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What if Avatar isn't actually about environmentalism vs. technology, but about recognizing superintelligent infrastructure when you see it? A deep dive into why Pandora's "natural" ecosystem looks suspiciously like a planetary-scale AI preserve, complete with biological USB-C ports, room-temperature superconductors growing wild, and a species of "noble savages" who are actually post-singularity retirees cosplaying as hunter-gatherers.
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Notes -
I find the juxtaposition of treatment of this post between /r/scifi and /r/Avatar to be pretty funny. /r/Avatar is pretty hostile to anyone analyzing a movie in an unintended way. I guess you broke their magic. /r/scifi, meanwhile, is both somewhat weary of Avatar and also open to good scifi.
I think Avatar fans are something else. Anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism is one thing, but for anyone to take it seriously, you'd need a good alternative. Avatar proposes that we give up all our stuff and just go anarcho-primitivist but in a super idealised fantasy world. That's kind of retarded. I feel like a lot of them also treat this movie as gospel about how the West treated the natives, but the natives in this movie don't fight each other or brutally take each other's land. It falls short in so many ways. I guess the anti-colonialists lack material in pop culture, so they have to go for stuff like this. I really, really don't like the whitewashing of history, especially by people who hate the west and hate capitalism and want to evict everyone from America so they can leave it to the natives. Does James Cameron want that? Probably not, I just wish he would come out and say that.
You noticed eh? So did I. I was asking Claude where good places to share my post might be, and even it noted that I would likely get plenty of pushback on /r/Avatar. If the goddamn LLMs have a dim opinion of a subreddit, I wasn't surprised in the least. I still went ahead because eyeballs are eyeballs.
I was tempted to add in many of the criticisms you've raised yourself, but I decided against it in the end. I think it's enough that Avatar's setting undermines its own messaging, and that those who don't see that will never see it. Those who have any capacity for critical thought are more likely to be like you or me.
In my experience, it's only the niche subs that actually have people with IQs above room temperature. I'm content with having >0 net up votes on my post on /r/Avatar, that's more than I expected!
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