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- [00:01]
Ashley Frawley
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- [00:53]
Matthew Schmitz
Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss Trump's UFC fight at the White House, the World cup taking place elsewhere in the United States, Steven Spielberg's new film Disclosure Day, and social media bans in the uk. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schillenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. I'm guessing I'm the only one here who watched the UFC fight on Sunday night and got to say you guys missed out. I thought it was a really striking and memorable event to see Justin Gaethje, one of the fighters in the main event, do the walkout starting in the Oval Office. You saw Gaethje with his big bulging ears from all the battering his head has received, looking at a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence with a flag draped over his shoulders, then walking down the colonnade and out onto the South Ellipse was extraordinary. And Gaethje, who won a really surprising upset over Ilya Topuria, later was asked about that moment where he was reading the Declaration of Independence in Trump's gilded Oval Office. And he said something like, you know, I couldn't even read it. You know, they, they used, they had a different language back then. And there's just something very striking about this guy draped in an American flag, looking at the Declaration of Independence and being just baffled by the English in it before he goes out and wins his fight. Gaethje was the American, the American hero. After his victory, he credited warrior spirit of his Mexican mother and the tough bones of his German American father. So the American hero was a kind of German Mexican American. He defeated Ilia Tapuria, the German born, ethnically Georgian Spanish citizen. And I mean, just really the whole, the whole event was very much like that. I think it's a sign of the way in which the Trump phenomenon is forward looking while being non progressive and anti progressive in various ways. You know, it's significant that it was a corporate event. It was in a UFC fight. The UFC is a company, right? It, the sport, the UFC Fighters have is called mma, but the UFC is a company. So this kind of corporate, kind of anti progressive Americana where, you know, actually every. Everyone ends up being pretty diverse. And the variety of some kind of process of melting just very, very striking. I wrote about it in compact, a piece titled the Revolutionary Significance of Trump's White House UFC Fight. And there I just talk about how a lot of people viewed it as bread and circuses, a kind of distraction from. From politics. And obviously Trump would rather people watch a UFC fight than think about the progress of his talks with Iran. But my contention is that the UFC fight is not really a distraction from politics. It's actually an expression of an attempt to advance Trump's particular political viewpoint, which is anti elitist, which is opposed to elite management of society. And this populist display at the White House really underlined that aspiration, or while also reinforcing Trump's own image of what it means to make America great again. Like a lot of leaders in the third World and on the periphery of American empire, various leaders of Mexico, Fidel Castro in Cuba, those leaders have embraced boxing as a way to kind of signal modernity and masculinity and nationalism, to kind of unite those three concepts, right? So to be a strong and modernizing nation has often been presented by leaders on the left and the right as to be a masculine nation, to be strong. And so there's an association between politics and boxers and other kind of combat sports you've seen throughout the 20th century in various places. And I think Trump's insistence that he is a fighter, Trump's attempt to associate his presidency with fighters and actually America itself, American leadership itself, with combat sports is kind of similar, and it's really interesting. One thing I didn't mention in my Peace for Compact was an observation from the Mexican boxing official and juror journalist Luis Spota, who wrote some decades ago that as Mexico became more developed, more advanced, he expected boxing to lose its popularity. So there's an idea that Spot is writing, that as you kind of go from the undeveloped periphery to a kind of developed center, you no longer have to lean on boxing as much. You don't need these demonstrative assertions of masculinity to maybe to kind of compensate for a perceived lack in the nation, economically, geopolitically. And I find that observation really interesting for a couple of reasons. One, Mexico is richer and boxing is very popular. Canelo Alvarez is a huge sensation there. But even more to the point here, rather than kind of Mexico losing its infatuation with Combat sports. You've seen combat sports rising in salience in the United States, rising in prominence. So it's not that these kind of less developed countries are suddenly losing their interest in combat sports. It's actually that the more developed country is more. Is gaining it. And I think they're, you know, that says, you know, one could ask a lot of interesting questions about why that is. I think, obviously, the Trump phenomenon reflects conviction that, you know, America is no longer great, it needs greatness, that certain people are disadvantaged, maybe that, you know, men are down and out and need a, you know, a fairer shake. So I think really, it's helpful to look at Trump's UFC fights kind of in parallel with the way other, Other countries have embraced combat sports. I think something. Something related is going on. So those are my thoughts on the ufc. I haven't been watching the World cup with equal attention or interest, I'm sorry to say. But, Ashley, I think you're a bit more up to speed on it than I am. So what's been going on with our American World Cup?
- [09:01]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, it's so interesting that it should. I mean, obviously, there's been an enormous push to try to make. Try to bring football to America, and it's not going to happen. And it's so much. So much more not going to happen than was the case maybe even 20 years ago. Because I found what you said in the Compact article yesterday about UFC and kind of like baseball and. Gosh, what was the other sport that you mentioned?
- [09:30]
Matthew Schmitz
Forgive me, American football. I'll say American out of respect for you, our international audience.
- [09:40]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah. So you have, like, these shifts from these different sports as sort of naturally embodying the spirit of the country, the spirit of the union, and. And it shifts to this kind, to these things that represent something about the nation, and there's something about UFC that represents, as you were just talking about, this kind of, like, turn against and reaction to a kind of managerial spirit. And that is such a wonderful juxtaposition. You have the World cup happening in America, and it was an idea that began when you had the. The relations between Mexico, Canada, and the United States were much more taken for granted. And it was supposed to be like this show of unity, and there it was. They were taken for granted under the watch, the careful watch of elite bureaucracy. That. That was just kind of the way that our countries had been going, and it would go on like that forever. So to kind of have this UFC match at the same time as you have this hangover of a form of kind of managerial democracy that is now being reacted to, I think is a wonderful kind of microcosm of our politics at the moment. And soccer itself has become this microcosm of governance and politics because. So I was talking about the World cup with my husband and I was interested because he's. He's an ex professional footballer. He lives, breathes soccer. His whole life is just soccer continuously. And he didn't seem particularly interested. And he comment. I mean, he is very interested watching every game. But like, you know, he commented they've done something weird. There's lots of different countries in. And you can kind of understand because it makes it a more level playing field for. For all these different countries to allow them in. So you wind up where Greece is, not in the World cup, but like countries that perhaps many people have never heard of in terms of soccer. R. And that just sort of opens things up. But one thing that he mentioned was there aren't any big names. He was like, years ago, there were so many stars, for instance, on the French team that you. It was a shame to bench anybody. Like, you couldn't take anybody off as subs because they were. You just had so much talent. You had so much talent. And now who are the big football stars? And I thought that's really interesting, just that you don't. I was like, well, there must be a few. Like, name a few. And he's like, I can't name any. And this is a man who, as I said, lives in football. And I said, well, well, why is that? He said, well, they turned football into an office. It's like an office now. And I thought, oh, my God. This is the kind of managerial. This is the effects of a kind of managerial revolution where you lose these kind of charismatic figures like the. The Maradonas and so on. And probably Ronaldo is the last of these. These big figures. You know, he's on his way out now that, you know, even someone like me could name. And. And then there's just nobody left. So you lose these kind of charismatic figures in favor of a style of play that favors. That is so rationalized down to the most minute detail that there's no space for a figure to show off his skills to be interesting, to do something that makes the crowd go wild. Because it's all technique. And they need people. It's speed, strength, technique, and they need people who are like cogs in a machine that make very good cogs in a machine. And that's how they select now. And so you get fewer and Fewer of these kind of charismatic individuals with a little bit of freedom on the field to do something interesting. And I said, has soccer got better? And he said, no, it's got a lot worse. And I said, in terms of like the skills? And he said, no, in terms of watching it, it's not as fun to watch anymore. And isn't that just the. That is like the story of our world. And it would be, wouldn't it? Because it is. It distills everything. It's a bit like an experiment, like a perfect social experiment because you have this like perfect sort of competition and capitalist kind of structure. And the whole point is to win because that's where the money is. But that's not the point. The point is to make it interesting to watch. That's the whole point. It's supposed to be entertainment. But as people pursue the end goal, which they have to in order for the sport to continue to make more money, to reinvest back into your stadiums and so on, you lose the actual purpose, which was that it ought to be entertaining. So it will. It's not going to catch on in the United States because what is already admittedly a really boring sport has become so much more boring because you don't even have these sort of charismatic personalities that can carry the game anymore. In fact, you've kind of selected out for them where there's. There's no moments of ah. Which is like. That's where sport and art kind of intersect. You know, this, this admiration for the skill of the painter, the skill of the football player, the skill of his footwork, all these sorts of things. No, you've got that ball for like 12 seconds. Not 12 seconds. That'd be a heck of a lot, like 1.2 seconds. And it hands off because it's part of the play, it's part of the technique and it's so data driven. I've been reading about this because I found it so fascinating, but. But yeah, it has become so data analytics driven that the beauty of the game is almost gone from it. I don't know if that's the way of everything, but it seems to me that something like boxing or you've got a charismatic figure who's there in front of you who's like, his masculinity is on display. And it's about two personalities that clash. I don't know if it can go that direction. So it's like the perfect middle finger up to the way of, of European sport and the way of Europe and the way of European Style of politics that Europe by the EU has almost perfected which is this kind of bureaucratic elite managerialism where you just tell everybody what to do and they just do it and all the beauty is sucked out of life and sucked out of, out of sport in this case.
- [15:40]
Jeff Schillenberger
Yeah, I think that's, that's all pretty interesting the, the World Cup. So I did catch the USA Paraguay match and you know, I mean a few things about it. One, you know, you did have a very impressive performance by the US player Foloran Baligun, who interestingly is by all, for all intents and purposes is actually British. He happened to have been born in the US but really only lived in the US for a few months of Nigerian parents and got the Nigerian, British,
- [16:20]
Matthew Schmitz
American and soccer and we have the German born Georgian, Spanish MMA fighter. Yeah.
- [16:28]
Jeff Schillenberger
And I mean to some extent this is just the way of sports today. But you know, I think the, the global, I mean the globalism of soccer is another kind of fascinating aspect of it I think which is related to this whole point about homogenization and the way that it's been sort of turned into this managerial science and the fact that it's this model of globalization where there are just these kind of interchangeable units. And then the model of the World cup is that of international competition between nation states. But what's strange is that then you have these countries that I would regard as barely even nation states. I'm thinking here of Qatar, which hosted the previous World cup is somewhat controversial, hosting four years ago. And Qatar also has a team that competes in the World cup which if you think of what the population there is and the fact that 90 something percent of the inhabitants are non citizens because it basically relies on a largely imported workforce. It's quite bizarre that a country of this profile would, would be able to field a World cup team. But it shows that if you have enough money to play around, you know, to throw around at these kinds of things, if you're this sort of post nation state that's just investing your capital from fossil fuel wealth into, you know, a sort of diversified portfolio, you can invest the resources necessary, I guess to produce a World Cup, a national soccer team that can actually, if not, you know, it's, it's, there's no way they're going to make it into the later stages of play, but you know, can at least qualify for the World cup, which is quite remarkable and I think reflects this kind of managerialism too that if, if a country like, you know, if you compare this to the Original World cup where you had largely countries that had this deep set of, of cultural tradition, I mean, modern cultural traditions, but nonetheless cultural traditions, you know, which are essentially like Italy, England, France and then, you know, these South American stalwart countries that have been deeply invested in football from a very early phase. Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, you know, these are countries where, where football is, is just deeply in the bloodstream. And so if, if you then think about the World cup today where you have all these countries that have managed to enter the play, you know, through various means that don't have this kind of depth of, of tradition or connection to it. But again, if it's this kind of one size fits all managerial model of play and everything is just interchangeable units, you know, you, I mean, it is interesting that you're, you know, the one limiting factor is you have, you know, you play for the country that you were born in and so that, you know, it imposes this kind of rule on it, which has some kind of odd effects, including the fact that Baligun, who's by all intents, for all intents and purposes British, is playing for the US So it's at least a kind of concession to the nation state in a world in which pro football is very much hyper, hyper globalized teams are not. Whatever, if you're born in a favela in Sao Paulo or born in a shanty town in South Africa or whatever, you might end up playing in the same sort of German, on the same German team in the Bundesliga. And so there is that kind of logic of globalization, of this kind of perfect globalized field of flow of units of value. So that's, I think the tension is also interesting in those terms just because again, the clear logic of it is to create a sphere of nonviolent competition between nation states in which kind of patriotism and national pride come into play. But at the same time it's very much an expression of this logic of globalization of kind of post national globalization. And then the other thing that I think is interesting with regard to Ashley's point is the centrality of VAR video assisted referee, which I think clearly contributes to this kind of scientific management ethos. Because if you have a kind of play that is subjected to this constant scrutiny at this point now, this kind of algorithmic scrutiny where a large part of the refereeing is sort of outsourced to these semi automated digital systems, that's going to increase the possibility of being able to managerialize and kind of, and subject the, the play to all kinds of, all kinds of you know, kind of quasi scientific, like statistical scrutiny. And it also means that the. Even as it's sort of being denationalized in various ways, it's also being. It's another way in which it's becoming more impersonal, it's becoming depersonalized, it's becoming removed from the judgment of the. The referee. And also that this in turn means that human judgment is going to be. And sort of individual judgment is going to be displaced in various other ways that the strategies come up with by teams are going to kind of reflect the demands of a field of competition which is defined partly by these impersonal technological systems. So, yeah, I think it is an interesting expression of all of these tendencies. And the other thing I was going to say, Matthew, in relation to your piece about football, about the, you know, transition of America from baseball to football to possibly ufc, MMA is, you know, my. This is like a thing my uncle. This is like one of these little factoids or whatever that my uncle brings up occasionally at Thanksgiving after a couple glasses of wine, which is he'll sort of say to all the young people at the table, you know what the most popular sports in America. And I've never verified whether this is actually true. You know, what the most popular sports in America were 100 years ago. And the answer is boxing and horse racing. So it's funny because, I mean, I think of that as the golden era. I would think of that as the golden era of baseball, of Babe Ruth, but I've never verified. And obviously there are different ways you can measure this, but my uncle will claim that actually it's boxing and horse racing that were the most popular sports in America 100 years ago. So I'm curious. We don't have to keep the sports conversation going forever, but I wonder how they fit into this narrative that's so
- [23:58]
Ashley Frawley
interesting because one of the points that I wanted to make is that part of the reason why football doesn't have these kinds of charismatic figures is because they often came out of a certain, you know, what Bourdieu would call habitus, like a specific working class kind of culture. So they had recognizable forms of. Of speech, masculine bravado, excess, you know, the footballer, like, splashing out his money on these cars and clubs and all these sorts that kind of came with their mystique, like the absolute sort of perfect embodiment of working class habitus. And I don't know if this, if it's like the managerial structure of football, select less for these kinds of people because they're harder to control and it selects more for kind of boring professionalism or if it's that that kind of habitus generally disappears with this kind of globalization or a kind of melting pot or, you know, there's a lot less awareness of class differences in America. I've just done a ton of interviews for a piece talking about class and dating people in America and Australia and the UK and there was a huge difference. Like people in America had no sense of talking about class. But what you just said, like a hundred years ago, boxing and horse racing is so class coded, obviously, right? You've got like bourgeois versus working class right there. It's exactly that. And now I'm. I mean, yes, that's still going to exist, but you know, with this kind of such a banal point with like this kind of rise of a monoculture, people are less able to kind of connect with this habitus and maybe they, they have it less. Maybe there's less of an identity associated with these classes that came with all this stuff. Like, I'm a blue collar, salt of the earth kind of man and I'm going to watch my baseball. Maybe that doesn't really make sense anymore.
- [25:44]
Jeff Schillenberger
So I just have one thing to add which I think underlines this. I mean, you brought up Maradona previously. So I happen to. I was in Argentina in 2010 when. And that was the year that Maradona was the coach of the Argentine national team in the World Cup. And he, you know, by all accounts, didn't really do a great job. But the interesting thing there was that you had Maradona and Messi. Obviously Messi is, you know, the great star of our era, although now his, you know, he's in the later phase of his career, but he very much is an expression of this later spirit of football. And people in Argentina when I was there sort of had a somewhat ambivalent attitude to him, perhaps surprisingly, or many, many did. I'd say particularly kind of older, older people I hung out with because he left the country, you know, because his talent was. I mean, he did not have this kind of habit, working class habitus that Ashley, you're talking about, with which would describe someone like Maradona. But Messi was plucked out of his provincial Argentine background and brought to Barcelona because his talent was recognized. And essentially he was, you know, he was a little bit like these kind of, I don't know, proverbial, like East German Olympic athletes who are sort of brought up in some sort of, some sort of strange, like quasi eugenic camp. Where they're like trained to do this from the earliest age. Like he was a little bit like that. And you know, they paid for it. They just plucked him out of obscurity and paid for everything from extremely young age. And so there was some sense that he didn't have the national spirit. Like he, he wasn't really an Argentine patriot because he had left the country and gone to Spain as a extremely young boy. And at the same time that he, he was a kind of reflection of this much more technique driven and by technique I mean sort of scientific technique driven approach to football as opposed to this kind of habitus derived one that you're alluding to. So I think that, you know, the fact that he was and, and still is to some extent the biggest kind of international star, he very much reflects this kind of later spirit of the sport, I would say.
- [28:07]
Ashley Frawley
I doubt he would score a handball on purpose and gloat about it afterward.
- [28:12]
Jeff Schillenberger
Exactly, exactly, yes. And of course the var would, would stop that. So.
- [28:18]
Matthew Schmitz
So Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg's new film about UFOs. I saw it on Thursday when it was released. I guess I was surprised by how much Catholicism was in the movie. But otherwise nothing, nothing was too surprising or exciting about it. I can't, I can't say I was overwhelmed with a sense of wonder and joy, but I'm sure you were, Jeff, given your great sensitivity and receptivity to art.
- [29:02]
Jeff Schillenberger
All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna admit that I, I was actually slightly. I found it a slightly encouraging.
- [29:08]
Matthew Schmitz
There you go.
- [29:09]
Jeff Schillenberger
Not because it was, you know, and it's notable in being a sort of summer blockbuster that is original ip. It's not a sequel, it's not a remake. It's ostensibly entirely original, at least in IP terms. I would say it's. It's actually profoundly unoriginal in the sense that all of the themes and sort of tropes and motifs of it are long standing ones. It's kind of this synthesis of a whole kind of cultural discourse about UFOs and secret government programs that you can trace back many decades. So to that extent it isn't particularly original. And obviously it, it sort of fits into Steven Spielberg's larger career, going back to movies like E.T. and Closing Hunters of the Third Kind. But. So what did I find encouraging about it? I mean, I suppose I, I found it was effective enough at kind of embodying the summer blockbuster spirit that it made me feel like I was kind of going back in time to some sort of earlier moments of cultural Apprehension and, and formation that, you know, took me back to my youth. And so to that extent, I think, I think it produced, it effectively produced a kind of simulacrum of that sort of experience. I mean, another thing that's interesting about it, beyond its, its Catholicism, which is indeed very fascinating, is the, or its engagement with Catholicism, we should say, is the, the role of media in it. Because it's centered around local tv, state, you know, local kind of broadcast TV station in Kansas City. And so there is this sense that it's both attempting to embody an older form of culture that is the, the old fashioned summer blockbuster. But it also kind of lays great emphasis on the importance of like a local news channel as this vector of, you know, some kind of immense revelation. And it's interesting because it's clearly set in the present. You know, the moment of disclosure. You do have everybody kind of glued to their phones like. But the original vector of, of revelation is this local news channel. And so, I don't know, I mean, there is some sort of attempt to reconstitute some older media dispensation in the film and some with that some kind of older regime of truth, it would seem. And it's. So it's fascinating how it, it sort of explicitly connects some sort of epistemological project whereby you put everybody on this, you know, you, you. Part of what's being achieved with this disclosure isn't just, isn't just finally letting people in on the truth that the government's hidden from them. It's kind of putting everybody on the same page epistemologically and thus kind of transcending this post truth state of, of cultural fragmentation. And I suppose the, the. I mean, there are a few movies that I think it would make an interesting contrast to, but one of them would be Eddington, where you have a depiction of the sort of post truth, fragmented epistemic reality of American life. And you also have this sense that there is no possibility of revelation that could transcend or move us beyond this. There's no possibility of transcendence of this situation. And so I have to admit, even though as, as sort of ridiculous and naive, I have to admit I was slightly taken by this fundamentally kind of nostalgic vision presented in the movie, at least momentarily. And then the other thing that I, the other thing that I compared it to in my mind, which I've tweeted about a little bit, is going to see the film Independence Day exactly 30 years ago, came out in 1996, which is a different kind of Alien movie. I, you know, they're. They're. In terms of the sort of tradition of Alien movies. There's basically the sort of Mars attacks, War of the Worlds type alien movie where the aliens are a hostile invading force. And then there's the type of movie, the type of movie that Disclosure Day is, where the aliens are this kind of benign presence that makes itself known to us through these kind of apparitions, and that it presents itself to us peacefully and is experienced more in the mode of a kind of, you know, again, a kind of divine revelation rather than a kind of hostile invasion. And so Independence Day is very much in the hostile invasion thing. And one point of contrast I thought was interesting was that Independence Day comes from the height of the sort of end of history era of globalization. And it does express that. The thing I always thought about with it going into the subsequent decades was that it really strongly anticipated some of the themes of, or it echoed some of the themes of the Project for a New American Century of the various figures who later became involved with the George W. Bush administration and were instrumental behind the Iraq war. Because the way I would read Independence Day is, you know, on some level, we need this alien invasion to save us from the decadence of a globalized world. We need. The alien invasion is going to come and heal us, but by allowing the world to come together in this martial manner and fight off this foreign threat. And the scene that I always thought was most interesting in that film, and, you know, another thing about it is you have the fighter pilot president played by Bill Pullman, who, you know, basically goes up to directly take on the aliens with his buddy, you know, fighter pilot Will Smith. And he, at some point, while he's up there, you know, in this kind of alien space, having sort of infiltrated this alien spacecraft, he has a kind of mind meld with the aliens. And at this point he basically says, you know, he comes back to Earth and says, you know, basically, like, I've looked into their souls and their pure evil, and they're just, you know, all they do is go around and sort of parasitize and destroy life elsewhere in the universe. And so this kind of gives carte blanche to just ruthlessly annihilate these invading aliens. So I thought that was a very interesting moment. And it's. I. I thought of it again with Disclosure Day because this kind of mind meld with the aliens also occurs in the form of these two characters who have sort of been brought into and sort of made, you know, brought up to the aliens level of kind of supreme quasi divine wisdom about the universe. And as I recall, the final line of the film is listen. And so there's some sense that this mind meld and. And there's an explicit statement that, you know, what these aliens most embody and value is empathy. And so, in a sense, it is the kind of opposite of the Independence Day message, which is, you know, the world is. I mean, implicitly is sort of sinking into this globalist lethargy. We need to recover some kind of virile, martial sense of purpose and destiny. And therefore, we need these aliens to invade so as to galvanize the world and also to bring the world together. And this is, interestingly, the thing that the two have in common, which is that, you know, what a lot of these alien movies and stories have in common is the idea that, you know, this is what will unite the world and in Independence Day unites the world as a warlike force. You know, where I think in Independence Day, you literally have, like, Israelis and Arabs sort of coming together to, like, shoot, you know, rockets up at the aliens or whatever. I'm pretty sure it actually shows that and the. So that. So there is this thing of the world coming together. The interesting thing in Disclosure Day is you have. In the background of the whole. Of the whole sequence of events portrayed is seemingly World War III is about to break out. There's something going on in North Korea. Seemingly conflict between the US And Russia has escalated. And so we are on the verge of potential nuclear apocalypse. You have scenes of people. This is before the alien revelation. You have scenes of people, you know, lined up at a gas station. Seemingly supplies are becoming scarce. Gas is becoming scarce. So there is this sense of looming catastrophe. And so the aliens are sort of rolled out and disclosed just in time, seemingly to bring the world together. And there is this scene again, much like, I mean, in the scene in Independence Day, it's. The world is coming together to fight off the alien menace. In this. It's. The world is coming together to. In sort of awe and reverence of this supremely wise and sort of empathic extraterrestrial being. But the effect is essentially the same, that the world is being brought together. But, you know, the problem in Independence Day is the. The world's. The. The globalized world is too. It needs to be brought together. I mean, in part because there are still these festering conflicts, but also, again, again, I think implicitly because of this sense of lethargy and purposelessness in the end of history, the sort of Threat of the last man. And so we need Bill Pullman, the tough fighter pilot, to save us from that by leading the world in this fight. And of course, George W. Bush shows up and sort of tries to embody that role in the subsequent decade. In this case, what's portrayed is the worry is the world is breaking apart, it's fragmenting. We have this danger of conflict. And so what we need is to look up to these aliens to provide some kind of new, some kind of new ethos that will, that will bring us together in peace. And so, but, but nonetheless, I think the films do. And, and this is not, you know, this is very common to these sorts of cultural narratives that, you know, the only thing that will bring the world together really is aliens. And so they both express this narrative, even though in seemingly opposite ways.
- [40:52]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, I feel like you've just completely changed my opinion of the film. But I, I, I've had the, I was like kind of deciding how much of a spoiler I was going to give, but you just done it. So as soon as the screen faded to black, I just screamed expletives. I was so mad because I was already there. You know, I am, I am one of these. I read all the UFO lore, I recognize the videos, I recognize the experiencer narratives, everything. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, get past all that. Get past all that. And then the movie ended. What? I want the movie to start there. That's where I want the movie to start. But yeah, I was really, I think part of my disappointment is that I was really excited to see it because I feel like Hollywood is recognizing that there's a hunger for a return to these kinds of big films that are unabashedly optimistic and not in a cheesy way. You know what I mean? Like, um, you know, if you were gonna be a movie that everybody talked about, you couldn't be an optimistic film. You know, you had to kind of be a bit darker, this sort of thing. And just, I had also just read Project Hail Mary. I couldn't see it in theaters. Cause I lived so far from a theater at the time, I wasn't able to see it. So I read the book in anticipation. Loved it. In spite of the fact that the characterization was so annoying. The main characters were just like the most millennial ner God, like outdated tropes and all that. And then I saw the film and I absolutely loved the film. And I was like, I want more of this. I need more of this. Because it was, it was light and it was a bit silly and so on, but it was in the same genre of kind of interstellar, where it's like humanity teaches itself something. It experiments, it learns and it overcomes. It uses reason to overcome a problem. And even in Project Hail Mary, like, humans are more advanced even than the. Like, slightly more advanced in some ways than the life form. Like, they didn't know about. Didn't know about things like radiation and stuff like that. But this is more like humanity being taught a lesson, you know, and that's. I feel like Hollywood is kind of having this playing out, this kind of cultural struggle that's happening between, you know, what humanity is, what we're doing, where we're going, what all of this is for. And it's like, oh, we need someone to come down from on high to save us. Which interstellar kind of plays with. And versus, like, we will. We are that thing. We will overcome. We are the thing that will save ourselves. In the end, there's nobody waiting. It's always been us, and we just have to realize it. And I love that. I love that. And what bothered me was like, oh, human. Humans need to be taught a lesson in empathy. Like, you know, and only some being from another universe is going to be able to do it. And also, it was very. I was. It was ambiguous as well. I thought that there was going to be a turn. You know, it was ambiguous about whether or not what was happening was actually good. And then. And I thought, like, that we're being played with. You know, like, they. The. The events that these children experienced were highly traumatic to them. They were. And as they were being forced to relive them, it was traumatizing. And it was like, was this actually a good thing that happened to them? And if you know anything about, like, experiencer stories, some of the way that they describe the way that the aliens kind of control them, they make you feel good about the situation even if you shouldn't. And people realize that later. So. And I know Spielberg knows this stuff because he's big into aliens, so I thought we were kind of being played with. And then at the end, I was wondering, like, did they leave it as a cliffhanger? Because it's unclear whether or not all of this was actually good or bad. I don't know. Perhaps I'm rooting too much into it, but that. But. But, you know, I. Maybe it's just silly me that I expected from a summer blockbuster that when you see a trope and a cliche, that it would be subverted in some way. And then it's like, oh, oh, no. That was just. Actually just it. That was. We were supposed to take that at face value. All right. So, yeah, the. It's annoying when you expect something great and then it kind of insults you a little bit. I feel like that Alien sequel was like, that was. Prometheus is like, wow, we're going to show you something beautiful and we're going to flirt with philosophy. But then halfway through, like halfway or like right away, they'd be like, ah, but you idiots, you don't want to see people floating around in space talking philosophy. You want to see someone rip someone's neck out. And I felt a bit like that, like, like they. It was like watching my kids play games, you know, like, I'm gonna rescue you because I have magical powers. Like, no, Ileana, that's not fair. You can't just have magical powers. No, Spielberg, she can't just have magical powers. Like, not everything needs to be explained. But I felt like, you know, we kind of go into that a little bit. What happened? I don't know. Maybe I'm just an idiot. Maybe I'm just a stupid filmgoer at the same time as I'm trying to be more enlightened or something. But I just, I felt that was really dissatisfying. It was sort of like, why are we able to do this? Ta da. Because I can. Why am I able to do that? Because I have this magical thing. Ta da. I can do it. And I just thought that's so lazy. And like, at one point, the woman's looking at clearly an alien and she goes, is that a child? No. Is that a person? No. Is it a human? I feel like we've already established that. Why? One of these questions has already been asked. Who's writing this? So I just found. I don't know, I just felt like it went. It tried to do something and because it made an effort to scratch an itch to do something that I feel like a lot of people want. They want these, these narratives, even, like light or heavy or whatever, but an optimistic vision of humanity. It tried to go there and then it didn't fully. And didn't fully deliver. And it tried to be intellectual and smart and then it didn't deliver. That just makes it so much more disappointing to me.
- [46:59]
Matthew Schmitz
The United Kingdom is restricting Internet access for users under 16. A lot of privacy concerns associated with this for users over 16 as well. Ashley, what's the state of play there? Are the concerns overblown or do you see Some real problems here.
- [47:23]
Ashley Frawley
So as I think it's a very similar thing to what I was saying last week, that these things are an agenda that exists at a supernational level and their solutions in search of problems. So there's already a move to have more, quote, unquote, transparency on the Internet and that, and by transparency it means you, you need to be transparent about who you are, your name needs to be attached to what you write on the Internet, less anonymous engagement and more control over information on the Internet and what's said and done on the Internet. And obviously there are good reasons and there are bad reasons to do this and the good reasons are the, the solutions that are, sorry, the problems that are conveniently found for the pre existing solution. So yeah, like it's not great to spend a huge amount of time on social media as a young person. It's not great to, you know, watch a lot of pornography as an adult. It's, you know, obviously there are certain forms of, you know, illegal materials that need to be controlled. All of that.
- [48:29]
Matthew Schmitz
Any pornography, Ashley, any pornography isn't, oh,
- [48:33]
Ashley Frawley
I'm very firmly anti pornography, so don't get me started on that. But yeah, so there are obviously good reasons, there are good reasons to, you know, control information on the Internet that it's not like are not being tried or are not having, going some distance to being successful. But I think in terms of this actually being a solution to a problem, I don't think it is. Because if you're going to restrict social media for under 16s, which is the goal, that means that you're going to have to put your ID in when you want to go. Because how does the Internet know that you're an adult? You don't know. In order to prove that you're able to access even the most banal of content, it happens to me even when I'm moving through certain areas in the eu, you have to put ID in or you have to put a picture of your face in. And I'm like giving my biometrics to some random website. I'm not putting my ID on some random website. So this is what begins to happen, is that you have to start showing ID to access more and more of the Internet. It becomes much more controlled and who you are online is more and more linked to who you are in the real world. And you know, you can say, well, there's trolling and blah, blah, blah, but you know, I don't want to have to show my papers when I'm walking through the world and I don't want to show my papers when I'm walking through the online world either. Sort of basic element of freedom. So I think what's actually happening is that there's a broader supernational agenda. And I'm not saying that in sinister terms. You know, there's lobby groups and all these things that are involved in this. It's just kind of the way that policymaking goes. And it often goes in this exact way, goes from Australia to Canada to Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and then England. It's a very, very common way of doing things. And it's just, it pressures different governments. And then when you're successful in one country, you then use that as pressure to. For the next country and so on. And this is just what's going on. So there's a broader kind of agenda here toward greater control over the Internet and of course the eu. I missed that. Which is important. So once you make an. If you have something at the EU level, it filters down to all these different countries. And it's just, that is much. You're much closer to making this policy that you want into a norm across the entire world. And that is essentially what's happening. It's like fast tracking toward digital id, which would make these things much quicker and easier. Right? So that you get sold on convenience quicker and easier to access the content that you want. Just give us everything about you every time you want to access porn or something like that. And that's. I find that to be highly, highly sinister. And now towards now to talk about the actual supposed problem that this is supposedly a solution to. I was listening to the radio the other day and you know, people talking about like, like as though kids were filling the streets, you know, 10 years ago. And if not for these darn screens and smartphones, they'd still all be out playing T ball or whatever. And I was like, excuse me, you were calling the cops on parents when they let their kids play outside unattended, like, what do you want? It's like, oh, you know, we would all, of course we would all like a world where kids played outside again. And you know, that's not going to happen. You know, the screens are here to stay. Like, as though the screens caused that. No, the screens are a solution for the fact that you force parents to be on top of kids in a way that was never the case historically. Historically, people had lots of kids. And the kids, the older kids watched the younger kids and all the neighborhood adults watched the kids as they all kind of played outside. And if Anything happened, you skimmed your knee, you could go to your friend's mom or whatever, and that has all broken down. That sense of community has broken down now, particularly in more affluent areas. If there are children playing outside unattended, you might get the cops called on you. And you cannot be inside, like entertaining your kids 24 7. They're going to be on a screen at some point. So, I mean, if parents want advice, you know, you've got to teach your kids how to stop themselves, how to govern themselves, how to decide for themselves what they want to do with their time and teach them how to, you know, that you can't outsource your judgment to the state. You can't outsource your judgment of what's right or wrong or what. How much time is it not for what age is enough to the state. You have to decide that for yourself. And that's what you're doing as a parent is gradually teaching these children to have adult judgment, to be able to, you know, I'm going to judge for you now and slowly, slowly I'm going to pass that response more and more responsibility on to you until you can judge for yourself what's good and what isn't. And, you know, like, let them get bored and leave some books around. Like, that's, that's what we got to do. Like, state can't, can't solve this problem for us and we absolutely should not expect it to. And just even thinking that we could open, open the door to all these new problems, new forms of surveillance.
- [53:22]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah. I have to say, you know, there are some ideas of proposing similar laws here in the US and it's hard not to see how they would run up against First Amendment concerns. Not that I think pornography is protected by the First Amendment, I think it clearly is not. But the larger issues of just controlling and monitoring speech online through requirements for ID verification are pretty troubling. Before we end, I want to let listeners know we have a sale on right now. Go to compactmag.com a year 410 and you'll be able to get a full year's subscription to the magazine for just $10. Go to our social media channels. You'll see where we've posted links for this. If you're not yet subscribing to Compact Mag, this is your absolute best, cheapest way to get in the door to get 12 months for less than a dollar each month. So go to our social media, find the posts advertising this sale, and subscribe that. Thanks to Jeff. Thank you, Ashley, and thank you listeners.
- [55:11]
Ashley Frawley
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