Daenerys Targaryen, Fantasy’s Version of the Tech Bro
Move fast and burn things
Spoiler alert: Please don’t read this article if still want to watch the Game of Thrones series and don’t know how it ends. I don’t know how anyone could possibly have avoided this knowledge, but if you have, I want to respect that.
We all know that if Game of Thrones was the real world, Jon Snow wouldn’t have prematurely ended Daenerys Targaryen’s short and surprisingly tyrannical reign. He would have crunched some numbers, seen how it could have benefitted him to continue on Team Daenerys, and then quietly retired to the North to reap the continued financial and cultural rewards of complicity.
In the fictional world of Westeros, Jon Snow had a conscience and followed it. And that, friends, is why we call it “fantasy.”
In no way am I qualified to write this article.
Of the Song of Ice and Fire book series by George R. R. Martin, I have only read the first book, A Game of Thrones. It was all right, but I clearly didn’t feel compelled to read anymore. Once, talking about the book series with a friend, he said, “It’s all about power and power’s the most boring thing in the world. Everyone wants it, they’ll do anything to get it, blah blah blah, boring.”
And that pretty much summed up how I felt about it as well.
I also have not watched the HBO series Game of Thrones, except in bits and pieces on YouTube. There are three reasons for this:
- I don’t have a lot of spare time and didn’t want to spend a huge chunk of it watching what my sister-in-law once referred to as “ultraviolent wizard porn.”
- I felt I could get most of the story by just wandering through some YouTube clips. This way I got to maximize my time choosing Jon Snow/Kit Harrington clips and minimize my time trying to figure out boring subplots like the Tyrells or the Tullys or having to watch anything sickening that had to do with Ramsay Bolton.
- I have a YouTube problem and will watch anything to avoid doing actual work.
But there is one clip on YouTube I have watched several times because it’s a stupendous piece of storytelling, acting, and filming. And that clip is the one where Daenerys hands over one of her dragons (not really) to the Unsullied slave master Kraznys and surprises both her military advisors by gaining the loyalty of the Unsullied army on her own terms. Here it is.
I say this as a former film major and person who has watched a LOT of TV: That’s a powerful, powerful piece of film.
There’s the double-takes done by the grizzled old men who are actually already on Team Daenerys when they realize she’s even smarter and more of a leader than they realized. (Every woman or poor person on Earth deserves at least one moment where people, even if they’re people who love her, realize they’ve underestimated her and signal that new respect with some straightforward eye contact.)
There’s the moment when Daenerys whips out her word-perfect Valyrian to let the overconfident Kraznys know she’s been on to him at all times. There’s the moment she realizes she has the power of the whip, and she tries it out. And then of course, there’s the beautiful, inspiring moment when she tells the Unsullied they are slaves no longer, and any one of them might leave the army at any time. She is beautiful, she is right, she is on the side of freedom, and she drops the whip in disdain because she has found an army that will fight for her precisely because she tells them they don’t have to if they don’t want to.
I’ve watched that clip a hundred times. It’s powerful, it’s inspiring, the music is good, and it makes you feel like maybe, somewhere, somehow, there IS someone out there who is a true “breaker of chains” and can be followed because we love them, not because they’re the lesser of two evils or we have to follow what our nonsensical political party tells us to.
But today I thought about that clip, and for the first time I thought, that’s nice, but even if some Unsullied took her up on that offer of freedom, where the fuck were they supposed to go? What is a nice eunuch with no idea how to make his own decisions and no resources of his own to start with, going to do, and where is he going to go?
Nowhere, is the answer.
And even if she doesn’t know she knows it, Daenerys Targaryen knows it.
Being given one choice after a lifetime of compulsory obedience and violence and no choices does not make a person free.
One of Mark Zuckerberg’s most-cited quotes is the one that succinctly encapsulates his business and tech style:
I know everyone loves Facebook, everyone loves Instagram, everyone loves social media, etc., etc., etc., but just sit with that quote for a minute.
When you look around the real world and stuff seems not to be open because nobody can find workers, everything costs twice as much for half as much, and there seems to be a real breakdown in civility…it seems to me that “move fast and break things” has become the ruling credo for the entire world.
It’s not really a very healthy credo.
And then there are people like Jeff Bezos, building ever bigger yachts to get away from the unwashed masses, Elon Musk refusing to abide by his own company’s employment agreements, and Peter Thiel wanting to milk the blood from younger people to try and extend his own life.
And we all idolize them because they’re “disruptors.” They’re powerful and they give us the tech that makes us “free.” Amazon frees us up from pesky in-person shopping; Twitter gives us freedom to say whatever we want (or at least what Musk will allow us to say); Peter Thiel’s invasive Palantir wants to help healthcare while he surveils every last little thing about you.
Is any of this really freedom?
If you don’t like it, don’t use it, they say. Just go off of social media. Think of everything that tech HAS done for you. (Although I don’t actually know what tech has done for me. Way back in the twentieth century, I had indoor plumbing, antibiotics, and plane travel, which are three huge aspects of life that disruptive tech has done nothing to improve.) Tech makes society more democratic! It frees you from the shackles of religion and groupthink and having to sign your name to your letter to the editor!
In no way was Game of Thrones meant to be a comedy, but this idea that Daenerys Targaryen, with her dragons (a disrupting technology if I’ve ever seen one) and her oh-so-generous idea that people who have nothing and know no other way of life will be able to just walk off and enjoy their freedom, is absolutely HILARIOUS.
Here’s the truth. Our children are the Unsullied.
We are training them to do nothing but look at screens and to think that the people who control those screens and the algorithms that run them are the best, the smartest, the richest, the most worthy, the most (like Daenerys) heroic, and beautiful.
We are providing constant comfort for them and shaping them while teaching them nothing. We all live in fear of our children tumbling downward through ever lower economic classes, so we pay for tutors for STEM topics and we push them to excel in sports so they get a good scholarship and we never take the time to teach them how to grow anything, make anything, cook anything, or clean up after anything, because they are our army that we have to push out there to destroy other peoples’ children on the standardized tests and by snagging those coveted and prestigious unpaid internships.
And someday when we all find our Jon Snow-esque conscience and try to tell all these horrible Tech Bros who helped create this mess, that we don’t need or want their insidious products or whacked-out idea of progress, well, maybe we’ll have a heroic moment of our own when we tell our children, Go! Don’t look at screens! Question tech and its overlords! Be free!
And our kids will all stamp their spears on the ground and stay where they are. They won’t be able to leave their lifestyle, because it’s all they’ve known since birth, and maybe, if they just follow the next all-powerful Tech Bro, they’ll still get to eat tomorrow.
The mistake I made about Game of Thrones was to consider it fantasy. What I see now when I watch Daenerys Targaryen moving fast and burning up the whole world is a documentary about the tech-driven billionaire class who uses us while simultaneously telling us we’re free.
