Login
Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series. With ten million units reportedly sold in its first three days—and other metrics on the prevalence of gaming and significant industry profits even after a rough 2022—I have started to wonder why the study of popular culture and International Relations (IR) has given video games relatively little attention.
Work on popular culture and IR has identified various ways in which films, television series, popular literature, and other cultural artifacts (often in the science fiction genre) might reflect and even affect real-world politics. It stands to reason that video games could have similar effects, but with few notable exceptions, these products have received much less attention than those in more established media. I will more systematically consider how video games might affect our political world in my next post. For now, I want to focus on TotK.
TotK might not seem like a game that offers much fodder for IR scholars. There is plenty of fun to be had, but at least in the first half of the game that I have completed, there is little explicitly political content. The story is a fairly straightforward tale of good versus evil, and our valiant hero, Link, is asked to find damsel-in-frequent-distress Princess Zelda.
At most, TotK scandalously asks you to corrupt a local mayoral election by gifting mushrooms from one of the candidates to potential voters. [Spoiler alert] Your election interference matters little—the two candidates decide to share power because, as it turns out, “The best way to keep Hateno Village vibrant is to work together to combine traditional culture with new ideas!”
Where TotK might matter most clearly for IR scholars is in the scope of the game’s reach. This will likely end up being one of the best-selling games of all time, and wherever it falls on that list, it will join many other Nintendo products. Given Nintendo’s world-wide popularity—as well as that of other Japanese game developers and publishers—we might consider whether popular cultural exports like TotK act as a source of “soft power” for the exporting country.
As Joseph Nye originally defined the concept in 1990, soft power is “co-optive” rather than “command” power displayed “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants”. Nye identified “culture” as a “soft power resource” because a state that “stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its message across and to affect the preferences of others”. (See the Duck’s own Peter Henne on this topic for a more detailed discussion of this concept.)
For Nye, soft power was a central aspect of his argument—developed more fully in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power—that the United States would not soon be eclipsed by any other potential competitor. The volume and uptake of American cultural exports constituted evidence that the United States could remain the world’s leading power even if others made some relative gains in the military or economic domains.
Nye saw various kinds of cultural exports as generative of American soft power. “Young Japanese who have never been to the United States wear sports jackets with the names of American colleges. Nicaraguan television broadcast American shows even while the government fought American-backed guerrillas. Similarly, Soviet teenagers wear blue jeans and seek American recordings, and Chinese students used a symbol modeled on the Statue of Liberty during the 1989 uprisings.”
By contrast, Nye saw Japanese cultural exports as unlikely to overtake American popular culture on the world stage. “Although Japanese consumer products and cuisine have recently become more fashionable, they seem less associated with an implicit appeal to a broader set of values than American domination of popular communication.”
Whether one is playing TotK or, say, watching 2020’s highest-grossing film, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, today’s ubiquity of Japanese cultural exports would suggest that such products have broader appeal and may be a more reliable source of soft power than Nye expected.
Writing a year before Nye, Francis Fukuyama made such an argument—”the triumph of the West” could be seen in part through the spread of its popular culture, and Japan’s popular cultural products had helped make it one of the world’s leading powers. Japan had “follow[ed] in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal consumer culture that has become both a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state”.
Fukuyama was not concerned that Japanese cultural products would rival those of the United States. Rather, the successful post-war infusion of “the essential elements of economic and political liberalism” into Japan produced a popular culture that complemented American cultural products and that affirmed “consumerist” liberal democracy as a path toward prosperity and influence.
For me and many others, the hours we log restoring order to TotK‘s Kingdom of Hyrule represent a fraction of the exposure we have had to Japanese cultural exports. Do all those experiences—perhaps the experiences of watching Studio Ghibli films, reading Haruki Murakami novels, or decluttering with Marie Kondo’s assistance—translate into soft power?
If enough Americans engage with images of Japan that generate fond feelings for (or “affective investment” in) the country, does that mean that the United States as a government will be more likely to “want what [Japan] wants” in at least some areas?
I do not yet have firm answers to these questions. At a time when Chinese officials are seeking to enhance their own country’s soft power, however, and when Japanese game developers are fretting about the rise of the Chinese gaming industry, it would be worth building on some of the scholarship I have cited here to answer such questions. We might thereby bring video games more fully into the study of popular culture and IR.
Author’s note: I have edited the original post to specify that “IR” is an acronym for International Relations and to add a spoiler alert for a side quest.
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
It's been about five weeks since I switched Digressions to Substack and last wrote an entry in my covid diary. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) It's time for an update on both. Also, some blog house-keeping at the end.
First, my new/replacement neurologist at the NHS long covid clinic in London was unhappy after listening to my narrative. Short version: much recovered by end of January; teaching went well in February/March, but have struggled since. Yes, I am doing much better since the last time one of his colleagues saw me (with apologies for canceling multiple appointments with me). But no, I shouldn't be taking naproxen so frequently at this stage in order to manage the effects of migraine.
The neurologist's concern was straightforward: I am not nipping the migraines in the bud, but rather masking symptoms. Bottom line, he wanted me to try out the treatment plan the long covid clinic had prescribed to me in June 2022 in order to get the covid induced migraines under control. These are primarily triggered whenever I am cognitively multitasking, that is, socializing, for any amount of time.
In addition, I have noticed an odd new symptom. It's a kind of tinnitus when I lie down to go to bed when I am fatigued. The low grade, but persistent noise 'sounds' like an air-conditioner, generator, or vacuum-cleaner in the distance. Luckily, it doesn’t prevent me from falling asleep because the simple meditation my sister taught me still works like a charm. After some testing with sound-meters and earplugs, I realized the sound is purely cognitive. I only 'hear' it at night when I go to bed, but again only when I am especially tired or migraine-y. (Upon reflection, I suspect I have had this symptom since last Fall and I hereby apologize to the Kimpton hotel in Cambridge in insisting on a room change because of the outside noise I heard.)
Problem is that the official June 2022 treatment plan involves rather serious meds, which were originally developed to treat high blood pressure, depression and/or epilepsy--all have serious (cognitive) side effects. I have not been especially eager to try any, especially if they prevent me from teaching, reading, and writing.
Now, a weird big glitch in the NHS is that the specialist generally does not send you home with the meds required (unless it falls under urgent care), and so I would need to go back with my treatment plan to my GP before I could start any of the treatments the neurologist prescribed. And at the moment any non-urgent appointment at my GP takes a lot of time to schedule. So by the time I met my NHS GP, I had devised an alternative plan.
As it happens when I first met my better half she suffered from awful, debilitating migraines that could last three or four days. But after a while she started a new treatment that has been very successful for her: Botox shots in the neck. Basically one poisons the muscles with Botox so that they can't reinforce a developing migraine with extra stress, and one cuts short the migraine cycle. In the NHS this is an approved treatment for migraine, but only after you try treatment with all the pills first. (Unfortunately, in Holland it's not an approved treatment of migraine so I can't get coverage there either.) Both the NHS neurologist and my GP warned me that if I skipped the pills I could never get reimbursed for the Botox shots, even if it worked. But the GP encouraged me to try it anyway, because he understood my apprehensions about the treatment plan.
So, about twelve days ago, I found myself in the most beautiful physician's office I have ever been in with one of the leading cosmetic eye surgeons of the UK (an old friend of my better half, who -- it was my birthday after all -- paid for my first treatment). fter going through the treatment with me, and ruling out some other medical issues, I got my first eight Botox shots at half dosage. (No, I didn't add a secret cosmetic treatment for eyes or chin!) The plan is to give it two to three weeks, and then, if necessary, add another dosage. If the treatment works, I would need the shots about two or three times a year.
After the first week of shots, I wasn't so sure. But in the second week I am seeing grounds for optimism. So, I'll report back later this Summer if the Botox shots have improved the quality of life structurally. It would be nice if it did because I start a full load of teaching in September. Before then, I am also key-noting this week in Utrecht and chairing a job search in the next few weeks so it would be nice not to live on Naproxen during this period. (I am not counting on that because I pulled a muscle in my back yesterday morning and I have had painful back spasms during the last 27 hrs! Hopefully, I can stand for my keynote on Thursday!)
So much for the Covid diaries update. As hinted in the previous paragraph, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. (This is the blog house-keeping.) Apologies for that in advance.
I want to close with sincere thanks to all the subscribers to my Substack. The good news is that since I switched to Substack, I seem to have doubled my readership, especially because a sizable chunk of my audience continues to read these posts at Typepad (where, for the time being, I re-post them a day later).
Unfortunately, less than 10% of my substack subscribers pays, so it's too early to contemplate a career switch or even reducing my professional appointment. I had been kind of hoping to blog my way to more structural sabbaticals as a way to manage my long covid on my own terms; but so far no cigar.
Going forward, I will experiment with giving my paying subscribers -- thank you, you are the best! -- more frequent, exclusive content during the Summer. (I have done that only once during the first month.) If you have any suggestions or requests, please don't be a stranger.
Either way, I am really enjoying the more intense engagement that Substack generates. I receive a lot more correspondence again about my near daily musings. Merci. And watch this space in June.
I did something I haven’t done in a while, I actually posted images to Flickr I took within a few hours and write titles and descriptions, and even tagged them. I know, crazy, right?
In many ways this seemingly moribund practice was resurrected by this discussion with Jon Udell on Mastodon. Jon was generously responding to my post about comparing Web 2.0 and Web3 for a presentation at OER23 this week, and his contributions were insightful (no surprise there) and started me thinking about the way many folks used to blog before the centralized social media sites. It was often for more often, a mix of long and short form, and not nearly as much psychological overhead at the idea of “writing a post.” You were just posting, it could be an image, a quick thought, or an essay, but long and short forms of writing lived together more comfortably, a practice Udell points to mico.blog as helping to preserve. More fodder for the presentation, thanks Jon!
Now, pair this with my recent post remembering the magic of the blogging conference NorthernVoice, and you might think I am heading for a web nostalgia tailspin. Fair enough, it might be the case, but one thing that was so cool about my looking back on NorthernVoice was the tags in Flickr that allowed me to see and remember the people, spaces, and general sense of that important moment. Many people caught it, and looking back visually was magic. I was like, damn, that’s a cool way to remember.
Scott Beale’s “Northern Voice 2007”
In fact, the founder of Laughing Squid, Scott Beale, wrote a post that included the mage above (forgive the Laughing Squid ads if you click through), providing a textbook example of just this kind of short-form blogging back in the day. He threw up some links to Flickr, quickly let folks know he was in Vancouver at a groovy blog conference hobnobbing with Anil Dash in less than a full paragraph. Not bad for a few minutes work
So, in that spirit, just wanted to let everyone know I arrived in Inverness, Scotland for the OER23 conference that will kick off with workshops and pre-conference events tomorrow, and then get going Wednesday and Thursday for two full days of re-connecting with some amazing people. I’m not sure what it is, but I am in the conference spirit right now and I am blogging like it is 2007! I will be uploading my pictures from the conference to Flickr with the tag OER23 and will also be posting here on the regular. I might event try and live blog a session or two, can you imagine that! What did Faulkner say? The past isn’t dead, it’s not even the past! Or something like that, that crazy southener!
Inverness was pretty glorious this afternoon.
What kinds of web footprints are you leaving? Or does it matter since they just blow away? Where do you choose to do your walking?
I am not talking about your data trails, am talking about the trails you make as a contribution for others.
I know my answers, which are just mine, and are not likely anywhere near yours. But with each day of 2023, the web I walked into in November 1993 with the widest sense of wonder (I wonder about when I last wondered about wonder), is fraying away, or being left behind for the commodified mall of platforms. Ot just left as error messages. The 404 web.
I could go darker, I say to my 3 or 4 readers. But. The Wonder is still there, I need to trust in that, and perhaps just extremely unevenly distributed as the past future used to go.
I don’t know why I reached for numerical headings, but am again borrowing your style, Kate Bowles. You see, like the current inevitable technical overlord, my mind is “trained” on stuff (though training is a narrow word for what I think my grey matter CPU does). All I have read and seen is in me, and then I generate something from it. Who ya callin’ Artificial?
There was an online discuss–well thread? blip? where some others I do “follow” and are friends I have been in the same room together, were talking about a certain aviary named technology dying.
My internal storage database went rummaging around for an article a long time ago I read from a rather prominent writer who had driven an interesting stake into the heart of claims that technology “dies”. I remember they had pulled a random page of tools (like implements) from a 1890s?1900s? Sears Catalog, all would be echnologies one would guess are dead. But the author found somewhere in the world, some artisan was still making them.
I could not for the life of me remember the author’s name. I tried the old oracle of knowledge with searches like “writer who found tools from old catalog still in use” and came up empty, just stuff about library catalogs. A few more failed. Is it the search fail or my weak prompts? Because apparently, all future work will be typing prompts into boxes.
Then I remembered I had likely blogged about it. My blog, my outboard brain! And shazam, my own blog search on old catalog tools still being made hits it as a first result- from Feb 1, 2011 Not One Tech Extinction reconnects my neurons! That was Kevin Kelly, a big shot that back then I had as a guest for an NMC online show I did (those footprints of course are wiped out, as is the recording done in old Adobe Connect).
But I did find what I sought, Kelly’s 2006 blog post on Immortal Technologies:
One of my hypothesis is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, do not go extinct. When I really look at supposed extinct species of technology, I find they still survive in some fashion. A close examination of by-gone technologies shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it. A technique or artifact may be rare in the developed world but quite common in the developing world. For instance, Burma is full of ox-cart technology; basketry is ubiquitous in most of Africa; hand spinning still thriving in Bolivia. A technology may be enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for traditional satisfaction. Consider the traditional ways of the Amish, or modern tribal communities. Often old technology is obsolete, that is, it is not very ubiquitous or second rate, but it still may be in small-time use, as many old-fashioned ways are.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/immortal_techno.php
Yep, these days a blog is “enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for traditional satisfaction” its posts in small-time use, left as durable footprints on the web, right there sitting where it was 17 years ago.
Someone’s re-share in Mastodon (oh yes boost), maybe it was Roland Tanglao brought a sad note to see from Boris Mann (who I crossed paths with long ago in the Northern Voice Vancouver days)
Boris’s message marked the passing away of Darren Barefoot, who was the co-founder of Northern Voice. In his last days before cancer closed the lights, or maybe it was ahead of time, Darren’s blog left his last web footprint, a post on his own blog/domain, They Were All Splendid.
I will not even taint it by trying to summarize. Read it yourself. I had some memories of seeing his earlier posts (tweeted maybe by Boris or Roland?) or perhaps in flickr photos of Darren’s Splendid things.
His site lists a long set of footprints, his first web site in 1999, but what I remember, his post describing the idea that lead to a survey that led to the first Northern Voice conference in 2005. I became aware of it of course because Brian Lamb blogged about it (more web footprints still visible), and I think reached out to me as I went to Northern Voice for the first of several times in 2006.
I can’t say I knew Darren, I probably met him, but I was there in that era, when nothing was proven and everything possible for the web. I can say I was there.So many things for me came as an outgrowth of Northern Voice, the connections, friendships, photos.
Web footprints that will be there for while.
Sadly, Darren was not the first Northern Voicer to blog their own last post- I remember being astonished/amazed at the web footprint left behind by Derek Miller in 2011, alas also a victim of cancer.
Northern Voice attracted a bunch of digital photography nerds, running informal sessions where people would gather and share/talk about gear, software, and invariably, go out on the Vancouver streets for a photo walk.
That’s where I met Derek. I cannot remember interactions, but that he was always gracious. The thing that is hard to describe about those Northern Voice conferences, is how there was no prestige hierarchy, it was flat, even though it drew upon people from not often overlapping Venn regions- tech nerds, educators, and social activists.
I remember using Derek’s example photos for How a Camera Works, showing visually how aperture shutter speed affected images.
Speaking of web footprints, I forgot Derek’s penmachine.com domain from one of my own Northern Voice talks in 2011- Looking Through the Lens where I tried to make analogies between the functions/settings for photography and learning.
But looking at that old site (broken links, dead flash embeds), are URLs that spark memories- I always liked using Kris Krug’s story that went behind a photo that went beyond viral on flickr. Kris too was like a rock star photographer, yet treated me as a young tech head and just starting in digital photography, as an equal.
I see in my links something stunningly relevant, a post from Kris’s blog:
What we leave behind is our digital footprint (Kris Krug) http://www.kriskrug.com/2011/02/01/what-we-leave-behind-is-our-digital-footprint/
With sad irony, that digital footprint link ends up at a domain for sale sign. Fortunately, ghosts can be summoned from the Wayback Machine.
Our future is being documented by us in our present. Each and everyone of us who has a digital camera, a cellphone, a computer or even a camera phone has the task of creating our living digital history in real time. Our digital landscape has changed drastically from the meaningless dribble that once was in a stream of collective consciousness that is being contributed to by all of us. Collectively everything that we capture is part of our digital footprint that will exist as a living breathing legacy of ourselves online.
…..
The combination of our collective task of documentation and incentive of sharing has joined forces with the thriving Open Source culture. Not only are we inspired to create and then share but we are also infusing the two into spaces, like unconferences and camps, which allow for both situations to transpire. These spaces are open to everyone, sustained by all and owned by none. It only makes perfect sense that our changing interaction with our present state would happen collectively in our own making.
What we leave behind is our digital footprint Kris Krug, Feb 1, 2011
Hello from 2023.
To go back to where this started, mobius strip like, I said “dying” not dead.
I am not contemplating my mountain of web sites as some kind of legacy that matters. Taking care of and preserving my web tracks is not about my last blog post as a goodbye. If anything, it’s perhaps about the first one, and all the ones in between, all of my Pinboard bookmarks (and earlier ones imported from del.icio.us), my flickr photos, the bits and bobs of my archived web sites and ones I have rescued from the dead when others closed shop.
I firmly believe in the web we have woven ourselves (not done by others for us) and the one we care for as individuals. I hate being responsible for breaking any link I have created.
If your followers, likes, and LinkedIn connections are the tracks you care about so be it.
My stuff matters. To me, and I care about that fading dream of the web. Without it, what is there?
There’s always stuff to add after publishing! I wonder if I should comment on my own posts (it helps with the illusion that no one reads me). But sitting in an open tab was Jason Kotke’s marking of his 25th year of leaving footprints
I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch Fire:
https://kottke.org/23/03/kottke-is-25-years-old-todayWhen I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
I too want to be on the web and “live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it” (back when we had to refer to it as the “World Wide Web” and not simply “the web”).
Featured Image: A combination of two of my own photo, which have their own tracks– Steps into Time flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2016/366/292 The Web is a Tentative Thing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Well, the only good thing about being away from the bava.blog for more than a month is the tried and true joy of blogging about not blogging. Or blogging about the will to blog. Or blogging about how no one blogs. In the end, any blogging about blogging is good blogging. And so it goes….cue the “I’ve been busy” clip from 48 Hours featuring Luther’s indignation at being questioned while retrieving his car from a parking garage after several years “away”:
Some tropes never get old, just like blogging. And what’s more germane to the form than a list of things to do? There are so many….
So I guess all of this (and more) is gonna keep the bava busy for the weeks and months to come. That’s the work, and I love it. Long live the blog!
I loved Henrik Karlsson’s piece, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”
He writes:
A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.
So what do you write about to find your people?
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
If you do this, Karlsson says, “You will write essays that almost no one likes…. Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.”
This is really a great summary of the best thing that writing and sharing your work can do for you.
According to conventional wisdom, Disney’s Andor is the best Star Wars narrative in years. Political scientists seem to agree. Dan Drezner speaks for many when he writes that the show’s “writing is stellar,” its “locations are great,” and its “visuals” are “arresting.” “But,” he argues, “there’s a deeper, simpler reason” why Andor succeeds so well: it is “the first Star Wars property… intended for grown-ups.”
Andor takes place after Revenge of the Sith and before Rogue One, when the Galactic Empire is tightening its grip throughout the galaxy. The show’s story is deeply political — it depicts the emergence of the rebellion against the Empire — and its creative team does a good job with the politics of imperialism and the challenges that an increasingly repressive regime poses to collective action.
The incipient rebellion tries to provoke imperial overreach and promote radicalization. Careerist imperial bureaucrats try to disrupt emerging networks of rebellion. Civilians often get caught in the crossfire.
Andor‘s showrunner, Tony Gilroy, explicitly draws on the history of uprisings against oppressive regimes. “There are things all the way through the show,” he explained in an interview, “and I don’t want to go through and quote chapter and verse, but this is the Russian Revolution. This is the Montagnard. This is something interesting that happened in the Haitian Revolution. This is the ANC. Oh, this is the Irgun Building, Palestine. This is the Continental Congress.”
I think that Andor deserves much of its praise. But as a long-time Star Wars fan, I do think that the show suffers from a fundamental tension: it wants to do “grown-up,” morally ambiguous politics in a universe where all things are shaped by the metaphysical machinations of The Force.
The central axis of the Star Wars is a struggle between good and evil — the “light” and “dark” side of The Force. One of the things that makes Andor so compelling is its careful portrayal of how a truly evil political system functions.
The viewer becomes well-acquainted with the Empire’s “bureaucracy of domination.”
The central axis of the Star Wars is a struggle between good and evil
The Empire’s corporate security contractors attract many employees eager to abuse the minimal authority entrusted to them. Officers of the Imperial Security Bureau authorize any violence necessary to establish “order” and win bureaucratic turf wars. Prisoners become disposable cogs in an imperial machine that extracts as much labor from them as possible. Imperial scientists ensure that no suffering goes to waste; the distorted cries of massacred alien children are used to torture multiple characters.
Star Wars is far less clear about what makes for a “good” political system. The most we get in Andor is a manifesto written by a “true believer” in the nascent rebellion, Karis Nemik, who argues that the Empire is stripping people of their “elemental rights” to freedom, independence, and justice. While Nemik pitches his manifesto to Cassian — who is, at that point in the story, calling himself “Clem” — their compatriot Arvel Skeen interrupts: “I’d like to hear what Clem believes.” All Cassian can say is that, “I know what I’m against. Everything else will have to wait.”
Nemik’s manifesto, from which we hear an excerpt in the season finale, has freedom at its core:
Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. …The Empire’s need for control is so desperate because it’s so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
We don’t know if Nemik aims for the restoration of the Galactic Republic, something less centralized, or an even more radical break with the past. It is one thing to yearn for “freedom,” another to design political institutions that genuinely protect it.
Saw Gerrera claims to be the only revolutionary with “clarity of purpose.” Gerrera first appeared in The Clone Wars television series, where he led an anti-Separatist insurgency alongside his sister, Steela.
In Andor, he voices opposition to “neo-Republicans,” “human cultists,” “sectorists,” and “galaxy partitionists” —whatever these mean — but his politics are treated as less important than his military tactics.
Gerrera is an extremist. He commits brutal acts of violence. For him, the ends justify the means. In Rogue One, Gerrera uses his final words to encourage the protagonist, Jyn Erso: “Save the Rebellion! Save the dream!” Gerrera’s political dream, however, remains ambiguous.
Two others in Andor might offer us a vision of a good political system — Mon Mothma, a senator from Chandrila, and Luthen Rael, who orchestrates much of the emerging rebellion while fronting as a dealer of rare artifacts.
Rael, like Gerrera, is defined by a particular approach to resistance—one that, in a dangerous move in the moral universe of Star Wars, seeks “to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them.” His political ends are anti-Imperial but otherwise unclear.
Even if our heroes could agree on what they want, however, it’s not entirely clear that it would actually matter.
Mothma, who presents as a mildly irritating advocate of imperial restraint while surreptitiously trying to establish a network of anti-imperial allies, has a more well-developed neo-Republican vision. Mothma will eventually become a central figure in the original trilogy’s Rebel Alliance—that is, the Alliance to Restore the Republic—but it is not clear why restoration should suffice.
As Paul Musgrave notes, the choices demanded of Mothma make her a compelling presence. Yet her neo-Republicanism offers only the unimaginative nostalgia for a broken system that Padmé Amidala offered in the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars series
Emperor (formerly Chancellor) Sheev Palpatine was able to subvert the Republic from within partly because it had become ineffectual and corrupt. Mothma, Amidala, and their few allies in the Senate offer no serious rethinking of a system that consistently failed its citizens, served the interests of the rich and powerful, and deployed the equivalent of a slave army against its foes.
Even if our heroes could agree on what they want, however, it’s not entirely clear that it would actually matter.
The Force has a will of its own. That will tends toward metaphysical good. In Star Wars, the universe really has a moral arc. This leaves Andor with a problem. Are Nemik, Andor, and the others fomenting rebellion simply instruments of the Force?
Such questions — including whether the Jedi and Sith themselves are ultimately used by the very Force they seem to wield — have made an appearance in The Last Jedi, multiple Clone Wars arcs, and in some media retconned as “legends” after Disney’s acquisition of the franchise. None of them have provided much in the way of answers.
Given the need to tell stories about heroes and villains making choices, those running the franchise are unlikely to resolve the matter in favor of a strongly deterministic view. But the role of The Force in Star Wars undermines stories that portray moral ambiguity — and limits any lessons that viewers might draw for real-world political and ethical dilemmas.
Perhaps it is simply too difficult to articulate a positive vision of galactic politics in a series meant for twelve-year-olds. The sequel trilogy’s quick dismissal of the New Republic may underscore the problem. It is easy enough to oppose galactic tyranny; it is more difficult to present a vision for what a just political system looks like. It’s also good for business if everyone can see themselves in the “good guys”.
All this matters for more than the viewing experience. Regardless of how realistic it is, fiction can inform reality or serve as a teaching tool in moderation. From Andor’s dehumanizing prison system on Narkina 5 to the working-class solidarity on Ferrix, the show’s goods and evils invite us to hold a mirror to our own political systems. I hope the second (and final) season gives us more goods to contemplate alongside the evils.
For years—like ever since I started blogging in 2003 or so—I’ve wanted to include a link blog on this site. You know, one of those side bars that just has cool links. Back in the day, Andy Baio‘s link blog was my jam, something I often paid more attention to than his main blog. It looks like Andy shut down his link blog (though you can see what it looked like circa 2006 via the Wayback Machine). As usual though, I’m behind the times by a few years, so I still want a link blog, even if they may be passé.
The main reason I want the link blog, honestly, is not to share the links, but to help me dig up links later on for teaching or research. And, like Andy’s original link blog, I wanted to provide brief annotations of the links—basically to remind myself why I saved the links in the first place. Now, I already save links with Pinboard, and if you look at my Pinboard feed, it is essentially a link blog. You can even use Pinboard’s “Description” field to add annotations to your bookmarks. But there are at least three problems with Pinboard as a link blog:
What finally spurred me to make a true link blog was a recent post by Tim Owens, who describes how he annotates articles in his RSS reader (TinyRSS) and posts them on a separate blog. Tim’s method got me thinking. It’s a great setup, but one drawback is that the annotations happen in TinyRSS, while I want the ability to annotate links from multiple places, not just what happens to show up in my RSS reader. For example, I’m just as likely to want to add a note to and share a link I see on Twitter as I am a link that’s among my RSS feeds.
The solution was simple: continue using Pinboard, but automate the posting of bookmarked links to my blog. But not every link, just the ones I want to share. Pinboard makes this stupid easy, because (1) you can tag your saved bookmarks with keywords, and (2) Pinboard generates a separate RSS feed for every tag. In other words, Pinboard can generate an RSS feed of the links I want to share, and I can use a WordPress plugin to monitor that RSS feed and grab its posts.
Here’s the step-by-step process:
A few notes:
So that’s it: my new link blog.
Bonus Content! I also set up Zapier to posts my annotated bookmarks to Twitter as they come in. Basically, the free version of Zapier (which is similar to If This Then That) checks my Pinboard links feed every 15 minutes, and when something new appears, it posts the link, title, and description to Twitter.
I once read that NPR uses a digital strategy they call COPE. Which means Create Once, Publish Everywhere.
I like to think of my Pinboard > Blog > Twitter system as DOPE. Draft Once, Post Everywhere.
Yesterday in Facebook Killed the Feed I highlighted the way Facebook and Twitter have contributed to the decline of scholarly blogging. In truth though, those specific platforms can’t take all the blame. There are other reasons why academic bloggers have stopped blogging. There are systemic problems, like lack of time in our ever more harried and bureaucratically-burdened jobs, or online trolling, doxxing, and harassment that make having a social media presence absolutely miserable, if not life-threatening.
There are also problems with blogging itself as it exists in 2018. I want to focus on those issues briefly now. This post is deeply subjective, based purely on an inventory of my own half-articulated concerns. What about blogging keeps me from blogging?
Individually, there are solutions to each of these problems. But taken together—plus other sticking points I know I’m forgetting—there’s enough accumulated friction to making blogging very much a non-trivial endeavor.
It doesn’t have to be. What are your sticking points when it comes to blogging? How have you tried to overcome them?
And if you say “markdown” you’re dead to me.
There’s a movement to reclaim blogging as a vibrant, vital space in academia. Dan Cohen, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Alan Jacobs have written about their renewed efforts to have smart exchanges of ideas take place on blogs of their own. Rather than taking place on, say Twitter, where well-intentioned discussions are easily derailed by trolls, bots, or careless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or on Facebook, where Good Conversations Go to Die.
Kathleen recently put it more diplomatically:
An author might still blog, but (thanks to the post-Google-Reader decline in RSS use) ensuring that readers knew that she’d posted something required publicizing it on Twitter, and responses were far more likely to come as tweets. Even worse, readers might be inspired to share her blog post with their friends via Facebook, but any ensuing conversation about that post was entirely captured there, never reconnecting with the original post or its author. And without those connections and discussions and the energy and attention they inspired, blogs… became isolated. Slowed. Often stopped entirely.
You can’t overstate this point about the isolation of blogs. I’ve installed FreshRSS on one of my domains (thanks to Reclaim Hosting’s quick work), and it’s the first RSS reader I feel good about in years—since Google killed Google Reader. I had TinyRSS running, but the interface was so painful that I actively avoided it. With FreshRSS on my domain, I imported a list of the blogs I used to follow, pruned them (way too many have linkrotted away, proving Kathleen’s point), and added a precious few new blogs. FreshRSS is a pleasure to check a couple of times a day.
Now, if only more blogs posts showed up there. Because what people used to blog about, they now post on Facebook. I detest Facebook for a number of reasons and have gone as far as you can go without deleting your Facebook account entirely (unfriended everyone, stayed that way for six months, and then slowly built up a new friend network that is a fraction of what it used to be…but they’re all friends, family, or colleagues who I wouldn’t mind seeing a pic of my kids).
Anyway, what I want to say is, yes, Google killed off Google Reader, the most widely adopted RSS reader and the reason so many people kept up with blogs. But Facebook killed the feed.
The kind of conversations between academics that used to take place on blogs still take place, but on Facebook, where the conversations are often locked down, hard to find, and written in a distractedsocialmediamultitaskingway instead of thoughtful and deliberative. It’s the freaking worst thing ever.
You could say, Well, hey, Facebook democratized social media! Now more people than ever are posting! Setting aside the problems with Facebook that have become obvious since November 2016, I counter this with:
No. Effing. Way.
Facebook killed the feed. The feed was a metaphorical thing. I’m not talking about RSS feeds, the way blog posts could be detected and read by offsite readers. I’m talking about sustenance. What nourished critical minds. The feed. The food that fed our minds. There’s a “feed” on Facebook, but it doesn’t offer sustenance. It’s empty calories. Junk food. Junk feeds.
To prove my point I offer the following prediction. This post, which I admit is not exactly the smartest piece of writing out there about blogging, will be read by a few people who still use RSS. The one person who subscribes to my posts by email (Hi Mom!) might read it. Maybe a dozen or so people will like the tweet where I announce this post—though who knows if they actually read it. And then, when I drop a link to this post on Facebook, crickets. If I’m lucky, maybe someone sticks the ? emoji to it before liking the latest InstantPot recipe that shows up next in their “feed.”
That’s it. Junk food.
FreshRSS 