Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 2/28/25

End of February edition

This newsletter was compiled hastily and under some duress, as Administration has been wrestling with deadlines and lackluster box office grosses, we find our office pulled this way and that, like carnival taffy. Rest assured, things are getting done, but at a more leisurely pace than anyone would like. If there’s anything more mentally tiresome than juggling finances for a seasonal business, I don’t know what it would be.

Fretful Proof of Life Selfie

Hashtag Activism, part 1

Today is the second of what I expect to be a regular thing over the next four years; a plea to avoid spending any money on Amazon or any of their other subsidiaries for one whole day (that’ll show ‘em!). As someone who has openly and repeatedly ruminated over doing that very thing, I don’t think this goes far enough, and also, I don’t think that’s the best way forward.

I don’t mean that we shouldn’t drop these services; we should. But as someone who lives in a culturally bereft part of Texas, where every convenience and all signs of civilization are three hours from here in any direction, it’s not enough to simply boycott Amazon for a day. How do you even do that, anyway? If you’re a Prime member, then guess what? You’ve already given them over a hundred bucks. You don’t want to rent a $3.99 movie? They won’t notice, not unless you regularly order 30 such movies every day, for a whole year. Middle management might feel that, but will Bezos the guy you’re trying to send a message to Dr. Evil notice? From his space station orbiting the Earth?

One day won’t cut it. It’s going to take a complete and total walk out to make any discernable difference. No one is on these platforms 24/7 anyway. We hop on, we hop off. They count the click-throughs. They clock how much time we spend scrolling. If you miss a day, they’ll just assume you were sick in bed (if they notice at all, which they won’t). The “strength in numbers” approach won’t be a factor unless millions of people (not just “us,” you know, the enlightened ones) cancel their subs and don’t renew the Prime membership, don’t make any online purchases, etc, and (this is most important) they have to stay gone.

Even then, that’s not a guarantee that anyone is going to change their behavior and start acting like a decent human being, and not a billionaire. None of the Gilded Age Robber Barons went bankrupt and suddenly decided that people were more important than profits. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it anyway.

A political cartoon from 1904 depicting Standard Oil as a greedy octopus.

I think it’s fair to say that the Great Social Media Experiment was a bust. Everything they said it would do, it actually did the opposite. Instead of more freedom, we got more control. Instead of coming together, it drove us apart into spiteful tribes, reinforcing the Us vs. Them dynamic. It turned all of us into Star-Bellied Sneetches, thanks to the Rise of the Influencer. And instead of freeing up the flow of information, it only spread lies, propaganda, and fabrication, so much so that we no longer trust our own political and societal institutions. The cracks are showing in this so-called utopian facade.

So, yeah, let’s burn it all down and get back to 2002. I’m talking Livejournal/Message Boards/Instant Messages. That’s about all we really need, and you know it. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many social media options out there that are deliberately not setting themselves up like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. There’s a “don’t be an asshole” solution to most, if not all of them, as we speak. I’d tell you to google it, but I’m trying to avoid that as much as possible because it’s a tire fire of a tool right now. Instead, maybe I’ll tell you to look it up on the Internet. Start with checking out Blue Sky (for Twitter) and DuckDuckGo (for a web browser). Oh, wait, here, let’s try this: Duck it up. No. DDG it? No. Duck it? Sigh. We’ll keep workshopping.

I’m all for leaving the current crop of Billionaire Tech Pet Projects in favor of apps and platforms that do not turn us into a commodity to be exploited and strip-mined for data points and demographics. Wow, the premise of The Matrix stopped being science fiction and is now an editorial cartoon, eh? But if we’re going to do this, we need some workarounds, because like it or not, the Internet is no longer just a thing we play around with; it’s a utility. It’s an essential service. We can’t live in the 21st century without it. Not when we use it to bank, pay bills, order goods and services, and communicate.

My charge to you is this: start looking. Not just for yourself, but for others, too. Robert McKee notes, in his influential book, Story, that no one runs when they can walk. He was talking about character motivation in fiction, but it’s largely a truism for modern Americans. If it takes a little extra effort, versus no effort at all, then people will always choose Door Number Two. You might convince them to try Door Number One for a little bit, but they will always default to the path of least resistance.

I want it all gone. I think Facebook should be MySpaced. I think Twitter should shrink down to the size of AOL Instant Messenger. And I think Amazon should be broken up into thousands of smaller, more sustainable sites. We don’t need monopolies, and we never did. In fact, historically, right up until the start of the 21st century, we were very opposed to them by any metric you’d care to examine.

BUT MAAAAAAAARK....HOW AM I GOING TO WATCH REACHER? OR BOSCH? DON’T MAKE ME GIVE UP PREMIUM TELEVISION!

Settle down. Much in the same way Daredevil migrated from Netflix to Disney, that stuff won’t go away. It’ll end up somewhere else. I think it’ll end up on physical media, but I’m sure something else will emerge before then that beams this shit straight into our brains.

But you don’t want to wait. I get it. I do. And there is a solution for you. I am not going to tell you what it is; you already know, don’t you? Don’t make me say it. Argh, come on, now, me hearties, let’s not pretend we are blind in one eye to the realities of what’s going on in the Pacific Rim. I want to emphatically state that I am not condoning it, at all, because the people who work on those shows deserve to get paid and the “nautical solution” would impact their residuals.

That’s a huge thing, completely dismantling several billionaires’ empires, and it makes my head hurt. So, let’s start smaller. Instead of an all-out war, let’s work on skirmishing first. I think we need to focus on a rollback of “A.I.” in all of the digital platforms, apps, and services. I’ll talk more about it next week.

In the meantime, go check out the many essays and articles of Ed Zitron. He’s been scathingly critical of these fevered egos for a while now, and I’ve yet to read any of his assertions that I disagree with. His newsletter is free. Give it a read. Where’s Your Ed At?

I was particularly excited to read this analysis, as I understand his level of frustration. I seem to end up in that head space a lot these days. The Generative AI Con. If you agree with me about Ed’s veracity, please share his essays; he’s not on a lot of corporate media outlets right now, because, you know, he’s critical of their bosses. It’s not like he can publish a guest-editorial in the Washington Post, now, can he?

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: before our review, everyone here in the DMR would like to acknowledge the passing of Gene Hackman, a respected and consummate character actor who was always a delight to watch, whether he was playing Sheriff Bill in Unforgiven, Lex Luther in Superman, or the blind hermit in Young Frankenstein. Not many actors have or will ever have as wide a range as him. He was one of the all-time greats. Rest in Peace.

Elevation (HBO)

Anthony “Cut the Check” Mackie and Morena “Deadpool’s MacGuffin” Baccarin star in a near-future survival story as mankind is forced up into the mountains to escape indestructible creatures from the Earth’s core.

I really like that motto.

Ever since the start of the 21st century, the genres of dystopian post-apocalypse and survival horror have increasingly blurred into one another (The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, A Quiet Place, Edge of Tomorrow, Planet of the Apes, et.al.). I’m okay with this; see, I know in my dark little heart that the apocalypse is nigh, but I’m much more interested in what the Destructor is going to take (a slorg? The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man?), and how we are going to adapt to the new paradigm. I understand that most of the world’s population is going to be wiped out by whatever boogum you’re selling in the story. That needs to make sense at a glance, of course, and the reason for that is, we need to know enough about the Architects of the Apocalypse so we can truly appreciate what brilliant solution the characters come up with to hoist them on their own petard.

Elevation plays by those rules, which is nice, and it also really seems to abhor flashback sequences, because you get the full and complete backstory on the characters by the end of the film, through initial hints in the dialogue, and then a series of concise info dumps along the way to give everyone a breather from whatever crazy shit just went down.

The creatures themselves are, to me, a cross between the cave crickets in the Fallout games and the alien bugs from Starship Troopers, with a bit of pseudo-science thrown in for good measure. Again, at first glance, the biology seems to check out. They are pretty terrifying and the danger seems real.

There are two bits of backstory that you have to willingly suspend your disbelief for: one, that these things came from somewhere in the bowels of the Earth, and two, that they stop pursuing and killing at an elevation of 8,000 feet. If you can square that in your mind, then strap yourselves in. Even if you can’t square it, but you want to see what happens, they give you a partial answer to number two at the end of the first movie. Yeah, there’s a set-up for a sequel, and it’s about as subtle as dancing bear in a pink tutu.

Otherwise, Elevation is an easy, breezy, romp of a B-Movie Monster flick, with the added bonus of having good actors playing off of each other. Mackie may be one of the most likeable onscreen presences around right now, so it’s cool to see him in other things being just as charming as he is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I liked it enough that I find myself easily recalling scenes and set pieces three days after watching it, and for most popcorn flicks these days, that’s a real rarity.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”