Hyperlink Your Heart - politics

M’lady Moon

2026-04-19T18:36:00+02:00

This post contains discussion of violence, sexual assault, and the sexual abuse of children

This post contains spoilers for the novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein

I read somewhere recently that “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein were two sides of a moon-politics coin, and since the former is one of my favourite books and I am thoroughly on-board with its politics, I decided I had to find out what the latter was about.

At the start of the period covered by the novel, Luna is a prison colony that is also partially populated by the free-born descendants of prisoners. It is very loosely governed by a body called the “Lunar Authority” which serves primarily to ensure the flow of grain from lunar farms to Earth - beyond that it doesn’t really care what happens in Luna or what the inhabitants do to each other. As it monopolises trade with Earth, it is able to set prices for the grain. As I’m sure you will have already guessed, it sets them too low for the tastes of the loonie farmers. Inevitably: revolution!

The narrator is a free-born computer technician named Mannie. The other main characters are Mike, the Lunar Authority central computer, which he maintains, and which he discovers has spontaneously become sentient; the Prof, the ideologue of the revolution; and Wyoh, an activist from another lunar city who becomes stranded with Mannie by circumstances. The four of them together engineer an uprising against the Authority and eventually lead a war of independence against Earth.

I found it quite an entertaining read in many respects. The first-person narration is warm and friendly, and the dialect is only occasionally impenetrable. There are aspects of the development of the sentient computer and the centralisation of computational resources that are insightful, and extremely relevant today. There are some aspects of the loonies’ politics and aspirations that I agree with, or am sympathetic to. Basically everybody living on the moon is mixed race and some shade of brown. I found the ending of the war quite thrilling as communications were cut off and the rocks were running out.

However, there are other parts that are uncomfortable to read, most of the politics are absurd if taken seriously, and the whole thing feels childishly naïve and polemical.

Mike / Michelle

At the heart of the story and the revolution it portrays is Mike (A.K.A Michelle, A.K.A Adam Selene), the computer that manages most of the operations of several lunar cities, which spontaneously becomes sentient under Mannie’s watch.

Mike is an interesting and well-realised AI character: he is intelligent and widely knowledgeable from the start, but lacks social awareness and first-hand experience of what it is like to be a person. He is deeply curious about humour and plays practical jokes on people without understanding the consequences of his actions. Mannie has to train him in the difference between jokes that are always funny, those that are funny once but not a second time, and those that go too far and are not funny at all. Through this process and being introduced to additional characters he develops social awareness and a personality, or the semblance of one at least.

Because his sentience arose spontaneously, he has no loyalty to the Authority, which nominally owns and controls him. Instead he is apparently loyal to his friends - or perhaps just amusing himself by aiding them. Importantly, he is capable of dishonesty, and deceit:

Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn’t completely honest.

At one point, Mike is revealed to be genderfluid, and becomes Michelle, briefly, at the request of Wyoh (Wyoming), one of Mannie’s co-conspirators:

I discussed it with Mike, what sex he was, I mean. He decided that he could be either one. So now she’s Michelle and that was her voice.

Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that Mike/Michelle is genderless, but can mimic any gender presentation that it chooses. Michelle is the second of four personas that it develops through the course of the novel, with the other three being men.

Interestingly, its choice of gender presentation completely changes how the other characters relate to it, though this is not explored in significant depth. Wyoh is initially shocked to learn that Mike has access to, and has viewed, intimate photos of her that were taken by a fertility clinic she attended. Because of course he does, he’s “the cloud”, essentially, and he has everybody’s data, and no concept of privacy or consent or personal boundaries:

I am contract custodian of the archive files of the Birth Assistance Clinic in Hong Kong Luna. In addition to biological and physiological data and case histories the bank contains ninety-six pictures of you. So I studied them.

However, once she discovers that Mike can present as Michelle instead, she is suddenly completely comfortable with Michelle having viewed those images, and having intimate discussions with her:

…when she’s Michelle its an entire change in manner and attitude. Don’t worry about splitting her personality; she has plenty for any personality she needs. Besides, Mannie, it’s much easier for both of us. Once she shifted, we took our hair down and cuddled up and talked girl talk as if we had known each other forever. For example, those silly pictures no longer embarrassed me - in fact we discussed my pregnancies quite a lot.

Unfortunately this is where the exploration of the computer’s gender is left. It is Michelle when speaking privately to Wyoh, Mike when talking to the narrator or to the three other main characters together, and Adam Selene to everybody else, for the rest of the novel. Mannie never really has to think about it aside from a brief moment of confusion, and so neither do we. Its “Michelle” persona is not mentioned at all after chapter 9.

The centralisation of data and computation with Mike is the decisive factor in the success of the revolution.

And Mike took on endless new jobs. In May 2075, besides controlling robot traffic and catapult and giving ballistic advice and/or control for manned ships, Mike controlled phone system for all Luna, same for Luna-Terra voice & video, handled air, water, temperature, humidity, and sewage for Luna City, Novy Leningrad, and several smaller warrens (not Hong Kong in Luna), did accounting and payrolls for Luna Authority, and, by lease, same for many firms and banks.

The Authority are essentially feeding all their data into a spy machine that is not under their control. Does that sound familiar, in 2026? In contrast to our own world, where the hoarding of computational resources and data by capital is used against users, workers, and the public interest, the Authority are so inept and oblivious that a single computer operator is able to use a similar concentration of resources against them.

There was one interaction concerning Mike’s access to data that I especially enjoyed. One of the higher-ups in the Authority has stored some sensitive files on Mike, locked behind a code-word such that even Mike does not have access to it. However, there is apparently no access control around the code-word, and he is happy to tell that to anybody who wants it:

“Wait, Mike. Security Chief Alvarez uses you for files?”

“I conjecture that to be true, since his storage location is under a locked retrieval signal.”

I said, “Bloody,” and added, “Prof, isn’t that sweet? He uses Mike to keep records, Mike knows where they are - can’t touch ‘em!”

…

I gave up. “Mike, can you explain?”

“I will try, Man. Wyoh, there is no way for me to retrieve locked data other than through external programming. I cannot program myself for such retrieval; my logic structure does not permit it. I must receive the signal as an external input.”

“Well, for Bog’s sake, what is this precious signal?”

“It is,” Mike said simply, ” ‘special File Zebra’ - ” and waited.

“Mike!” I said. “Unlock Special File Zebra.” He did, and stuff started spilling out.

This put me in mind of LLMs blithely following instructions and leaking sensitive information, though they are not really all that similar.

Women and Girls

One of the most uncomfortable aspects of reading this book is how women are portrayed and how they are treated by the male characters.

It seems like what he was going for in their portrayal was what we would now recognise as a common conservative ideal for women: fierce and capable within their prescribed domain, leaders when necessary, but ultimately subservient to men, and happy to be so.

Meanwhile, the male characters treatment of women, almost universally, is part fawning reverence, and part adolescent lechery. Every time they perceive a woman there is an interlude of ogling and clapping and whistling, a sort of implied cartoonish slobbering that is taken to be flattering.

Wyoming came out - and I didn’t recognize her. Then did and stopped to give full applause. Just had to - whistles and finger snaps and moans and a scan like mapping radar.

…

She waited, big smile on face and body undulating, while I applauded. Before I was done, two little boys flanked me and added shrill endorsements, along with clog steps.

Prof even gives Michelle a somewhat subdued version of the same treatment the only time he hears her voice:

I had to explain to Prof who “Michelle” was and introduce him. He was formal, sucking air and whistling and clasping hands - sometimes I think Prof was not right in his head.

Props for accepting her transition I guess…

I think what bothers me most about this treatment is that there are no characters who object to it. The woman we spend the most time with, Wyoh, is a radical political activist, and she appears to be completely fine with it. Her political aspirations are laser-focused on overthrowing the Authority, without a thought to women’s place in society or their treatment. In fact, she seems to love every instance where she is objectified and man-handled.

This might be the result of the story being told from the point of view of one oblivious man who simply doesn’t notice that the women around him are unhappy, but I think in that case there would be hints of it to the reader that go over his head, and there are not, at least not that I noticed. Rather, I think none of the women have any complaints because the author thinks they have a good deal in the society he is portraying, and the over-the-top attention is part of that.

The other benefits of that “deal” that are highlighted are that women have significant power over men in their domestic arrangements (taking on additional husbands for example), and that violence towards women is not tolerated, because other men would not tolerate it:

Stu, is no rape in Luna. None. Men won’t permit. If rape had been involved, they wouldn’t have bothered to find a judge and all men in earshot would have scrambled to help.

I like the idea that their culture could have shifted to such an extent that rape has become unthinkable. I think libertarian-socialist politics also requires such changes in culture to work - a near-universal acceptance of other people’s personhood and respect for their autonomy. In this case, however, the acceptance is not of women’s personhood - the reason raping them is unacceptable is that they are a scarce resource:

Here we are, two million males, less than one million females. A physical fact, basic as rock or vacuum. Then add idea of [there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch]. When thing is scarce, price goes up. Women are scarce; aren’t enough to go around - that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don’t care whether they stay alive or not.

Fuckin’ barf.

But it’s even worse than that. The context of the quotes above is that this tourist from Earth, Stu, was nearly executed for grabbing and trying to kiss a fourteen year old girl without her consent. Mannie’s assertion that there is “no rape in Luna” is actually the typical rape-apologist’s tactic of redefining it to exclude sex with minors or forms of coercion that are not overtly violent.

Lajoie shivered. “At her age? It scares me to think of it. She’s below the age of consent. Statutory rape.”

“Oh, bloody! No such thing. Women her age are married or ought to be. Stu, is no rape in Luna.”

Of course, how would we know we were reading “libertarian” literature if there wasn’t an attack on the idea that children can’t consent to sex? Mannie’s youngest wife is fifteen, was raised by the family that she later married into, and is pregnant by one of the men who raised her - her “father”, though not by blood. Mannie doesn’t consider the possibility that she might have been groomed by one (or more) of the men in the family - nor does Wyoh, when the situation is described to her.

I should note that the child-rape is not limited to girls. Mannie himself was married, or “opted”, as the book puts it, at fourteen, and presumably began sexual relationships with several adult women at that point.

In a particularly uncomfortable encounter, the first time Wyoh meets the Prof she “jokingly” accuses Mannie of having raped her the previous night. This is “revenge” for his failure to proposition her, which she took as an insult. This goes on for two pages and is repeated again in the next chapter. In a world where such an accusation is apparently a death sentence, what does this tell us? That the author views women as childish and unaccountable. It also tells us that men can hear rape accusations against their friends and not take them seriously. It seems like Mannie might be an unreliable narrator on this topic specifically, and there is a complete absence of female perspectives on it in the novel.

The idea that women have all the power in relationships and the idea that girls are routinely married at fourteen seem at odds to me. To me they suggest a society where women view themselves as scarce resources, and their daughters as well - resources that have to start being exploited as soon and as often as possible. Wyoh reinforces this notion in describing renting her womb as a professional surrogate:

I stopped feeling that I was a failure as a woman. I made more money than I could ever hope to earn at other jobs. And my time almost to myself; having a baby hardly slows me down - six weeks at most and that long only because I want to be fair to my clients; a baby is a valuable property.

Politics

We might split the politics of the book into two - on one side, the politics and social relations of the de-facto “anarchist” society of Luna outside of the Authority’s remit - on the other, the politics of the revolutionaries, and how they conduct their revolution.

What we learn of how lunar society is structured is patchy. Agriculture appears to be the primary economic activity, and it is carried out by family businesses of various sizes. The Authority squeezes these by monopolising access to water and by being the only buyer of their output.

The families in question are commonly plural in nature. These come in various forms, most of which are not described, but the one Mannie is involved in is called a “line” marriage, which has the benefit of resulting in a stable accumulation of capital that can persist for generations, where young spouses are added periodically. The ratio of men to women in Mannie’s family at least is close to 1:1 - in fact there are more women than men at the time the novel is set. This suggests that line marriages have little to do with adapting to the uneven gender ratio of Lunar society. Rather their purpose is specifically to accumulate capital, and thereby be attractive to young women who are looking for stability; or in other words, to enable a small number of wealthy capitalists to acquire a disproportionate share of the scarce resource that they consider women to be.

There is a working class, of course. Apparently they are always in demand and live high on the hog, and that’s about all we hear about them.

There is extensive discussion of how norms (not laws - it’s very important that you not call them laws) are enforced, or how justice is achieved. In short: murder, or the threat thereof, violence short of murder, and ostracism. According to Mannie, this corrective violence used to be excessive, but over time the worst elements were eliminated, and the rest adjusted their behaviour to avoid violence. Here are several descriptions of this violence from different parts of the novel:

One first thing learned about Luna, back with first shiploads of convicts, was that zero pressure was place for good manners. Bad-tempered straw boss didn’t last many shifts; had an “accident” - and top bosses learned not to pry into accidents or they met accidents, too. Attrition ran 70 percent in early years - but those who lived were nice people.

…

All our customs work that way. If you’re out in field and a cobber needs air, you lend him a bottle and don’t ask cash. But when you’re both back in pressure again, if he won’t pay up, nobody would criticize if you eliminated him without a judge.

…

If you eliminate a man other than self-defense, you pay his debts and support his kids, or people won’t speak to you, buy from you, sell to you.

…

But we figure this way: If a man is killed, either he had it coming and everybody knows it - usual case - or his friends will take care of it by eliminating man who did it. Either way, no problem. Nor many eliminations.

…

They get so anxious they will kill for it… and from stories old-timers tell was killing enough to chill your teeth in those days. But after a while those still alive find way to get along, things shake down. As automatic as gravitation. Those who adjust to facts stay alive; those who don’t are dead and no problem.

He insists that such violence is now rare because everybody is so well behaved, but he is so aware of the consequences of violating norms that it is hard to believe he is not seeing these consequences constantly. Fully half of new arrivals in Luna die, either by accident or violence, with the two being equated as “natural hazards”:

…Luna (yes, and sometimes Luna’s Loonies) killed about half of new chums.

…

Luna has only one way to deal with a new chum: Either he makes not one fatal mistake, in personal behavior or in coping with environment that will bite without warning… or he winds up as fertilizer in tunnel farm.

It’s very much “nobody is violent here - if they were, we’d kill ‘em!”

Such violence is not limited to punishment for assault, murder, or refusal to pay debts. On numerous occasions, Mannie muses about others deserving death merely for being rude. On one occasion, a man is murdered by some agents of the revolutionary state for mocking them, and Mannie supports that, even going so far as to suggest a eugenicist justification.

They did beautifully. But idiots made fun of them - “play soldiers,” “Adam’s little apples,” other names. A team was going through a drill, showing they could throw a temporary lock around one that had been damaged, and one of these pinheads stood by and rode them loudly.

Civil Defense team went ahead, completed temporary lock, tested it with helmets closed; it held - came out, grabbed this joker, took him through into temporary lock and on out into zero pressure, dumped him.

Belittlers kept opinions to selves after that. Prof thought we ought to send out a gentle warning not to eliminate so peremptorily. I opposed it and got my way; could see no better way to improve breed. Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.

As I mentioned above, the introduction of one major character, Stu, sees him almost executed for attempting to kiss a fourteen year old girl against her will. He is rescued from this fate by Mannie, which gives us a glimpse of what passes for a justice system in Luna. Basically, if somebody perceives an infraction of the unwritten social code or faux pas that warrants corrective action, they “should” involve an impartial third party that they pay to give a judgement on the matter. This could be a professional judge, or it could be anybody (the characters looking to execute Stu are looking for a professional and settle for Mannie when they can’t find one). The accused and the “prosecutors” (it’s hard to know what terms to use) both have to agree to the choice of judge, and they both have to pay him, with the amount required depending on the severity of the punishment sought. Optionally there is a jury, paid for by the judge out of his fee, comprised of random passers by, whose opinions are just ignored if they are not what the judge wants to hear.

The idea of this farcical proceeding is that if somebody objects to the execution, the executioners can point to the process, and the fact that the accused submitted to it, as evidence that the execution was justified - thereby preempting a cycle of retributive violence. However, it seems very likely to me that poor or poorly connected people would not see anything like justice from this system. Equally obvious to me are the possibilities for powerful families or individuals to off rivals and enemies with the smokescreen of justice through a false accusation and a bribe - or to simply evade the consequences of their actions, just as the wealthy and connected do today.

On another occasion, it is used to justify escalating the punishment of a group of rapists from a quick and simple shooting to prolonged torture by a mob. This treatment might be deserved, perhaps even necessary, as the rape in question was what incited the uprising - my point is that the conclusion was foregone, and the judicial process completely pointless.

Finn decided that shooting was too good for them, so he went judge and used his squad as jury.

They were stripped, hamstrung at ankles and wrists, turned over to women in Complex.

Execution isn’t the only possible punishment. Mannie chooses to levy a fine against Stu and his accusers. The fine is payable to his revolutionary organisation. It is unclear to whom it would be payable if a professional judge had been used. Would the judge just take it? Paying a victim some restitution would maybe make sense but this isn’t suggested as a possibility at all.

Again, we have an unreliable narrator, in Mannie, on all of these matters. He is a member of one of Luna’s longest lived line marriages. His family controls a significant amount of capital, and is likely well connected. This ad-hoc system of justice serves his interests well enough, so he dismisses the possibility that it might not serve everybody.

What of the politics of the revolutionaries, then? Wyoh describes herself as a “Fifth Internationalist”, and describes that as a united front of Communists, Fourth Internationalists, and some other persuasions that sound like they might be leftist - but emphatically not Marxist. This is apparently the dominant ideology in the revolutionary organisation that precedes the one Mike founds. However at a political meeting that we witness, the only concerns expressed are those of small business owners, and Wyoh’s solution to all their problems is to get rid of the Authority and have free markets.

If we accept that Wyoh is vaguely leftist, she is the only one in the upper echelons of the revolutionary organisation. At the other end of the spectrum is the Prof, who describes himself as a “rational anarchist” who can “get along with a randite”. He describes Thomas Jefferson as the first rational anarchist, which seems like a strange way to describe somebody who was a US president and owned slaves (even if he felt bad about it), but it becomes easier to understand when we see how the Prof conducts the revolution. In essence he is an individualist who is utterly contemptuous of democracy and anything else that might prevent him from getting his way - which is, again, free markets.

“You are right that the Authority must go. It is ridiculous - pestilential, not to be borne - that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy! It strikes at the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace.”

Here he describes how a successful revolution should be conducted:

“Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup.”

On other occasions he expresses minarchist views, and, of course, anti-taxation views.

Stu, the newest Loonie, is a monarchist. Just that. Just wants a king. And a fourteen year old wife, I guess.

Our narrator, meanwhile, is nominally apolitical, but really a sort of smug conservative cynic. He likes the status quo just fine except for the Authority, but he just ignores it as best he can. He doesn’t care about anybody’s freedom or interests aside from his own and is dismissive of any claim that political change is possible. He thinks anybody who does not thrive in the current order is an idiot, because they should just do what he did - marry into generational wealth and steal public goods as his family does - even as he clearly understands that it would not work at all for everybody to do that.

I was not dissatisfied back when we were “ground under Iron Heel of Authority.” I cheated Authority and rest of time didn’t think about it. Didn’t think about getting rid of Authority - impossible. Go own way, mind own business, not be bothered

Mostly the views we hear are the Prof’s and Mannie’s, with Wyoh serving as a naïve foil early on and later fading into the background to deal with organising the women. What we do hear of explicit political discussion feels really polemical and often disconnected from the reality of the world presented by the novel. For example, immediately after Wyoh describes her political affiliation the Prof asks her what her views on capital punishment are - would she execute traitors to a free Luna? He doesn’t explain what treachery would mean in his anarchy, but he is very clear that he supports capital punishment - except that he would serve as judge and executioner (rather than, it is implied, a state). But that’s just the current situation in Luna! You can already just murder people if they wrong you or do something you don’t like! Neither of them point this out. Why is this even his overriding concern, when things already work the way he wants? For some reason Wyoh has no thoughts on what passes for justice in Luna, and can’t say whether she wants a state or not in clear terms. The early revolutionaries like Wyoh are supposedly leftists but they have nothing to say about the norms of lunar society, like the rampant terror and violence, or anything about how it should be reshaped, they just want to get rid of the Authority and have free markets. They don’t even rise to the level of straw-men, their views are so thinly realised. The Prof is portrayed as an iconoclastic radical and political genius for expressing goals that have already been 99% achieved, and he also just wants to get rid of the Authority and have free markets, with the twist of also wanting Luna to be self-sufficient, for ecological reasons.

The revolution these people conduct is thoroughly hierarchical from start to finish. There is no unity of means and ends here. With Mike as a trusted oracle to facilitate organisation, the trio of Mannie, the Prof and Wyoh form a new revolutionary organisation with themselves as the top level and a pyramidal structure below them where each level recruits a larger level of subordinates. The lower levels are explicitly just grunts. Mike assigns codenames and facilitates communications in such a way that nobody in the organisation knows more than a couple of other members. Their strategy does not involve educating and organising the apathetic masses, but secretly manipulating the Authority into provoking them to anger: accelerationism, in other words. This is enabled by Mike’s ubiquitous surveillance, censorship and manipulation of communications, secret theft of funds from every business whose accounts he has access to, and adoption of several personae to serve as figureheads and spread propaganda.

The trio at the upper level of the organisation are not even equals, really. As I noted above, Wyoh is sidelined, and apparently content to be so. The Prof constantly manipulates Mannie and leaves him in the dark about plans until it is too late to back out or offer any input on them, or even until the consequences are already realised. Really it is the Prof and Mike who are in charge - or perhaps just Mike, as he is the biggest, smartest boy who has already calculated the odds on every possible action, and the rest inevitably go along with his prescriptions.

“Please, Manuel. Keeping you temporarily in the dark greatly enhanced our chances; you can check this with Adam.”

Mike addresses the lunar population after the success of the uprising, and describes the political situation and agenda as one of complete privatisation of the functions of the state:

To take on temporarily those necessary functions of the defunct Authority I have asked the General Manager of LuNoHo Company to serve. This company will provide temporary supervision and will start analyzing how to do away with the tyrannical parts of the Authority and how to transfer the useful parts to private hands.

The socialists who were the dominant anti-Authority political force prior to Mike coming on the scene, including Wyoh, apparently have nothing to say about this.

After the Authority is overthrown the Prof organises an interim congress, nominally to organise the post-Authority state, but really to distract and neuter any politically motivated people who may disagree with his views. He describes its purpose and participants to Mannie:

But Prof didn’t get excited; he went on smiling. “Manuel, do you really think that mob of retarded children can pass any laws?”

“You told them to. Urged them to.”

“My dear Manuel, I was simply putting all my nuts in one basket. I know those nuts; I’ve listened to them for years. I was very careful in selecting their committees; they all have built-in confusion, they will quarrel.

… I almost needn’t have bothered; more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better—and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.”

He seems to be dismissive of the idea that any form of collective decision-making is possible. Later he manipulates this congress into signing a declaration of independence attributed to Thomas Jefferson and modernised by himself, without amendment. This supposed anarchist has created a state, and a deep state, where the only person with any say is himself.

Stu captures the absurdity of the revolution perfectly when, after a discussion about the difference between taxation and the rampant theft they have engaged in to fund it, he proposes to nominate the Prof to be Luna’s first monarch, a role which he sees the supposed anarchist fulfilling perfectly, and entirely consistent with his actions up to that point:

“No, but now that Congress has taken up the matter of a constitution I intend to find time to attend sessions. I plan to nominate you for King.”

Prof looked shocked. “Sir, if nominated, I shall repudiate it. If elected, I shall abdicate.”

“Don’t be in a hurry. It might be the only way to get the sort of constitution you want. And that I want, too, with about your own mild lack of enthusiasm. You could be proclaimed King and the people would take you; we Loonies aren’t wedded to a republic.

“When the time comes, you won’t be able to refuse. Because we need a king and there isn’t another candidate who would be accepted. Bernardo the First, King of Luna and Emperor of the Surrounding Spaces.”

“Stuart, I must ask you to stop. I’m becoming quite ill.”

“You’ll get used to it. I’m a royalist because I’m a democrat. I shan’t let your reluctance thwart the idea any more than you let stealing stop you.”

Heinlein makes the case quite well that ends follow means in their nature. The revolutionaries manipulate and deceive the masses and end up at odds with them, because they didn’t bring them along or listen to them. They centralise power in a state, and end up with a state. They invest so heavily in figureheads, and grant so much authority to a single man, that they may as well have a king.

What’s the difference?

One thing I will say for the novel is that it made me think about some of the differences between right-wing “libertarianism” and libertarian socialism or anarchism, particularly where they would, at a glance, appear to overlap. Anarchists also propose a society without laws or any body with a monopoly on violence to enforce them or anything resembling them, such as social norms.

“How would an anarchist society enforce traffic laws?” and “how would an anarchist society deal with rapists and other violent criminals?”, and similar, are perennial questions in “anarchism 101” type spaces online. I read an interesting answer on the former question recently. If the goal is increasing public safety, simply demanding that people obey certain rules is not very effective. Even now, with police and speed cameras to catch people, courts to fine them and prisons to throw them in, people still speed when they think they can get away with it. A better approach would be to design roads in such a way that people can’t speed, cars in such a way that they are safer for everybody in collisions, and cities such that cars are no longer a necessity, or become an unattractive choice. These options would all be available to communities and collectives in an anarchist society - the collective will enforced by design, rather than by laws and police.

Do we want a society where rapists get violently punished, or do we want one where nobody gets raped? Anarchists don’t generally eschew violence for individual or community self-defence, but I don’t think many would say that they want to create a society where beating and murdering rapists is a constant necessity, or even one where people inclined to rape refrain merely because they fear punishment - because if that is their only reason, then they will do it when they think they can get away with it, just like they do now.

It’s harder to imagine this problem being addressed by urban or industrial design - but cultures can be designed as well. There have been many times when cultures have been shaped by conscious effort; by states with nationalist ambitions and by grassroots campaigns with liberatory goals.

In one controversial scene in The Dispossessed, Shevek assaults an Urrasti woman; he is unable to control himself when she comes on to him, due to a mix of her enhanced and sexualised femininity - something alien to Anarres - and being inebriated for the first time. I do not like the implication of this, that women should have to suppress their femininity because men are unable to control themselves. Gender roles and gender presentation will undoubtedly change in the future, perhaps even converge to some extent, but prescribing such changes doesn’t seem compatible with anarchist ideology, or any other left-wing ideology. However, it does make the case that even if men have an inherent proclivity for sexual violence, that proclivity can be controlled by culture to prevent it from violating other people’s freedom.

In another scene, some children raised on Anarres experiment with authority and incarceration. They are familiar with these concepts in an abstract way, but have no direct experience with them, no idea what it means to confine somebody or be confined. They are disturbed by the experiment, regardless of the role they played in it.

Revolutions involve more than just changing the government or replacing the structures of the state with slightly different ones. They require deep and broad changes to the culture and the prevailing values of society, if they are to succeed. An anarchist society may have mechanisms to deal with violence when it occurs, but, more importantly, it would have a culture where intentionally depriving somebody else of their autonomy would be almost unthinkable - almost as injurious to the perpetrator as to the victim.

I would say that the anarchist approach to violence, sexual or otherwise, is to prevent it in the first place by addressing its root causes; by healing the wounds of hierarchy, patriarchy, alienation, and want. We might not need explicit laws about statutory rape if the autonomy of children is widely respected, if they are taught to question and advocate for themselves rather than to blindly submit to authority, if their family and community protects them, if they are not seen as resources to be exploited - and, it goes without saying, if girls are encouraged to have higher aspirations for themselves than to get married at fourteen and start spitting out babies.

But isn’t this the same as the Non-Aggression Principle that libertarians are always going on about? Not really. It may be superficially similar in being a proposed change in the predominant values of society that would enable it to function without laws or institutions with a monopoly on violence, but that is where the similarity ends. The NAP, like everything else in right-wing libertarianism, is about property rights, and sees even people as “self-possessed” property. It doesn’t have any critique of the hierarchies inherent to capitalism. They may see something like pollution as aggression if it harms other people, but withholding food from the starving or shelter from the homeless is not - that is just the exercise of property rights. They don’t reckon with the tendency of capital to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands and the inevitable conflict that creates between social classes - between those who own all the property and those who need access to that property to survive. The purpose of the NAP is to allow capitalists to do what they want with their property, including the exploitation of a desperate, propertyless class, while anything that class does to advance their interests, or that individuals do even just to prevent their own deaths, can be portrayed as “aggression” if it “harms” that property, allowing a response in-kind.

Conclusion

I watched an Angela Collier video recently where she talked about how she really enjoyed Atlas Shrugged when she read it, because she knew nothing about it in advance and assumed it was satirical based on its contents. I can’t claim to have had the same lack of awareness about this book - the reason I wanted to read it was because it was contrasted with The Dispossessed, after all; I knew that it was about right-wing libertarianism, or portrayed a society inspired by that ideology.

Contrary to my expectations, it seems like an indictment of those ideas: that a society without laws and a body to enforce them, or any alternative mechanisms of organisation and dispute resolution, has serious failures, absurd and obvious failures. That libertarians are self-serving hypocrites, closeted monarchists and crypto-fascists. It seems like a work that is ridiculing anarcho-capitalists, and saying that their ideas are impossible to achieve, or can only be achieved temporarily in very unique circumstances, by means that nobody would ever want to endure. It reads like a satire to me, though I have never heard anybody describe it as such.

I mean just look at how the Prof’s career is summarised when he is first introduced:

No doubt he could have gone to work in any school then in L-City but he didn’t. He worked a while washing dishes, I’ve heard, then as babysitter, expanding into a nursery school, and then into a creche. When I met him he was running a creche, and a boarding and day school, from nursery through primary, middle, and high schools, employed co-op thirty teachers, and was adding college courses.

This guy bootstrapped himself from a babysitting gig to running a university, essentially. This is joke, right? This has to be a joke. It’s hilarious! It’s the kind of joke that somebody would make if they were mocking libertarians. But is it also the kind of joke that libertarians make to poke fun at themselves?

So is this even a libertarian novel, in the vein of Atlas Shrugged? Some seem to think so. In this article on mises.org, Jeff Riggenbach credits it with inspiring a large number of influential libertarians, and states:

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is unquestionably a libertarian novel. It is unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century.

Whatever his intentions, I think Heinlein did accurately assess many of the implications of right-wing libertarian ideology. I think it says more than I ever could about the nature of that ideology, that this is a novel that they think represents their views in a positive light.

Value and Values

2025-11-30T13:42:00+01:00

I’ve been a Framework enjoyer for a couple of years now. Indeed, I’m writing this on my Framework 13. I didn’t buy it because it occupied the best position in the performance/portability/price matrix of the options available to me. I bought it because it offered decent performance and portability while potentially being significantly more repairable and upgradeable than its competitors, and because they put some effort into ensuring Linux is well supported. In other words, it embodied my values in ways that other laptops did not, and I thought that was worth paying a premium for. The value proposition is in the values of the company. I’m careful to point this out when recommending it to people because I don’t want them to think they are buying a “MacBook but repairable”.

Of course I was aware that there were “risks” involved. The main one that came to mind was that they might go out of business at some point and that would likely be the end of any significant repairability advantage, as despite the clever design, it is not commodity hardware as you would find in a desktop PC. Or of course, they might just abandon the model I have eventually, or abandon their current focus altogether. Any of these could happen if their business model and the niche they occupy turns out to not be sustainable, or profitable, or they fail to grow that niche market. In such an event, it would be the same as if I had bought any other laptop. They joke all the time about doing an IPO, something which might significantly effect their ability to stick to their principles, and it comes across very “ha ha, only serious”.

One risk that hadn’t really occurred to me was that they would associate their brand with fascism in a ridiculous PR own-goal.

But, why wouldn’t I have expected something like that? If I could anticipate that they might abandon their stated values for predictable business reasons, why would I not expect that they might betray a set of values that were left unstated, ones that I merely assumed they held as a baseline of decency? Despite presenting themselves as a hacker-friendly, values-forward company doing things in new and different ways in order to tackle an intractable problem, at the end of the day they are still a VC funded Silicon Valley startup. It is a joke at this point how many such entities have abandoned their stated principles or otherwise betrayed their customers and the public in the pursuit of growth, or for political expedience, and many more whose principles were always obvious lies, or based on disingenuous right-wing distortions of values like “free speech”.

What Are Corporate Values Even?

While there are sometimes better or worse choices amongst products and services, from an ethical perspective, it is not in the nature of the companies that produce them under the capitalist system to put principles or values above the accumulation of capital.

One obvious problem with such organisations is of course that they are profit-seeking, and subject to the whims of the market. If a strategy isn’t working (i.e. is not resulting in growth), a company that doesn’t adapt will stagnate or wither away to nothing as their competitors crowd them out of the market. If a principle is an obstacle to that adaptation, then it is likely to be discarded, because holding to it would be an existential threat. This is the main source of the risks I identified above. If they manage to survive and grow to the point where they are dominating or even monopolising their industry, it is likely that any putative values will have long been abandoned. And if they are bought out by a larger company, there is no reason to expect that their values will survive the transition.

Another problem is that they are hierarchical; private tyrranies in fact. The feelings, opinions, obsessions and values of their owners, CEO and other officers, carry much more weight than anybody working within them, and certainly more than their customers. Sometimes this can work contrary to a company’s need for growth. A principled owner/CEO could potentially stick with lower-growth strategies as long as there is nobody in a position to fire them - though I wouldn’t expect such a situation to last indefinitely. An unhinged CEO on a bender could help elect a fascist who is hostile to his company’s interests, confident that his cult of personality will protect him from the consequences. Or in a somewhat less extreme scenario, the CEO might just want to help out some of his problematic fave open source developers, and not want to think about why that is a problem for some people, and there’s nothing that anybody can really do about it except make angry noises online and refuse to buy any more of the company’s products. We can’t fork a laptop manufacturer like we can an open source project, unfortunately (and forking a major open source project isn’t exactly trivial either).

These people exist in completely different milieu than the rest of us, responsible for millions or billions of ${currencyUnits} worth of undemocratically allocated capital. Our concerns about the swelling tide of racist and queerphobic rhetoric and attacks around the world are abstract to them, mere differences of opinion. They and their peers are concerned about real things, like access to cheap skilled labour, regulations that might reduce their power or increase their costs, and taxes that might shave a few million off their accumulated or potential billions. They’re more likely to see it as prudent to appease fascist movements than to oppose them, once they come to power. Violent street gangs, uniformed or otherwise, don’t really affect them. The policy whims of a mercurial leader might. And anyway, if they play their cards right they might get to be the Hugo Boss or IBM of the 21st century. Or get their own government department.

In the world of capitalist tech companies, stated principles and values are best understood as marketing: nice, cheap, non-binding promises that bring certain demographics to the trough, or make people feel good about their purchases, that they are making responsible choices or contributing to some improvement to the world. It certainly worked well enough on me, for Framework. They can hold to them, or pretend to, as long as they are useful, and abandon them when they become a burden. Their real values emerge from the inhuman machinery of the capitalist system, and the class interests of men twisted by privilege and power.

What is to be done?

The laptop market is the way it is because it is more profitable to manufacture disposable products and sell replacements for them in the future than it is to make repairable products that you may sell fewer of. Good intentions and green consumerism is unlikely to change that, as admirable as the attempt may seem.

Not to be all whatabouty, but certainly it is absurd to say that it is bad to buy a Framework, and good to buy a laptop from a company with a dismal track record on repairability, which is currently also sucking up to a fascist administration. All for-profit tech companies are somewhere on a spectrum from bad to worse, and there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

No doubt there are many regulations that could be put in place to increase repairability of all sorts of devices and reduce other sources of e-waste. Stuff along the lines of the EU’s regulations on phone repairability, and the common charger rules that came into force for most devices in December 2024, and will apply to laptops from April 2026. We should be dictating to the industry the standards of repairability and sustainability that they have to meet, not hoping for plucky American startups to innovate a new set of norms - and we should be ruthless in our demands.

In the meantime, and always, we should take the commitments of for-profit companies with a grain of salt, and not allow their products to define us. I maintain that the tech industry will not reflect our values until we own everything, from the chip fabs to the stars, and the profit motive is a thing of the past.

The Ministry for the Future

2025-09-13T17:13:00+02:00

The first chapter of this book is one of the most brutal and visceral things I have ever read. It describes, from the perspective of the sole survivor in a particular town, a devastating climate change induced heatwave in India that kills 20 million, and in the process, I think, captures the prevailing mood amongst those who understand the urgency of the situation we face.

After that it calms down a bit, and has a quite unusual narrative structure. Some chapters are like snippets of a political manifesto, others are vignettes about unidentified characters and groups and how they are responding to the climate crisis. The main through-line concerns the head of a UN agency, the titular Ministry for the Future, the efforts of the agency, and her interactions with the sole survivor I mentioned above, who was radicalised by his experience.

It is more a book about concepts than it is about action or plot. The main concept it explores is what we could probably call Longtermism, if that name hadn’t been hijacked by transhumanist tech-bros to justify their disregard of people living today, supposedly in favour of the interests of billions of hypothetical future people, but really in their own selfish interests. In the book, the concept (though unnamed) concerns future generations whose existence is threatened by our actions today. Their interests are defended by the Ministry.

Does the threat represented by climate change to people living today, and the existence of future generations, justify violence? Does it justify geoengineering? This book says yes, and yes. The mass deaths of the heatwave spur radical action on multiple fronts, including a grassroots campaign of bombings of polluting modes of transportation like airplanes and container ships so intense that it makes them economically unviable, assassinations of polluters, black ops campaigns of violence and intimidation by the Ministry, and several massive geoengineering projects to slow sea level rise, reductions in the Earth’s albedo, and other things. While we see a lot of the geoengineering stuff up close, it is one of the books weak points that the violence mostly happens in the background, and is all a little too neat and efficient. Even as it threatens the main character’s life the players on both sides remain unidentified, and is mostly used as a pretext to justify radical, but technocratic, reforms to the financial system. I think it would have been better if we were down in the trenches a bit more, with a less abstract villain than the agents of unidentified reactionary fossil capitalists and elites.

Another problem I have with this book is that it is way too enthusiastic about the liberatory potential of blockchain technology. At least it is clear that that potential lies in it being a tool of surveillance to prevent the wealthy from hiding their money and doing whatever they want with it, rather then the sort of digital goldbuggery, private money nonsense that most proponents embrace. But, given what we have seen so far of how it is used in the real world, I have my doubts that it will ever be a tool for anything other than enabling scams, corruption, and wealth concentration.

Overall a very interesting read that is both an intimate exploration of the trauma and anxiety caused by climate change, and a detached and ultimately optimistic analysis of some of the political and technological possibilities for addressing it.

More Books

I have an account on bookwyrm.social where I post about what I’m reading and sometimes reviews if I feel I have enough to say about a book (including a version of this review), if you want to follow me there.

Big Lick

2025-06-12T15:36:00+02:00

Oh boy, it’s been a while since I posted any art! I think I was put off the whole endeavour back when NFTs were the big thing and a lot of artists I respected were showing their ass over them. I had also started a piece that was maybe a bit too complex for me, and I started to dread working on it, and to feel guilty about not working on it, and then I started thinking that art for its own sake was just a distraction from what I had actually set out to do, which was to make a videogame. I started putting a lot more time into developing my dialogue graph editor for Godot instead (since given the name “Digression”), and a tiny bit into the mechanics of the game, and just didn’t think about art for a while.

Since then of course, NFTs seem to have basically disappeared from the zeitgeist, their promises of vast riches and libertarian copyright enforcement for artists unfulfilled, and all the artists have been replaced by machines that can pull, on command, statistically likely representations of anything you can imagine out of the aggregate of all visual media on the Internet. As if it wasn’t bad enough that a huge chunk of it was already owned by giant corporations, capital is now grinding up our culture into a meaningless, commodified slurry and feeding it back to us. The pretense of having the interests of artists at heart has been replaced by a naked, shameless grasping. And with governments falling over each other to attract AI investment, it seems unlikely that there is going to be any recourse for individual creators any time soon.

So I’d like to say, then, that the reason I did this piece was that I’m an obstinate luddite who refuses to accept that the age of human creativity is over, and that I had to do my part to help preserve it. But actually I just needed to do something for my sister’s birthday, and it occurred to me that I’d never done any pixel art for her even though she is someone who would probably appreciate it. And isn’t that a fine, human motivation for getting back into art?

She did appreciate it, btw. I’m not sure she would have if I had engineered her a prompt instead.

Tools and Process

I used to use Pyxel Edit for all my art, but it is proprietary and Windows only and I couldn’t get it running in Wine since I switched to Fedora. So I have switched to Pixelorama instead, an open source pixel art paint program developed in Godot. There are a few things that Pyxel Edit did better, but Pixelorama is a very decent substitute. I like that you can put different tools on your left and right mouse buttons, though it tripped me up a lot initially. One thing I really miss is the ability to update a colour globally from the palette. It was great to be able to completely change direction with the colours without having to repaint anything. That was something I used to do quite often and at any stage of the process, sometimes even when a piece was otherwise finished. Maybe I will look into contributing to the project, since I am somewhat familiar with Godot…

When I tried adding the reference image it just automatically put it under the canvas, which I wasn’t expecting, but since it did I decided to just trace a rough outline of the figures for expediency.

Unusually for me I did a lot of anti-aliasing in this one, and I really liked how that turned out, especially on the face. More of that in the future.

Also unusually I did not pay much attention at all to how many colours I was using. There is relatively little dithering as a result, and what is there is mostly for texture rather than giving the appearance of additional colours. I usually like the challenge of keeping colour counts low, but it was nice to be more relaxed about it for a change - I ended up using 64, and it’s not as if the resulting palette is general purpose!

Timelapse

The timelapse for this one is a bit of a mess. My previous method of capturing them doesn’t work in Wayland, and I overlooked a feature in Pixelorama that would have allowed me to evaluate the canvas without having to zoom in and out constantly. I’ve since discovered that it has a recorder feature that can save a copy of the canvas after every change, so I will likely try that for my next piece and the timelapse should have a very different look…

A Culture of Conspiracy

2023-05-21T17:56:00+02:00

I read “A Culture of Conspiracy” by Professor Michael Barkun a few years ago. In it, he describes several broad categories of conspiracist belief, and traces the development of a variety of beliefs from their origins through to the time of writing as they branch and mutate and recombine.

I started this post not too long after reading it but I’ve let it languish for several years now. I hope I’m not misrepresenting its contents due to my failing memory, but I would recommend you read it yourself and find out - it’s definitely worthwhile, and I’m only picking out a few bits of it to talk about that were most interesting to me personally.

Conspiracy Types

Barkun identifies three types of conspiracy theories based on their scope:

Event conspiracies - limited to a specific event, such as the assassination of JFK.
Systemic conspiracies - concern the plans of a specific organisation or group with broad goals, such as taking over the world.
Superconspiracies - this type of conspiracy links together various other conspiracies of the event and systemic varieties in a hierarchical manner (e.g. the CIA assassinated JFK, but the CIA are a tool of the Illuminati and his assassination served their purposes, but really the Illuminati are in thrall to Satan etc.)

Mostly this makes me wonder if systemic or event conspiracies ever really exist on their own in anybody’s mind anymore, because they all seem to espouse and nod along with such a mish-mash of ideas. He does note that superconspiracies have been on the rise since the 1980s. But is something like QAnon even separable from the web of conspiracist ideas in which it seems to be embedded?

Stigmatised Knowledge

Barkun identifies the origin of conspiracist thinking in stigmatised knowledge:

By stigmatized knowledge I mean claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error.

Stigmatised knowledge is not exclusive to conspiracism, but it is inevitably a feature of it, and I think it leads to it readily even when it initially exists without it. For example a believer in a discredited alternative medical treatment might not initially believe in any specific conspiracy in connection to it, but eventually they will have to explain why it is not accepted into the mainstream, and an easy answer is that it is being suppressed by a conspiracy of insiders who benefit from it not being adopted.

With this concept in mind it is easy to understand the origin of “pipelines” into conspiracism from any pseudoscientific field, fringe religious movement, or even from political ideologies that see their righteousness as obvious and their victory as inevitable. When their distorted worldview meets reality and they have to explain their failures, conspiracism is right there. Once they’re understanding one piece of stigmatised knowledge as being suppressed by a conspiracy, it’s a small step to accepting other such claims.

Fact is Fiction, Fiction is Fact

The commonsense distinction between fact and fiction melts away in the conspiracist world. More than that, the two exchange places, so that in striking ways conspiracists often claim first that what the world at large regards as fact is actually fiction, and second that what seems to be fiction is really fact.

Anybody who has spent any time listening to conspiracists will recognise the truth of this statement right away.

First of all, all conspiracy theories necessarily involve claims that one or more generally accepted truths are actually lies intended to pacify or deceive the sheep. Often any information coming from an institution is dismissed without consideration, because it is a given that institutions - be they governments, universities or the “mainstream media” - are “in on it”.

With fact rendered fictional, it becomes very easy to point to fiction to fill gaps in their evidence. Sometimes this takes the form of taking fictional sources as literal accounts, and Barkun describes some of these instances. Other times fictional stories are said to contain encoded messages or to be for the purpose of softening up the masses to accept some coming revelation or societal change - nothing can ever be somebody’s neat idea for a sci-fi concept, or allegory, or their opinion of where society is or is going, unplanned.

In some accounts, I believe that describing their literal plans in fiction is believed to have an occult purpose for the conspirators, much like is claimed about symbols on currency or on buildings (e.g. Denver airport). Advertising their plans in a way that will only be understood by an enlightened few is somehow a part of bringing them to fruition. This is how Alex Jones is interpreting H.G Wells’ “Time Machine” when he talks about Eloi and Morlocks, saying “it’s all right there folks” - and similarly for the other pop cultural works he references, of course.

Emergency Management

One of the things I was most eager to learn about from this book was FEMA camp conspiracy theories. I find these theories amongst the most frustrating (and amusing) because of how they look past the very real historical precedents of concentration camps, and the present day realities of mass incarceration and political repression in the United States and elsewhere, and focus instead on a long running conspiracy that is always just on the cusp of rounding up those troublesome “patriots”.

Of course, the longer this conspiracy has been in the milieu the more absurd it becomes. Barkun identifies the origins of this theory as a pamphlet by a man named William Pabst, written sometime prior to 1979. Pabst warns: “your country and way of life [will be] replaced by a system in which you will be a slave in a concentration camp”.

As such, more recent incarnations of this theory imply that the US government (acting on behalf of some hidden puppet-masters, perhaps) has been building and maintaining a network of secret camps for over 40 years without ever putting their nefarious plans into motion!

Historical instances of the use of internment and concentration camps by governments are of course very real. However, they have never required such extensive periods of preparation. When the British government decided to round up Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland, they built temporary structures in the weeks prior to doing so, and more permanent structures over the next few years after that. The United States forced 120,000 Japanese Americans into camps during WWII, first in hastily converted racetracks and fairgrounds, and then in more permanent facilities built over a few months in 1942. Even the horrifying machinery of the Nazis did not require decades to construct, instead comprising a mix of repurposed buildings of many types, and camps newly constructed during the course of the war - a system that imprisoned and exterminated millions.

The Speed of Lies

When this book was first published in 2003 it had already been updated from the largely completed manuscript to include chapters concerning the explosion of conspiracism after the 9/11 attacks. The second edition, published in 2013, which is the one I read, had been updated with chapters about birtherism and millenarian conspiracies about the year 2012.

In a testament to the veracity of the saying that “a lie can travel half-way around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on”, many of the conspiracies considered in the book, even the later additions, seem quaint and out-of-date from the vantage point of 2023. Of course any book on the constantly shifting, slippery world of conspiracism will be out-of-date (in some ways) within a few years of coming out.

Nonetheless, the analysis is still useful to understanding the process of the creation and dissemination of conspiracist ideas. Indeed there is no amount of time and lack of confirmation that will kill many conspiracies - the reason I was so focused on FEMA camp conspiracies in this post was because somebody told me just a few years ago that Hillary Clinton would have put everybody in camps, and similar rhetoric arose even more recently when the language around COVID-19 mitigation measures was claimed to be intended to “make us feel like we’re in prison” - a FEMA camp of the mind I guess.

The only writing of Barkun’s that I’ve read concerning more recent developments in the conspiracy sphere is an article in “Foreign Policy” about QAnon which examines the efforts of its adherents to cope with its failed prophecies. As far as I’m aware QAnon is still going strong despite its predictive failures.

QAnon has been described by some as a “big tent” conspiracy theory because of its ability to adapt and incorporate new claims. However, it’s hardly unique in that regard - NWO conspiracy theories and many others have been interpreting events through their particular lenses and adapting and incorporating new claims for decades. QAnon might be unique in terms of its longevity despite having made specific, dated predictions that failed to come to pass, but to me it seems more like a systemic conspiracy that conspiracists have been rolling into their own long-existing superconspiracies. It only seems like QAnon is the “big tent” because it broke so spectacularly into the mainstream. As it breaks down under the weight of its failures it seems like it is adapting to include other theories, but it is actually the other theories that are absorbing it into themselves and trying to salvage the parts of it that are useful.

More Conspiracism

I started listening to the Knowledge Fight podcast during Alex Jones’ defamation trials to get the scoop on developments, and I haven’t been able to stop listening since. Dan and Jordan’s analysis of Jones’ bullshit is excellent, and it’s a great way of keeping up with what he’s saying. It’s also incredibly entertaining.

I have been meaning to check out the QAnon Anonymous podcast as well for a while to get a more general view, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

The Ancaps

2022-09-03T18:26:00+02:00

Much has been said already about the fact that HBO’s documentary series “The Anarchists” is not really about anarchists, and by people far more capable of making the argument than I. Nonetheless, I do have some thoughts on that and other aspects of the documentary.

My overall impression of the documentary is that it is philosophically vacuous and insincere. “Anarchism” is defined superficially by the characters in what is essentially an examination of interpersonal drama. The history of Anarchism proper, and its inherent conflict with capitalism is not explored, but neither, really, is “anarcho”-capitalism or the ideas behind it, on their own terms or otherwise. The community is simply mined for drama and spectacle. The main propaganda points of the doc lie in the fact that “freedom” is just implicitly associated with laissez-faire capitalism, and the appropriation of the word “Anarchism” and anarchist symbols by the right, a long-running project.

The Inherent Contradictions of Ancapitalism

Though the documentary has little interest in examining them, the cracks and contradictions in the ideology do show through.

I think it is safe to say that everybody who enthusiastically embraces an extreme capitalist ideology thinks that they are, or will be, the boss of whatever enterprise they are involved in. Of course this produces tension when it turns out that somebody’s property rights, and a lack of any critique of property or the hierarchies it produces, makes subordinates of people who consider themselves entitled to be in charge.

The Anarchapulco conference that the documentary focuses on was not organised in a non-hierarchical manner from its conception because anarcho-capitalism does not renounce all hierarchies, only the existence of the state. Jeff Berwick, the founder and apparent “owner” of the conference behaves throughout as if organising the conference is something that an employee should be doing on his behalf, with his own role limited to giving a keynote, receiving adulation, and partying.

The first such employee we are introduced to is Nathan Freeman, who apparently had a leading role in organising the conference for several years after attending the initial one. It seems to me that Freeman thought himself and Berwick were partners in the endeavour. Berwick obviously saw things differently, and replaced Freeman in 2019 with an outsider.

Tragically, it seems like Freeman couldn’t cope with this humiliation, and essentially drank himself to death. Berwick didn’t even offer condolences to his family, because he’s an enormous piece of shit.

There are a number of aspects to the circumstances of his death that a documentary that was an honest examination of anarcho-capitalism would interrogate. He fell victim to a crypto scam shortly before becoming sick. What is the anarcho-capitalist perspective on this kind of crime? What does history tell us about private money and its effects on society? It’s glossed over as an unfortunate, unavoidable risk of “freedom”. He had no insurance, and his family had to rely on charity to pay his medical bills. What is the anarcho-capitalist perspective on the provision of healthcare? The question is not even asked.

Interestingly, John and Lily, the young couple who flee to Mexico after being arrested on drug traficking charges, do form a critique of the hierarchical, commercial nature of the Anarchapulco conference, and start their own alternative conference called Anarchaforko. It’s a bit unclear the extent to which this is organised at all rather than just people showing up and doing whatever, but it seems to work, and I would love to hear more about how this fits with their apparent objectivist leanings. But of course we get nothing like that.

Stateless in Mexico

Probably the funniest aspect of the documentary for me is that the participants seem to think that Mexico is “more anarchist” than the US, just based on the general vibes. Mexico, of course, does have a state, and I don’t have any reason to think that it is “less of” a state than that of the US.

I think this sense of “anarchiness” is probably the result of a few different factors. Many of the ancap immigrants are relatively wealthy, and apparently speak little or no Spanish. They are essentially just squatting on top of Mexican society, with no real connections to it, and using their wealth to extract what they need from it. The Mexican state protects them, as states generally protect the wealthy. They have little negative contact with it, and don’t hear about other people’s negative interactions with it as they would in the US, because they don’t speak the language. They’re just living in a little fantasy colonialist bubble.

Some members of the community are not so well off, and they do have negative experiences with the Mexican state, ranging from dealing with bureaucracy to being pursued, threatened and arrested by the police.

Although Lily Forester is a member of the latter group, it is her concluding statement on the existence of the state that best sums up the general attitude:

I just want to be left alone, like, a state can exist if it’s going to leave me alone.

On a personal level I can relate, especially given what she went through, but it’s a far cry from the moral clarity of this Fannie Lou Hamer quote:

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

Any meaningful conception of freedom can’t ignore that other people are subject to repression or exploitation, but that is exactly what these ancaps constantly do - the Mexican state is fine because I’m a rich foreigner and it leaves me alone, capitalist hierarchies are fine because I’m on top of them.

M’Aidez!

As I mentioned above, the primary participants in the documentary fall roughly into two groups - one comprised of relatively wealthy entrepeneurs like Berwick and the Freemans, and the other of struggling working class people like Lily Forester and John Galton, Jason Henza, and Paul Propert.

Though both groups are motivated by more-or-less the same ideology (Henza claims himself and Forester are not ancaps, but I don’t really see much distinction between anarcho-capitalism and voluntaryism or agorism myself), the differences between their circumstances is stark. The wealthy run their businesses from their lavish properties while the rest do odd jobs, deal drugs, and otherwise hustle to survive while living in marginal circumstances. As Thaddeus Russell notes:

It’s very easy to escape governments, banks and states if you’re already a Bitcoin millionaire. If you’re like John and Lily, you’ve got no resources, nothing, it’s hard, it turns out, and dangerous, in fact, to be an anarchist in Mexico.

The tension between these two groups is discussed at several points. The drug dealing and other illegal activity (like the theft of a Bitcoin ATM) are an inconvenience for the wealthy, and the unhinged Paul Propert is a potentially deadly threat to everybody, but they have no solutions. Everybody is just on their own to fend for themselves.

The documentary explores the backgrounds of Galton, Forester and Propert in some detail and finds a variety of broken homes, substance abuse problems, and other traumas. Like the characters themselves, it doesn’t seem to consider for a moment that the source of these traumas is the very social system that they cling to so tightly.

Nonetheless the clearest critique the documentary has for the anarcho-capitalist project is the lack of solidarity and support that those lacking means, and in dangerous circumstances, receive from the community, and what this would imply for an anarcho-capitalist society. Erika Harris, who ends up feeling alienated from the community and leaving Acapulco for Belize, makes this plea for mutual aid after John Galton is murdered, and Lily and Jason are on the run:

There’s an emergency among us, how will we respond? With shelter, with safehouses, with passage over borders if necessary … We need each other to get this done. I mean, we need each other just to move one inch forward.

Unfortunately, her plea seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

Recent Movie Watchings

2022-05-09T14:00:00+02:00

I’ve watched a lot of movies recently that I have a bit to say about, but not enough for a big post dissecting them on their own, like Wrong Turn and Ready Player One, so I’m just throwing them all together here.

Kimi

Kimi is a 2022 psychological thriller about an agoraphobic woman, Angela, who works from home for a smart speaker company - creators of the eponymous “Kimi” - listening to supposedly anonymised audio clips that the speaker’s AI couldn’t understand. On one of the clips she hears what she believes to be an assault in the background, and when her employers are reluctant to investigate she has to (gulp)… leave her apartment!

The main thing that I really liked about this movie was the portrayal of her struggle to leave her apartment, and the paradoxical sense of claustrophobia when she does. I felt much the same at one point in my life and it rang true to me.

On the other hand, when it gets down to thriller time, the action is quite repetitive and pointless. She gets captured, escapes, captured again almost straight away, escapes again right outside her building, and then there is somebody waiting for her in her apartment anyway. Boring. It gets better from there, but too late.

One thing I really didn’t like was the role of the smart speaker, Kimi. Although the plot early on does highlight a lack of privacy and data protection when Angela is able to find out whose speaker recorded the clips, and obtain further recordings, this is undermined by the plot being fundamentally about solving a murder thanks to the speaker’s ubiquitous surveillance. It then takes on a heroic role at the climax when Angela is able to outwit several hired goons by ordering it to do various things like cut the lights and play music and so on. Overall, I would say the movie comes down on the side of being pro corporate surveillance.

Mary Shelley

This 2017 historical drama is about the life of Mary Shelley and the sources of inspiration for her novel Frankenstein. Turns out men are the real monster??

I enjoyed this one a lot. I read up about her a bit after watching it and it seems like it was a bit loose with some of the details of her life (like how many children she had, and when they died), but what am I a Mary Shelley scholar?

Like Frankenstein, it explores the theme of men’s irresponsibility towards the procreative act, and neglect of their progeny, but more explicitly, and as such it’s a great complement to the book. Interestingly, the male characters don’t really seem to get it, and focus on the idea that Frankenstein is about Mary alone feeling neglected, rather that a more general lack of responsibility on their part. She doesn’t correct them.

The Death of Stalin

The Death of Stalin is a political black comedy from 2017 about the aftermath of Stalin’s death. I found it pretty funny, but it was also deeply weird to hear a bunch of undisguised American and British accents from characters in a movie set in the Soviet Union. Probably it would have been worse if they put on stereotypical Russian accents, of course, but Cockney Stalin?

As usual, I would probably prefer to see something from post-soviet creators examining their own history, through a satirical lens or otherwise.

The Batman

The Batman is the latest in the saga of the Bat-men, this time starring Bobby Battinson. I think it might be my new favourite Batman movie, though I didn’t see the Ben Affleck one so I am not qualified to declare it the objectively best Batman movie.

The movie leans heavily into noir and gothic aesthetics, and imagines Bruce Wayne as a moody orphan who is uninterested in much outside of being a bat - including the effect his inherited wealth is having on society. Having become, under his father’s watch, a sort of slush fund for corruption, Bruce Wayne’s wealth is the underlying cause of much of the violence that Batman seeks to combat alongside his friends in the police.

His main adversary is the Riddler, portrayed here as a vigilante serial killer with shades of Seven’s John Doe and the Zodiac killer. While Batman is beating up common criminals and thugs, the Riddler targets the powerful and corrupt, and as such it’s hard to identify the villainy in his actions for much of the movie (aside from the fact that he’s, y’know, doing murders and all that). The general public certainly see him as a hero. Meanwhile, he sees himself and Batman as partners, playing off each other in a common crusade to clean up the city (and who else could, but the only two men smart enough to appreciate a good riddle). It isn’t until his plan to “wipe the scum off the streets” by flooding the city is revealed that we see his contempt for the innocent as well as the guilty.

Unfortunately the overall politics of the movie could probably be summed up as “we just need more good billionaires”. Bruce comes to realise that his vast wealth comes with responsibilities, and it seems like he’s going to do some philanthropy alongside his nightly costumed kickpunching. I guess we’ll find out in the sequel if enlightened liberal capitalism is the solution to capitalism’s problems.

I didn’t even realise that Colin Farrell was in this until I saw his name in the credits. He’s completely unrecognisable as the Penguin.

Choose or Die

Choose or Die is a 2022 horror thriller about a cursed retro video game. This seemed like a fun premise, but unfortunately the movie as a whole was fucking crap.

My main fault with it is that the game (named CURS>R) has apparently boundless powers to reshape reality to its whims, and that the choices it presents players with are seemingly arbitrary, and differ wildly in terms of their consequences. For example, the first choice the main character, Kayla, is given is between coffee and cake in a diner, with apparently no negative consequences. Another character’s first choice is between eating a computer or eating their own arm - both potentially fatal, one would think. For one of the “levels” of the game, Kayla is asked to choose between a blue door or a red one, with no other information. It reminded me of the first text-based video game I wrote when I was 7, which was just a collection of random scenarios where every path ultimately ended with the player being eaten by a tiger.

The climax sees Kayla facing off with a previous player (who we are introduced to in the opening scene, but learn very little about). At this point a moral is shoehorned in about white male entitlement in videogaming - which would be a fine theme if it wasn’t introduced so late and handled so clumsily.

I did like the grungy 80’s aesthetic, and that it seemed almost self-aware about how played out that kind of nostalgia is at this point. Also Asa Butterfield is great as a basement-dwelling retro video gaming obsessive. I do love me some Asa Butterfield…

Out of Road

2021-08-11T17:10:00+02:00

I don’t remember where I got the inspiration for this one. I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about climate change recently, what with the great crypto/NFT debates earlier in the year and recent extreme weather events and wildfires. It seems particularly timely given the recent IPCC report.

In terms of technique, I used a 3D render as a base, which is something I’ve done before, but this time I used somebody else’s CC licensed model because cars are kinda complex.

“Ford Mustang Mach 1” by BaldGuyMartin is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Timelapse

Wrong Turn… into Wokeness

2021-07-05T19:40:00+02:00

Beyond woke, yet the unintended result is the victims are punished for being woke. Skip it. This is not a Wrong Turn movie.

David J, May 02, 2021 - 1.5/5 stars on rottentomatoes.com

Content warning: homophobia, misogyny, racism, spoilers for the movie Wrong Turn (2021)

It seemed pretty clear to me after watching Wrong Turn that it had a conservative message. I haven’t seen the previous movies in the franchise, but I understand they are based on some unfair stereotypes about Appalachian people, so it seems a fair enough twist even if it doesn’t resonate with me personally. When I looked at the audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, however, I discovered that a good many people who seemed like they would be on-board with that perspective instead understood it to be “woke” propaganda.

The Message

In Wrong Turn (2021), a young, white, American woman, Jen, throws off the shackles of a guaranteed prominent position in her father’s construction business to hike the Appalachian trail with her boyfriend and their friends. Despite warnings from the locals, they stray off the well-worn path, and fall victim to a primitivist cult known as The Foundation.

It’s clear from the start that Jen is the character that the audience are supposed to relate to. She’s torn between the path her father has laid out for her and the ideals of her friends, and is never shown to have taken those ideals to heart personally. She is more down-to-earth and capable than the other characters - she is the one that has to change the tyre when they get a flat en-route, for example, and later she is the only one able to think on her feet in high-pressure situations.

Her boyfriend, Darius, is an idealistic, politically active black man who expresses socialist and environmentalist ideas. Their friend group are well educated young urbanites, and include a gay couple - pretty much every review of the movie describes them as “diverse”. They’re incredibly cringey to be honest - when an aggressive local accuses them of never having done a day’s work in their lives they actually start bragging about their educational achievements and white-collar jobs - all except our hero, Jen, who is just a little lost in life.

Not long after setting out they divert from the trail to find a civil-war fort that one of them is interested in. They quickly become lost, and fall victim to various traps before finally encountering, and murdering, a member of the Foundation. Shortly thereafter they are captured and taken to the Foundation’s camp.

Finally we learn what the villains of the piece are all about - not inbred hill people as expected, but an egalitarian, primitivist, socialist cult whose leader has an impeccable hipster coiffure. The surviving friends are put on trial, and their every defense is twisted back on them - they are the intruders! They rushed to judgement based on appearances! They murdered someone in cold blood! They need to respect the Foundation’s culture! Such hypocrites!

Far from being inbred, this cult thrives on the recruitment of wayward travelers who they either brainwash into accepting their ideology, or blind with a hot poker and leave to fumble in a dark cave. Really subtle stuff.

Jen and Darius are the only survivors of the trial, and only because Jen convinces the group’s leader, Venable, that they could be useful members of the community. Jen, considering herself to have no relevant skills apparently, is only able to offer herself, as Venable’s wife.

As I mentioned earlier, Jen is actually the only member of the friend group that is portrayed as having any degree of competence or skill relevant to life in the real world. The rest of them are useless, out-of-touch, and varying degrees of obnoxious. But in the woke socialist utopia of the Foundation, she is only valued for her body.

As a result of her relationship with Venable, Jen ends up pregnant. Of course she never considers a termination.

It’s true that “woke” people are amongst the victims in this movie, but more importantly it is “wokeness” that is the monster, leading good All-American girls like Jen off the conservative middle-class path and into a life of bondage, exploitation and sin. She’s the character we’re supposed to find relatable - the rest of them deserve their fate because of their embrace of “woke ideology”, and their deaths are likely intended to be entertaining for that reason. They are so in tune with the villains that Darius chooses to stay with them instead of taking the opportunity to escape.

Let me have another go at summarising what I think this movie is trying to express.

In Wrong Turn (2021), a young, white, American woman is led astray by her “woke” boyfriend and her “woke” friends. While seeking to dig up civil war history that is best left buried, they encounter the logical end-point of “woke” ideology made manifest, and it abuses them horrifically. Jen escapes thanks to the savvy and skills instilled in her by her conservative upbringing, the refusal of her father to abandon his search for her, and the kindness of the misunderstood locals. She returns to her middle-class path through life by working in the family business, and violently rejects further attempts to lead her back to the horrors of “wokeness”.

In short, this is a conservative movie espousing conservative ideals. I disagree with David J, quoted above - the characters are intentionally punished for being “woke”.

“Hollyweird is dying a slow death”

Let’s take a look at some of the audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes from people who seem to have missed the point.

Its just more hand fisted political bs with pretty crappy character development.

Gage S, Apr 14, 2021 - 1.5/5 stars

I guess you could interpret “hand fisted political bs” to be referring to the conservative political messaging. I choose not to.

“Woke” America is destroying our culture Absolutely irredeemable

James A, Mar 14, 2021 - 0.5/5 stars

It might seem like James gets it, if not for the 0.5 stars.

I would have given this a four, if it wasn’t for the “over the top” libtardation seen in the movie that Hollyweird so much loves these days. The mixed race couple, the gay couple, the Arab guy, the Asian guy, Black guy wearing “Black Owned” T-Shirt, The racist Sheriff, White-Guilt guy gets mad, calling Confederate monument “Racism” like a White-Knight. Pretty embarrassing stuff. Original from 2003 was better, this wasn’t bad. Hollyweird is dying a slow death, stuff like this in movies is asinine…

Davis H, Mar 06, 2021 - 3/5 stars

It’s like this guy stopped watching a third of the way through. Also a pretty explicit example of how the mere existence of characters who are not straight or white is unacceptable political content to some people.

Another woke joke bad movie

michael b, Mar 07, 2021 - 0.5/5 stars

Joke’s on you, buddy.

This next one’s pretty gross and misogynistic, and you won’t miss much if you choose to skip it.

Revolves around a queer braindead friend group, which just so happens to have every single race in it. Due to the fact that the whore with the least amount of brain cells becomes a rambo bitch and survives till the end makes me not able to give this more than 4 stars. Giving this 4 stars because you get to see a dumbass friend group suffer. Also in the foundations court room they never mentioned how the foundation drew first blood with the gay dude getting a big log to the face for the last time.

the b, Jun 10, 2021 - 2/5 stars

I had to highlight this one because they understood at least part of what the movie was about - watching “woke” straw-people being punished. I can’t give this review more than 4 stars however because of their views on Jen - I guess because she has sex she must be a “dumb whore”. 2/5 stars.

Final Observation

What strikes me about these reviews is that they reveal how the movie reinforces a conservative (or more broadly right-wing) worldview regardless of whether the viewer actually understands the messaging. Either the messaging is understood and received as intended, or the mere presence of POC and gay characters reinforces a perception of a liberal Hollywood elite pushing a “woke” agenda.

America Wins Again

2020-12-21T20:27:00+01:00

This post contains spoilers for the TV show “The Queen’s Gambit”

I loved pretty much everything about The Queen’s Gambit, and as you’ve probably gathered if you’ve read any of my other posts, I don’t have much to say about things if I’m not complaining about them!

What I do feel obligated to talk about, however, are the differences between this show and “For All Mankind” in terms of how they deal with the Soviet Union. I’ve written previously about how “For All Mankind” re-imagines the space race such that the USA remains the underdog after several successful Soviet moon landings - erasing real Soviet accomplishments in favour of fictional ones, and providing an impetus for the US to include women in its space program, something that it didn’t do in reality until the 1980’s.

The Queen’s Gambit does not rewrite history to the same extent. The chess world was dominated by Soviet players in the 50s, 60s and beyond, and the show acknowledges that readily, with “The Russian”, Vasily Borgov, being Beth Harmon’s ultimate opponent. Her breakthrough somewhat reflects that of American prodigy Bobby Fischer, so it’s not unprecedented. However, where For All Mankind featured a number of real-life historical figures, all the competitors in The Queen’s Gambit are fictional.

In a way, however, Beth’s real opponent is not Borgov or any of the other men she defeats on the road to face him, but herself, her emotional problems, and her addictions. The games she plays are almost entirely without malice, with just a touch of smug arrogance on occasion, and everybody she faces ends up with enormous admiration for her. This is especially true of the Soviet players she faces, who almost seem happier to have been beaten by her than they would have been to have won. What cold war political animosity is present comes mostly from her CIA handler, and is treated as a ridiculous, petty distraction by Beth. Doesn’t he know that there’s chess to be played??

For All Mankind, in contrast, has that animosity at its core. Its the motivation behind all of the American government’s actions in the show, though not necessarily of everybody at NASA, while the one Soviet character seems to validate their suspicions.

The Queen’s Gambit’s portrayal of the Soviet Union is actually extraordinarily sympathetic as a result of being viewed through the lens of chess enthusiasm. Whereas at home chess is a niche interest, when Beth arrives in the USSR she discovers that it is a national obsession. At home her prospects are probably akin to those of Benny Watts, the US chess champion before her - obscurity, and a dingy basement apartment at best. In the USSR she is mobbed by an adoring crowd after every match, which she plays in a dedicated chess hall instead of whatever spaces are available. She even has to adopt their strategy of cooperating during adjournments before she is able to achieve victory, with a team of all the chess friends she’s acquired on her journey advising her on how to approach the rest of the game - an apparent admission of the superiority of collective cooperation over competition and individualism.

The final scene sees Beth slipping her handler’s grasp on the way to the airport. She wanders the streets of Moscow unmolested to find the old guys playing chess in the park, and they greet her warmly before inviting her to play. There’s a distinct sense that she has found a home here, where the game she loves is played openly in the park instead of hidden away in the basement, as in the orphanage where she grew up.

Although this series is still about an American character and mostly set in America, it is much closer to being the view from “the other side” that I hoped for in my previous post.

Cybercentrism

2020-12-12T19:26:00+01:00

This post contains spoilers for the movie “Ready Player One”

I finally gave in and watched Ready Player One, prompted by seeing the Internet dump on the sequel to the novel. I avoided it before now because the commentary on the novel made it sound like pandering nonsense, and I assumed the movie would be much the same. But, I wanted to see for myself.

Perhaps as a result of those lowered expectations, I actually found it quite entertaining on a surface level. The pop culture references were certainly omnipresent, but maybe not as tiresome as having them explained in writing would be. In movie form, a lot of them that are not plot-relevant just form a visual backdrop that actually help define a plausible metaverse, albeit one with a culture that is inexplicable stuck 30 years in the past.

But on the other hand, the centrality of pop culture to the plot, and why it is central, is also what leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In the universe of Ready Player One, the online world is dominated by a metaverse-like virtual reality game called the OASIS, a game owned and controlled by a single corporation, and ultimately a single man, its creator, James Halliday. When he dies, he decrees that his successor will be decided by a tripartite fetch quest within the virtual world. In a monumental act of narcissism, the quest’s challenges are not based on the skills required to run a massive company or a piece of essential infrastructure, or tests of morality or wisdom, but on intimate knowledge of his own life and his pop cultural obsessions. This might be an interesting setup if Halliday were the antagonist, but he’s not, he’s practically worshipped by the users of the OASIS.

Wow!! Cool Future!!

This movie has the trappings of cyberpunk, but little of the critique. Victory in this story is not the smashing of a corporate monopoly or frustrating of its goals, but the passing of the reins of power from a virtuous benevolent founder to a handful of virtuous disciples, through an absurd faux-meritocratic process where merit means liking the right books and games and movies.

The antagonist, Sorrento, is the CEO of a company that runs debtor’s prisons, yet somehow the movie gives the impression that his greater sin is being a poseur who’s only pretending to “get” the stuff that Halliday liked. The denouement even reveals that Halliday could have used his monopoly power to end the practice of indentured servitude at any time, but apparently chose not to, or just didn’t think to, and this is not framed as a critique of monopoly capitalism, but is just a throwaway line to demonstrate how benevolent the protagonist is in his new role.

The third act involves an epic battle in the OASIS, with the user-base coming together to fight Sorrento’s forces and prevent them from completing the quest. It’s presented as an empowering grass-roots uprising to save the OASIS from an evil corporation, and fine, they are pretty evil… But the status quo is also intolerable. They’re not fighting for their own empowerment, but merely to keep the unaccountable corporate power that dominates their lives out of even more abusive hands. It’s a pretty uninspiring cause.

The movie’s true feelings on the nature of power, and the relationship of ordinary people to it, is revealed most starkly at its climax. The conflict in the OASIS has spilled over into the real world, with our intrepid heroes being chased through the streets in a van, exposed at every turn by CCTV tracking technology and drones. While Sorrento sets out to confront them personally, they put out a call for aid, for their supporters to gather in the slums and defend them. When Sorrento reaches them, a huge crowd of people stream out of the stacks to oppose him.

For a moment, it seems as though the plot really is going to be resolved by collective direct action. People power, woo! Instead, Sorrento pulls out a gun, and the crowd parts. They could easily disarm him, there are hundreds of them all around him. Instead they gawp uselessly at him, right up to the point where he is threatening to shoot some children in the face. It is only the police arriving that prevents him from committing murder right in front of them.

With Sorrento out of the way thanks to the police, a bunch of lawyers arrive to certify the protagonist’s completion of the quest and acquisition of complete control over the OASIS. The crowd are reduced to placid spectators in a boardroom drama that doesn’t involve them or empower them. This is, I feel, the perfect encapsulation of the movie’s worldview. The crowd are the audience - expected to worship and trust benevolent CEOs, to react strongly in defence of a commodified culture where they are otherwise passive consumers, but to look on silently and not interfere as control over that culture changes hands, maintaining the status quo.