentials that are common at American companies.”

Pinsker, bro, “pay differentials” is a funny way of saying that these businesses are “willfully riping their workers off.”

We are generally in the dark when it comes to how much our peers make, leading to these perceptual bubbles. Working-class Americans are ashamed to admit that many of them are not part of that mythical middle-class and are being failed by society at large. Rich Americans, meanwhile, are comparing themselves to other rich people and don’t realize (or simply don't care) how little everyone else is making. There is a lot of shame over class in the United States. We are so deadset on internalizing all of society’s failings that we effectively try to pretend like class doesn’t exist, and if there is something a bro shouldn’t be, it’s in denial. This confusion leads to situations where a lot of people are fighting against their own class interests.

As an example, it’s not simply the rich who oppose unions. Despite high support from the public, as well as ample evidence that unions increase benefits and salaries, there is often a hesitancy from some workers to engage with new unions. “Everything they say they want from a union, we’ve already got by working directly with Amazon,” one worker remarked recently of their decision not to support a new union at an Amazon warehouse. Not every union is perfect, by any stretch of the bro-tastic imagination, but to think that you will have better bargaining power alone than alongside your other workers' ties into that belief of meritocracy we were talking about earlier. A lot of people still think that work is all they need. “I work hard here, and I think I’ll be rewarded for that,” said another worker of her decision also to vote no.

As we can see, this refusal to acknowledge what class we even are leads to tangible harm. It muddies the waters so that we don’t recognize where our interests lie. Most Americans lack what some based bros might describe as “class consciousness” or an understanding of where they are on the economic hierarchy.

Instead, we have a system where everyone thinks they are valued, and very few are.

There is no universal agreement on how to deal with this problem of class in America. Solutions run the gamut from education and awareness to passing reforms so capitalists cannot extract and hoard as much wealth to getting rid of capitalists entirely. The point of this article is not to convince you of a solution but rather to have you understand your position in this hierarchy.

You may believe in the ideology of capitalism (again, this article is not seeking to judge you for believing in the dominant ideology on the planet), but unless the majority of your wealth is earned from capital (i.e., stocks, bonds, commodities, capital goods, a business you own, cryptocurrency, etc.), not your labor, then you are not a capitalist. Just as peasants who support the monarchy are not kings, very few people who support capitalism are capitalists. You are a worker. You have always been a member of the working class, and you will most likely die a worker.

What you do with that information is up to you, bro.

Alex Has Opinions 7/18/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/18/21

Everyone Got The Movie ‘The Hunt’ Wrong

The political satire about liberals hunting conservatives has more to say than culture war shenanigans.

The movie The Hunt (2020) was controversial before it even aired. The social commentary about liberals hunting conservatives garnered criticism from far-right pundits like former president Donald Trump. It was pulled from its initial release in 2019 following the mass shootings in Gilroy, Calif., El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, and then aired during the pandemic when we all had more to worry about than a movie being insensitive.

As political satire, The Hunt is a story that, from start to finish, cautions against “political extremism.” This straightforward, admittedly reductive political commentary is nothing we haven’t seen before (see Braindead), but underneath the bluster is a rather insightful message about how politics is a game for the wealthy. While the creative team behind this film most likely didn’t intend to focus on class, we end up getting a message about one working-class woman struggling against a group of wealthy elites.

Based loosely on The Most Dangerous Game (1924), the plot is quite simply about a cadre of rich liberals capturing a group of conservatives that they drop into an unknown location to hunt for sport. Many of the victims quickly suspect they are part of a well-known conspiracy in conservative circles called “Manorgate,” which is an Internet rumor about this very scenario that allegedly happens every year, and in a certain respect, they are (more on this later). However, this realization doesn’t help them as they are killed by the likes of spiked pits, arrows, and cyanide-powdered donuts.

The narrative doesn’t have too much sympathy for either side of the alleged political spectrum. The deaths of liberals and conservatives alike are gleefully framed in ways that are as visually interesting as they are shocking. For example, near the beginning of the film, we are shown a perky blonde woman (Emma Roberts) who fits the archetype of many conservative figures like Tomi Lahren. At one point, as she is navigating a death arena, she narrowly dodges sniper fire. “That almost hit me,” she gasps before her head immediately explodes from gunfire. By killing off the type of person who, in another film, would be the protagonist, this scene tells you that this movie will take no prisoners. That it’s not interested in favoring the darlings on either the “left or the right.”

This irreverence suggests that the movie is favoring the political “center.” We see this textually supported in the film’s protagonist Crystal Creasey (Betty Gilpin), who goes the entire film not really offering up her political ideology, even when it might directly impact her life. When asked if she’s interested in understanding why people are trying to kill her, Crystal responds: “They're trying to kill me. I don’t give a shit why.” She is framed, for all intents and purposes, as apolitical.

Yet, she isn’t just another passive figure in the liberal death arena. Crystal looks damn cool fighting through it. The way she MacGyvers, her way through the death traps of these rich elites, often seeming like she is the only smart person in the room. We are very clearly supposed to trust her logic and opinions, and given that she’s the sole “contestant” who ends up surviving The Hunt, it's quite clear that she’s our moral center as well.

We see this preference for the political center indicated by the director of the film Craig Zobel, who wrote to Variety: “Our ambition was to poke at both sides of the aisle equally. We seek to entertain and unify, not enrage and divide. It is up to the viewers to decide what their takeaway will be.” This response is obviously a nonanswer. We can understand why it’s a position that might be offensive to those who consider the asymmetrical polarization that has overtaken the Republican party to be worse than the “wokescolding” that permeates some leftist and liberal circles. In the words of Peter Debruge, also from Variety:

“The danger of “The Hunt” isn’t that the project will inspire copycat behavior (the premise is too far-fetched for that), but rather that it drives a recklessly combustible wedge into the tinderbox of extreme partisanship, creating a false equivalency between, say, Whole Foods-shopping white-collar liberals and racist, conspiracy-minded right-wingers.”

This perspective is valid; however, we will soon see that The Hunt accidentally provides a far more nuanced depiction than “moderates” good, “extremism” bad. There is an unintended message broadcasted here that has everything to do with why Crystal is “apolitical” and what her politics actually are in the film.

The thing about politics is that no one is really apolitical — everyone has opinions. While we don’t get many stated political opinions from Crystal, we are repeatedly shown her positions. Crystal is insanely practical and down-to-Earth. She hilariously figures out that two rich liberals are faking their characters based on the price of cigarettes in Arkansaw. She seems to have spent her life just trying to survive, and she doesn’t have the time to engage in the bs both her peers on the left and the right do in the film. She has to get the job done and values “hard work” and “common sense.” In other words, she is coded as a member of the working class, specifically the white working class.

Compare Crystal’s positive traits (e.g., resourcefulness and common sense) to the negative ones of the liberal elite. The film certainly takes a few superficial jabs at cancel culture and political correctness (jokes that often don’t quite land, in my opinion), but the thing that mostly demonizes them is their immense impracticality: these people barely know how to use the weapons they are firing; they hired a movie star actor to train them how to fight; one of them even leaves a bunker during the middle of a fight to pee. This hunt is not a matter of life or death to them but a game.

The showdown between Crystal and the liberal leader Athena Stone (Hilary Swank) doesn’t focus on a grand debate over ideology. Athena takes the time to instead monologue about how to make the best grilled cheese (hint — it allegedly involves Gruyere). She then reads Crystal’s bio, judging her for having a broken home, using welfare, and not being able to get a job.

“Crystal May Creasey. Born in Missippi, Whites Crossing. Fitting. Dropped out of school at 12, right around the time your daddy was killed by the police when they raided the methamphetamine lab. Your mother joined him soon after that — overdose. Probably the last batch of Daddy’s stuff. Romantic…After your mom died you bounced from part time job to part time job, to welfare and back. More times than I can count honestly. The only consistency was your inability to stay employed.”

These insults say far more about Athena’s class resentment towards the poor than anything about her being on the left. A rich Republican could have equally said this monologue, the words unchanged.

In fact, the thing that prompted these rich liberals to go on a homicidal rampage in the first place was that initial “manorgate” rumor. It was a joke they said once on a text message thread — not something that, at the time, was real. The message was then leaked to the public, causing a scandal that led them to lose their jobs and positions in high society.

It was the loss of some of their status that led to this sick plan, not actually a political motivation. They enacted “manorgate” for real as a form of revenge. The politics were simply a rationalization these rich people used to feel better about themselves. Most of the liberals in the film even risked death by posing as elaborate characters to attempt to extract an apology from the people they were trying to kill. It had nothing to do about politics and everything about their egos.

This reading even changes the context for how we see the political correctness jokes throughout the film. These liberals are not coded as terrible for hating racism or talking about appropriation. It's because they are utterly detached from reality, perceiving politics as a game of sport (quite literally in this case) rather than an institution of power that affects people's lives. They see things like anti-racism as the language of respectability. In one chilling scene, they try to rationalize including a Black Conservative in the hunt so that it’s not “problematic.” They are so detached from the material conditions surrounding these political fights that they don’t understand what the words they are saying even mean.

In the end, we learn that Crystal isn’t even one of the intended “deplorables.” She was picked up by mistake. “You got the wrong Crystal,” she informs Athena shortly before their fight. And so the movie doesn't end up being a fight between the left and right at all, but one woman struggling to survive against the whims of the rich.

When Crystal finally succeeds in her fight against Athena, she patches up her injuries and heads to the plane these rich people arrived in during the start of the film. The workers there are in shock. “Oh shit,” the flight attendant gasps. They are briefly worried that Crystal will enact revenge on them for all the events that unfolded in the film.

This fear is unfounded, however, as Crystal holds no animosity towards them. “The, uh assholes you work for tried to kill me, so I killed them instead,” she says nonchalantly. The movie then ends cutely with the flight attendant, who has never had the caviar she serves on the plane before because she’s “not supposed to,” being given some to eat by Crystal. They barely know each other, but they are bonded by class, and that’s something Crystal seems to recognize instinctually.

There is clearly a class element that gets lost in the debate in this movie — one that I don’t think was intentional. Based on how writers Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse talk about this film, they most likely didn’t intend to make class a focus at all. They wanted the audience to sympathize with Crystal, and making her working class was the quickest way to do that, but by centering a working-class woman against a cadre of wealthy elites, that narrative is textually there.

Regardless of someone’s political affiliation, politics is often treated as a game by those in power. The rich wage fights that are utterly detached from the reality of everyday people, and it leads to a distorted worldview. It's great to see that absurdity reflected in a film, even if only by accident.

Alex Has Opinions 7/12/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/12/21

Gettr: The Conservative Twitter That Is Already Attracting the Worst Kinds Of People

The story of Gettr, Steve Bannon, gay erotica, and trolls

Gettr launched in the public eye on July 4th to much fanfare. The press immediately picked up on the story with gusto. “Team Trump quietly launches new social media platform,” wrote Politico on July 1st. The initial welcome post on the site has over 150,000 comments, and the Gettr app has quickly been downloaded millions of times the world over.

Immediately, however, it was clear that there were problems. The product that rolled out was confusing and eerily similar to Twitter. It was plagued with trolls and lax security easily exploited by said trolls. Worst of all, it attracted the very types of people it intended to — far-right reactionaries hell-bent on carving out space for themselves on the internet.

There are many problems with this app, some of which are sure to plague any startup venture this political in nature. Since Gettr was pitched to the public as an alternative social media platform for conservatives (the app’s slogan is literally “The Free Speech Network”), right from the start, it was plagued by trolls looking to trigger the intended user base.

That welcome comment we referred to earlier had far more comments than likes or reposts — a practice referred to in Twitter culture as “ratioing.” This is when people drag a post with funny or negative comments hoping that they will overtake all other engagement. When we peruse that comment section of that initial post, among the routine thank yous and spam, many posts are devoted to gay erotica and homoerotic anime.

In fact, trolls are posting this type of content all over the site. As David Gilbert writes in Vice’s Motherboard: “Unfortunately, whatever protections the site has in place to filter out such content aren’t working right now, and as a result, one of Gettr’s biggest potential user bases has sworn off the platform after it was flooded with porn and ‘bad words.’”

Some of these trolls (or social justice activists, depending on your perspective) have performed far more serious sabotage than just posting some salacious pictures. Several high-profile accounts were almost immediately hacked by a user who redirected people to their Twitter handle, along with the statement “free Palestine.”

Gettr has many unaddressed security concerns and appears to have lifted much of its code directly from Twitter. More of these hacks will likely continue in the future, especially since the foundation of this app is so shoddy.

However, one of the largest business problems for the platform is that, as of right now, the former 45th President of the U.S. is not on it. Donald Trump does not appear to be directly linked to the project.

Jason Miller, a former spokesman for Trump during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, is one of the forces behind the site, and he has so far been unsuccessful in getting his boss’s support. He claims that he has Trump’s former Twitter handle reserved for him, and yet the President still seems committed to working on some unidentified project of his own.

This lack of the former president has hilariously led to a situation where multiple accounts are competing to be the top “real” Donald Trump account. One of them — “@presDonaldTrump” — has nearly 100,000 followers at the time of writing this article. We know this account is fake because, unlike the white “v” and red background given to Gettr’s verified accounts, this account is unverified, placing a fake checkmark reminiscent of verified Twitter accounts.

And yet, despite the deception being rather obvious, @presDonaldTrump still posts consistent content that makes it seem like they are real. “Will be speaking live about our First Amendment Rights at my Bedminster golf club in New Jersey in 2 hours…” they posted on July 7th to thousands of likes.

Sometimes the interactions between these fake accounts can get hilariously pointed. “look at this f@cking liar,” the user @pres_trump wrote of user @DJT45Official. The former is a satire account poking fun at the obviously fake @DJT45Official account, which has less than 500 followers. There are a lot of these fake accounts circulating in the early days of Gettr. It’s easy to find fake or parody accounts of Dave Rubin, the video game platform Steam, and even Gettr’s own verification handle.

This is not to say that anything flies on the platform (although much does). As is standard on many platforms nowadays, keywords such as the n-word and “nazi” are hidden from search results. These efforts, however, seem less to do with removing hatred on the site and more about keeping on the good side of Apple and Google so they can remain on their app stores.

Gettr takes a very hands-off approach to content moderation. While Gettr reserves the right to modify or delete content in its Community Guidelines, it explicitly emphasizes that it does not “have any obligation to.”

As a result of this lax stance, the platform also attracts the very people it’s intended to — far-right conservatives. Among typical conservative pundits like Ben Carson and Dinesh D’Souza, are far-right fascist figures who have tentatively started to make Gettr their home.

Director of the anti-Muslim hate group Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer, has established a small presence here, using it as a backup repository for their Twitter. I also see small accounts for hate groups such as the Asatru Folk Assembly and the Proud Boys.

Additionally, the fascist Steve Bannon was verified on the platform as well as his podcast The War Room. “Speak truth to power on the Twitter Killer,” Bannon posted on July 4th, referencing a comment by xenophobic commentator Peter Navarro encouraging people to start downloading Gettr. Bannon, a man, banned on Twitter and YouTube, has mostly kept his account to reposting episodes of The War Room, but he may be directly involved with this project behind the scenes.

According to Miller, the family foundation of exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who co-owns G-TV Media Group with Bannon, allegedly contributed seed money to the app. However, there is evidence that this may not be true (or at least not the whole truth). Bannon and Guo seem to have been involved in building this app from the get-go.

According to reporting from Politico, the app appears to have initially been an anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) platform that was then retooled as a pro-Trump one. In the words of reporter Tina Nguyen: “A POLITICO review reveals that prior to it being revealed on Thursday, GETTR had existed for nearly a year as a Chinese-language social media network linked to Guo and G-TV Media, and on which anti-CCP content had been promoted on a regular basis.”

The app has now pivoted to pro-Trump content, but it was always going to exist somewhere in the proto-fascist or fascist ecosystem. Since its inception, the G-TV Media Group is an organization that has notoriously been plagued by accusations of fraud, with a federal probe into the company initiating just last year.

Guo has been described as being at the head of a vast disinformation network. We have every indication that that energy will continue with this latest venture as well. Bannon and Guo clearly wanted to provide members of the alt-right a space to avoid the alleged “persecution” they claim exists on other social media apps.

As of right now, there doesn’t seem to be any major fascist organizing on the platform. The app is still growing, and most people are setting up their accounts and feeling things out, but the potential for extremist activity is very much there.

We don’t know what will happen to Gettr as it evolves in the days and months ahead. There are some pain points that could cause it to stagnate or fail completely.

Like Parler before it, Gettr could get pulled from Google or Apple app stores. It will have to manage a balancing act between the “free speech” it desires to maintain and the tech industry’s standards surrounding hate speech and violence. Many businesses also just fail. There are countless dead social media sites out there, littering the virtual graveyard.

It’s also possible, though, for Gettr to become a permanent fixture in the conservative media ecosystem. Its growth thus far has been explosive. As of right now, it remains on the top free apps list in the Google app store for one of the most downloaded applications in the past few days.

We do not know what this app will become, but given the large and growing alt-right presence on Gettr, it is definitely worth monitoring. Hatred always is.

Alex Has Opinions 7/7/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/7/21

The Conservative Conspiracy Theory About A Supreme Court Coup

Inside a conservative nonprofit’s attempt to ‘astroturf’ the fear of a Democratic takeover of the Supreme Court

If you have been on YouTube recently, you might have noticed a very peculiar ad. “Political elites from the radical left want to overthrow the Supreme Court,” an imposing voice booms. “The cost would not only be our founding principles but our civil liberties as we know them.” The ad claims that a Supreme Court “coup” is underway and that Americans must be vigilant to stop radical leftists from overtaking the country.

This hysteria is very clearly not true on multiple levels that we will go into in more detail later on. The left is nowhere near capturing any federal branch of government, let alone one as recalcitrant as the Supreme Court. These ads are not about a real threat to America, but rather signal a concerted effort from one overly litigious nonprofit to fire up the conservative base so that it can rake in plenty of dollars in donations.

Right off the back, I want to clarify several points about this alleged “Supreme Court coup.”

Firstly, adding more seats to the Supreme Court via legislation isn’t a coup. A coup is when power is seized or displaced from the existing executive authority. This means a transition of power that is either illegal or “extra-legal” (i.e., goes beyond extraordinary measures included in the country’s constitution or body of laws, such as declaring a permanent state of emergency). The Cline Center for Democracy has defined 12 different categories of coups ranging from the military seizing power (i.e., a military coup) to the existing executive taking extreme measures to eliminate the power of their opposition (i.e., an autocoup), and none of these categories fit this current situation very well.

You would have to have a pretty ignorant reading of the law to assume that Congress changing the court's composition constitutes a coup. The number of seats in the Supreme Court is dictated by Congress, arguably as a constitutional check on the judiciary from the legislature. It would not only be constitutional to change the number of justices, but it historically has happened before. Congress established the Supreme Court in the Judiciary Act of 1789, originally with six justices. Since then, the number of seats has shifted six times, settling on nine justices, 80 years later in 1869.

Changes to the Court’s composition may not have happened in over 150 years, but something being irregular is not the same as something being illegal or even unconstitutional. No one is proposing that the Democratic Party remove the existing justices by force or bar Republican justices from serving on the Court. They are proposing the political majority in Congress, elected by the people of the United States, vote on a law to amend something that they are constitutionally permitted to do.

Secondly, this entire conversation is academic because Congress is nowhere near adding seats to the Supreme Court. Thanks to conservative Democrats such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat majority can barely pass an increase to the minimum wage, let alone distorting the laws of the land to prevent Republicans from holding power. The image presented in this ad is hyperbolic, at best, and far better describes the Republican Party’s efforts to suppress voter turnout.

So what’s brought on this Supreme Court panic showing up in your YouTube feed?

The Biden Administration has created a 36 member commission to study the debate around reforming the Supreme Court. They publicly met for the first time in May of 2021 and are expected to release a report sometime in August. These findings will not be binding in any way. Sadly, there has been a long history of presidents convening commissions to study issues they have no intention of fighting for politically. There is a remote chance this study might incite more serious political reform, but given the composition of the Senate, it’s more than likely to lead nowhere.

Conservatives are playing into the mostly unfounded fear that this commission will be used as a pretext to expand the number of seats in the Supreme Court via legislation (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “court-packing”). Again, this decision is legal and will probably not happen because of the previously aforementioned conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. However, something being unrealistic hasn’t stopped conservatives from making a big deal out of it (see, as an example, the debate on Critical Race Theory).

Specifically, these ads come from the First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal nonprofit founded by lawyer Kelly Shackelford. This organization is infamous for fighting for “religious liberty” cases, a term that sadly often translates to people trying to impose their religion in secular spaces or using religion to discriminate against marginalized people. Examples of the organizations' caseload include representing a high school football coach, who was dismissed after he refused to stop praying at the 50-yard line after games, and Melissa and Aaron Klein, owners of an Oregon cake shop that in 2013 refused to do a cake tasting for a same-sex couple. All of these cases are highly sensationalized, tending to attract the attention of conservative media.

We do not know who funds First Liberty because they do not disclose their funders, but according to their 2019 filing from ProPublica, they get most of their revenue from individual donations and grants — a large portion of which seemed to come from funds likes the Schwab Charitable Fund, the National Christian Charitable Foundation, and the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund. These funds facilitate these donations, but it's the donors themselves who are making the individual decision to donate to First Liberty. This fact implies that First Liberty might actually rely on individual supporters for a chunk of their revenue.

This need to reach out to small-time funders ties directly into their content media strategy. The content they put out is all about creating meaningless conflicts in the culture wars. First Liberty releases hyperbolic, fearmongering videos and ads regularly so that they can drum up support (and money) from triggered conservatives.

In one recent video titled Marxism in the Military?, they interview a former Lt. Col. Allen West, who discusses “the creeping ideologies that are infecting our U.S. Military.” The video does not provide viewers with a serious way to combat this alleged “Marxism,” but an option to donate to First Liberty does periodically pop up onto the screen. “Donate: Text First to 474747,” the video asks as the two men drone on about an activity they are allegedly very concerned about but also not concerned enough to fight for a specific policy.

It’s all bluster and no substance. This “SupremeCoup” is not a legitimate political concern but an obvious fundraising tactic. The original “Supreme Coup” ad doesn’t give you tools to contact political leaders or fight for a specific law, but instead to the website supremecoup.com. The first thing that happens on the microsite is a popup asking you to take a heavily biased survey which, once completed, redirects you to a page that asks you for a one-time or recurring donation.

This isn’t a tactic unique to this organization. “Surveys” are a common fundraising tool used by both conservative and liberal organizations. However, it does speak to how this is a non-issue. If a coup were actually on the horizon, the only organization talking about it would not be trying to raise money first and create political change second. This conspiracy theory is all about “astroturfing” outrage over a nonissue so that this one organization can continue funding its “religious freedom” vanity projects.

Conservatives in US politics love exaggerating issues so that they can paint themselves as victims. They control so much political power — both in terms of people in political office and agenda-setting — and yet they still perpetuate these outlandish conspiracy theories about Democrats conspiring to take power from them.

Democrats have no interest in overthrowing the Supreme Court or really usurping political power in the same way Republicans do (an article for another time). If Democrats were halfway competent, Conservatives would not have all this time on their hands to be inventing fake plots against them. They would be playing defense like the rest of us. It reflects their ingrained privilege and power that they can create such an outlandish narrative utterly divorced from our material reality.

It’s too early to tell if this narrative will catch on in the wider conservative media apparatus (First Liberty’s bank account certainly wants it too). It could very well be something that dies soon, replaced by some other absurd battle in the culture wars. Yet, given that the commission will not release their report for another month or so, we should expect some level of buildup over the next couple of weeks.

It may not be a real threat, but reality has nothing to do with conservative anxiety.

Alex Has Opinions 7/3/21 Alex Has Opinions 7/3/21

The Frustrating Queerbaiting in Disney Pixar’s ‘Luca’

The queer community deserves more than subtext.

Disney released the animated film Luca around the world in late June during the height of Pride month. It’s a movie that features two prepubescent boys in the Italian countryside. They have an incident that prompts them to leave home, sending them on a journey of self-discovery. The film is fairly standard in the coming-of-age genre. You are probably well familiar with the drill at this point.

Since some of the themes in the film focus on hiding your identity and accepting who you are, a lot of queer viewers have picked up on what they perceive to be a queer allegory. Articles such as Richard Lawson’s “Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie? Maybe” have populated the Internet speculating on whether this is one of Disney’s first “gay” characters in a mainstream release (the show Andi Mack takes that title on the Disney Channel). Yet, the fact that this queer interpretation is only subtext has some people frustrated by what they perceive to be queerbaiting.

The problem here, however, is far more systemic and insidious than a single film. Disney does not care about its queer viewers . We are so starved for representation that we are willing to see it where it’s frankly not there.

This conversation naturally asks us to define what queerbaiting even is in the context of media. For our purposes, it’s when a franchise purposefully creates cues that can be picked up on by the greater LGBTQIA2+ community but can easily be discredited by the director or creative team so that a work can be more marketable to a larger (more homophobic) audience.

A classic example of this would be Teen Wolf (2011–2017), where characters Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) and Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien), had a “frenemies” dynamic that is quite homoerotic. This tension was something that the marketing team of the series definitely leaned into. In one promo for the Teen Choice Awards, Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien are on a boat, seductively wrapped around each other. “We are on a ship, pun intended,” Dylan O’Brien says, referencing the fan culture word shipping, which is about fans pairing two characters together romantically. Despite using queerness to pique the interest of queer viewers starved for representation, this relationship would never be defined in the text as anything more than a friendship.

Disney also queerbaits a lot. They will often generate a bunch of goodwill in the press by announcing the inclusion of a queer character, only for those characters role to either be small and inconsequential or for the scenes that validate their queerness to be easily ignored. We saw this in 2017 when the character LeFou (Josh Gad) had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, same-sex dance with a minor character at the end of the film. We saw it again in Avengers: Endgame (2019), where director Joe Russo portrayed a gay man in a support group run by Captain America. This trend continued in Zootopia (2016), Toy Story 4 (2019), The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Onward (2020), and Cruella (2021). The scenes that confirm these characters' queerness, assuming that they are explicit at all, are so tiny that they can be cut for releases in countries whose governments are openly bigoted.

Source: The Rise of Skywalker; some groundbreaking shit apparently

Some believe that Luca falls within this trend. There are arguably queer cues sprinkled throughout the movie. The tension between Luca Paguro (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto Scorfano (Jack Dylan Grazer) is palpable. There are many scenes where they hug and show affectionate handing holding — something I am glad we are seeing between two boys in a film, regardless of their orientation. There is one comical scene where Luca has to tackle Alberto for plot reasons. The two fall underneath the table and then re-emerge awkwardly as if nothing has happened.

A queer subtext is also present in the “hidden world” or “masquerade” trope that is the cornerstone of the film. Luca and Alberto are both sea monsters who have the ability to transform into humans but revert back to their underwater form if they touch any water. They have to hide their identities from the human world. Luca faces heavy judgment from his parents for wanting to live more openly. In response to his decision to spend time on the surface, his parents literally threaten to send him to his uncle, who lives in the watery deep, which is a pretty apt metaphor for the proverbial closet. To escape his parent's decision, Luca runs off to the nearest town with his new friend Alberto so that they can live a freer life.

While these sentiments are not exclusively queer (the masquerade can loosely map over to any marginalized identity), it's not hard to understand why many queer people may have felt a subtext here. Many LGBTQIA2+ people have also had conservative parents resorting to drastic means to control their desires, forcing them to flee to a more tolerant nearby city so that they can live more openly. The ending moral of Luca is for you to live among your chosen family, regardless of the hatred that might bring — a message many queer people have had to internalize as an act of survival. “Some people, they’ll never accept him,” remarks the Grandmother near the end, “But some will. And he seems to know how to find the good ones.”

Finally, there is the indirect association with the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name — an Italian film about two gay men having a budding romance in the countryside. This film was a big deal in the queer community, so much so that singer Lil Nas directly referenced it in their hit 2021 song MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name). It was also a popular film from a prestige perspective, snagging an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Disney — a corporation whose job is to be aware of the cultural zeitgeist — definitely would be aware of this film and how themes in Luca might draw some comparisons.

The promotional material never directly validated this subtext, but there were certainly nuggets to satiate representationally-starved Disney fans. The trailer released in February of 2021 had a scene of Luca and Alberto wrapping their arms around each other as they stare off into the sunset. An Italian cover of “You Are My Sunshine” — a song often used as a romantic overture— plays in the background.

Who is Luca’s sunshine, I wonder?

The queer subtext is clearly there, yet we are supposed to believe that all of this is incidental. When asked by a reporter from Polygon at a press day back in April of 2021, the director for Luca, Enrico Casarosa, explicitly stated that this was a movie that didn’t talk about sexual orientation at all. He says: “I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things…This was about their friendship in that pre-puberty world.”

While there is nothing wrong with making a film centered on a platonic relationship, this concept of sexuality is inaccurate. Romance and sex are not the same things. Many straight and queer people have romantic desires at an early age, including during their early teens (and even before then). There are also queer, asexual romantics who remain so throughout the course of their lives. Luca and Alberto sit at the ages of 13 and 14, respectively, meaning that they very much would have been at the appropriate age for such a love story to unfold. Like, you know, the dozens of other Disney movies with teenage characters in heterosexual romances (see High School Musical, The Sound of Music, etc.).

It’s impossible to know what director Casarosa really intended with this statement. At its best, his position seems clueless and screams of unexamined homophobia. At its worst, he (and by extension, Disney’s marketing department) used cues easily recognizable by the LGBTQIA2+ community without ever intending to follow through on them. Disney, as a company, knows that they have an intense queer following at this point. There are gay days at Disney World. There are also articles and online communities trying to sift through debatable subtext and turning it into queer gold.

None of this should be a surprise.

Worse, Disney knows that people are annoyed by this pattern of queerbaiting. This exact dynamic was replicated with Frozen II, where there was a queer subtext picked up by fans in the first movie, only for the company to actively deny it. “Elsa is gay” became such a meme that SNL even had a skit where Elsa comes out as gay in a deleted scene. “The lack of any romantic interest doesn’t bother me anyway,” an obviously bothered Elsa, played by Kate McKinnon, sings to her sister Anna.

There are literally countless articles talking about Disney’s queerbaiting problem. As Ask’s Senior Managing Editor Michael Kasian-Morin remarked following Luca’s release: “Are they really giving us a story like Luca and then completely denying it’s about our community? Will there ever be any actual storytelling about young queer romance? Don’t tease us like this — it’s almost more offensive.”

This situation is frustrating — chiefly because of the obvious hypocrisy. As we have already mentioned, there are stories of heterosexual romance in Disney products. Disney also creates many stories involving male-on-male friendships (see Toy Story, The Lion King, The Jungle Book, etc.). There are no queer protagonists, though, and fans are so starved for representation that they are willing to see it in the most bare-bones of subtext.

Luca is a cute film about friendship and self-discovery. There is nothing wrong with making films about platonic relationships. If you feel “seen” by Disney’s Luca, that’s great. I constantly impose themes into works I know are not there. I have spent hours looking for cues that Leia from Star Wars is a lesbian, and I am currently writing a fanfiction that validates this desire. Believe me; I get it.

Let's make one thing abundantly clear, though, Disney as a corporation does not see you. They are a conservative company that has a record going back a decade of perpetuating obvious queer-baiting. They will eventually get to a point where they are comfortable with openly queer characters (see Out, The Jungle Cruise, etc.), but it will only be after teasing us for years. Stop giving them credit for representation they do not intend to deliver on. There are studios such as Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation (Mitchell vs. the Machines), Laika (ParaNorman), and DreamWorks (She-Ra and the Princess of Power) that will treat you better than this.

You deserve to be someone’s sunshine, not the chum they toss into the bottom of the ocean to attract bigger fish.