Before we begin, a quick note: today’s dispatch is more than usually focused on things in the US: the mess we have on hands and how to start cleaning it up.
Diego Luna as everyone's favorite cuddly cutthroat Cassian Andor.
Hello darlings, looking fabulous as always. Over the past few weeks I’ve been watching the second season of the Star Wars series Andor. I am absolutely loving it and glad to see the Star Wars franchise still has some magic in it. And not just magic, but some spine, too! What we’re seeing now is the result of years of work, but still its appearance at this moment is remarkable. It’s giving us a very unvarnished look at fascism and the messy, messy work of organizing a resistance to it. Pop Heist has been offering some amazing coverage that I encourage you to read—after watching. Spoilers abound!
And if you’re really digging it, may I suggest joining the rebel alliance, too?
Why stop at just watching?
Taking a step back from this singular event and looking more broadly at the media landscape, I’m amazed at all the lovely stuff that’s been available on the various streaming platforms over the last decade or so. Not sure I’d call it a golden age of television, but it’s been quite a ride. My fear, however, is that it might be coming to an end. And that it will end with a whimper more than a bang.
These are the dangerous trends that have been taking up room in my thoughts recently.
Artificial, certainly, but not at all Intelligent. Oh, yes, the so-called “AI” that’s popping up everywhere with promises of unheralded productivity and innovation. More than a few minutes with these tools quickly shows that they’re at the level of eager intern. Fast and enthusiastic, but naive, uniformed, and riddled with errors both obvious and subtle. Their use in artistic endeavors is a drama being acted out before our eyes, and no one knows the ending yet.
As an interesting side note, and keeping with the anti-fascist theme of today’s dispatch, check out this essay on the aesthetics of fascism and why AI is so popular with that crowd.
The AI-generated content—commonly and appropriately referred to as slop—won’t replace the good stuff. But it might drown it out. At the core, these miraculous engines are averaging machines. They can’t make something original, only average. After all, average plus average can never equal original. Originality requires risk, but profit-seekers abhor it and fascists can’t control it. Thus, an uninspired but unswervingly obedient machine offers great temptation to those in charge. “Fire all the difficult artists and let the machine do it for pennies—the masses will never know the difference.” That thinking could easily dominate the decision making of a corporate board room, but not sure it would play out that way in reality.
A decade of discovery ends. The major corporate media interests would seem to have discovered that diversity actually works, actually produces originality and leads to things people love. But, will this little bit of enlightened self-interest stand up to fascism-fueled fear? I can all too easily see these fledgling gardens of delight torn up and replanted with blander and assimilationist fare. The US has been mercilessly barraged by government attacks on culture, expression, diversity and representation in corporate and cultural settings alike. We’re on the cusp of a new—new as in what’s old in new again—wave of censorship. It remains to be seen which mainstream corporate media outlets bow to fascism, how quickly, and how it will roll out.
Thinking in ecosystems. Nature has a lot of lessons for us, if we’re willing to listen. A key lesson we seem to need repeated over and over again: monocultures collapse in on themselves each and every time. The diversity just discussed needs to run deeper than the content, it needs to be how the underlying systems run. As things stand, we have an ever-shrinking handful of centralized and rigid sources of content.
Consider, for a moment, the humble book. We may not think of books as terribly resilient, but consider how long, under the right conditions, they have lasted. Now, think of the control you have: you can read it anytime, copy things from it, lend it out, resell it. Hell, you can even make your own. The techniques and materials are widely disseminated and the technology within reach of an amazingly high proportion of the general populace. This may not scale well, may not fit the dictates of capitalism with its twin obsessions of total control and unlimited growth, but has an unquashable resilience.
Now, consider my gushing above about Andor—or substitute whatever your favorite show from a streaming service is. How much control do we really have? A subscription lapses, software or device is out of date and we can’t upgrade, the service disappears the show, or the service itself disappears altogether. If we didn’t grab a copy, if it’s not available on physical media we control, what can we do?
We are not without options, darling. I’ll throw out a few that I have considered or engaged in myself. But don’t stop there, diversity is the name of the game. The wider the variety of efforts and experiments, the stronger and more resilient our intersecting and overlapping shared cultures become.
Bolster our beleaguered public libraries! First and foremost: use it or lose it. Get your card and check out some stuff to enjoy. You can take the next step and donate to your library system. Their budgets, despite being minuscule compared to things like police, are constantly under attack. Donations over and above your taxes go a long way. Beyond that, consider becoming of defender of your library. (Yet another rebel alliance you can join. They are everywhere, darling!)
Support indie creators directly or through anti-capitalistic platforms. Yep, even more work. But worth it. Showing up at in-person events and actually talking to people is always the best strategy here. The benefits of handing them cold, hard cash cannot be overstated. We’re now in a time where something previously so ordinary can become a form of resistance.
Become a renegade archivist. For the technically inclined, even more renegade options exist to rip, encode, and share digital media—liberating it from its corporate confines. I’ve written about dark forests already, this is a continuation of that line of thought. The rest I’ll leave as an exercise for you, dear reader…
Fascism—and despair—love inactivity. Don’t worry about doing the right thing, doing enough, or making it count. Do anything that creates joy, anything that helps another person, anything that brings just a little bit more light into the world. Whatever it is, it’s right, it is enough, it does count.