Brandon Marcus

Politics is fandom — indeed, everything is fandom — because everything is mediated. Most of what we know, feel, and act on is almost exclusively delivered to us through screens, images, text. In practice, there is no clear break between “real life” and “media.” We experience reality the way we experience fiction. Fandom is the organizing principle... See more

The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that myth first emerged to help people cope with what he called “the absolutism of reality” — the overwhelming scale of the world and its fundamental indifference to human concerns.

Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as... See more

As Merry puts it, metrics and indicators require all kinds of political compromises and judgment calls to compress so much rich information into a single ranking. But the superficially simple nature of the final product—the metric—tends to conceal all kinds of subjectivity and politics