We Manufacture Those, By The Way

If there's one thing the movies of the late seventies through early nineties taught us - especially sci fi and horror movies - it's that we know exactly where humanity's enemies live.

No, not this one.

"But John," I hear you cry. I hear you because we're in space, and everyone can hear you scream. "But John. The bad guy in this movie is the aliens! Or the people that made the aliens! Or Ian Holm! Or humanity itself!"

A likely story.

So a little background. This is stuff that, if you like the Alien movies but you don't like Prometheus, you might have missed - but it quite cleverly frames how the entire universe came to be the way it did, and why things are done the way they are done.

This is Peter Weyland.

Yes, I am using his old-man picture, rather than the dashing flashbacks we are treated to in the TedTalk spinoff video and in the beginning of Alien Covenant.

So - we all remember the beginning of Alien, when the crew all wake up in those sleeping pods, blinking sleep out of their eyes, finding out where they are, how long they have been out. We remember Aliens, wherein Ripley's pod is discovered drifting in space, and she is all safe and secure inside.

Those sleepers exist because of Peter Weyland, because Peter Weyland had two wishes: 1) to live forever and 2) to meet the beings that made mankind. Literally, the technology was developed for him, and in part by him, to allow him to survive long enough to make this happen. This is because Peter Weyland - founder of Weyland Corporation - has a god complex, further shored up by him being obscenely wealthy.

He made his OWN life, obviously. The Weyland line of android synthetics, beginning with David. Why wouldn't a man believe he was god if he could create his very own servant underclass that was expected to be superior in skill and capability but inferior in power and importance?

And in part, Weyland's quest for those creators - that he fully believed existed - led to a colonisation program that spread mankind across the stars.

Of course we are perhaps more familiar with the merged company, Weyland-Yutani.

While the first AvP film features one of Peter Weyland's predecessors, the second (vastly inferior) AvP film features one Ms. Yutani, of Yutani Corporation - who takes possession of a piece of Predator technology. While the Alien vs Predator movies are of questionable quality, they do actually thread reasonably well into the canon of the rest of the movies (with the potential exception of Predator from 2018, which I haven't actually seen yet - perhaps I ought to change that tonight).

It can be inferred from the actions of the company during the movies that it is aware of both the Yautja (Predators) and the Xenomorphs by the time of the events of Alien. So it almost certainly knows just how dangerous interfering with beings like them can really be.

The company, of course, doesn't care.

In a world wherein you have multiple classes of people - and the Alien universe is one such universe, just look at how the shares are divided between the crew (half shares for the engineers, full shares for the people wearing uniform) - then one of the dynamics that comes about is risks taken being pushed downwards. It's why, when the stock market crashes, regular people suffer quite a lot. It's why, when a business goes under, the workers all get laid off and their pensions get raided, but the owner got to leave two weeks ago with a nice golden handshake.

If there's a catastrophic failure somewhere, it is always someone else putting in the work and taking the actual risk, so it will always be someone else that takes the fall.

So of course, Weyland-Yutani wants the creature. It wants everything it can get. Corporate culture has bred several layers of corporate individual who will do just about anything to gain a promotion or favour within the ranks, has been doing so since the mid-1980s. There's no end of individuals that will overlook the regulations, morals, laws, anything, in order to get a bigger cut of a pie - or a whole pie of their own.

There's always a Carter Burke.

Weyland-Yutani are the real bad guys. Without the immense hubris of Peter Weyland, none of this would have happened. Without a culture that we have cultivated as a society for almost forty years, shored up at every angle by individuals sympathetic to it and people defending it because it might one day profit them.

One of humanity's greatest enemies wears a suit, has an office, and talks about people dying as "collateral" and "PR".

Art imitates life.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

A Close Shave

So in case you missed it - relatively recently, Gillette released an advert which somewhat goes against their previous formula.

The theme of the ad is pretty simple, when it comes down to it. It takes a look at shitty behaviour which society has normalised, and says, hey, people are doing this - maybe we shouldn't do this. I've tapped up a summary of that behaviour below.

- Physically Intimidating People
- Sexually Harassing People
- Making Comedy Out Of Sexually Harassing People
- Demeaning People Because They're Women
- Physically Assaulting People
- Being Cool With Other People Doing Any Of The Above

I mean... seems pretty basic, right?

It seems like a pretty solid list. On your first day at a new job, meeting new people, going to dinner with a group of friends, like - that's not a bad list things to NOT do. If we're going to the pub and any of those things are on your list of things to do, then I kind of don't want to hang out with you.

There wouldn't be a blog about this if there wasn't controversy, of course - because the group called upon to not do these aforementioned things, statistically speaking the group far more likely to do any of these things, is men.

I think the actual objection is probably based around something other than the extant content of the advert. I daresay it probably didn't actually gain a lot of negative attention - for THIS reason anyway, trust me, I'm going to go into a little more of the corporate background of this in a minute - until people like THIS goon

got their hands on it and decided it was anti-men.

Now I'm not sure what Piers Morgan has going on in his past. Or any of the... dozens of men on YouTube who had to record twenty-minute videos about "ANTI-MAN GILLETTE AD IS TOTAL FAIL !!!!!". I'm just going to speak from experience when I say:

This ad isn't anti-me.

Like I have no problem in recognising that all the behaviours that ad calls out are shitty behaviours. I don't feel personally called out when someone says "kids beating up other kids is bad" or "maybe we shouldn't catcall women in the street" or "I defended someone from having the shit kicked out of them by a mob".

Is that how people like Piers Morgan want masculinity to be defined? By the right to be violent and sexist and generally shit, and never be called out for it?

Actually I rather think that Piers Morgan doesn't feel that way at all, but I think he wants to appeal to a specific demographic. He wants to appeal to a slice of society that isn't happy, and can't quite work out why, and so it needs something to complain about. It needs to grumble. It's already had significant advantage throughout its life, but that hasn't led to total success or satisfaction. He wants the ear of those who grumble about things being too politically correct, who want things to be the way they were back in the day, when Roy Chubby Brown was considered funny and women "knew their place". The "It Never Did Me Any Harm" brigade, who would desperately benefit from some therapy to try and undo the harm that it really, actually, did do them.

Is it better or worse that he is using this whole thing as a marketing exercise? Honestly, kind of worse, I think. Anyway, I digress.

If you really, really want to die on that hill - that being a man involves being allowed to treat people like that, like that is the only way men should act and that being called out for it is a bad thing - then be our guest. Be as loud about it as you want. Please.

It's a great warning sign. Like the bright colours on this little guy.

Let us know, that that is who you are, so the rest of the world can get on without you.

It can take some time to realise that masculinity doesn't have to be toxic. It can take a lot of work to uncouple the whole alpha-dude-me-tarzan thought process. Especially if you have been a victim of it previously, and are now repeating it because it's the way you think you get the power back.

I distinctly remember that happening when I was in school. The older kids bullied kids my age. Kids my age bullied weaker kids my age. Weaker kids my age bullied younger kids. Like a chain of arseholes, leading all the way up into this core behaviour that is being directly challenged. That should have been challenged a long time ago.

I mean... it seems like, if you don't want to challenge that behaviour, then you've watched Battle Royale as a how-to guide, rather than a dystopian action movie.

Empathy is not a weakness, no matter what the world and the old way of doing things tells you. Thinking about how your actions affect other people is not a weakness. Being considerate is not a weakness. It's the only way we are getting out of this alive as a collective people, and if you are threatened by the notion of people caring about each other, that probably says a lot more about you than you'd like.

With all that said, however.

It bears remembering that Gillette are a company. They exist to make money. They aren't a person, no matter what corporate law tells you. They don't have a personality. They aren't interested in being the good person. They're interested in profits.

Companies are going to increasingly do this - they're going to latch onto causes that other people campaign for, try and align themselves with the right thing to do. You'll see examples of it all over the place. The fact is that they can market themselves as being "nice" or "woke" or "socially conscious" or "not evil or greedy" all they want. None of it is true. You need to judge the companies based on how they act - and as the system that props them up doesn't reward kindness or solid morals, well... guess how that works out.

To point the finger at Gillette directly, of course - they're a razor company. They benefit from insecurity, leverage it, make it manifest if possible. Like any product in the grooming sector, the fashion sector, every sector that revolves around image. That attitude that women should always shave their legs and have no body hair that isn't pleasing to their husband/significant other? Thank razor companies for that. Literally. Gillette is just hoping that you'll forget the sexist and generally trash shit it has done in the past, in the light of its new "woke" image. Oh god, how I hate that term.

Companies like Gillette are in bed with media that tells you that you aren't good enough. You'll find adverts for razors and grooming products everywhere, but especially in magazines that tell you how important it is to lose ten pounds, to do this, to wear that. This is no accident.

And for all the negative attention that companies may get from aligning themselves with, well, not being assholes - from assholes - it will still get their name out there. The controversy is free advertising. Every video that talks about how someone is burning their Nike socks because they sponsor the kneely football man is more advertising.

I'm even advertising Gillette right now, paradoxically.

So really the message we should take from this whole thing is to be nicer to each other, to not stand by idly when people are assholes, and to not trust companies at all.

Get it? Got it? Good.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Where Monopolies End

Yep, it's that time of year again - I am doing National Novel Writing Month once more, and this time, we're going cyberpunk, baby.

This will form part of a series of blogs about my NaNo project and about writing in general, each looking at themes I am exploring or generally find neat or awful respectively.

Now, with cyberpunk, we find ourselves in the corporate future.

Take this shot from the set of the original Blade Runner:

See how well-lit everything is? And can you see any actual streetlights? It's all shining down from logos and neons.

This is a theme that gets heavily picked up in cyberpunk and scifi. Neal Stephenson, in 1992's Snow Crash, labels the effect Loglo. Here it is demonstrated in the TV series of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon:

Pretty but also a bit troubling, right?

For comparison, here is what I believe to be Tokyo, circa 90s:

I have gone on record before as saying that I believe the cyberpunk future to be the future we are heading into.

Picture this though. Picture the far future. Not the relative near, wherein we are still Earth-centric and our values are pretty similar to what they are today. Wherein the things that trouble us are also relevant to what they would be today.

Instead let us turn our eyes hundreds, if not thousands, of years into the future - a future based on the notion that, today, now, the corporations win. Massive business entities made out of hundreds of different individual corporations handling the exploration, colonisation and habitation of spheres beyond Earth. I hope that doesn't sound too out there, given that SpaceX exists. How big a jump is it, really, to go from SpaceX to something like...

So if one single company colonises a planetoid, builds all the homes there, makes it breathable, makes it habitable - is there still going to be a monopolies commission to make them let other corporate interests take root in the soil that they themselves made fertile?

Given how the world is going, I daresay that the law against monopolies will be left on Earth.

So this business ends up basically owning this entire planetoid, be it a moon, a large asteroid, an actual planet, whatever. And it can either let other businesses in, or it can just...do it its damn self.

Lets say that the company that ends up owning Titan is Nestle. I'm sure you have all seen this rather scary image.

Now this is just food and drink items, but it shows what a spread of products each of these individual large businesses has under their purview.

So lets say Titan needs places to live. Good news, one of the subdivided companies actually has a wing that deals entirely with housing. The people that live there need places to eat and shop, which is good, because another subdivision has both a chain of stores and a chain of bars and fast food restaurants.

These people need to work, though - and only so many of them are needed to actually "service" everyone else. Which is great, because Titan has plenty of natural resources to exploit, and there's plenty of business opportunities! ... for the processing and manufacture divisions of the company.

Who gets to tell them no? Who goes out into the solar system and rocks up to every single settled planetoid and demands that the company that literally built everything on it needs to let in competition?

The company gets to be the law, here. Gets to be the judge and jury. And one might assume that the way a business gets to be the one to settle, say, Titan is by a bidding system. That the colonisation rights would be put out to tender, and whoever can afford / make the best case for the rights, gets them.

So you, the normal person, some fifty generations after settling - you have grown up knowing nothing but the company. You've only ever lived, eaten, breathed, worked around company territory. You pay them rent out of the pay they give you for the work you put in. And whatever central government exists doesn't have to care about you, because you are the sole responsibility of the company that bought Titan.

Or Analog Incorporated, the company that bought the civic rights to Corpus VIII's second moon. Auroch, a moon with an atmosphere that is breathable and survivable but that has no magnetosphere and can't shield you from very rapid death from solar radiation. You can't go out by day - which is okay because a significant amount of time is spent in eclipse behind Corpus VIII, a gas giant.

The company doesn't have to pay for street lights. It has its own logos to light your way.

Welcome to the setting of my NaNo, 2018.