Stoner Bricolage

June 13, 2025June 13, 2025Leave a comment

One key difference between A New Hope in 1977 and The Empire Strikes Back, and everything that’s followed since, is that we shifted from stoner bricolage to nerd control panels. In the ‘70s, the best sci-fi came from people who thought like collage artists and smelled like soldering irons. You had stoners with engineering degrees, or at least stoners who could strip a car down and rewire it to play Pink Floyd backward. These were not people obsessed with canon—they were obsessed with vibe, with flow, with how light hits chrome at sunset and what it might mean to hear a Tibetan bell ring inside an airlock.

They weren’t interested in clean lines or perfect logic. They made futures out of junk. Kit-bashed starships. Duct tape aesthetics. Space as a frontier not just of exploration, but of expression. Think Silent Running—eco-mysticism in orbit, robots tending gardens. Think Dark Star—a beach ball alien and existential ennui drifting through the void. Think Star Wars itself: Tatooine wasn’t designed, it was discovered. Found materials, global myth, broken tech, samurai films, World War II dogfights—all smashed together and lovingly duct-taped into a universe.

That’s stoner bricolage. You take what you’ve got—industrial detritus, mythic fragments, weird dreams—and you jam until it resonates. You don’t build a schematic; you build a tone. The force doesn’t get explained. It feels like something.

But sometime in the long crawl through the ’90s into the 2000s, the nerds inherited the galaxy. The ones who catalog. The ones who annotate. The ones who really need you to know that this particular blue milk came from a canonically verified bantha variant. Suddenly, sci-fi became a series of wiki entries strung together with action scenes. Every mystery required an origin story. Every background extra had a name, a rank, and a tie-in novel. The subconscious was evicted by the spreadsheet.

It’s not that these new architects aren’t talented. It’s just that the mess—the holy mess—got scrubbed out. Everything’s polished. Gridded. Pre-vizzed. Nerd sci-fi is like a showroom replica of something that was once lived-in. You can sit in the cockpit, but you can’t crash it into a weird idea.

Andor is a fascinating exception, because it moves with the mood and melancholy of spy fiction. It feels like it was written with cigarettes and regret instead of keyframes and lore decks. But even it, despite the emotional texture, is still tightly engineered. It’s masterful, but it’s not stoned.

The difference isn’t just cultural—it’s procedural. The stoner bricoleur makes a spaceship out of a broken blender, a Yashica lens, and an old mythology book. The nerd builds a universe in Unreal Engine and writes a 30-page internal memo about the ethical structure of the Gungan Senate.

One wants to open your third eye.

The other wants to document what your third eye would see, had it been canonically opened in Episode III.

So yeah—sci-fi used to be a cosmic garage band made of welders and dreamers. Now it’s a consulting firm of continuity experts. And somewhere out there, floating past a binary sunset, a stoned engineer stares at a half-finished model and thinks: what if the spaceship had feelings?

And then they build it.

That engineer’s half-built ship with feelings? It wouldn’t hum. It’d cough. Sputter like a VW bus climbing the Rockies. Its thrusters would glow with the uneven warmth of thrift-store lampshades. And when it broke down—not if—it’d weep hydraulic fluid in oily rainbows, singing dirges only understood by abandoned satellites. That’s the magic: the tech has soul precisely because it’s flawed. It’s not about efficiency. It’s about conversation.

Stoner bricolage doesn’t fear the jagged edge. It craves it. The duct tape isn’t hiding mistakes—it’s documenting them. Every scuff on the Millennium Falcon’s hull is a story: a smuggler’s panic, a cosmic dust storm, a drunken bet welded shut at 3 AM. Modern sci-fi buffs out those scars. Sands the history smooth. Replaces Han Solo’s fraying nerve with a spreadsheet calculating parsec efficiency.

Where the nerd sees canon, the bricoleur sees compost. Rotting ideas, rusted tropes, dead genres—pile it high, let it ferment. Water it with bong water and Jung. What grows? A sentient city built from crashed generational ships, breathing through algae-coated vents (hello, Alastair Reynolds). A droid forged from a Soviet fridge and a Kabuki mask, reciting Rumi in glitchy binary (RIP, Jodorowsky’s Dune). The future isn’t a blueprint—it’s a mycelial network. Messy. Interconnected. Thriving on decay.

This ain’t laziness. It’s alchemy. Turning leaden pop-trash into gold through sheer audacity. Remember: the Death Star trench run was cobbled from WW2 newsreels and Kurosawa. Vader’s breath? A scuba regulator mic’d to hell. The bricoleur hears the music in the static—the rhythm of a broken fan belt becomes the pulse of hyperspace.

The nerds won the galaxy. Fine. Let them have their polished obsidian spires and 900-page lore bibles. The stoner bricoleurs? They’re out back in the junkyard, watching lichen crawl over a dead warp core. One whispers: “What if the lichen… is praying?”

And the blender starts humming.

Andor might be the real son of Star Wars in spirit—a moody, wounded heir who took the rebellion seriously—but if we’re tracing lineage through stoner bricolage, the wild-eyed, half-welded, road-burnt bastard child is Mad Max: Fury Road. That film is pure bricoleur vision: repurposed machinery, myth-as-metal, visuals screaming louder than exposition ever could. It’s not built on backstory; it’s built on kinetic intuition. The world-building happens at 120 mph with spray paint, glue fumes, guitar amps, and the stink of gasoline-soaked leather.

The genius of Fury Road is that it proves stoner bricolage doesn’t belong to the past—it’s a living process. It mutates. It evolves. It’s the freedom to make the future out of rust and rhythm, junk and joy, where meaning is hammered together from texture and motion, not exposition dumps or meticulously architected canon. It’s the same visual alchemy that gave A New Hope its soul: take a samurai, a cowboy, a fascist, and a failed film student with a garage full of model train kits and camera glue—shake violently.

Let’s not forget what A New Hope really was: a chemical reaction in a hot warehouse. Burnt fingertips from glue guns. Kitbashed X-wings cobbled from plastic leftovers. Droids made from paint cans and vacuform scrap. The smell of melting foam. Matte paintings warping under studio lights. Dust blown onto set pieces with hairdryers to make them “lived-in.” Every prop held together with tape, sweat, and second-hand mythology. That’s stoner bricolage—stoned and bricoleur—vibing your way into space by any means necessary.

There’s a massive, still largely unexplored zone between the intuitive myth-building of A New Hope and the operatic chaos of Fury Road. That in-between space—call it stoner bricolage—is where the next great sci-fi could erupt. It doesn’t have to be reverent. It doesn’t have to be tidy. It can stutter, shimmer, misfire, and still hit harder than anything clean. Give us duct tape and dreams. Give us matte lines and bad compositing. Give us gravity that’s implied, not diagrammed. Give us future tech that makes no sense but feels inevitable.

And beyond that—why stop at collage? Why not rupture the frame entirely? Imagine sci-fi made like outsider art. Like Basquiat in orbit. Like Tarkovsky with a pile of NASA salvage. Like an anime made by a dropout welder on a desert mushroom trip. There’s a universe waiting for stoner-bricoleur mythologists. They just need a camera, a junkyard, a soldering iron, and permission to ignore the lore.

We don’t need to explain the Force.

We need to feel it again—under our fingernails, in the heat haze of a backlot planet,

in the rust, in the glue,

in the sound of broken glass echoing through the stars.

Revenge of the Writer

May 20, 2025Leave a comment

Any showrunner, TV writer, film hack — they all know exactly when they’ve cut a corner. It’s not a mystery. It’s a negotiation. The only variable is how many corners you can cut before the whole thing falls over. You do just enough for the audience not to notice — or not to care. Minimum viable illusion. Minimum viable soul.

What makes Andor so remarkable — so seditious, really — is that Tony Gilroy doesn’t cut a single corner. Not one. He sees the corner. He nods at it. Then he calmly redraws the floorplan of the entire building to make sure he doesn’t have to step around it like a hack. It’s not extravagance. It’s integrity-by-design. He doesn’t spend more — he just refuses to insult the architecture because he remembered that storytelling is architecture, not spray foam insulation..

And what Andor proves — possibly by accident, though that makes it even better — is that audiences remember what real storytelling tastes like. You give them one clean bite, and suddenly the processed paste of “content” starts to feel like what it is: a gray, high-fructose slurry of tropes and compromises. They tune out. They ghost your IP. They unsubscribe.

It used to make sense — in that late-ZIRP, money-is-free, flood-the-zone-with-crap way — to mass-produce cultural noise and pray for virality. Just churn out cheap narrative scaffolding and let the algorithm hang a poster on it. But interest rates are up. Audience patience is down. Burnout is real. The margins are thinner and the bar is higher. Slop isn’t just artistically bankrupt — it’s financially obsolete.

Gilroy didn’t just make a good show. He launched a quiet indictment of the last decade’s content-industrial complex. He made it clear that every “efficient” decision — every data-driven storytelling hack — is actually a tax on attention. And sooner or later, people stop paying.

In Andor, everything earns its place. Pacing has weight. Dialogue does more than explain. Walls speak louder than digital backdrops. The conflicts aren’t charted in the writer’s room with a beat sheet template — they grow out of character, out of lived contradictions, political tensions, exhaustion, dreams.

Gilroy’s not using a different toolbox. He’s using the same hammer, the same wrench, the same limitations. He just bothers to ask what each tool is for before he swings it. No flourish, no flex — just honest craftsmanship. And that kind of rigor, once thought of as auteurist indulgence, might turn out to be the only model that survives the next contraction.

Not because it’s noble. But because it works.

There’s that scene in Michael Clayton — late in the game, late in the hallway, where George Clooney tells Tilda Swinton, calm as a surgical laser: “I’m not the guy you kill. I’m the guy you buy. You don’t kill me, because I’m the one you make a deal with.”

And that line — that whole beat — it’s not just corporate thriller tension. It’s an operator’s truth. It’s also the secret contract between the writer and the system.

Because for years, the system has believed it could kill the writer. Replace them with a brand, a committee, a plug-and-play template, or lately, an LLM that’s read a million three-act structures and still doesn’t know what a beat means. But Andor is that hallway moment. Gilroy stands there and says: “You don’t get to kill me. You don’t get to discard me. Because I’m the guy who makes this real. You want something that works? You make a deal with me.” Because for a long time, the writer was the ghost in the machine. Useful, sure. Necessary, kind of. But mostly treated like an obstacle to be optimized, shortened, or outvoted. Pitch decks and IP libraries grew fat while the soul of the thing — the part that actually made it mean something — got stripped for parts.

Somewhere along the line, Silicon Valley — and, let’s be honest, a few execs in Burbank too — started thinking, “Wait a minute. We’ve been training these AIs for years on every story ever written. What if we actually don’t need writers? Not real ones. Maybe just a few to steer the ship. Traffic controllers, not architects. Button-pushers, not operators.” People like Bob Iger looked at the charts, saw the margins, and thought, why not? Writing became a line item, a bottleneck, a risk to be automated. But what they missed — fatally — is that when you remove the architect, you don’t just lose elegance. You lose load-bearing integrity. You lose the part that holds.

The audience can feel it. That covenant. That authorship. They don’t articulate it in trade lingo — they just notice when everything stops feeling like soft plastic. They notice when it’s a story, not a simulation. You can’t kill the operator and expect the machine to run. Not for long.

What Andor does — structurally, narratively, even politically — is insist that the operator must be in the loop. Not as a nod to old-school prestige. Not as a writer’s ego trip. But because in the new economy, craft is leverage. Attention is a finite resource. Garbage doesn’t just bore people — it breaks the machine.

Gilroy’s show says: you want tension? You want payoff? You want an arc that means something when it lands? Then bring in the operator. Make the deal. Respect the craft. Otherwise, you’re just throwing zeros at a script-shaped object and calling it development.

And in this post-ZIRP, post-algorithmic-discovery wasteland, that approach might not just be better — it might be the only one left standing. Because once audiences have seen the guy in the hallway, calm and clear-eyed, they’re not going to cheer for the boardroom anymore.

So here we are. The floor is rising. The money’s tightening. The audience is ghosting your carefully A/B-tested sludge. The studio notes don’t land like they used to. The algorithm’s drunk and retraining itself on garbage. Everyone’s standing around, confused, wondering why nobody’s clicking “next episode.”

Andor is the blowback. The consequence. The quiet proof that you can’t cut the operator out of the loop without the machine eventually breaking down. You don’t get the tension, the stakes, the soul of that prison arc — or the monologues that actually say something — unless there’s a writer at the controls. Not a content manager. Not a data wrangler. A writer.

It’s not romanticism. It’s thermodynamics. You want something with structure, friction, heat? You need someone who knows where to place the load-bearing lines. You want to move someone, shift them — not just entertain them, but change the temperature of their thoughts? Then you need someone who understands how emotion and revelation intersect. That’s not a spreadsheet skill. That’s a writer’s domain.

And now, the model’s changing. Capital has a cost again. Algorithms have plateaued. Audiences are done being tricked. You don’t get to kill the writer anymore. You have to make a deal. Because without that, you’re just throwing noise into the void — and the void isn’t listening.

The Revenge of the Writer isn’t loud. It’s not violent. It’s structural. It’s architectural. It’s the slow, methodical return of everything the industry thought it could cheat.

Bookstores

May 18, 2025May 18, 2025Leave a comment

The point of a bookshop is not to find what you are looking for. To believe otherwise is to mistake the architecture of the labyrinth for that of the supermarket.

A bookshop is not a catalog made flesh, nor a repository of answers to pre-formed questions. It is a topos, a place of sacred disorientation, where the intellect is ambushed by digressions and the reader, like a medieval monk encountering glosses thicker than the scripture itself, is drawn into interstitial alleys of thought. We enter seeking X—some manual, some recipe, some utilitarian solution—but leave burdened and blessed by Y, Z, and perhaps an entire apocryphal alphabet we never knew existed. Consider Darwin, who wandered into a library seeking beetle specimens and stumbled upon Malthus’ treatise on population—a detour that rerouted the course of biological history. The bookshop’s shelves are temporal wormholes: each spine a door to a century, each footnote a fracture in chronology.

This is because the bookshop, unlike the algorithm or the library of Borges’ perfect order, is governed by a friendly chaos—a microcosm of culture where the unexpected lurks in proximity. You may reach for Wittgenstein and find Perec; you may stumble upon a treatise on falconry while navigating toward Derrida. This is not an error but the essential genius of the place. Neuroscience confirms this: browsing shelves activates the brain’s ventral attention network, a diffuse state akin to daydreaming, where dopamine spikes at the sight of unexpected titles. fMRI studies reveal this mode—linked to the default mode network—correlates with creative insight, as if the mind, unshackled from task-oriented focus, begins weaving metaphors between disparate domains.

To truly read is to be led astray. The purpose of the bookshop, then, is serendipity formalized. It embodies what I once called the antilibrary: that great, looming pile of unread books which accuses our ignorance not with shame, but with invitation. Every volume not sought is a provocation to the mind, a challenge to the self’s imagined coherence. This is the lesson of the flâneur: to wander is to let the city—or the shelf—think through you. Just as Walter Benjamin’s arcades birthed the vagabond philosopher, our bookshops cultivate the browser, the devotee of disorientation, for whom getting lost is a form of prayer.

In short, the bookshop exists so that we may not find what we are looking for—but instead discover what we could never have known to seek.

Scientifically, the bookshop operates as a heterotopia—a space that reflects yet subverts the outside world. Its chaos is not random but a stochastic geometry: a network where books act as nodes connected by thematic, tactile, and temporal threads. Scale-free network theory explains why certain titles (e.g., Nietzsche, Woolf) become hubs, drawing connections to obscure poetry or out-of-print memoirs. As you navigate the aisles, your brain mirrors this structure, the hippocampus mapping knowledge not linearly but topographically, like a medieval monk memorizing scripture through spatial mnemonics.

Algorithmic platforms, by contrast, are epistemic monocultures. They thrive on filter bubbles, narrowing choice into echo chambers of preference. Where Amazon whispers, “You may also like…”, the bookshop shouts, “You may also be…”—a provocation to become someone new. Zadie Smith once wrote that algorithms “know what you want but not what you are,” a poverty the bookstore inverts. Its shelves weaponize adjacency: a 17th-century herbal placed beside cyberpunk fiction, Borges nested in birdwatching guides. These collisions follow Zipf’s Law, where frequency and proximity breed meaning, turning chance into inevitability.

Tactile entropy further defies digital efficiency. Studies on haptic memory show that physical interaction with books—the drag of fingertips over embossed titles, the musk of aging paper—anchors ideas in the sensorium. To heft a novel, to dog-ear a page, is to engage in a somatic dialogue absent in scrolling. The bookshop’s “noise” (disordered shelves, frayed covers) acts as stochastic resonance, amplifying faint signals (an overlooked memoir, a forgotten philosophy) into conscious attention.

Historically, this dynamic birthed revolutions. The Strand’s labyrinthine aisles once yielded a first edition of Leaves of Grass beside a punk rock zine; Shakespeare and Company’s chaotic trove led Hemingway to a geometry text that tightened his prose. These moments are not accidents but phase transitions—leaps of insight that occur only at the edge of chaos, where order and disorder interlace.

The bookshop is thus a machine for manufacturing epistemological surprise. It weaponizes distraction, knowing that novelty emerges not from efficiency but from the fertile overwhelm of too much. To enter is to surrender to the physics of curiosity: every unread book a gravitational anomaly, pulling the mind into orbits unknown. We come seeking answers and leave with better questions—ones we lacked the language to ask. The antilibrary’s whisper is relentless: You are larger than what you seek.

The Ossification of the Second Brain

Once, in the luminous dawn of the third millennium, humanity approached the construction of a new organ—a noösphere not unlike Teilhard de Chardin’s mystical dreams or Vannevar Bush’s speculative memex. This was not merely a technological apparatus but a metaphysical extension of mind, a Promethean gesture wrapped in silicon: the so-called Second Brain.

In those halcyon years, the Web resembled a kind of semiotic Babel—disordered, yes, but teeming with vitality. The hyperlink served as the fundamental connective tissue, its promiscuous referentiality echoing the Talmudic tradition, or the labyrinthine footnotes of a 16th-century legal codex. Wikipedia appeared as a kind of Alexandrian Library reborn—not static, but always-already revising itself. It suggested a democratized Gnosis, where knowledge, once the province of hierophants and mandarins, now unfolded through revision histories and Talk pages.

Early Twitter, similarly, mimicked the operation of the medieval disputatio: brief propositions offered to a dispersed scholastic community, who responded not with systematic treatises but aphorisms, hashtags, and occasionally, revolutions. Hashtags, those curious metadata sigils, acted like cabbalistic characters—summoning ideological mobs into being, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park.

The blogosphere was a cathedral of subjectivity. Each author a minor abbot of some obscure monastery, tending his garden of idiosyncrasies via RSS, referencing other abbots, debating, digressing. It was a pre-modern digitality—a form of literacy more scholastic than bureaucratic.

Yet every Renaissance begets its Counter-Reformation. As the platforms matured, they underwent what any ecclesiastical institution eventually does: codification, centralization, and dogmatization. The algorithm replaced the hyperlink as the dominant epistemological force—not a path chosen, but one calculated.

The interfaces themselves began to enact a kind of silent Inquisition. Chronology was abolished—replaced by predictive recursion. Like the synoptic gospels stripped of apocrypha, feeds became canonized. The machinery of engagement—a term once connoting intimacy or military action—now referred to the precise neurochemical manipulation of the user-subject.

Nuance perished in this new liturgy. The “Like” became a sacrament of shallow assent; the “Block” a digital excommunication. Knowledge, once plural and contested, was subsumed under taxonomies dictated by ad revenue and search engine optimization. The rich ambiguity of texts—so beloved by Derrida and medieval glossators alike—was flattened into monetizable “content.”

At this point we must speak of ontology, that old scholastic preoccupation. The platforms did not merely change behavior; they instituted a regime of Being. In the 2010s, this regime calcified around a few tenets—quasi-theological in tone, but technological in form.

Consider first the heresy of Zombie Libertarianism—a faith professed even as its prophets (Thiel, Musk, et al.) built monopolies. This creed professed decentralization while consolidating control, all under the guise of “innovation.”

Next, Metric Fundamentalism: a faith in that most American of idols, the quantifiable. “If it cannot be graphed, it does not exist,” declared the new priesthood of data. Here, Aquinas is replaced by the A/B test; hermeneutics by analytics dashboards.

Worst of all, perhaps, was the Imagination Deficit—the metaphysical anemia of a civilization that could simulate reality in high fidelity but could no longer envision alternatives to ride-sharing or social scoring. The platforms had replaced the possible with the plausible, and then the plausible with the profitable.

Yet, as with all decaying cathedrals, reformation stirs. The disillusioned now seek newer monastic orders. Some retreat to the hinterlands of Mastodon or the samizdat of indie blogs, others rediscover the sensuousness of analog tools—typewriters, Moleskines, mimeographs. These acts are not quaint nostalgia but ritual acts of re-enchantment.

And then comes the Mirror: the artificial intelligence that—trained on the very detritus of the platform age—vomits back a pastiche of clichés. What failed was not the technology per se but the telos it served. We mistook the extension of cognition for its compression. The promise was a machine for thought; the reality, a machine for recursion. We wandered into a mirror maze and mistook it for a horizon.

The algorithm optimizes; the bookstore confounds. In the one, we are guided by the cool logic of statistical regularities, a machinic shepherding of curiosity into the pen of the already-likely. In the other, we stumble upon the unexpected, not by accident but by designed chaos, as if drawn by the magnetism of the marginal. A reader might reach for Kierkegaard and encounter, inexplicably yet meaningfully, a treatise on moth migration—a juxtaposition impossible within the predictive tyranny of “Customers Also Bought.”

This is not nostalgia; it is metaphysics. The digital world believes in taxonomy: a world precisely named, flattened, indexed. But the bookstore is topological: a space where affinities are spatial, analogical, erotic even. Cookbooks rest beside cosmology, not out of disorder but because the bookseller, a minor Hermes of shelves, has perceived a common yearning—for the origin of things, whether edible or celestial.

Even the tempo of cognition differs. The platform accelerates—its ideal form is the frictionless interface, the zero-lag stimulus-response loop. But in the bookstore, time congeals. Pages resist; spines creak. Browsing is a muscular and moral act. There is no scroll, only the turn. Haptic memory, as psychologists have shown, inscribes thought more deeply than keystrokes. Nietzsche might say: the algorithm thinks with its feet, sprinting blindly toward relevance; the bookstore thinks with its hands, fumbling toward insight.

So what might a post-platform epistemology look like, if not this? It would not be a rejection of technology but a re-sacralization of disorientation. We would build engines that refuse to sort by relevance, curators who assemble poetry beside politics, quantum physics beside the metaphysics of hell. We would restore the gloss—that medieval form of marginalia, the scholar’s whisper to herself beside the canonical text—that platforms have effaced in favor of SEO and clarity.

To honor the unread is not to scorn knowledge but to confess that it exceeds us. The algorithm seeks closure; the bookstore invites recurrence and becomes a heterotopia in the Foucauldian sense: not merely a different space, but a space that unsettles all other spaces by its very existence. In its aisles, we are freed from the tyranny of the “You might also like,” and instead, like Borges’ Funes, we remember that reality’s richness lies in its irreducibility.

In the age of platformal ossification, when engagement masquerades as thought and the past is endlessly re-fed to itself, the bookstore offers not a second brain, but something stranger and more vital: a second chance. Not to know better, but to not know differently. To let the unread accuse us. To dwell, even briefly, in the sublime disorder of the infinite shelf.

Andor

May 11, 2025May 17, 2025Leave a comment

The Nocturne of Small Betrayals:

Doing this now, probably because of early Andor withdrawal symptoms onset.

Why Furst now? Because I’ve got maybe four episodes left of Andor Season Two, and then it’s back to the algorithmic sludge of prestige TV — safe, symmetrical, and so thoroughly test-screened it might as well be AI. I’m clutching at straws, maybe. Trying to do some highbrow copium with a stack of Alan Furst paperbacks. Except it turns out it’s not copium at all — it’s a lateral move. Furst, especially in the late novels, is pure signal. No noise. Just low-level operatives in overcoats slipping through the cracks of history, trying not to get noticed, trying not to die, trying not to care too much. It’s not comfort. It’s just fantastic.

Alan Furst is an American novelist, sure, but he doesn’t write like one. Not in that bomber-jacket, Tom Clancy, high-fructose, ordinance-pornography way. No, Furst’s imagination is definitively European, and not the Europe of Eurostar and EU technocrats. He writes from the wet cobblestones of Vichy, the train platforms at dusk, the café corners where people drink vermouth and quietly die inside. His lineage doesn’t run through Hemingway and Chandler — it cuts instead through Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, the patron saints of weary moral compromise.

I think Furst has got better with time. The early novels felt like he had the right moves, but they were slightly 1990s coloured, but the new stuff seems old and bitter, the heroism more incidental which is thoroughly enjoyable.

I say I started “Under Occupation” as a way to manage the early onset of Andor withdrawal symptoms. And it‘s working. Because if anything, Furst has aged into the role. The new novels aren’t about espionage as swashbuckling. They’re about friction. Delay. Small moves made without conviction.

Tony Gilroy didn’t stumble into Andor. He’s spent decades writing about surveillance, systems breaking down, and the people stuck inside them. Michael Clayton, the Bourne films — his whole thing is men who know how to operate but don’t run the board. He doesn’t do heroes. He does professionals. That’s what gives Andor its charge.

Gilroy plugs Star Wars into a pressure cooker built by Ambler and Greene and starts stripping it down. He understands rebellion as inertia, not idealism — that what crushes people isn’t evil, it’s weight. The system matters more than the individual choices inside it.

Given something rare in Hollywood — time — Gilroy doesn’t just nod to writers like Greene, Ambler, Le Carré, or Furst. He earns his place among them. The 90-minute thriller script is a speed-run: it’s built for clarity, not contradiction. But Andor has room to stretch. With nothing to sell but dread, Gilroy lets the story mold at the edges. Characters get to linger in their contradictions. Their competence is frayed by exhaustion, their loyalty situational. It’s not about saving the galaxy — it’s about surviving the next meeting without betraying someone.

That space he’s given? He fills it not with myth or redemption, but with paperwork, paranoia, and the kind of resignation that only shows up in people who’ve been in the fight too long. It’s the real thing.

It’s not that Andor copies Alan Furst. That’s the wrong architecture. In any case, Andor is doing what Furst himself was doing — running a backchannel off a longer, older transmission. If Andor is “influenced” by anything, it’s a palimpsest: Le Carré rewriting Graham Greene, who was already lifting structure and moral weight from Eric Ambler, who had one eye on the newsreels and the other on Joseph Conrad — or maybe John Bunyan, depending on how Protestant your hangover is.

You see the recursion here. Everyone’s cribbing from the guy before, but they’re not stealing plot — they’re stealing atmosphere. They’re inheriting weather systems: fog, rain, moral ambiguity. What changes is the hardware. Ambler had battered freighters and fake passports. Greene had MI6 memos and guilty priests. Le Carré had the bureaucratic sinews of Cold War drift. Furst leaned into train stations, wet boots, people who weren’t quite important enough to be watched.

Andor just updates the infrastructure. It’s railguns and orbital prisons now. The Empire does real-time surveillance. The rebels run ops off a closed-loop network. The tone, however, is grandfathered in. Nobody trusts anyone. Everyone’s already compromised. Faith is out, competence is in. This isn’t copying — it’s convergence. A genre inheritance repurposed for an age that doesn’t believe in genres anymore. Only systems.

It’s occupying the same emotional bandwidth. The same architecture of dread. The same low-grade, high-stakes murk. Just with droids.

The narrative DNA is encoded with the same bitter proteins: fear, fatigue, restraint, and the paradoxical dignity of staying human when the future is already lost. There are droids, yes, and space travel and orbital prisons — but the world they serve is lit by the same half-burnt filament bulbs that hang over Furst’s crumbling Parisian safehouses and Balkan border towns.

The rebellion isn’t a fireworks show. It’s a bookkeeping error that becomes a philosophy. It’s a thousand little lies told in the name of something better. It’s not heroism. It’s work.

And in that sense, Andor isn’t just a genre piece with gravitas. It’s the ghost of Ambler and Greene, passed through a droid’s optical sensor and broadcast in Morse.

This is what Gilroy and Furst have in common: neither writes about the people who bend history to their will. They’re more interested in the ones history brushes past, people who aren’t the main characters of history. They don’t storm barricades or end wars; they rent apartments with thin walls and wait for coded messages that may never come. They are adjacent to history — not the actors on stage, but the ones crouched in the wings, holding their breath as the play stumbles forward. They loiter near power, near catastrophe, brushing up against the dread of world events like the side of a trench coat catching fire.

These are the types who smuggle microfilm not out of idealism but because they’ve learned how to slip through cracks in the system. They don’t aspire to change the world — they’re trying to stay upright as it shifts beneath their feet. The stakes are unspeakably high, but the work is small, grubby, and often absurd: bad coffee, unreliable contacts, unmarked doors in cities that don’t forgive mistakes. You keep your head down. You lose sleep. Sometimes you fall in love with someone you shouldn’t — a border agent’s sister, a poet with a false name — and sometimes you try to leave a letter behind to explain yourself. Usually, you run out of time. And when it’s over, there’s no parade. Just a train ticket, a new alias, and a story no one wants to hear.

Andor is not just the most disciplined product of the Star Wars industrial complex, but the only one that understands that rebellion is logistics, not romance. It’s not waving a sword in the desert. It’s arguing in basements, laundering money through fake construction firms, and killing people who used to be on your side. Andor doesn’t mimic Alan Furst — it simply operates in the same terrain. It lodges itself between Eric Ambler’s gray pragmatism and Graham Greene’s Catholic guilt, in a zone where everyone is morally compromised and still showing up for work.

Nobody in Andor believes in clean victories. There’s no cavalry coming, no righteous arc. The revolution is underfunded, underinformed, and always one courier away from collapse. Surveillance is constant and granular — not poetic, but administrative. Every ally is a liability; every conversation is a risk assessment. This isn’t mythmaking — it’s management under duress. The Empire isn’t evil because it’s cruel. It’s evil because it’s functional. It scales. It audits. It delegates horror through middle management and memos.

It runs like a spreadsheet — massive, boring, structurally elegant, and utterly indifferent to the lives it nullifies. Nobody throws lightning. They just file forms. And what’s left of the resistance isn’t a rebellion in any traditional sense — it’s a tangle of deniable assets, empty safehouses, and exiles with shaky cover stories. It’s a startup that’s lost the plot, held together by shared paranoia and outdated codebooks. Every victory is provisional. Every failure, permanent. And in the meantime, the Empire just keeps printing uniforms.The resistance is less an army than a shell corporation with delusions of relevance.

And here’s where it gets interesting: there’s a resonance with Che Guevara’s Congo Diaries — not the poster-boy Che, not the romantic on the motorcycle, but the failed field commander buried in a collapsing jungle op — ironically, Diego Luna’s business partner, Gael García Bernal, already played the young idealist version in The Motorcycle Diaries. Andor skips that phase. It starts in the Congo and skips the wide-eyed phase entirely. It opens in the jungle, already lost. Already compromised.

Che arrived in Africa thinking revolution was portable — that you could drop ideology into a failing state like a firmware update and watch justice boot up. What he found instead was a logistics graveyard: undisciplined fighters, broken comms, rotting food supplies, and comrades more interested in rank than radio codes. He writes with growing despair that passion doesn’t patch malaria nets. Righteousness doesn’t make people carry water. The jungle doesn’t care what you believe.

Andor gets this. Its early jungle-set pieces don’t feel like adventure; they feel like maintenance nightmares. The rebels are cold, wet, sick, and unsure who will flinch next. The planning is bad. The morale is worse. Ideology is mostly unspoken because everyone knows it’s not enough. And that’s the point — Andor is not about the triumph of belief. It’s about the attrition of human systems. The creeping, granular failure of plans made too late with people half-trained, underfed, and increasingly unsure whether the cause is real — or just another failed export.

The world doesn’t fall because you’re righteous. It falls because nobody’s paying attention while you quietly lose. Andor is fluent in that. It knows revolutionaries are often indistinguishable from criminals, and that the most dangerous thing you can do in an authoritarian system is waste time explaining your principles. It’s not here to inspire. It’s here to demonstrate operational continuity under existential pressure. In the end, Furst’s late novels — bitter, beautiful, and twilight-lit — aren’t about winners. They’re about ghosts. So is Andor. The war is coming, yes, but the cost is already counted in the dead eyes of men who’ve made too many compromises and the women who vanished on trains bound east.

So sure, call it Star Wars. That’s the IP wrapper, the merchandising code, the decoy title printed on the front of the box. But really, Andor inhabits the same universe as Night Soldiers — not literally, but morally, atmospherically. It’s a world where nothing is clean, everyone is compromised, and courage comes in the form of small, unpaid choices made in quiet rooms. A world of dossiers, code names, whisper networks, and the sickly hum of fluorescent betrayal. You don’t win by being bold; you win by being missed. By not showing up on the right radar. By vanishing into forms, protocols, and sealed envelopes that no one bothers to open until it’s too late.

And maybe that’s the real shock: how much this world — the world of Furst and Andor — feels contemporary. How it doesn’t just mirror the past, but suggests we’re running the same operating system again. The OS of polite authoritarianism, hollow alliances, and bureaucracies so vast they function without intention. The age of the charismatic ideologue is closing again. What’s replacing it is colder, quieter — a world where systems fail not in fire, but in paperwork.

But maybe that’s not entirely bad. In these stories, clarity doesn’t come from glory; it comes from friction. From the grinding of motives, the negotiations in shadows, the refusal to give in to the logic of utility. Andor understands, as Furst does, that the grand battles are already lost. The only thing left is to decide whether you disappear on your feet or your knees. And whether you can teach someone else, before the lights go out, how to find the fuse box.

Minecraft

April 12, 2025April 12, 2025Leave a comment

I went to see Minecraft and couldn’t help noticing a pattern in recent blockbusters—from Mario Bros. and Everything Everywhere to Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, and The Batman: every character is hustling, struggling, or just scraping by. It signals how economic precarity has been normalized in American storytelling—and not just in dramas or indie films, where you’d expect that tone. It’s everywhere now.

It’s as if the industry’s collective unconscious lags people’s reality but much is much faster than politics. Back in 2020 or 2021, when these scripts were finalized, screenwriters and execs had already recognized that “broke and overworked” wasn’t a quirky character trait anymore—it was the default condition of the American viewer.

The contradiction is sharper considering media kept insisting things were improving—or, in Fox’s case, that they weren’t because of “woke” or brown people. Meanwhile, Hollywood was already packaging narratives that admitted the opposite.

At first glance, Minecraft—a game about infinite possibility, where players sculpt blocky worlds with godlike creativity—seems like an escapist fantasy. But dig beneath its colorful surface, and you’ll find a mirror reflecting the quiet desperation of modern life: the grind. Survival mode, the game’s most iconic format, isn’t about building castles in the clouds. It’s about punching trees for lumber before sunset, frantically cobbling together a shelter to fend off zombies, and mining deep into the earth for scarce resources, all while hunger gnaws at your pixelated stomach. This is precarity, gamified.

Minecraft’s core loop—grind, hoard, survive—resonates because it replicates the rhythms of late capitalism. Players aren’t just crafting tools; they’re performing the daily calculus of scarcity. Will this coal last the night? Can I afford to risk the caves for diamonds? Should I prioritize bread or armor? These aren’t just gameplay choices; they’re metaphors for a world where stability feels just out of reach, where every gain is shadowed by the threat of losing it all. Even Creative mode, with its cheat-code abundance, can’t escape the ethos of productivity: the pressure to build bigger, faster, better, as if self-worth is measured in virtual monuments.

The game’s brilliance lies in its unspoken critique. While politicians spin fictions about “resilient economies” and “opportunity for all,” Minecraft admits the truth: life is a series of precarious transactions. You labor to stack blocks, only to watch a creeper blow them apart. You plant crops, only to have them trampled. You build empires, but the grind never stops—there’s always another resource to extract, another threat to outrun. It’s no accident that “automated farms” became a hallmark of advanced play: even in a world of limitless dirt, players engineer systems to optimize their toil, mirroring our own obsession with gig apps and side hustles.

Hollywood’s recent blockbusters—from Spider-Man’s rent woes to Everything Everywhere’s multiverse-adjacent IRS trauma—have begun to acknowledge this reality. But Minecraft short of did it first, and more honestly. It doesn’t package precarity as a plot twist or a character quirk; it’s the default condition of existence. The game’s unrelenting demand for labor, its indifference to your struggles, and its refusal to guarantee safety even after hours of work make it the purest cultural artifact of our age. In a world where politics peddles fantasy, sometimes the clearest truths come from a world made of blocks—where survival isn’t a hero’s journey, but a daily scramble to keep the lights on.

The pervasive theme of economic precarity in recent blockbusters—from Minecraft to Spider-Man and The Batman—does more than mirror America’s fraying economic reality; it underscores a profound political failure. While Hollywood’s storytellers have instinctively woven narratives of hustling, scraping-by protagonists into mainstream entertainment, the center-left and center-right political coalitions remain strikingly unable—or unwilling—to articulate a coherent response to the material conditions driving this cultural shift. This dissonance reveals a vacuum in political imagination, where pop culture has become a reluctant truth-teller while partisan elites cling to outdated frameworks.

When these films entered development in 2020-2021, creators implicitly acknowledged what policymakers still struggle to name: that stagnant wages, gig-economy exploitation, and the erosion of social safety nets had transformed “broke and overworked” from a temporary setback to a permanent state of being. Yet the political establishment’s response has been muted, even as Hollywood packaged precarity as escapism. The center-left, tethered to incrementalism and allergic to structural critique, offers Band-Aid solutions—student debt tweaks, means-tested tax credits—that fail to match the scale of collapse. The conservative right, meanwhile, defaults to nostalgia for a mythologized post-war prosperity, blaming cultural scapegoats (“wokeness,” immigrants) while accelerating the very policies—deregulation, union-busting, austerity—that gutted economic stability.

This paralysis is amplified by media narratives that oscillate between gaslighting and deflection. Corporate outlets tout declining inflation or “record job growth” as proof of recovery, ignoring how metrics like GDP obscure lived realities of working-class Americans juggling three apps to pay rent. Right-wing media, as noted, weaponizes precarity to fuel culture-war panic, framing inequality as a symptom of moral decay rather than policy choices. Both approaches alienate audiences who see their struggles reflected not in political rhetoric, but in Peter Parker’s eviction notices or the existential fatigue of Everything Everywhere’s laundromat-timeline-hopping heroine.

Hollywood’s embrace of precarity-as-backdrop exposes how thoroughly neoliberalism has eroded political language. The center-left, still courting donor classes invested in the status quo, avoids terms like “class struggle” or “redistribution,” recasting systemic failure as individual hardship to be mitigated, not overturned. The center-right, having abandoned even lip service to economic populism, peddles libertarian fairy tales (“just work harder!”) that resonate only with those insulated by wealth. Meanwhile, blockbuster screenwriters—unburdened by partisan constraints—depict a world where systemic collapse is the air everyone breathes: Batman’s Gotham isn’t saved by a bold policy agenda, but by a traumatized billionaire punching clowns.

The result is a cultural moment where fiction feels more honest than politics. Audiences flock to these films not just for escapism, but for the relief of seeing their struggles acknowledged in an era when political leaders refuse to do so. Until the center-left and center-right confront the roots of precarity—corporate power, financialized capitalism, the dismantling of worker solidarity—their platforms will remain as disconnected from reality as a Mario Bros. warp pipe. And Hollywood, however unwittingly, will keep drafting the obituary for an American Dream that politics no longer dares to name.

The irony is almost too rich: Hollywood, an industry built on selling fiction, now peddles narratives closer to material reality than the Democratic Party does. For all its corporate cynicism, Hollywood at least acknowledges the dystopia it monetizes. Its superheroes juggle rent and existential dread; its multiverse-hopping heroes are crushed by IRS audits and immigrant parent guilt. These stories, however garish, are rooted in the lived texture of precarity—the three jobs, the debt, the sense of systems spiraling beyond control. Democrats, by contrast, have crafted a political brand so untethered from material conditions that it verges on magical realism.

Consider the plot holes in the Democratic script: They tout “Bidenomics” while presiding over a housing market where the median home price now requires a $115,000 salary—a sum 75% of Americans don’t earn. They celebrate “record low unemployment” as if gig work and AI-driven layoffs haven’t turned full-time employment into a luxury good. They nod at climate disaster while approving more oil drilling than Trump, as if we’re all living in a Pixar film where the laws of physics pause for moderate bipartisanship. Hollywood’s heroes might battle cartoonish villains, but the Democrats’ villains—corporate greed, oligarchic power—are treated as unmentionable ghosts, haunting a set everyone pretends isn’t on fire.

Hollywood’s “unrealism” is at least honest about its artifice. When The Hunger Games franchises rake in billions by dramatizing wealth inequality and elite sadism, they’re channeling a collective recognition that capitalism has become a death game. Yet Democrats still frame poverty as a personal failure to be solved with tax credits and bootstraps, a narrative so detached from the algorithmic wage suppression and monopoly pricing crushing households that it makes Avengers time travel look plausible. Even Marvel’s Thanos had a clearer policy platform (“snap away half of life”) than the party’s milquetoast stance on corporate monopolies.

The true fiction isn’t Batman’s rogues’ gallery—it’s the Democratic Party’s insistence that incremental tweaks to a broken system will reverse decades of collapse. Hollywood’s writers, for all their clichés, understand that audiences crave catharsis: a villain to punch, a system to smash, a blueprint for revolt. Democrats offer none of these. Instead, they gaslight voters with spreadsheet macros about “cost-saving efficiencies” and “public-private partnerships,” as if the working class hasn’t already seen this movie—and hated the ending.

In this era of compounding crises, Hollywood’s lies are at least useful lies. They admit, however crassly, that life under late capitalism feels apocalyptic. Democrats, meanwhile, are stuck in a Frank Capra fanfic, insisting America is one bipartisan infrastructure bill away from a rainbow-farting utopia. The party’s refusal to name power—to confront banks, monopolists, or the billionaire donor class—renders its rhetoric more delusional than anything in Barbie’s plastic feminist dreamhouse.

So yes: Hollywood is a profit-hoarding, union-busting machine. But in a perverse twist, its greed forces it to listen. To stay relevant, it must metabolize the anxieties of its audience, even if only to repackage them as entertainment. The Democratic Party, by contrast, answers to a donor aristocracy that profits directly from the status quo—and thus has no incentive to see, hear, or speak the truth. The result? An industry that sells $20 popcorn to audiences watching films about late-stage collapse is still more reality-based than a political party asking those same audiences to vote for “4 more years of normalcy.”

The final act twist? Hollywood’s fictions are a cry for help. The Democratic Party’s fictions are a demand for complacency. One admits the house is burning. The other hawks commemorative “This Is Fine” mugs.

The Non Existent Knight

April 4, 2025April 5, 2025Leave a comment

Of Empty Armor and Absurd Quests

The first time I read The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino, I imagined I had stumbled onto a lost Monty Python script—one written in secret, translated from the Italian, and perhaps smuggled through time in a hollowed-out codpiece. There it all was: the self-serious knight with no self, the ludicrous battles fought for reasons long forgotten, the crumbling machinery of Church and State, and a narrator who may be inventing the entire tale while cloistered in a convent. If Don Quixote and Waiting for Godot had a baby in a suit of armor, and then handed that baby over to the Pythons for finishing school, this would be the result.

Calvino’s Agilulf is a knight in shining armor—literally only that. He’s a suit of armor animated by sheer will and adherence to knightly protocol, a bureaucrat in a battlefield, a man so perfect he ceases to exist. The knights who surround him are petty, confused, and perpetually distracted. The Church is there to muddle things. Women disguise themselves as men. And all quests lead not to glory, but to farce.

Sound familiar?

Though there is a 1969 film version of The Nonexistent Knight—a strange hybrid of animation and live-action directed by Pino Zac—it’s worth remembering that Calvino’s novel came first, published in 1962. The film adaptation captures some of the book’s surreal, satirical energy, but it’s the novel itself that feels eerily ahead of its time.

Reading The Nonexistent Knight now, you can’t help but notice how much it seems to anticipate the tone and structure of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). The empty armor, the collapsing logic of knightly codes, the bureaucratization of the quest, the existential jokes delivered in deadpan—Calvino’s book often feels like a conceptual blueprint the Pythons could have stumbled upon, giggled at, and filed away until the coconuts were ready.

it practically is—albeit accidentally, accidentally Italian, and about 70% more philosophical, a dreamlike prequel where the Holy Grail hasn’t been lost yet, the knights are even more neurotic, and God is replaced by bureaucratic absurdity. In other words, imagine this madcap meditation on identity, purpose, and purity… performed by the Monty Python gang.

You’ve got:

A chivalric order reduced to absurd rituals, where no one remembers why they’re fighting but everyone insists on the forms—check.A protagonist defined more by concept than by character (Agilulf as pure will, Arthur as divine appointment)—check.

Knights whose quests collapse into petty squabbles, misunderstandings, or bureaucratic mishaps—check.A narrator who may be making it all up, filtering the story through a lens of religious guilt and romantic confusion—sounds an awful lot like the Holy Grail’s opening intertitles crossed with Terry Gilliam’s God character.

And the kicker: an obsession with the emptiness inside armor—literal in Agilulf’s case, symbolic in the Pythons’.Even the tone overlaps—equal parts high-concept satire, medieval parody, and lowbrow farce.

You could almost imagine The Nonexistent Knight sitting on the same shelf as 1066 and All That or The Goon Show scripts—slotted between Dante and Dada, passed around late-night at Oxford or Cambridge parties.

You’ve got:

A chivalric order reduced to absurd rituals, where no one remembers why they’re fighting but everyone insists on the forms—check.

A protagonist defined more by concept than by character (Agilulf as pure will, Arthur as divine appointment)—check.

Knights whose quests collapse into petty squabbles, misunderstandings, or bureaucratic mishaps—check.

A narrator who may be making it all up, filtering the story through a lens of religious guilt and romantic confusion—sounds an awful lot like the Holy Grail’s opening intertitles crossed with Terry Gilliam’s God character.

And the kicker: an obsession with the emptiness inside armor—literal in Agilulf’s case, symbolic in the Pythons’. Even the tone overlaps—equal parts high-concept satire, medieval parody, and lowbrow farce albeit accidentally, accidentally Italian, and about 70% more philosophical.

If the Pythons didn’t read Calvino, then we’re dealing with one of those eerie creative convergences where the postwar absurdist current broke the surface at the same time in Italy and Britain, each wearing a slightly different helmet.

But imagine, if you will, a dreamlike prequel where the Holy Grail hasn’t been lost yet, the knights are even more neurotic, and God is replaced by bureaucratic absurdity. In other words, imagine this madcap meditation on identity, purpose, and purity… performed by the Monty Python gang.

John Cleese as Agilulf the Nonexistent Knight

Cleese is perfect as Agilulf, the knight so perfect he doesn’t actually exist. With his trademark rigid posture, clipped delivery, and commitment to rules (even when the rules make no sense), Cleese turns Agilulf into a send-up of fascistic order—a man of armor and principle, who literally evaporates if you question him too hard. One can picture him ranting in a tent, correcting everyone’s Latin declensions while polishing armor that may or may not be empty.

Michael Palin as Rambaldo, the Naïve Young Knight

Palin brings his signature wide-eyed innocence to Rambaldo, a character who could wander straight into a shrubbery skit without batting an eyelash. Rambaldo’s quest for glory and love mirrors Palin’s turn as Sir Galahad, always enthusiastic and painfully confused by everything around him. Whether charging into battle or flirting awkwardly with Bradamante, he maintains that classic “Palin-in-peril” charm.

Eric Idle as Torrismund the Monk (Who Might Also Be a Peasant and a Revolutionary)

Let’s slot Idle into this role, shall we? Torrismund, with his secret lineage and shifting loyalties, is ripe for Idle’s gift at playing self-important everymen who talk too much and know too little. Cue a subplot involving mistaken identities, sermons interrupted by peasants complaining about the feudal system, and a song about the joy of not knowing who your father is.

Terry Jones as Bradamante, Warrior Nun and Lovesick Mess

Jones, never one to shy away from playing women, would be perfect as Bradamante, especially in the tragicomic scenes where she pines for Agilulf—yes, the guy who doesn’t exist. His performance would add a delightful awkwardness to Bradamante’s struggle between chaste virtue and frustrated libido, somewhere between Life of Brian’s mother and a lovestruck Valkyrie with a battle axe.

Terry Gilliam as the World Itself (And Probably the Narrator Nun Too)

Gilliam, the animating madman, wouldn’t act so much as warp the entire visual aesthetic of The Nonexistent Knight. Expect forests that look like melting chessboards, siege engines with eyeballs, and paper cutouts of saints wagging fingers. As Sister Theodora, the unreliable narrator who may be inventing the whole story, Gilliam would peer from behind an illuminated manuscript, giggling at inconsistencies and sipping mead from a fish.

David Chapman (a surprise guest star as the Horse)

Let’s get weird and have Chapman play Agilulf’s horse—a beast of burden that, much like its rider, has no actual personality but is imbued with strange dignity. Chapman, master of playing the ultimate straight man in a world gone mad, might even steal the show with a deadpan whinny or a stoic refusal to move in protest of metaphysical contradiction.

The Nonexistent Knight, in Monty Python’s hands, would be less a film than a fever dream of false identities, empty armors, collapsing authority, and slapstick heresy. It’s Holy Grail before there was a grail to lose—where the main joke is that the knightly ideal isn’t dead, but never lived to begin with. A crusade against meaning, carried out by fools, lovers, clerics, and the ghost of reason.

All that’s missing is a shrubbery. And maybe a foot that comes down from the sky and squashes Agilulf into a puff of existential despair.

I mean, the parallels are so specific, it starts to feel less like coincidence and more like a secret adaptation done under the cover of coconut halves.

Honestly, it’s the kind of literary mystery that deserves its own sketch:

Michael Palin: “Look, I told you, Agilulf doesn’t exist!”

John Cleese (in full armor): “Then who’s polishing my pauldrons, you silly man?!”

Terry Jones (as Bradamante): “Does this mean I’ve been flirting with a concept all along?!”

Makes you wonder if Holy Grail was the Pythons’ own answer to Calvino: “What if we took that metaphysical knight… and made him look even more ridiculous?”

HYPERREALITY

In attempting to place The Nonexistent Knight within the world of Monty Python, we inadvertently construct an accidental hyperreality—a blending of Calvino’s medieval archetypes with the absurdity of Python’s comedic sensibilities. By layering these distinct worlds, we’re left with a knight who, while rooted in the medieval tradition, is refracted through the absurdity of modern sensibilities. The Pythons’ characters often embody archetypes of authority, absurd heroism, and misguided purpose—traits that mirror the empty nobility at the heart of Agilulf’s existential crisis. When these elements are layered on top of Calvino’s original medieval constructs, the knightly archetype becomes a hollow, comedic parody of itself. Instead of representing valor and honor, these characters begin to stand for the performance of those ideals, trapped in an endless loop of their own absurdity.

The beauty of this process lies in the accidental nature of it. What begins as an attempt to merge two worlds—the medieval and the absurd—results in a multi-dimensional satire where traditional symbols of knighthood are completely distorted. The knights in Calvino’s narrative are already part of a decaying system, performing a ritualistic role without any true meaning behind it. The Pythons take this idea further, layering on top their own archetypes of bumbling authority figures, smug tricksters, and everyman fools. These characters, often self-important and out of touch with reality, further detach the archetypes of knighthood from any semblance of their original meaning. What we are left with is a hyperreal version of knighthood, one that no longer serves its original purpose but instead reflects the absurd, fractured nature of modern life.

This blending of archetypes—both medieval and Python-esque—creates a simulacrum of knighthood, a copy of a copy, detached from the original context. The more we attempt to analyze these characters, the more they slip away from any grounded reality. They become symbols of symbols, performers of roles that are increasingly irrelevant to the world around them. In a Baudrillardian sense, this is the essence of hyperreality: the collapse of the “real” into an endless chain of representations that no longer refer to any original source. What’s left is a culture where meaning is perpetually shifting, fragmented, and disjointed—a space where archetypes, once fixed and meaningful, have become absurd performances detached from their historical or cultural origins.

Nosferatu

March 10, 2025March 10, 2025Leave a comment

In the twilight of late-stage capitalism, where the gig economy thrives on precarious labor and ephemeral rewards, the vampire emerged as a cultural icon, embodying the dark allure of a crumbling empire. These vampires were not mere monsters; they were avatars of a seductive decay, haunting neon-drenched cities where ambition and exploitation intertwined. They whispered Baudelaire in rain-slicked alleys, their existence a blend of high art and predatory chic. These creatures mirrored the gentrifiers of urban landscapes—stylish, calculating, and insatiable. They dwelled in minimalist lofts, their lives curated like Instagram feeds, sipping plasma spritzers (a grotesque parody of artisanal cocktails) while romanticizing the grind. Their bite was both a threat and a forbidden promise: to be chosen was to be part of an exclusive, eternal hustle, a darkly glamorous transcendence above the drudgery of gig work.

Yet this fantasy rotted as quickly as it bloomed. Enter Orlock, the Nosferatu reborn—a gnarled, rat-faced monstrosity rising from the sewers of collapsing infrastructure. Unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t brood in shadows or offer poetic soliloquies. He is hunger incarnate, a blunt force of consumption. His emergence coincides with societal fracture: bridges corrode, power grids flicker, and pandemics sweep through populations already drained by austerity. This vampire doesn’t seek permission to enter; he oozes through cracks in the system, a metaphor for crises that ignore borders and bank accounts. There’s no seduction here, only extraction. His victims aren’t transformed into leather-clad immortals but left as desiccated husks, littering alleys like discarded packaging—a stark commentary on disposable labor in an age of algorithmic exploitation.

The 2025 vampire is a creature of pure transactional horror. The plague backdrop sharpens the metaphor: just as viruses expose societal vulnerabilities, these vampires reveal the raw mechanics of power. They don’t love, don’t linger, don’t aestheticize. They are the gig economy stripped of its glamour, the endgame of gentrification—consuming until nothing remains. Those bitten don’t ascend to demigodhood; they become fuel for a machine that thrives on exhaustion. Friends vanish not into a coven of eternal nightlife but into the void of precarity, their vitality siphoned to feed platforms, landlords, and oligarchs.

This shift from allure to atrocity mirrors our disillusionment. The romantic vampire reflected a time when we still believed in the myth of meritocratic ascent, however vampiric. Now, Orlock’s grotesqueness captures the reality: exploitation without pretense, decay without poetry. The plague years have stripped away the fantasy, revealing a world where consumption is unapologetically violent, and the only eternity offered is the relentless grind—a cycle where you’re not a participant but prey, your value measured in calories, not dreams. The vampire, once a mirror to our aspirational sins, now reflects our collective depletion: a future where we’re not bitten, but drained.

In the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) era, the vampires wore Patagonia vests and carried pitch decks. They were venture capitalists in all but name, their coffers swollen with cheap capital, their hunger masked by buzzwords like “disruption” and “scaling.” These vampires didn’t drain you in one go—they engineered a sustainable extraction model. A nibble here, a sip there, calibrated to keep you juiced enough to grind through back-to-back Zoom calls, to chase the dopamine hit of a Slack notification, to treat your burnout as a personal branding opportunity. They monetized your exhaustion, securitized your attention span, and called it “synergy.” You, meanwhile, called it survival. The bloodletting was frictionless, digitized, gamified—a subscription service to your own depletion.

But the cheap money dried up. The bull market in bullshit expired. Now the vampires don’t bother with the pretense of mutualism. The hoodie-clad optimists have been replaced by private equity ghouls, their fangs sunk deep into the carcass of the real economy. Layoffs aren’t “rightsizing” with meditation app subscriptions and career coaching—they’re a slaughterhouse conveyor belt. Buyouts aren’t golden parachutes; they’re asset-stripping, pension-looting, gutting companies for parts like organs harvested from a roadside wreck. The rot you ignored—the burn rate glamorized as “hustle,” the equity traps disguised as “stock options”—has metastasized. The infrastructure is collapsing, the social contract is ash, and the vampires are no longer sleek Silicon Valley incubi. They’re revenants of an older, rawer hunger: Transylvanian aristocrats in a world stripped to the bone.

You realize now, too late, that the cold charisma of the tech-bro vampire was always a veneer. The “cold, predatory cool” you fetishized—the midnight coding sprints, the kombucha keggers, the cult of the founder—was just the glitter on a corpse. Behind the IPO fireworks and the “change the world” slogans festered the same primordial greed, the same indifference to human biomass. You mistook the vampire’s smirk for sophistication, its detachment for transcendence. But detachment was always the point. The vampire doesn’t hate you. It doesn’t see you. You’re a battery, a vessel, a resource log to be mined until the servers crash.

The plague years peeled back the fantasy. Now, when the vampire feeds, there’s no artful bite to the neck, no velvet-draped eroticism. It’s all exposed bone and septic wounds. You’re not a player in the game anymore—you’re the ambient fuel. The “decomposing mass” behind the scenes? That’s the real economy: a necropolis of gig workers coughing through delivery shifts, nurses rationing IV bags, teachers buying pencils on credit. The vampires didn’t create the rot. They just built their castles on top of it. And you? You were too busy polishing your LinkedIn profile to smell the decay.

Welcome to the post-illusion era. The vampires aren’t pivoting. They’re not iterating. They’re feeding. And this time, there’s no exit strategy.

Prime Directive

February 20, 2025February 21, 2025Leave a comment

James Bond: Prime Directive (An Amazon Studios Original Film—Available Exclusively on Prime Video with Free One-Day Shipping!)

There was a time—perhaps mythical, perhaps real—when James Bond was a man of simple appetites: martinis, women, and the occasional war crime disguised as “Queen and Country.” He was a blunt instrument of empire, a wrecking ball in a tuxedo, and that was fine. That was the job. But those days are gone, rotted from the inside out, liquified in the great capitalist centrifuge.

Yes, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, keepers of the Bond franchise—steadfast, unwavering—have finally cashed out. Not just in the usual Hollywood sense, where dignity is a line item in the budget, but in a way that would make even Ian Fleming choke on his filtered Morland cigarette. The Broccoli-Wilson dynasty didn’t just sell Bond to Amazon. No, no. They absorbed Spectre into Amazon and handed 007 the login credentials. James Bond now works for Spectre, which now is Amazon, which is now… what? A privatized intelligence agency? A planetary-scale data hoover? A corporation with its own standing army? Hell, maybe all three. The lines have blurred so much they may as well be static.

Of course, it all makes perfect sense. If there was ever a modern incarnation of Spectre, it would be Amazon—tentacles in everything, invisible yet omnipresent, its ultimate loyalty not to any ideology but to control itself. And Bond, the eternal patriot, ever the good soldier, does what he always does: adapts to the mission. So now, instead of serving Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he answers to the unholy trinity of market analytics, surveillance capitalism, and one-click assassination authorizations.

MI6 is no more. The British government, citing cost-cutting measures and an unprecedented trade deal with a shadowy corporate entity, has privatized its entire intelligence apparatus. Enter Amazon-Spectre Global Security Solutions™ (ASGSS™), a thrilling new subsidiary handling espionage, assassinations, and same-hour drone strikes with the efficiency of an optimized supply chain. Bond villains used to be deranged industrialists hell-bent on global domination. Now? They just made payroll.

In the teaser sequence James Bond, now codename Agent Prime-007, reports directly to Jeff “Blofeld” Bezos, who strokes a genetically engineered, algorithmically perfected cat while sipping a $14 artisanal oat milk espresso from his own monopoly-controlled supply chain. Bond’s mission? To hunt down a rogue faction of MI6 purists—led by a disgruntled, furloughed M—who refuse to accept that the future of national security is a subscription-based service.

MI6’s absorption wasn’t a hostile takeover—it was a mercy killing. Spectre-Amazon didn’t need British intelligence; it already controlled more data than any government agency could dream of. But there was something quaint about MI6, a relic of the Westphalian system, a charming little espionage boutique with all its Cold War nostalgia and stiff-upper-lip theatrics. So, in an act of sheer sentimentality, Amazon-Spectre simply acquired it, much like one acquires an artisanal coffee brand or a failing newspaper. The Brits, ever the romantics, were allowed to keep their little rituals—tea at headquarters, the whole “Your Majesty’s Service” schtick—but make no mistake: every operation, every assassination, every bit of intelligence now runs through Spectre-Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. It’s service to the Crown, sure—but only as long as the Prime Membership is active.

As Bond navigates this brave new world, he finds himself questioning everything: Does he still have a license to kill, or is it now a revocable in-app purchase? Are his Aston Martin’s machine guns now merely an auto-renewable feature, locked behind a Prime Ultra Premium Subscription? And most importantly—who is really in charge when Spectre, Amazon, and the British government are all just different names on the same offshore tax document?

Of course, James Bond has always been a well-groomed billboard. For decades, he’s been shilling luxury watches, overpriced cologne, and cars most of his audience will only ever see in video games. But with Amazon-Spectre at the helm, this has been taken to its final, logical conclusion: Bond himself is now a storefront.

Every frame of Prime Directive is an interactive shopping experience. When Bond walks into a casino, a discreet ka-ching sounds, and a sleek Prime overlay pops up: “Shop the Look: Bond’s Midnight Tuxedo Collection™—FREE Same-Day Delivery with Prime.” The film’s action scenes now feature strategically timed slow-motion sequences, allowing audiences to scan on-screen QR codes for exclusive access to Bond’s tactical gear. “Want to smell like a government-sanctioned murderer? Try 007 Noir: An Amazon Exclusive.” Even Bond’s classic Walther PPK now comes in a special “Alexa-Enabled” edition, complete with voice activation—“Alexa, shoot the bad guy.”

Gadgets? Forget Q Branch. Those bespoke MI6 innovations have been replaced by Amazon Basics™ tech—cost-effective, mass-produced, and delivered in frustration-free packaging. Instead of an ejector seat, Bond’s Aston Martin now comes with Amazon AutoPilot™, powered by AWS—it doesn’t eject you when things get dicey, but it does offer exclusive in-car shopping deals when you’re in the vicinity of an Amazon Fresh. The new MI6-issued smartwatch? An Amazon Halo, tracking Bond’s stress levels, sleep patterns, and how efficiently he eliminates corporate threats.

The product placement isn’t subtle—it’s an onslaught. Bond can’t have a drink without an on-screen notification prompting “Buy the Official Vesper Martini Cocktail Kit—Available Now on Amazon Fresh” or step into a high-stakes poker game without “Shop Amazon Casino Royale: Luxury Chips & Felt Tables for Your Home.” Every fight scene features a “Click to Buy” overlay on Bond’s boots, his tie, his bloodstained shirt. Even the henchmen are monetized—each one sporting an Amazon Workwear Essentials™ tactical vest, available at a discount for Prime members.

But the real coup de grâce? Amazon’s proprietary Predictive Commerce Engine—an AI-driven feature that automatically adds Bond’s latest gear to your cart before you even realize you want it. By the time the credits roll, you’ll have a package at your door containing the very same sunglasses Bond wore while dodging drone strikes in a Dubai skyline chase.

And why wouldn’t Bond sell out completely? The man’s been whoring himself out to brands for decades. The difference now is that you don’t just watch Bond. You buy Bond.

With thrilling sequences shot entirely inside an Amazon fulfillment center—where Bond fights off disgruntled warehouse workers radicalized by too much safety training.

TEMU

Bond’s mission is clear: eliminate TEMU before it’s too late. Deep inside Jeff Bezos’ secret orbital fortress, AMAZON ONE, the High Council of Spectre-Amazon convenes for an emergency strategy meeting. It’s a sleek, sterile chamber of glass and steel, floating above Earth like the watchful eye of a retail god. Holographic charts flicker across the room, showing plummeting profit margins. The enemy is spreading. The West is losing the shopping war.

For decades, Spectre-Amazon has controlled the flow of goods, services, and intelligence with the precision of a trillion-dollar supply chain. Every consumer tracked, every purchase logged, every fleeting impulse turned into a same-day delivery. The system was perfect. But now, an outside force is disrupting the equilibrium—something sinister, something… cheap.

Like a parasitic organism creeping through cracks in the firewall, TEMU has been infiltrating the European and American markets with ruthless efficiency. It’s flooding the system with impossibly low prices, baffling shipping times, and mysterious, unlabeled packages that seem to materialize out of nowhere. “How are they doing it?” the analysts at Spectre-Amazon whisper in their data centers. “Who is funding them?”

The truth is too horrifying to say out loud: TEMU doesn’t play by the rules. It doesn’t need brand partnerships, doesn’t need infrastructure, doesn’t need permission. It operates from the shadows, an empire of disposable goods churned out by algorithmic black magic. No licensing deals, no regulations, just an unrelenting tsunami of $3 smartwatches and $5 tactical boots, undercutting every market, destabilizing economies, turning loyal Prime Members into treacherous bargain hunters.

Spectre-Amazon’s predictive models are crumbling. Warehouse workers are defecting. Prime Members—once the most loyal consumers in human history—are clicking on other apps, wandering into the depths of discount anarchy. The system is breaking down.

And so, Bond is deployed—not to kill, necessarily, but to restore order. His mission takes him deep into the heart of the chaos: grimy ports overflowing with boxes labeled in unreadable fonts, dark factories humming with a workforce that seems eerily… automated. No paper trails, no board of directors, just an unknowable entity funneling goods into the global bloodstream at speeds even Spectre-Amazon can’t match.

His orders? Destroy TEMU’s supply chain at the source. The plan is brutal, direct, and Prime-eligible for immediate execution: Bezos’ space station—outfitted with AWS Orbital Strike Capabilities™—will unleash a “targeted fulfillment disruption” on TEMU’s offshore megafactories. The operation is codenamed FREE SHIPPING, and it will be Spectre-Amazon’s largest tactical intervention since the hostile takeover of MI6. Bond suits up. His mission: infiltrate the TEMU Quantum Relay, a secret communications satellite coordinating their entire global logistics empire. If he can hack the system, Spectre-Amazon can deploy its ultimate weapon—a proprietary Cloud-Based Hyperinflation Virus that will render TEMU’s entire pricing model obsolete, forcing all their $2 sneakers to cost at least $300 overnight.

Temu isn’t a company. It’s something older, something bigger—an evolving economic virus, a self-replicating supply chain that answers to no one. Not even Beijing. It doesn’t sell things—it creates need, spinning synthetic desire out of thin air.

And for the first time in his long career, Bond faces an existential crisis. How do you kill something that doesn’t exist?

And now, it’s winning.

There’s only one solution. Total economic warfare.

THE FINAL SHOWDOWN

But TEMU won’t go down without a fight. As Bond launches toward the TEMU satellite in a Bezos-funded Blue Origin tactical shuttle, a swarm of unbranded Chinese drones intercepts him, piloted remotely from a sweatshop-turned-cyberwarfare lab in an undisclosed industrial park. The battle is on.

Zero gravity combat. Bond, floating through the void, using a laser-equipped Kindle as a makeshift weapon. TEMU’s android enforcers—cheaper, faster, entirely disposable—closing in from all sides. He kicks off a floating pallet of Amazon Basics™ stainless steel water bottles, sending them spiraling into an enemy drone, exploding on impact.

Finally, Bond reaches the TEMU Quantum Relay, a monolithic, unmarked structure orbiting 200 miles above Earth. Inside, the final boss awaits: a nameless AI CEO, a digital consciousness that is TEMU, its voice a distorted chorus of customer reviews and vague product descriptions.

TEMU AI: “Welcome, James Bond. Would you like to see similar items based on your preferences?”

Bond grips his Amazon Special Edition Omega Smartwatch™, featuring real-time stock market tracking.

BOND: “Yeah. Show me something… discontinued.”

The final showdown? A high-speed chase through a giant, AI-run shipping hub, where Bond battles TEMU’s faceless operatives—men in logo-less jumpsuits wielding discount machetes. They fight atop conveyor belts, dodging crates of knockoff Ray-Bans and suspiciously cheap Bluetooth earbuds. Bond reaches the control center, only to discover the horrifying truth:

He slams a Prime-branded EMP device onto the core processor. Sparks fly. The algorithm glitches, screaming in a thousand languages at once. A system-wide failure. TEMU’s supply chain begins collapsing in real time—factories grinding to a halt, cargo ships losing direction, warehouses turning into ghost towns of unsold products.

THE SYSTEM CRASHES. THE ECONOMY REBOOTS. AMAZON RESTORES ORDER.

EPILOGUE: THE WORLD BELONGS TO PRIME

With the mission complete, Bond returns to Earth. Western markets stabilize. Spectre-Amazon’s AI-driven commerce model reclaims its rightful dominance. Democracy, as it was meant to be, is restored.

As he sips a Nespresso Martini™ (now available exclusively on Prime), Bond reflects on what he has done. Was it justice? Was it even real? Or was he just another product, another tool in the great fulfillment warehouse of history?

He doesn’t care.

He adjusts his Amazon-Echo-integrated cufflinks, scans his Prime status, and walks off into the neon skyline, ready for the next mission.

The new James Bond Experience™ will be available exclusively on Prime Video, optimized for maximum engagement. There will be algorithmically determined chase sequences, deep-learning-generated sex appeal, and product placement so aggressive it borders on physical assault. Bond’s new gadgets? Limited to the latest Echo devices and a carbon-neutral, subscription-locked Walther PPK that requires a firmware update before firing.

“James Bond will return… pending annual revenue projections.”

Nobody will care. By all measurable metrics, this will work. The world will watch, Prime memberships will spike, and the critics will write their little think pieces about “late-stage capitalism and the death of the hero myth” while queuing up their next delivery of gluten-free snack bars and lithium-ion batteries. So, fine. Let Bond be a company man. Let him clock in, hit his quarterly objectives, and survive on corporate synergy alone. Let him wear the suit, say the lines, and pretend that anything he does still matters.

Diary of a Streamer

February 8, 2025February 10, 2025Leave a comment

Watching The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Absolutely baffling how they made movies back then with zero fucks given for modern streaming necessities. No bathroom breaks, no snack intermissions, no “Are you still watching?” judgment pop-ups. Just a relentless, uninterrupted story unfolding at a steady pace, as if people were actually expected to just… sit and watch. It’s like they thought people could handle a movie without doing other stuff. Truly barbaric. 😵‍💫

A list of its glaring deficiencies follows:

1. No Repetitive Recaps Every Ten Minutes – Astonishingly, the film expected me to remember what had already happened. At no point did a character turn to the camera and say, “As you may recall…” before summarizing the entire first act. Unforgivable.

2. No On-Screen Text Explaining the Obvious – No pop-up stating “London, 1889” when we were clearly in London, in 1889. No ominous subtitle declaring “The Hound” when the enormous, glowing-eyed dog lunged at the screen. Just trusted the audience to infer things. Barbaric.

3. No Overcompensating Sound Design – When something important was revealed, it was done through mere dialogue and acting. No swelling orchestra, no aggressive bass rumble, no ear-shattering “BWAAAH” to alert me that This Is A Big Moment. Reckless and irresponsible.

4. No Artificially Inserted Cliffhangers – Scenes flowed into one another with distressing smoothness, rather than cutting off mid-sentence to force me into watching the next part. I was left to decide of my own free will whether to keep watching. Disorienting.

5. No Excessive Exposition – At no point did a minor character enter solely to deliver two paragraphs of backstory, exit, and never return. If you wanted to know something, you had to listen or, heaven forbid, piece things together yourself. Who has time for that?

6. No Forced Reactions to Ensure I Knew How to Feel – After a dramatic reveal, the camera did not cut to every single character so I could gauge their emotional state. Some of them simply reacted naturally, and the movie moved on. I found this offensive.

7. No Time-Wasting Fake-Outs – When a shadow loomed ominously, it turned out to be an actual threat, rather than the butler carrying a tray. Every scene contained forward motion. I grew suspicious.

8. No “Dumb Character to Ask Obvious Questions” Trope – No one said, “Wait, so you’re telling me that the mysterious deaths and the giant paw prints could be connected?” The film seemed to think I could follow along without a designated idiot to spell things out. Upsetting.

9. No Algorithmically Inserted Diversity of Tone – The film committed to its atmosphere. No quippy side character deflating the tension. No random slapstick moment to balance out the “heaviness.” Just a persistent, deliberate mood. Reckless disregard for emotional variety.

10. No Sudden Flashbacks to Explain Something Already Understood – At no point did the screen fade to black-and-white and replay an earlier moment just in case I had become distracted by my phone. The film relied entirely on me paying attention the first time. Monstrous.

By the time the credits rolled (without automatically minimizing into the corner of the screen), I was left shaken. The sheer nerve of these filmmakers, crafting something meant to be absorbed in a single, uninterrupted sitting. The sheer audacity of it all.

Had I… just watched a movie? The questions swirled. Had I truly understood the plot without redundant exposition? Had my brain… filled in gaps on its own? Worse still—had I experienced suspense not force-fed by aggressive musical cues, but simply by allowing events to unfold?

I felt changed, and not for the better. My faith in the natural order of things had been shaken to its core.

I glanced at my streaming app, desperate for reassurance. But now, the endless rows of thumbnails, all promising easily digestible. I staggered to my feet, lightheaded, my worldview unraveling. In the distance, my phone buzzed, beckoning me back to the comfort of fragmented attention. I had endured 87 whole minutes of pure, uninterrupted storytelling?

God help me.

Extras

January 14, 2025January 14, 2025

Ah, cryptography! It’s like Andy Millman in Extras, no? At first, it presents itself as this pure, untouchable ideal—a bastion of privacy and individuality in a world determined to collapse all boundaries. It says, “No! I will not compromise!” But what happens? Reality intrudes. And what is reality if not the persistent erosion of the symbolic structure we cling to? Cryptography—like Andy—believes it can exist in a vacuum, but it is always already inscribed into the systems of power it seeks to resist.

First, we must confront the fantasy of cryptography as an unbreakable shield. It relies on assumptions: the hardness of math, the impossibility of brute force, the limits of computing power. But history teaches us that every “perfect” system is ultimately undone. The Enigma machine? Broken. RSA with weak keys? Broken. Andy’s principles? Also broken. The system’s failure is not an anomaly—it is its destiny! Cryptography’s strength exists only as the ideological mask of its inevitable fragility.

Season 1: Episode 3: Kate Winslet Episode (Public Key Encryption)

Here is Andy Millman on the set of a serious film about the Holocaust, only to discover that Kate Winslet—beloved, respectable, pure—is doing it to win an Oscar. This is public key encryption in its ideal form: the clean separation of public and private keys, promising a perfect balance of accessibility and security. But the moment Andy enters this scene, the cracks in the fantasy appear. Kate’s public persona (“I care about meaningful art”) is hollowed out by the private truth (“I’m doing this for the awards”), just as public key encryption rests on fragile assumptions—prime factorization, computational hardness—that become increasingly vulnerable over time. Andy, like cryptography, begins to realize that the symbolic purity he depends on is always already a performance.

And then, ah! Darren Lamb—the human element. Cryptography assumes the weakness is outside the system, in the adversary trying to break in. But the true weakness is always internal! Humans with “password123,” social engineering, phishing emails—Darren is the embodiment of the internal failure that cryptography cannot account for. The very people it relies on sabotage it from within, much like Andy’s sitcom is ruined by his own compromises.

Season 1 Episode 4: The Les Dennis Episode (Bitcoin Forks)

Ah, poor Les Dennis—reduced from household name to desperate panto performer. He is Bitcoin after the first big hard fork: still recognizable, but irreparably fractured, clinging to relevance in a world that has moved on. Andy, desperate to make a name for himself, tries to elevate Les’s sinking career, much like the crypto community rallies around Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, claiming they will solve scaling issues or restore “Satoshi’s vision.” But the truth is obvious: just as Les’s glory days are behind him, so too is the simplicity of Bitcoin’s original promise. What remains is a fragmented system fighting for legitimacy in a world of diminishing trust.

Season 1 Episode 6: The Patrick Stewart Episode (Mass Surveillance and the Myth of Perfect Privacy)

Now, let us speak of governments and corporations. Patrick Stewart’s infamous, “And then I see everything” line is not just a joke; it is a profound metaphor for how power operates.

Patrick Stewart’s absurd obsession with omniscience—turning invisible and spying on women—is a perfect metaphor for mass surveillance programs like PRISM. These systems promise omnipotence, claiming they can “see everything” even through encrypted channels. And yet, like Stewart’s ridiculous fantasies, their power is always undermined by their absurdities. Cryptography, in this context, plays Andy: caught between the desire to maintain its artistic integrity (privacy) and the demands of the industry (governments mandating backdoors). The result is a farce: encryption schemes that work only until the Patrick Stewarts of the world decide they don’t.

These entities want cryptography—yes—but only if it includes backdoors, exceptions, and surveillance mechanisms. They demand a system that is strong, but only insofar as it reinforces their ability to control. Cryptography, then, is caught in this dialectic: a tool of resistance that is co-opted by the very forces it resists.

Series 2, Episode 1: The Orlando Bloom Episode (NFT Hype and Scams)

Orlando Bloom, obsessed with proving he is not jealous of Johnny Depp, is the perfect stand-in for NFTs. Here is a system (Bloom/NFTs) built entirely on insecurity, desperately trying to prove its uniqueness while the public (like Maggie) doesn’t care. Andy’s bewilderment at Bloom’s posturing mirrors the cryptography community’s reaction to the NFT hype. “But what is the point?” Andy asks, just as critics ask of NFTs: “Why build a digital asset reliant on cryptographic signatures if the value is entirely performative?” The whole episode is a commentary on the hollow, performative uniqueness of systems that collapse under their own absurdity.

And AI—ah, this is where it gets truly terrifying! AI doesn’t break cryptography in the traditional sense. It bypasses it entirely. Metadata, patterns, behavioral inference—these are the tools of an intelligence that does not respect the boundaries cryptography was designed to protect. It doesn’t crack the dam; it seeps through every tiny crevice, eroding the walls from within.

Ah, the David Bowie episode! (Series 2, Episode 2). This is Andy Millman’s lowest point, where he is publicly humiliated by Bowie, who improvises a mocking song about Andy: “Chubby little loser.” And yet, this episode is also about how AI relates to creativity and its ability to expose the uncomfortable truths we try to hide.

David Bowie in this episode is AI at its most disruptive and incisive. He is the generative model that observes Andy for mere minutes, synthesizes his insecurities and failures, and turns them into a cutting, viral hit. Bowie’s improvised song functions much like AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data—behavioral patterns, preferences, insecurities—and distill them into something that feels unnervingly personal. It’s a reminder that AI, like Bowie, doesn’t just collapse boundaries between public and private; it also mirrors back our worst traits, stripped of the illusions we use to protect ourselves.

Andy’s reaction—humiliation and retreat—is the perfect metaphor for how institutions and individuals respond to AI-generated insights. Much like Andy, we are not ready to face the sheer power of these models to deconstruct our curated identities and replace them with brutal, data-driven caricatures. AI, like Bowie in this scene, holds up a mirror, and it is not a flattering one. It doesn’t care about Andy’s efforts to appear serious or respectable; it reduces him to the essence of his contradictions: a chubby little loser who dreams of fame but cannot handle its cost.

And yet, there’s a darker layer here: Bowie’s performance is not just an act of truth-telling. It’s also an exercise in dominance. By reducing Andy to a figure of ridicule, Bowie consolidates his own artistic mystique. Similarly, AI systems consolidate power by exposing human vulnerabilities, often while their creators benefit—whether through profit or influence. Just as Bowie walks away unscathed, AI developers are rarely held accountable for the societal impacts of their creations. It’s Andy, not Bowie, who pays the price.

This episode captures the dual nature of AI: its ability to deconstruct and reveal, but also its complicity in perpetuating systems of power that thrive on our insecurities. AI doesn’t just create; it redefines the terms of creation, leaving us, like Andy, scrambling to understand our place in a world that has already moved on.

The great irony, then, is that cryptography believes it is preserving individuality, but it is already complicit in the systems that erase it. Andy Millman thought he could resist the collapse into celebrity shallowness, but the moment he entered the game, he was doomed. His BAFTA speech, like cryptography’s desperate claims of stability, comes too late. The collapse has already happened.

Series 2, Episode 6: The BAFTA Episode (The Collapse of Cryptographic Trust)

Finally, we reach the BAFTA episode, where Andy delivers his scathing speech denouncing the system that has destroyed his integrity. This is the collapse of cryptographic trust—when encryption fails to protect privacy, and the public realizes the system itself is compromised. Think of major breaches like the Snowden revelations or the meltdown of cryptographic protocols like MD5 or SHA-1. Andy’s disillusionment is the moment when the fantasy breaks, and he realizes that no amount of encryption—or artistic integrity—can withstand the relentless pressures of a system designed to exploit rather than preserve. His speech is cathartic, yes, but it comes too late. The damage is done. The collapse is irreversible.

So, we must ask: what is cryptography? It is not a stabilizing force; it is a fantasy of stability in a world where collapse is the only constant. It is the symptom of a system that cannot sustain itself, a last-ditch attempt to hold together the boundaries that power—and AI—are determined to dissolve. Cryptography does not delay the collapse; it is the collapse, caught in its own impossibility.

The lesson of Extras is the same as the lesson of cryptography: the system that promises stability and integrity is always undermined by its own contradictions. Andy’s integrity crumbles under fame’s pressures, just as cryptography’s guarantees crumble under the weight of quantum computing, AI inference, and human error. To believe otherwise is to indulge in the same hubris as Andy Millman—thinking you can maintain boundaries in a world determined to collapse them.

MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

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Category: FILM IN PHASE SPACE