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the-most-humble-blog · 1 month ago

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Privilege, Identity, and the Death of Consequences: Lessons from Infinity Pool

Can You Still Call Yourself Human If You’ve Abandoned All Accountability?

In a world where consequences can be bought, morality becomes optional, and privilege is the ultimate shield. Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool doesn’t just tell a story; it grabs you by the collar and demands you confront the ugliest parts of human nature. At its core, this film isn’t just science fiction or horror—it’s a searing exploration of what happens when people are given the chance to escape accountability entirely. The real terror isn’t in the alternate universe; it’s in the mirror.

1. Privilege: A License to Escape Consequences

In Infinity Pool, we’re introduced to James Foster, a struggling writer vacationing in the fictional country of Li Tolqa. After a tragic accident, James learns about the country’s unique judicial system: for the right price, the wealthy can purchase a clone to take their punishment.

It’s not just a get-out-of-jail-free card; it’s a literal escape from moral responsibility. But this isn’t just about science fiction. The premise eerily mirrors the real world, where privilege and wealth often allow people to dodge the consequences of their actions.

Dark Humor:

“Accidentally killed someone? Don’t worry, just Venmo the government, and they’ll handle it.”

Isn’t this just a sci-fi version of celebrity scandals? Replace the clone with PR damage control, and you’ve got a headline from TMZ.

Real-World Parallels:

Brock Turner’s infamous case: A rich Stanford athlete gets a slap on the wrist for sexual assault because “prison would ruin his future.”

The college admissions scandal: When millions buy your kid a seat at a university, who cares about merit?

The film forces us to confront a chilling question: How much humanity do we lose when we live in a world where wealth and privilege can overwrite accountability?

2. Identity: Who Are You Without Consequences?

The cloning process doesn’t just erase guilt—it creates a perverse form of self-destruction. In one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, James is forced to watch his clone executed, knowing full well that it’s a stand-in for his own punishment.

The Question: What happens to your sense of self when your actions carry no weight?

James begins to blur the lines between himself and his clone. If someone else dies for your crimes, are you still guilty?

Worse, James begins to enjoy the spectacle. Watching his clone suffer becomes thrilling, even liberating.

Relatable Satire: Imagine if, every time you ghosted someone, a clone of you had to deal with the awkward confrontation. Would you still feel bad about being flaky? Probably not.

The film’s genius lies in how it makes us examine our own behavior: When accountability is removed, what stops us from becoming monsters?

3. The Death of Accountability: Modern Reflections

Infinity Pool might be extreme, but the themes hit close to home in an age where accountability feels more like a suggestion than a rule.

Cultural Examples:

Social Media Outrage: People post, cancel, and condemn without facing any real consequences themselves. It’s a digital purge, and we’re all guilty of it.

Corporate Greed: Billion-dollar companies commit crimes, pay fines that barely scratch their profits, and continue business as usual.

Political Corruption: Politicians manipulate laws, exploit loopholes, and emerge unscathed while their constituents suffer.

In the film, the wealthy tourists in Li Tolqa return every year to commit heinous crimes, knowing they’ll never face justice. Sound familiar? It should. From tax havens to legal loopholes, the elite have always had their own version of the clone system.

4. Humanity Without Morality: The Darker Question

The central theme of Infinity Pool isn’t just about privilege or justice—it’s about what happens to our humanity when accountability ceases to exist.

When you no longer fear consequences, does morality even matter?

Without guilt or accountability, are you still human—or just a hollow shell playing out desires without restraint?

The Darkest Irony: The more James indulges in this consequence-free world, the less human he becomes. By the end of the film, he’s little more than a walking husk—a man who has lost all connection to his own identity.

Real-Life Echo: Think of people who’ve lived their entire lives shielded by privilege—those who’ve never been told “no” or forced to confront the impact of their actions. Are they living authentically, or are they just avatars for their unchecked impulses?

5. What Infinity Pool Teaches Us About Our World

Cronenberg’s film doesn’t just entertain; it stabs at the heart of our societal flaws. It asks us to examine the systems that allow people to escape justice and how those systems corrupt not just individuals but entire cultures.

Lessons for Us:

Wealth and privilege shouldn’t be shields from accountability—they should be reasons to act more responsibly.

True humanity isn’t defined by freedom but by restraint. What we choose not to do matters as much as what we do.

Accountability isn’t a punishment; it’s the backbone of morality. Without it, society collapses into chaos.

Can You Still Call Yourself Human?

Infinity Pool leaves us with a haunting question: Can you still call yourself human if you’ve abandoned all accountability? The film’s answer seems clear: No. Without consequences, morality fades. Without morality, identity erodes. And without identity, humanity becomes meaningless.

If nothing else, the film is a wake-up call. Privilege may let you escape punishment, but it won’t save your soul.

Love thought-provoking takes like this? Follow The Most Humble Blog for more cultural dissections, sharp humor, and unapologetic truths. Let’s dive deeper into the absurdity of modern life together.

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redrobin-detective · 4 years ago

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I have never watched DP and everything I know about it is what I saw on Tumblr but... are you telling me... that you have ANOTHER fandom where the villain wants to adopt the MC?

Oh hun, let me tell you about how absolutely delicious and messed up the relationship between Danny Fenton and Vlad Masters is. It’s a veritable mine of content, a fic writer could get lost in that sweet, sweet sauce.

Long story short is Vlad is also part human, part ghost from a lab accident also caused by Danny’s parents 20 years ago when they were in college. He used his powers for selfish gain, lying and cheating his way to billions of dollars. But he was still bitter, still alone, falling victim to the ghostly nature of his powers and becoming obsessive. He was in love with Danny’s mom, Maddie and is convinced he had a chance with her if only his accident hadn’t happened. He blames Danny’s dad, Jack and swears to kill him.

He puts his plan into motion for their 20 year college reunion, to kill Jack and woo Maddie and finally stop feeling so alone. Only he finds out that the Fenton’s youngest son, a shy boy he’d written off, is also a half ghost hybrid. And just like that Vlad isn’t totally alone in the world.

But does Vlad approach Danny like a normal person? Offer his understanding, help with his powers and generally act like someone with half a conscious? hell no. Instead he beats the child halfway to Sunday, demands that Danny forsake his home and family and become Vlad’s apprentice all the while actively trying to kill his Dad. Danny, predictably, says no dice.

And it spirals out of control from there. Vlad’s obsession with Maddie slowly shifts until he’s become obsessed with Danny. He says he wants love, he says he wants a family but he’s trying to get at it by scaring the child, by threatening him, by trying to get rid of every other place for Danny to turn so he has no where else to go but into Vlad’s welcoming arms. He wants a son but he has no idea how to be a decent person much less a father. At one point, he goes full blown nutso and tries to clone Danny to create “the perfect half ghost son”, it blows up in his face (literally) but it goes to show the lengths he’d go to.

Danny, meanwhile, is rightfully angry and upset about the whole situation. He’s scared to death of these ghost powers and he meets someone who finally understands and all he does is manipulate and hurt Danny. It really takes a blow to Danny’s trust in adults, Vlad instantly tries to control him once he learns about Danny’s powers so how can Danny trust anyone? He wants some guidance, he wants security and all he keeps getting is pain. He lashes out just as hard back as Vlad, mocking his loneliness and flaunting the loved ones he has in his life. He spits and curses the man as Fenton and tries to punch his smarmy face in as Phantom.

They’re two members of the world’s smallest species and they can’t stand each other. But it’s not as simple as that. Vlad has been isolated from people for 20 years, he’s conniving and manipulative as a human but his ghost powers make him 10x worse and his moral compass is perpetually broken. He does love, in his own twisted way, but things he had to force and painfully grip that love not realizing he’s driving people off. Danny is also just a kid and it’s not his job to help Vlad through his many, many issues. Vlad also exacerbates Danny’s paranoia and mistrust in general. I think some part of him still does look up to Vlad, hoping that one day he’ll turn around and become an actual mentor to Danny who really has no adult he can rely on. He’s willing to lend a hand to help his enemies but he always hesitates with Vlad, burned too many times. We see in a future AU that Vlad is capable of change and regret, Danny likewise is very compassionate and open but just can’t extend the same curtesy to Vlad.

Danny Phantom said “lets take this traumatized boy soldier with death powers who cant relate to anyone living and dead, give him an archenemy that 30 years older than him, more powerful in wealth and skills and smarts who is out to mentally break the child until he submits completely” and we fans just ate it up

#danny phantom #the relationship btw vlad and danny is so fascinating #its MESSED UP on a fundamental level #its so goddamn sad in its own way #but its interesting to see played out #S3 butchered Vlads character and made him out to be a stereotypical villain who wants to rule the world #not a laser focused manipulative asshole who just wants to own you #which is far far scarier #gentrychild #now that i think on it #there ARE a lot of parallels btw DFO and Vlad and Danny #dan obviously isnt his real son but the supposed love being felt? the manipulation? the lack of trsut on the child's part?? fab

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ilonga · 5 years ago

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rise of skywalker and sequels salt time, y’all

things I’m salty about in the rise of skywalker and the star wars sequels, in no particular order:

- Finn was sidelined

- FINN WAS SIDELINED

- he was such an interesting character with so much potential (a stormtrooper who deserted!! pretty sure that was the first time we’d ever seen that!!), and it was all ignored and he was turned into background noise for what?? kylo ren??

- seriously! after TFA, the movies should have explored his backstroy! we should have seen his stormtrooper past affect him!! maybe a stormtrooper revolution!! he should have had a CHARACTER ARC!

- also his force-sensitivity being turned into a joke and comic relief was frankly insulting

- they could have done so many things with that side of the character (even though it was kind of out of nowhere)! parallels between finn and rey, finn questioning his identity, the whole a former stormptrooper being force sensitive thing should have been explored!

- Poe was sidelined

- Poe was a spice runner for no reason?? 1) isn’t that a rude stereotype, and 2) Poe is not Han Solo 2.0!! he was his own, different character!

- Finn/Poe didn’t happen

- gonna be salty about that forever, though I guess I saw it coming :( (it’s disney, what did I expect?)

- but they gave Poe a straight love interest that we’d never heard of before this movie and who he had like two lines of dialogue with just to rub it in?? like, really?

- they completely forgot Rose existed

- like, listen, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the finnrose kiss either, but you can’t just pretend it didn’t happen and hope everyone forgets about it

- and sure, rose’s introduction and character in TLJ was a bit clumsy

- BUT YOU CAN’T JUST IGNORE HER AND PRETEND SHE DIDN’T HAPPEN

- she had a lot of potential as a character, and interesting backstory, a practical pragmatic personality, and a lot of ways she could play off the other characters

- TROS could have been where we saw Rose grow as a character and really shine

- instead, she was forgotten

- ugh

- REY PALPATINE WAS THE DUMBEST FRICKING THING OKAY--

- like, first of all, palpatine coming back for some reason somehow was the most ridiculous direction this movie could have gone and didn’t work, at all

- their enemy for the first TWO MOVIES was the First Order and Kylo Ren

- they had a huge moment in TLJ where the Resistance is steadily being destroyed and they won’t last long against the First Order

- now they’re supposed to take on the First Order and a now-supposedly-immortal emperor palpatine who has a collection of unmanned star destroyers he can control for some reason??

- both of them at once? the resistance is barely alive as is, now you’re adding an OP extra army + sith lord to the mix?

- I mean, this is ridiculous. Palpatine’s dead. Anakin’s big sacrifice in return of the jedi was KILLING palpatine. now he’s back, and the resistance somehow realises he’s back and decides he’s enemy #1 now?

- how did the resistance find out a dead sith lord came back to life on a remote planet anyways?

- and WHAT ABOUT, YOU KNOW, THE FIRST ORDER? AND KYLO REN?

- Kylo Ren, who they finally decided was going to be the main villain in TLJ (even with that stupid “rey trying to redeem the mass murderer” plot going on in the background), and now they don’t have the guts to commit to making him evil (which he was for the LAST TWO MOVIES AND THE MAJORITY OF TROS)

- so, since they weren’t committed enough to make Kylo a villain like he actually was and didn’t have the groundwork for a redemption, they just decided to ignore the fact that he was evil and hope it would go away

- like, are we going to forget that he literally MURDERED HIS DAD, HAN SOLO

- or that he and his first order destroyed a whole SYSTEM OF PLANETS? filled with billions of innocent people?

- he personally tortured Poe, he personally tortured Rey, and he was complicit in a system that kidnapped Finn, took him from his family, and brainwashed him

- not to mention that one of the opening scenes of TROS was him literally massacring people

- but no!! it’s all fine now, bc he looked at his dad’s ghost a little sadly and got a new lightsaber color

- like, no. he isn’t “redeemed” because he’s decided he has the hots for rey. heck, that makes it even worse. he’s been trying to manipulate her for all three movies, he’s gaslighted her, he’s threatened her, he’s hurt the people she cares about. NONE OF THAT IS OKAY. and it’s even less okay that all of his evil deeds can be written off because rey’s “”love”” for him “healed” him or whatever the fuck they want us to think

- and why would they have Rey HEAL him? after SHE stabbed him? in what universe does that make sense?? even if rey didn’t defeat him fairly bc he was distracted or whatever, this is still the supreme leader of the army rey and the rebels are trying to defeat. like, rey, are you a part of the resistance or not? it doesn’t matter if he was “nicer” to you than the rest of the rebels. He’s still your ENEMY. Your “”empathy”” here helps no one, least of all yourself. Kylo Ren dead would have been a massive victory for the resistance--maybe they’d even have had a chance against the first order then! you know, the first order? the enemy you were fighting for the last two movies?

- is this the message you want to be sending to young girls in the audience? that it’s ok if their partner hurts them, hurts other people, is a bad person in general, because their love can “”heal”” him? and that eventually, he’ll turn good if you just try hard enough?

- this is how people wind up in abusive relationships!! that shit is NOT okay

- and the kiss is ridiculous for the same reasons. you don’t owe kylo ren anything, rey. Not in the least for “rescuing” from a situation that was pretty much created bc of him. He’s the one who teamed up with palpatine at the beginning of the movie, remember?

- sometimes I feel like this movie forgot that kylo ren is, you know, a bad person, which the other two movies spent their entire runtime showing us

- like darth vader’s sacrifice was one thing. first of all, it was for his son, his child, and secondly, vader was very much under the power of the emperor and debatably had the mindset of a slave

- kylo ren, on the other hand, was completely under his own power. HE was making the choices, and calling the shots. HE murdered Snoke. And he died for a girl he was manipulating and gaslighting constantly and that he didn’t have much of a connection to other than “the force”

- like, darth vader’s “”redemption”” definitely wasn’t perfect either. you can argue that him killing the emperor and sacrificing him self to save his son didn’t negate any of his actions or him being a bad person. but it was definitely more meaningful and better handled.

- and let’s talk about rey

- I will forever be bitter that rey didn’t get a meaningful character arc and character growth

- which is so disappointing because she was SUCH an interesting (& mysterious) character with so much potential in TFA

- I feel like, in making her palpatine, which was pretty out of nowhere and contrary to the last jedi, they were so busy trying to fit her heritage into the movie in a way that sort of made sense that they forgot to make the movie about her growing as a character and person

- couldn’t they at least have given her her own lightsaber?

- I mean, her being a palpatine is already ridiculous because since when does palpatine have a son? (clone, whatever) And since when did that son have some sort of epic struggle where he refuses to join palpatine and runs away? and when did that son find someone he fell in love with, and have a daughter? and then subsequently abandon her, a seven-ish year old, on a dangerous desert planet? (I mean, wasn’t palpatine dead by then anyways?)

- it just doesn’t fit with the already established star wars universe. we already know palpatine’s story (well, not the beginning of it, but enough). It was movies 1-6, clone wars, and rebels. if he had had a son that had a luke-esque struggle against the darkside, it would have shown up.

- it just doesn’t fit

- but anyways, back to rey

- I guess they were trying to give her some luke-style struggle where she struggles with her heritage and a pull to the darkside that she has to ultimately triumph over? but it doesn’t work

- one, because she never HAS any struggle with the dark side. shooting lightning out of your fingers out of nowhere doesn’t count (and wasn’t that a ridiculous scene. it was more comical than anything else, which is definitely not what they were going for)

- a struggle with the darkside is about being tempted to give into anger, fear, and hatred, and struggling not to do the wrong things and turn evil. In luke’s story, we SAW that. we also saw luke’s horror and eventual acceptance of his heritage, which we never really saw with rey. It was just like, “okay, guess I’m a palpatine?” and it wasn’t nearly as impactful bc palpatine had been dead for the past thirty-ish years. as a contrast, vader was a living and very present villain who the heroes had to contend with, and it was personal for most of them.

- so I guess they tried to make that her character arc, but it didn’t work. so we were left with a stale character who didn’t really have any meaningful victories or losses.

- is she really a “”mary sue”” like everyone’s claiming if they never really made the story about her?

- I think that was the biggest thing that was so unsatisfying about the sequels

- she was hyped up to be the first real mainstream female jedi protagonist (obviously clone wars got there first, but movies are definitely more mainstream than a show, sorry cw :( ), but she never really got a journey, struggles, or real triumphs. which is such a shame because she was this really empowering character in TFA that I was so excited to see more! but her trilogy-wide character arc just wasn’t satsifying

- I wanted to see her really struggle, and rise above her struggles! I wanted her to have meaningful triumphs!

- also I don’t think she ever got injured either, which is definitely a deviation from the star wars trilogy pattern. that’s kinda strange. (luke lost his hand & got electrocuted, han got frozen in carbonite, leia got tortured & shot, anakin got, well, a LOT of injuries, but even before becoming darth vader w/ the foregone conclusion, he had his arm cut off, padme was pretty heavily injured on genosis, and obi-wan was injured in the fight against dooku)

- yup

- also the sith wayfinder was kinda dumb, and I never felt like there were real stakes in TROS

- and let’s address the rey skywalker thing: ok, fine, I get what they were trying to say, kind of

- and I’m not foaming at the mouth about it like some people are. I’m fairly indifferent

- but it would have been a lot more meaningful if rey had had like, a really close, deep relationship with Leia and Luke, so she could say that she and they considered her a skywalker

- but she didn’t have that sort of relationship with them, not really. Sure, she and leia were friends on-screen, but that was it. and luke didn’t really seem to like her all that much.

- so like, “meh”

- especially since Leia’s technically a Solo or an Organa, so that line working really relied on her relationship with Luke, which wasn’t strong enough

- yea, so that’s that

- the “jedi voices” scene was pretty cool though (AAAAH AHSOKA!! AND ANAKIN!! AND ALL THE OTHER JEDI!!), and I liked her yellow lightsaber (although she could have built her own lightsaber at the BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE, instead of carrying luke’s the whole time)

there are things I like about the sequels, mind you. a lot of things!! but there’s a lot I was disappointed in too.

congrats if you got this far, that was a LOT of salt

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jerusalemstraycat · 3 years ago

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Gov’t, Population, Infrastructure (Founding February week 2)

As mentioned in my previous post, the two sapient species that live on the world of the Bura are the Bura themselves, who evolved there millions of years ago from leporid-like creatures, and the caras, who came to the world through a portal a few millennia before the Bura began recording their own histories. The total populations of the Bura and the caras are a little under 3 billion and a little over a million respectively. Having coexisted for so many thousands of years, they have a relatively friendly (if distant) relationship. The caras mostly keep to themselves, and the places where they live are too hot and dry to be hospitable to the Bura. However, in recent decades, cara colonies have started to spill over into Bura cities, increasing tourism and trade between the two. This also means that commuting for work or leisure between the planet and the cara homeworld, while commonplace for the caras for millennia, is just becoming a more regular activity for the Bura. The caras that make their primary place of residence on their homeworlds, which comprise around half the total cara population, have mixed feelings about this. Even so, they will not turn down the advanced technologies that the Bura will bring them - a reversal of roles from how things were thousands of years ago.

Because innovation is driven by historical events, the technological level of the societies on this planet is difficult to compare against that of humanity. They are far more advanced than we are in genetic manipulation and agricultural engineering, less advanced in architecture and communication, and about the same in transportation and mechanical automation. In most of their “developed” societies, it averages out to something similar to the US in the 1960s. The caras were instrumental in the technological progress of the Bura. They brought with them tools and machines for cloning, teleportation, small-scale manipulation of spacetime, and other things that we humans can only dream of. However, they had to learn from the Bura all medicine beyond first aid and field surgery, as well as the principles of architecture as they apply on a planet with Earthlike gravity. To this day, cara colonies are mostly comprised of low, flat buildings - a far cry from the soaring spires that are possible in their homeworlds’ microgravity.

The caras’ home system is divided into two warring kingdoms, with one capital asteroid each and the rest of the asteroids being used as neutral ground. The governments of both kingdoms are composed of a king (who acts as the commander-in-chief), a queen (who enacts legislation and handles administrative affairs), and a cabinet of advisors (who are also the judiciary authority). This is the way the government there has always been, and the caras who live in their home system accept it as a fact of existence. The caras on the planet, on the other hand, are VERY politically-minded for people who don’t form political entities. They are essentially one large nation, with regional councils overseeing activities in different areas of the world, and people moving between regions as they please. However, recent immigrants may express support for a monarchy like the ones back home, and some movements of longtime planet residents consider going back and getting rid of the monarchies entirely. They don’t have wars, per se, but very loud and disruptive demonstrations of their differing ideologies.

The governments of the Bura are largely based on city-states, where the central city, ruled by any of a number of different types of governments, controls a surrounding area of land marked by natural or artificial borders. With the rising population in modern times, some borders between city-states have dissolved, with the cities forming a sort of confederation and behaving like a single unit. That, or they become areas of conflict and battle over limited resources. However, the large wars are less often border disputes and more often justified by ideological differences, like those of the caras (even if the actual reason is different).

The Bura have many languages, but the one most commonly used as a lingua franca is Masang, originating in the plains of Masa and spreading through the world thanks to that city-state’s stupendous economic influence. Incidentally, the language of the caras is mutually intelligible with an archaic dialect of Masang. Some historians think that they, like most neighboring Bura languages, were influenced by Masang. However, ancient cara texts from both before and after they came to the planet reveal that their language has changed very little in all those thousands of years. So perhaps it is Masang that was influenced by the caras? It could be both. The temporal relationship between the worlds of the caras and the Bura has always been...complicated. Their history is full of these paradoxes. It’s best not to think about it too hard.

#worldbuilding #founding february #buraverse

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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Why Star Wars Trilogy Editor Marcia Lucas Hates the Sequels

https://ift.tt/3zrNmhV

The divisiveness of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy remains powerful nearly two years after its conclusion. Yet, as topically wide-ranging—and, in some cases, strangely political—as debates over the Disney-dealt follow-ups to the sacred Original Trilogy became, the cold-hard metric of box office grosses confirms their status as Star Wars’ least-lucrative mainline movies (excluding the anemic Solo). Now, the camp of sequel detractors has apparently gained a surprisingly authoritative ally in film editor Marcia Lucas, who, besides being the ex-wife of George Lucas, was a crucially grounding visionary in the franchise’s formation.

One of Star Wars’ early guiding forces, Marcia Lucas (born Marcia Lou Griffin), has offered some scathing criticism of Sequel Trilogy films The Force Awakens (2015), The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019), rife with the kind of adjectives that don’t beat around the bush. The stinging words stem from Howard Kazanjian: A Producer’s Life by J.W. Rinzler, a recently-released biography on the legendary, Lucas-collaborating film producer. In the book’s foreword, Marcia delivers a devastating rebuke (via Inverse,) of the franchise’s most recent films and their stewardship under veteran producer Kathleen Kennedy—albeit with the rhetorical analgesic of a complimentary preamble.

“I like Kathleen. I always liked her. She was full of beans. She was really smart and really bright. Really wonderful woman. And I liked her husband, Frank. I liked them a lot,” says Lucas. “Now that she’s running Lucasfilm and making movies, it seems to me that Kathy Kennedy and J.J. Abrams don’t have a clue about Star Wars. They don’t get it. And J.J. Abrams is writing these stories—when I saw that movie where they kill Han Solo, I was furious. I was furious when they killed Han Solo. Absolutely, positively there was no rhyme or reason to it. I thought, ‘You don’t get the Jedi story. You don’t get the magic of Star Wars.’”

Interestingly, Marcia Lucas’s role behind the scenes of the original Star Wars Trilogy—and the George-penned, Steven Spielberg-directed Raiders of the Lost Ark—as an editor and informal story consultant has only recently started to become widely known from a handful of tell-all books and behind-the-scenes television specials. However, it does seem clear in hindsight that the world-altering pop culture groundswell that was 1977’s original Star Wars was a gestalt effort that saw George’s early, allegedly-vague Flash Gordon-esque serial sci-fi designs refined by personnel such as producer Gary Kurtz and, most notably, Marcia. Indeed, as alleged, Marcia—as his wife—primarily possessed the clout to criticize George’s wilder, unfeasible ideas and constructively refine them in a way that bore pathos on the screen; the Apollo to his Dionysus, if you will.

Lucasfilm

However, the acrimony in their marriage metastasized beneath a public façade in 1982 during production of the trilogy closer eventually titled Return of the Jedi. In hindsight, this arguably affected the flow of the film, which is widely believed (an admittedly anecdotal qualification,) to be the weakest and most out-there entry of those first three films. Unfortunately, the chemistry that conjured some of the most beloved and influential movies of all time unceremoniously dissipated upon their divorce and professional split, which was announced shortly after Jedi’s 1983 release. In fact, a frequently-cited reason for the also-divisive direction of George’s eventual tenure on the 1999-2005 Prequel Trilogy was that their production occurred against an untenably hierarchical situation, in which George bore unchecked power as director, writer and studio bigwig. Indeed, notwithstanding today’s newfound nostalgic love conveyed to the prequels, conventional critiques frequently point to convoluted plots, generally dry performances and artificial green screen aesthetics—aspects that conceivably could have been neutralized and/or salvaged by the splicing and advice of Marcia.

Contextually, Marcia’s Star Wars excoriation, is being made nearly a decade in the aftermath of Disney’s 2012’s acquisition of Lucasfilm (and the Star Wars franchise as a whole) in a $4 billion deal that notably saw George capitulate any control he had over the franchise, business-wise and creatively. So, this is hardly a case of decades-preserved sour grapes being spewed onto an ex-spouse. Rather, it can be perceived as the case of the franchise’s de facto mother watching from afar as her child makes what she believes are terrible choices. In fact, she doesn’t mince words when addressing the elephant in the Sequel Trilogy room, Daisy Ridley’s Rey. While her status as the trilogy’s clear protagonist meant that she was destined to become a powerful figure, even proponents of the films have to admit that Rey’s rise was, in the very least, unnaturally quick, going from solitude as a scrap salvager on desert remote planet Jakku to besting the powerful scourge of the galaxy at his own game—something that took Luke Skywalker three films to achieve.

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The Mandalorian Season 3: Bo-Katan’s Darksaber Story Is Far From Over

By John Saavedra

Regarding Rey, she sounds off, “And they think it’s important to appeal to a woman’s audience, so now their main character is this female, who’s supposed to have Jedi powers, but we don’t know how she got Jedi powers, or who she is.” Marcia’s criticism is obviously destined to be met with opposition from the segment of the fandom that connected with Rey in a meaningful way. Yet, it is worth noting that Rey, by the end of 2015 sequel opener The Force Awakens, showcases an inexplicable preternatural ability in the ways of the Jedi, notably in the film’s climax, in which she—without any lessons whatsoever—picks up a lightsaber for the very first time to duel and defeat Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, who—having been depicted as skilled and powerful throughout the film—had been trained in the Jedi arts throughout his entire life before his Dark Side turn. In conjunction with that, the scenes on the Millennium Falcon in which she is giving Han Solo advice on how to repair the ship has also facilitated claims of her being a “Mary Sue,” which refers to a know-it-all character without any substantive flaws, who is often a vicarious manifestation of the author.

However, the Sequel Trilogy initially seemed destined to laugh its way to the bank with the J.J. Abrams written/directed The Force Awakens going on to gross $2 billion worldwide, having tapped the well of nostalgia hard—so hard, in fact, that film’s structure arguably renders it a remake of the original Star Wars, a.k.a. A New Hope. Yet, as one could expect from a sequel that’s 32 years in the making, the movie manifested as a passing of the protagonist baton from returning heroes like Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2 to a trio of new heroes in Daisy Ridley’s would-be Jedi Rey, John Boyega’s side-jumping former Stormtrooper Finn and Oscar Isaac’s heroic-but-cocky pilot Poe Dameron, along with a rounder-built droid in BB-8.

However, the trilogy’s follow-up films would suffer from storytelling that went in disparate directions, first with 2017’s The Last Jedi, which saw writer/director Rian Johnson make bold, but controversial changes in tone and plot developments, specifically regarding Rey, who, in that film, seemingly had her Chosen One status revoked when she learned her parents where just ordinary people. Tellingly, that film yielded a box office decline, which saw it gross $1.3 million worldwide. Consequently, upon the abrupt removal of the third film’s appointed visionary, Colin Trevorrow, Disney brought Abrams back for 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, which retroactively rescinded those developments in lieu of a hastily-concocted climax that revealed Rey to be the granddaughter of a clone-resurrected Emperor Palpatine, who had been hiding behind the scene manipulating events the whole time. Additionally, she was given a pedantic, quasi-romantic connection to Kylo Ren as part of a “Dyad” of the Force. The result was a final box office whimper of $1 billion, cementing a steady decline that led to much soul-searching over at Disney.

“It sucks. The storylines are terrible. Just terrible. Awful. You can quote me—J.J. Abrams, Kathy Kennedy—talk to me,” says Marcia with an emphatic stamp. Yet, whatever one might think of the Sequel Trilogy, Rey or even Daisy Ridley’s performance, the bizarre malleability of her arc certainly boosts the point Marcia conveys about the weakness of her backstory. Indeed, the accelerated skills of a protagonist across multiple films (akin to Luke’s unexplained upgrade between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi,) can be a forgivable offense if said skills drive the story forward. However, in Rey’s case, it seems to be an example of a character being driven by what’s expedient to the story.

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For now, though, the Star Wars franchise is taking a break from the big screen as the recent success of live-action Disney+ television series The Mandalorian will soon yield subsequent offerings like The Book of Boba Fett (which will arrive in time for Christmas), Obi-Wan Kenobi and Andor. However, a monumental comeback is set for the far horizon when the Patty Jenkins-directed Star Wars: Rogue Squadron eventually hits theaters, the first of more films on the docket.

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webdevelopment010 · 7 years ago

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As tech’s social giants wrestle with antisocial demons that appear to be both an emergent property of their platform power, and a consequence of specific leadership and values failures (evident as they publicly fail to enforce even the standards they claim to have), there are still people dreaming of a better way. Of social networking beyond outrage-fuelled adtech giants like Facebook and Twitter.

There have been many such attempts to build a ‘better’ social network of course. Most have ended in the deadpool. A few are still around with varying degrees of success/usage (Snapchat, Ello and Mastodon are three that spring to mine). None has usurped Zuckerberg’s throne of course.

This is principally because Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. It has also bought and closed down smaller potential future rivals (tbh). So by hogging network power, and the resources that flow from that, Facebook the company continues to dominate the social space. But that doesn’t stop people imagining something better — a platform that could win friends and influence the mainstream by being better ethically and in terms of functionality.

And so meet the latest dreamer with a double-sided social mission: Openbook.

The idea (currently it’s just that; a small self-funded team; a manifesto; a prototype; a nearly spent Kickstarter campaign; and, well, a lot of hopeful ambition) is to build an open source platform that rethinks social networking to make it friendly and customizable, rather than sticky and creepy.

Their vision to protect privacy as a for-profit platform involves a business model that’s based on honest fees — and an on-platform digital currency — rather than ever watchful ads and trackers.

There’s nothing exactly new in any of their core ideas. But in the face of massive and flagrant data misuse by platform giants these are ideas that seem to sound increasingly like sense. So the element of timing is perhaps the most notable thing here — with Facebook facing greater scrutiny than ever before, and even taking some hits to user growth and to its perceived valuation as a result of ongoing failures of leadership and a management philosophy that’s been attacked by at least one of its outgoing senior execs as manipulative and ethically out of touch.

The Openbook vision of a better way belongs to Joel Hernández who has been dreaming for a couple of years, brainstorming ideas on the side of other projects, and gathering similarly minded people around him to collectively come up with an alternative social network manifesto — whose primary pledge is a commitment to be honest.

“And then the data scandals started happening and every time they would, they would give me hope. Hope that existing social networks were not a given and immutable thing, that they could be changed, improved, replaced,” he tells TechCrunch.

Rather ironically Hernández says it was overhearing the lunchtime conversation of a group of people sitting near him — complaining about a laundry list of social networking ills; “creepy ads, being spammed with messages and notifications all the time, constantly seeing the same kind of content in their newsfeed” — that gave him the final push to pick up the paper manifesto and have a go at actually building (or, well, trying to fund building… ) an alternative platform.

At the time of writing Openbook’s Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign has a handful of days to go and is only around a third of the way to reaching its (modest) target of $115k, with just over 1,000 backers chipping in. So the funding challenge is looking tough.

The team behind Openbook includes crypto(graphy) royalty, Phil Zimmermann — aka the father of PGP — who is on board as an advisor initially but billed as its “chief cryptographer”, as that’s what he’d be building for the platform if/when the time came.

Hernández worked with Zimmermann at the Dutch telecom KPN building security and privacy tools for internal usage — so called him up and invited him for a coffee to get his thoughts on the idea.

“As soon as I opened the website with the name Openbook, his face lit up like I had never seen before,” says Hernández. “You see, he wanted to use Facebook. He lives far away from his family and facebook was the way to stay in the loop with his family. But using it would also mean giving away his privacy and therefore accepting defeat on his life-long fight for it, so he never did. He was thrilled at the possibility of an actual alternative.”

On the Kickstarter page there’s a video of Zimmermann explaining the ills of the current landscape of for-profit social platforms, as he views it. “If you go back a century, Coca Cola had cocaine in it and we were giving it to children,” he says here. “It’s crazy what we were doing a century ago. I think there will come a time, some years in the future, when we’re going to look back on social networks today, and what we were doing to ourselves, the harm we were doing to ourselves with social networks.”

“We need an alternative to the social network work revenue model that we have today,” he adds. “The problem with having these deep machine learning neural nets that are monitoring our behaviour and pulling us into deeper and deeper engagement is they already seem to know that nothing drives engagement as much as outrage.

“And this outrage deepens the political divides in our culture, it creates attack vectors against democratic institutions, it undermines our elections, it makes people angry at each other and provides opportunities to divide us. And that’s in addition to the destruction of our privacy by revenue models that are all about exploiting our personal information. So we need some alternative to this.”

Hernández actually pinged TechCrunch’s tips line back in April — soon after the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal went global — saying “we’re building the first ever privacy and security first, open-source, social network”.

We’ve heard plenty of similar pitches before, of course. Yet Facebook has continued to harvest global eyeballs by the billions. And even now, after a string of massive data and ethics scandals, it’s all but impossible to imagine users leaving the site en masse. Such is the powerful lock-in of The Social Network effect.

Regulation could present a greater threat to Facebook, though others argue more rules will simply cement its current dominance.

Openbook’s challenger idea is to apply product innovation to try to unstick Zuckerberg. Aka “building functionality that could stand for itself”, as Hernández puts it.

“We openly recognise that privacy will never be enough to get any significant user share from existing social networks,” he says. “That’s why we want to create a more customisable, fun and overall social experience. We won’t follow the footsteps of existing social networks.”

Data portability is an important ingredient to even being able to dream this dream — getting people to switch from a dominant network is hard enough without having to ask them to leave all their stuff behind as well as their friends. Which means that “making the transition process as smooth as possible” is another project focus.

Hernández says they’re building data importers that can parse the archive users are able to request from their existing social networks — to “tell you what’s in there and allow you to select what you want to import into Openbook”.

These sorts of efforts are aided by updated regulations in Europe — which bolster portability requirements on controllers of personal data. “I wouldn’t say it made the project possible but… it provided us a with a unique opportunity no other initiative had before,” says Hernández of the EU’s GDPR.

“Whether it will play a significant role in the mass adoption of the network, we can’t tell for sure but it’s simply an opportunity too good to ignore.”

On the product front, he says they have lots of ideas — reeling off a list that includes the likes of “a topic-roulette for chats, embracing Internet challenges as another kind of content, widgets, profile avatars, AR chatrooms…” for starters.

“Some of these might sound silly but the idea is to break the status quo when it comes to the definition of what a social network can do,” he adds.

Asked why he believes other efforts to build ‘ethical’ alternatives to Facebook have failed he argues it’s usually because they’ve focused on technology rather than product.

“This is still the most predominant [reason for failure],” he suggests. “A project comes up offering a radical new way to do social networking behind the scenes. They focus all their efforts in building the brand new tech needed to do the very basic things a social network can already do. Next thing you know, years have passed. They’re still thousands of miles away from anything similar to the functionality of existing social networks and their core supporters have moved into yet another initiative making the same promises. And the cycle goes on.”

He also reckons disruptive efforts have fizzled out because they were too tightly focused on being just a solution to an existing platform problem and nothing more.

So, in other words, people were trying to build an ‘anti-Facebook’, rather than a distinctly interesting service in its own right. (The latter innovation, you could argue, is how Snap managed to carve out a space for itself in spite of Facebook sitting alongside it — even as Facebook has since sought to crush Snap’s creative market opportunity by cloning its products.)

“This one applies not only to social network initiatives but privacy-friendly products too,” argues Hernández. “The problem with that approach is that the problems they solve or claim to solve are most of the time not mainstream. Such as the lack of privacy.

“While these products might do okay with the people that understand the problems, at the end of the day that’s a very tiny percentage of the market. The solution these products often present to this issue is educating the population about the problems. This process takes too long. And in topics like privacy and security, it’s not easy to educate people. They are topics that require a knowledge level beyond the one required to use the technology and are hard to explain with examples without entering into the conspiracy theorist spectrum.”

So the Openbook team’s philosophy is to shake things up by getting people excited for alternative social networking features and opportunities, with merely the added benefit of not being hostile to privacy nor algorithmically chain-linked to stoking fires of human outrage.

The reliance on digital currency for the business model does present another challenge, though, as getting people to buy into this could be tricky. After all payments equal friction.

To begin with, Hernández says the digital currency component of the platform would be used to let users list secondhand items for sale. Down the line, the vision extends to being able to support a community of creators getting a sustainable income — thanks to the same baked in coin mechanism enabling other users to pay to access content or just appreciate it (via a tip).

So, the idea is, that creators on Openbook would be able to benefit from the social network effect via direct financial payments derived from the platform (instead of merely ad-based payments, such as are available to YouTube creators) — albeit, that’s assuming reaching the necessary critical usage mass. Which of course is the really, really tough bit.

“Lower cuts than any existing solution, great content creation tools, great administration and overview panels, fine-grained control over the view-ability of their content and more possibilities for making a stable and predictable income such as creating extra rewards for people that accept to donate for a fixed period of time such as five months instead of a month to month basis,” says Hernández, listing some of the ideas they have to stand out from existing creator platforms.

“Once we have such a platform and people start using tips for this purpose (which is not such a strange use of a digital token), we will start expanding on its capabilities,” he adds. (He’s also written the requisite Medium article discussing some other potential use cases for the digital currency portion of the plan.)

At this nascent prototype and still-not-actually-funded stage they haven’t made any firm technical decisions on this front either. And also don’t want to end up accidentally getting into bed with an unethical tech.

“Digital currency wise, we’re really concerned about the environmental impact and scalability of the blockchain,” he says — which could risk Openbook contradicting stated green aims in its manifesto and looking hypocritical, given its plan is to plough 30% of its revenues into ‘give-back’ projects, such as environmental and sustainability efforts and also education.

“We want a decentralised currency but we don’t want to rush into decisions without some in-depth research. Currently, we’re going through IOTA’s whitepapers,” he adds.

They do also believe in decentralizing the platform — or at least parts of it — though that would not be their first focus on account of the strategic decision to prioritize product. So they’re not going to win fans from the (other) crypto community. Though that’s hardly a big deal given their target user-base is far more mainstream.

“Initially it will be built on a centralised manner. This will allow us to focus in innovating in regards to the user experience and functionality product rather than coming up with a brand new behind the scenes technology,” he says. “In the future, we’re looking into decentralisation from very specific angles and for different things. Application wise, resiliency and data ownership.”

“A project we’re keeping an eye on and that shares some of our vision on this is Tim Berners Lee’s MIT Solid project. It’s all about decoupling applications from the data they use,” he adds.

So that’s the dream. And the dream sounds good and right. The problem is finding enough funding and wider support — call it ‘belief equity’ — in a market so denuded of competitive possibility as a result of monopolistic platform power that few can even dream an alternative digital reality is possible.

In early April, Hernández posted a link to a basic website with details of Openbook to a few online privacy and tech communities asking for feedback. The response was predictably discouraging. “Some 90% of the replies were a mix between critiques and plain discouraging responses such as “keep dreaming”, “it will never happen”, “don’t you have anything better to do”,” he says.

(Asked this April by US lawmakers whether he thinks he has a monopoly, Zuckerberg paused and then quipped: “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me!”)

Still, Hernández stuck with it, working on a prototype and launching the Kickstarter. He’s got that far — and wants to build so much more — but getting enough people to believe that a better, fairer social network is even possible might be the biggest challenge of all.

For now, though, Hernández doesn’t want to stop dreaming.

“We are committed to make Openbook happen,” he says. “Our back-up plan involves grants and impact investment capital. Nothing will be as good as getting our first version through Kickstarter though. Kickstarter funding translates to absolute freedom for innovation, no strings attached.”

You can check out the Openbook crowdfunding pitch here.

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endenogatai · 7 years ago

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Openbook is the latest dream of a digital life beyond Facebook