I’ve been thinking about Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth film in the Mad Max franchise, and a film I liked very much. I’d like to offer an interpretation, perhaps even a “Straussian reading”, as Tyler Cowen likes to call such things.
Think about the world in which the film is set. It is our world, that is, our earth, but it is desolate. It is, shall we say, post-apocalyptic. The nature of the apocalypse is not at all evident, but whatever it was, it left enough machinery around that the remnants of humanity can cobble things together and make their way across the desert.
Humans live in small autonomous tribes, none obviously capable of dominating the others. In particular, there is no ginormous empire lording it over everything and all like we have in the Star Wars franchise. In that franchise the Empire is clearly evil while the rebels are clearly good. There is little such moral differentiation in the Mad Max world.
That world centers on Max Rockatansky, who had been a policeman before the apocalyptic event, and who lost is wife and child in the first film. He wanders the world alone. He is our moral center, such as it is.
At the beginning of the film he is captured by a tribe headed by Immortan Joe. Joe is a misshapen thug who hoards water, thereby controlling his tribe, and keeps a harem of young women. That makes him a suitable stand-in for evil. As for the people in his tribe, well, that depends.
He sends one of his lieutenants, Imperator Furiosa, on a run for gasoline and ammunition. She decides to help Joe’s harem flee and hides them in the rig. That makes her a suitable stand-in for good.
As for Max, he starts out as a “blood bag” for Nux, one of Joe’s War Boys. In the chase after Furiosa Max manages to escape from War Boys and join up with her. As things develop Nux ends up falling for one of the escaping wives. There is a lot of exciting this and that, Furiosa hooks up with a gang of biker women who’d raised her as a child, followed by more exciting stuff, with Max, Furiosa, and the women defeating Joe and liberating the women.
Max rides off.
* * * * *
Now, think of Immortan Joe as, say, Donald Trump, and Max Rockatansky as, say, Mark Zuckerberg – though, tbh, he strikes me as more of a Nux, with the chrome silver teeth and all.
Yes, I know, I know. Trump ran for President in 2016 while the film came out in 2015, started photography in 2012 and was a gleam in its father’s eye way back in 1998. And, yes I know, Zuckerberg already got his film in 2010 (The Social Network). Remember, we’re speaking allusively, figuratively. None of this is real, nor is it unreal. It is in suspension, hanging in the Straussian flux.
Max Zuckerberg just wants to move fast on his unicorn while breaking things and staying alive. He doesn’t want to be in thrall to Immortan Joe, Darth Sidious, or Donald Trump. But Immortan Sidious Trump, he wants it all. Why? Because it is always already all his.
All of which is to assert though implication that the emergence of digital technology and the web has created a world of actors, individual, corporate, diffuse, and otherwise, that is not well suited to existing institutional structures, which are grounded in the 19th century, if not before. These new actors have imperatives of their own. They are lawless. They are creatures of the Mad Max world. Drained of civilization, the dross, the cream, floats to the top.
* * * * *
What are we to make of the oversight board Facebook has just recently established to make content moderation decisions? Note that while Facebook has set it up and endowed it with a $130-million trust fund, it is an independent legal entity. It would be possible, in theory, for other entities in the digital wasteland to contribute money to and avail themselves of the board’s services. Is it the beginning of a new institutional order on the digital frontier, brokering deals among individuals and tribes in the Mad Max wasteland but beholding to none?
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