Sunday, February 25, 2024
11:05 AM |
The Fascination of The Floor
I’m enjoying Rob Lowe’s new game show
The Floor but its fundamental flaw is that it will always favor, as the overall winner, a player who will be called in later episodes. He/she succeeds on the labors of previous winners, and just swoop in winning great swathes of territory often after winning only one duel, relegating exhausted previous winners to the exit. But here’s what’s fascinating: the show also obliquely offers insight on how capitalism works. Yes, life under capitalism. It perfectly demonstrates the grit of the rat race: how one tries so hard, often on skills not demonstrably your own, to win life’s little duels — but the biggest “landowners” can rest easy and win the big cash at the end of each episode. The ease of passive income.
Labels: capitalism, game shows, television
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, February 13, 2020
11:13 PM |
Parasite and Miky Lee
Reading
this article in
The Hollywood Reporter, and it answered a question I had while watching the Oscars Monday morning. Just like I was, many people were confused what to make of the second woman who gave an acceptance speech after
Parasite won Best Picture at the Oscars.
"Who was that woman who professed to loving Bong Joon-ho's hair and how he talks?" mostly in dismissive mocking tone.
Turns out she is
Miky Lee, one of South Korea's richest women, whose family built Samsung—and whose love for movies and pop culture almost single-handedly led to the two-decade rise of Korean film, and music. [Yes, K-Pop!]
Two things I'm taking from this article:
[1] Is there a Pinoy equivalent of Miky Lee, an insanely rich individual who built multiplexes all over the country in a long-term belief that the only way to make a robust film industry is to strengthen its movie-going base by providing sufficient film distribution, and by nurturing filmmakers who delivered quality content—educating a mass audience in the process, instead of coddling them with formulaic fare?
[2] Isn't it fascinating that for all of
Parasite's anti-rich rhetoric, it wouldn't have been possible without chaebol money? Is this another instance of capitalism consuming everything—including, paradoxically, criticism of itself—for profit?
Labels: capitalism, film
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
8:27 AM |
Science and Capitalism
Capitalist short-sightedness.
Must everything we do -- especially in pursuit of forming new knowledge -- have profit motive? I'm currently watching the documentary
Particle Fever (2014), directed with gusto by Mark Levinson -- which has sadly been left out of the short list of documentaries vying for the Oscar this year -- and this particular scene struck me as the answer to many of our dilemmas. And why unflinching capitalism, which asks how we can profit above all, is the secret problem hindering progress.
The film follows the scientists of the
Large Hadron Collider and their search for the Higgs Particle. In one scene, scientist David E. Kaplan is asked this question in a conference: "Let's assume you're successful, and everything comes out okay. What do we gain from it? What's the economic return? How do you justify all this? By the way, I am an economist."
Dr. Kaplan replies: "I don't hold that against you." Much laughter from the conference. Then he goes on: "The question was, what is the financial gain in running an experiment like this, and the discoveries that we will make in this experiment. And it is a very, very simple answer:
I have no idea. We have no idea. When radio waves were discovered, they weren't called 'radio waves' because there were no radios. They were discovered as some sort of radiation. Basic science for big breakthroughs needs to occur at a level where you're not asking what is the economic gain, but you are asking: what do we not know, and where can we make progress. So what [is this experiment] good for? Could be nothing -- other than just understanding everything."
Labels: capitalism, documentaries, film, Higgs Particle, Large Hadron Collider, life, science
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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