LIFE IS PAIN 1988. WELCOME TO YAOI TOWN USA

i also considered choosing a tagalog song, but to be honest, i'm not much of a music listener so i didn't know enough songs that would've reminded me of disco elysium or had the vibes/inspiration i was looking for. but, oh well!

another inspiration for this drawing was that one sculpture with flowers bursting from its head that people were redrawing, i kind of wanted to capture that but a little differently! instead of drawing flowers, i get to draw one billion trillion disco elysium npcs good god why did i do that to myself

it's actually been a while since i've drawn this i'm trying to remember if i have anything else to say hm hm hmmm oh yea accessories harry's got are the eight-eyed teratorn tie and on the side is the hat he gets from annette! (it's not very obvious, it just looks like a very colorful part of the background too but that was what my idea was anyways pftt) i wanted harry to be wearing things that were out of the little acts of kindness you do in the game.

A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute

Elon Musk stretches out his right arm and everyone jumps over it. Welcome to the new attention regime.

There's no need to make this unnecessarily complicated at the start. Anyone who raises their right arm in a political speech on a political stage in front of an audience, some of whom belong to the far right, is doing the Hitler salute. There is no need for “supposedly” or “similar” or “disputed.” The gesture speaks for itself; it is documented in the video. Anyone who wants to reinterpret it, who doesn't want to see the Hitler salute, does so at their own expense. Anyone who, for example, now thinks they have to discover the older “Roman salute” as a supposed Musk reference is demonstrating above all their willingness to make a convenient reinterpretation.

So Elon Musk stretches out his right arm and makes everyone jump through a hoop. The day of the inauguration marks the formal start of Donald Trump's second presidency. The associated attention regime is becoming more visible than ever before.

Because that's what it's all about: Attention. It is the most contested commodity in a world in which, at any given moment, every snippet, every image, video and quote is vying for attention. Trump and Musk are masters in this competition. Especially because they manage to use even negative attention for their own benefit. See the Hitler salute.

What is happening now is foreseeable: Neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists may interpret the outstretched right arm as a gesture of fraternization and encouragement. Moderate, benevolent supporters as an escalated gesture of jubilation. And everyone else is faced with an impossible choice: either to ignore the breach of taboo and thus contribute to its de-tabooing or to mark it as a breach of taboo and thus produce outrage, which in turn invites gloating from the other side. You can lament this, but you have to reckon with the fact that a relevant part of humanity now only sees scandalizing the Hitler salute as virtue signaling.

These are the rules of this attention game that has been going on since at least 2016, and the winners seem to be as certain as the helpless losers.

Journalism, in particular, is also faced with the choice between paying attention to such events and ignoring them. It plays the attention game. Indeed, the media are the traditional arena of this game. This text, too, can be read as evidence of a certain helplessness. So far, no better solution is in sight than to distinguish the small hoops from the Hitler salute-sized ones, and at least try to point out the mechanisms of the game when jumping. 

Honorable, but powerless

Political gestures and sentences work like all other stimuli to which people are exposed: They no longer have as strong an effect the second time as the first, and they're even weaker the third time. Humans are creatures of adaptation. Habituation is one of the few constants of human existence, which is why the calls that we should “not get used to political monstrosities” are honorable but powerless. 

For Trump and Musk, the political return on their attention-grabbing victories therefore lies not only in the public becoming accustomed to their specific positions and style, but generally in the fact that they are the ones who determine what people get used to. That they have the greatest power over the window of what can be said.