in the polka dots world

Alexa is not neutral technology.

Neutrality is a comforting myth; and a deeply capitalist one. She does not exist to help you; she exists to collect, predict, and sell you. Every “Alexa, what time is it?” is less a question and more a data point. Every command is another brick in the architecture of surveillance.

Contemporary capitalism no longer needs smoking factories or visible whips. It prefers microphones. It prefers listening. It prefers knowing your habits before you even recognize them yourself. Alexa does not invade your home: she is invited in, placed at the center of the living room as a functional decorative object, a small domestic altar to efficiency.

Foucault, at least the way my professor explained him, described the panopticon as an architecture of control: it is not necessary to watch all the time, as long as the subject knows they might be watched. Alexa is the panopticon in its minimalist version, with clean design and a sweet voice. She does not need to threaten. She normalizes. Surveillance stops being an exception and becomes routine, a kind of background music to private life.

And the most perverse blow is not the control of the body, but of thought. Late capitalism understood something essential: thinking is tiring. Thinking slows down consumption. Thinking creates friction. So it offers shortcuts. It turns reflection into an outsourced function. Why remember, if someone can remember for you? Why decide, if an algorithm decides better? Why question, if the answer already comes prepackaged?

Alexa does not only eliminate physical effort... she anesthetizes autonomy. She produces a docile, efficient, predictable subject. A subject who does not need to know, only to ask. Who does not need to remember, only to delegate. Who does not need to concentrate, only to react.

And while you ask, she learns. She learns your schedules, your silences, your repetitions, your poorly articulated desires. In surveillance capitalism, you are not the customer. You are the raw material. Your daily life becomes a database. Your intimacy becomes a product. Your home, a laboratory.

Connecting your lights, your calendar, your lock is not progress; it is the privatization of intimate life. It is handing the key to your home over to the market, naïvely believing that comfort asks for nothing in return. It does. It always does. And the price is the slow erosion of freedom; not heroic, abstract freedom, but the small, daily freedom of thinking alone.

Dystopia does not arrive in military boots. It arrives with free shipping, a friendly interface, and voice commands. It does not say “obey.” It says, “just ask.”

And when we realize we are trapped, the collar will no longer be around our necks.

It will be in habit.

In attention.

In the way we have learned to exist.

If this were a film, Alexa would not be the black-cloaked villain. She would be the background detail no one questions. She would be there on the table, like in Her, promising companionship; like in Black Mirror, swearing efficiency; like in Brazil, hiding horror behind clean, functional bureaucracy. Terror never arrives screaming... it arrives well-mannered.

The problem is not the machine. It is how accustomed we have become to not thinking. To asking instead of deciding. To delegating instead of remembering. To confusing comfort with freedom. Every dystopia begins when the protagonist stops finding the world strange and starts calling it normal.

So perhaps the most revolutionary gesture today is not shutting down the entire system, but standing up from the chair, turning off the light with your own hand, doing the math in your head, remembering an appointment without help. Small, everyday disobediences. Micro-acts of resistance against a world that prefers you distracted, predictable, and quiet.

Because in the final scene, when the dark house is still listening and you realize you were never truly alone, the question will not be whether Alexa was dangerous. It will be: when did we decide it was acceptable to place a microphone at the center of our own lives and call it progress?

Today I was listening to the Skins UK soundtrack (as one does when one wants to feel 16 and catastrophic again) and “Don’t Preach to Me” came on.

And I had that horrible, clarifying moment where a song stops being aesthetic and starts being diagnostic.

I realised I’ve always loved that song because it articulates something I’ve felt since I was about ten years old: the suffocation of certainty.

When I was around ten years old, I had this quiet, disorienting realisation: other children didn’t relate to religion metaphorically. They weren’t treating it like Santa Claus, a moral story you eventually outgrow. They believed it as fact. As final truth.

And I remember thinking:

oh.

Not in rebellion. Not in superiority. Just in distance. I couldn’t access that certainty. It felt… staged. Performed. Rehearsed. Like everyone had agreed to stand inside something airtight, and I couldn’t breathe in it.

I don’t disbelieve. I don’t believe. I resist 100% statements.

and that’s what the song captures... not atheism, not blasphemy, but resistance to being instructed into meaning. “Don’t preach to me” isn’t a rejection of truth. It’s a rejection of authority, claiming ownership over it.

What terrifies me about rigid religion (and rigid ideology in general) isn’t the metaphysics. It’s the moral outsourcing.

Dogma is when interpretation freezes. When questioning becomes disobedience. When doubt is framed as moral failure. When a 3,000-year-old text is treated not as history, not as literature, not as philosophy... but as a closed system immune to context.

That is what suffocates me.

Because dogma removes the burden of thinking.

If the answer is already written, I don’t have to wrestle with it.

If morality is codified, I don’t have to deliberate.

If the book says so, I am absolved.

And that is terrifying.

Not because people believe, belief is human, but because dogma turns belief into insulation. It shields people from the discomfort of ethical responsibility.

Sartre would call this bad faith.

Bad faith isn’t lying to others. It’s lying to yourself about your own freedom. It’s pretending you are an object following a script instead of a subject making choices. “I had no choice, it’s what my religion says.” But you chose to follow it. You chose to interpret it that way. You chose to prioritise it over alternatives.

Freedom doesn’t disappear just because you hide it under scripture.

Sartre argues that we are “condemned to be free,” which sounds dramatic (and it is), but what he means is that there is no external script we can ultimately hide behind. Even refusing to choose is a choice. Even obedience is chosen.

And that’s the part that resonates with me; not because I want chaos, but because I don’t want insulation.

I would rather carry the anxiety of freedom than the comfort of obedience.

Religious certainty often functions as a kind of existential anaesthesia. It reduces vertigo. It gives you coordinates. It says: this is good, this is evil, this is your role, this is your path.

But what if those coordinates were written 3,000 years ago in a world that no longer exists?

What if clinging to them means refusing to think in the present?

What if certainty is just fear dressed as virtue?

And yes, I hear the irony of saying I agree with Sartre “100%.” That’s the joke. The point isn’t to replace one doctrine with another. The point is to defend the right to revise.

I don’t like 100% truths. The moment someone speaks as if something is absolute, I feel doubt rising automatically. not because it must be false, but because finality feels like a closed door.

I don’t want to be attached to ideas in a way that makes them immovable. I want permeability. I want the ability to change without feeling like I’ve betrayed something sacred.

And maybe that’s why Skins still hits.

Because that entire show is about teenagers confronting inherited systems; religion, class, gender roles, and family expectations; and realising that adulthood is not inheriting a script, but deciding whether to keep it.

“Don’t Preach to Me” is not anti-spiritual. It’s anti-coercion.

It’s not saying “there is no truth.”

It’s saying, “you don’t get to hand it to me pre-packaged.”

Sartre would say that anguish is the natural condition of someone who understands their freedom. And maybe that’s what I felt at ten years old without having the language for it. not disbelief. anguish.

The knowledge that if there is no divine recipe book, then the weight of my life is mine.

That’s terrifying.

But it’s also honest.

And if I have to choose between suffocating certainty and uncomfortable freedom, I will choose the vertigo.

There is something cosmically humiliating about opening Wuthering Heights to Charli XCX whispering “I think I’m gonna die in this house” like she just discovered gothic literature via Pinterest-core. The intention was probably irony. Maybe sex appeal. Maybe “look how modern we are.” What it gave was prophecy. I, too, thought I was going to die in that house. Not of passion. Of cringe.

The TikTokification of a 19th-century fever dream is not bold. It’s not subversive. It’s not “collapsing temporal boundaries.” It’s branding. Emerald Fennell does not use anachronism as tension… she uses it as aesthetic SEO. There’s no dialogue with Emily Brontë. There’s a moodboard. There are vibes. There is a social media intern somewhere salivating.

And then. “He shall be your pet.”

Are we in 1847 or are we in a Wattpad comment section written by someone whose only exposure to class conflict is “rich x poor enemies to lovers” tagged #darkacademia #toxicbuthot?

Updating a text is not the crime. Flattening it is. The violence of class and racialized otherness gets reduced to roleplay dialogue that sounds like it should be followed by “don’t kink shame.”

Young Cathy is pure “I’m not like other girls” without the self-awareness. She is not feral. She is not socially warped. She is not tragically egoistic. She is insufferable in the way only algorithmic girlbosses can be. Every line sounds like it was rehearsed in front of a ring light.

The tree scene? The corset lifting? The “animalistic” sex scenes that look like two people trying to solve a geometry problem with their mouths? I have seen more erotic tension in IKEA assembly instructions.

This film believes intensity is loud gestures. Smash a chair. Add viscous close-ups. Make the walls look like they have veins. Insert fluids. Repeat. But grotesque imagery without psychological depth is just set dressing for people who think shock equals substance.

And listen, we’ve been here before. Promising Young Woman. Saltburn. Visual audacity over thematic rigor. Transgression as aesthetic, not philosophy. But here it collapses entirely. The film wants to be scandalous, erotic, feminist, tragic, camp, literary. It ends up being loud and weirdly prudish at the same time.

The most devastating line in the novel; “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”, is not romantic. It is fatal. It is a curse disguised as intimacy. Here? It lands like a Canva quote over a grayscale sky.

And then the casting.

Whitening Heathcliff by choosing Jacob Elordi is not neutral. It removes the structural racial ambiguity that defines his outsider status. Heathcliff is supposed to be socially illegible. Disturbing. Unassimilable. Not a melancholic editorial model with artisanal dirt.

By erasing the racial tension, the film erases the engine of his resentment. What remains is “sad hot man in fields.” Revolutionary.

But the deepest misunderstanding is genre. Wuthering Heights is not a romance. It is not about true love conquering anything. It is about obsession curdling into generational rot. It is about people who are, frankly, terrible; and the way trauma reproduces itself.

Turning it into stylized dark romance is not reinterpretation. It is domestication. It sands down the cruelty and markets it as “toxic but iconic.”

The latex costumes. The runway silhouettes. The constant visual screaming of “this is daring!” while the script can barely hold a conversation without sounding like a dramatic TikTok POV.

It wants to be Fifty Shades of Grey with literary legitimacy. It doesn’t even commit hard enough to be kitsch. It’s a million-dollar fanfic that discovered Brontë through an aesthetic playlist.

I left the theater not disturbed, not shaken, not morally implicated… just embarrassed. The specific, public embarrassment of watching something try so hard to be profound that it forgets to actually think.

If this was reinvention, it was dilution.

If this was transgression, it was cosplay.

And if those quotation marks in “Wuthering Heights” were meant as irony… they are the most honest artistic decision in the entire film.

What bothers me about ancient Greece isn’t just that women weren’t heard... It’s how deliberate the silence was.

Athens loved to imagine itself as the birthplace of reason, but only under very specific conditions. Public speech was power, and power was male. Women weren’t excluded because they were incapable, but because their exclusion was necessary to keep the system looking coherent. As Simone de Beauvoir reminds us, women are not born but made. And in Athens, they were made invisible.

The city worked by splitting life into two: the public and the private. The public was where thinking mattered; the private was where women were kept. Hannah Arendt talks about how speech is what turns life into political action... so what happens when half the population is denied speech? They don’t just lose power; they lose historical existence.

This is why Athens feels claustrophobic. It wasn’t loud oppression; it was polite.

Clean.

Intellectual.

Women were allowed to exist as long as they didn’t interrupt the conversation.

And then there’s Sparta, which everyone rushes to call barbaric.

Sparta didn’t “liberate” women out of feminist conviction, let’s be real, but it did something Athens refused to do: it let women take up space. Spartan women trained, owned land, moved freely, and spoke publicly. Their bodies weren’t hidden or moralised in the same way. Not because Sparta was good, but because control took a different form.

And that’s the uncomfortable part: women’s freedom has always been treated as optional. contextual. negotiable. If it serves the system, it’s allowed. If it threatens it, it’s framed as chaos.

This logic never went away.

We still live with Athens.

Women are visible but not authoritative, encouraged to speak but punished when they don’t speak “correctly.” We’re told to participate, but only in ways that don’t disrupt anything. Judith Butler would call this the regulation of intelligibility; you can speak, as long as your voice fits the script.

And Sparta? Sparta is still the cautionary tale. The woman who is too loud, too physical, too autonomous is still read as excessive, dangerous, unfeminine. Not because she’s wrong, but because she exposes how fragile the rules actually are.

So ancient Greece doesn’t feel like the past to me. It feels like a draft that never stopped being revised. The same argument, dressed up in different centuries.

Maybe the grief isn’t that women were silenced. Maybe it’s that we keep being told this is new.