By A PPE Student

The year is 1883. A German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche writes a story from the perspective of his fictional alter ego. Zarathustra, the prophet, wanders down a mountain and into a town. He starts warning people of the coming age of nihilism: a collapse of virtues in which the pursuit of greatness is traded for comfort and entertainment.

Nietzsche had no idea that over 140 years later, he would be describing the phenomenon of Grand Theft Auto 6 with frightening accuracy.

Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) games, are the closest thing to a modern-day da Vinci. They are the absurdly diligent development studio creating the most realistic simulation of the real world in history. GTA 5 sold over 200 million copies and crossed $10 billion in revenue — more than any film, book, or music album ever made.

But through a Nietzschean lens, Rockstar’s GTA 6 isn’t just the hyped-up sequel we think it is. It is nihilism’s final, most dystopian evolution.

Rockstar have perfected a marketing strategy that sells the idea of the game more effectively than the game itself. They have perfected a loop of secrecy and information, manipulating their audience into developing an entire identity out of waiting. So today, I’m deliberating how Nietzsche could have predicted the mania enshrouding GTA 6 without even hearing of a television.

God is dead

Nietzsche’s most quoted line is also his most misunderstood. In The Gay Science, he wrote,

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

Nietzsche wasn’t making an argument for atheism, and he wasn’t claiming a deity had literally died. He was describing the collapse of Christianity as the West’s dominant worldview. By the 1880s, science had left religion unsustainable as the organising principle of society. So, Nietzsche asked, if God no longer fills that space, what does?

The answer was nothing. A flat, indifferent nothing, dressed up as freedom. Nietzsche called it nihilism, a condition where nothing is sacred and the highest values devalue themselves. For centuries, Europe’s sense of right and wrong rested on God. You were honest because God was watching, and you were good because one day you’d be judged. Once people stopped believing, those rules and ethics lost their ontological justification. A value nobody can explain slowly loses its meaning.

Nietzsche didn’t live to see what nihilism’s flagship product would look like, but we have.

In the GTA series, you play as a criminal. You steal cars and kill for money… or for nothing at all. You traffic drugs and rob banks. You torture a person in a mission you cannot skip. And there are no consequences. If you die, you respawn. If you get arrested, the world resets. If you kill someone, the body disappears. Nothing you do matters. And that is the point.

This portrays exactly what Nietzsche meant by nihilism. The freedom to do anything to anyone feels like freedom because we have forgotten what the alternative was. The alternative was a world where actions carried weight, where killing a man could damn you and every choice answered to something larger than yourself. Take that away and nothing you do can count for anything. The GTA series sells that feeling of weightlessness as liberation, when it is really just a simulation of the highest values devaluing themselves. The most financially successful piece of art in modern human history is one in which the central pleasure is doing the things every ethical framework has deemed unethical.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Rockstar are not a symptom of Nietzsche’s nihilism. They are an active participant. The GTA games are an exaggerated parody of modern America. Every billboard in GTA 5, every radio ad, every NPC monologue is a deliberate caricature of late-stage American capitalism. Nietzsche thought the job of an artist in a post-God world was to create new values, to be life-affirming in the face of the void. By that standard, Rockstar has the biggest, most complex canvas any artist has ever had… and rather than offer anything to fill it, they use it to reflect the void back at us. Their satire works because the audience can’t tell (or doesn’t care) whether they’re laughing at its ridiculousness or actually living through it.

If God is dead in real life, He’s certainly going to be dead in Rockstar’s Vice City.

The death of God only explains why GTA is so beloved despite it being so debauched. There’s a second Nietzschean concept that explains something stranger, why we’ve spent a decade angry about a game that hasn’t come out yet.

Ressentiment

Four years after Zarathustra, Nietzsche published On the Genealogy of Morality and gave us a word with no clear English translation, ressentiment. It isn’t quite resentment. It’s what happens when someone is wronged or made to feel powerless, but cannot fight back. The anger turns inward, and then, Nietzsche says, it does something strange…

“A revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.”

Powerless people, unable to change their situation, invent a moral framework in which their position becomes the benevolent one and their oppressors the malevolent one. The friend who can’t afford the overseas trip announces travel is overrated anyway. The colleague who misses out on a promotion decides the person who got it is a suck-up. In each case, the powerlessness comes first, and the moral judgment is built afterward to make it bearable. Ressentiment is one of the most ordinary feelings we have, and we construct it again every time we want something we can’t control. GTA 6 is simply an example of millions of people constructing it at once.

You’ve seen the comments. “We got (blank) before GTA 6”, or “We’re not making it to GTA 6.” It looks like a meme, but it’s ressentiment in miniaturised form. The audience has invented a moral framework where Rockstar, the studio crafting the game meticulously and secretively, is the villain, and we, the players, are the victims. We can’t make the game come out faster, so we cast our patience as noble and their diligence as betrayal.

And just as Nietzsche described, the ressentiment has become creative and given birth to values. Waiting has become a virtue: the true fan is the one who has been here since 2013. Cynicism has become wisdom: anyone who gets excited by a trailer is naive. Even the meme has become a badge — proof that you have suffered the wait alongside everyone else.

Ressentiment doesn’t just simmer, it builds cultural identity. Open any GTA 6 community space and watch what the conversation is actually made of. Anger at delays, anger at Rockstar’s silence, anger at the rumored price, anger at the platforms it’s launching on, anger at the platforms it isn’t, anger at trailers for being too short, anger at the next trailer for taking too long.

Most ressentiment arises on its own. Readers of A Song of Ice and Fire have been waiting for The Winds of Winter since 2011, a very real frustration, but it’s aimed at an author who seems to be stuck, not at a marketing plan. Rockstar are different because they have leaned into the frustration. Ressentiment needs an absence to organise itself around. A studio that talked openly about development would deflate the hype, so Rockstar used their silence as their advertising. Nietzsche thought ressentiment was making the modern age small, but it’s lucky he didn’t live to see it digitalised and monetised.

Eternal recurrence

Nietzsche’s most confronting idea appears in The Gay Science in a passage called “The Greatest Weight.”

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more, and innumerable times more.’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth?”

This is called eternal recurrence. Imagine that every meal, every embarrassment, every joy, every minute stuck in traffic, every heartbreak repeats exactly the same forever. No changes. How do you react?

For Nietzsche, this was the deepest test of whether a life had been lived well. It wasn’t a metaphysical claim. He didn’t think time was literally a circle. He thought the question was a measuring instrument. The Übermensch, the overman, is the human who can say yes again and again, living the same life forever. The rest of us throw ourselves down and gnash our teeth. Strictly speaking, Nietzsche meant this as a test to evaluate the life you’ve already lived, but the most useful thing to do with the question is point it forward. So, let’s look at how we’ve waited for GTA 6.

December 2023, after more than a decade of silence, Rockstar drops Trailer 1. 90 seconds of footage, 93 million views in 24 hours. For one week, the wait feels kind of over. Then it restarts as a wait for Trailer 2.

May 2025, Trailer 2 arrives 18 months later. 2 and a half minutes of footage. Reaction videos, frame-by-frame breakdowns, reels dissecting every shop sign. For one week, the wait feels over again, then it restarts as a wait for Trailer 3.

In August 2026, Rockstar premiered a 26-minute extended-look on Netflix. Same media explosion, same week of analysis, same restart, this time as a countdown to launch day. The cycle has run four times in under three years, and the underlying feeling hasn’t changed once.

And the day after GTA 6 finally releases, someone will type GTA 7 into a search bar. A leaker will claim insider info. A channel will post everything we know about GTA 7 so far. The wait will begin again.

We have been doing this since GTA 5 launched on the Xbox 360. We will do it on consoles that haven’t been invented yet. We will do it forever because we’ve built our cultural emotional life around the wait, and the wait now needs us as much as we need it.

Nietzsche’s question isn’t whether the cycle exists. It is whether you’d choose it again knowing what the wait has cost: the years, the trailers, the delays, and the discourse. Would you live this exact decade of anticipation again?

The der letzte Mensch, the last man, says, “Yes.” Of course yes. The wait is the point. The trailer drops are little holidays. The leak threads are community. The countdown is content.

Give him the cycle forever, and he’ll thank you, because the last man’s whole project is comfort dressed up as engagement, and the wait delivers both. Nietzsche feared the last man not because he suffers, but because he doesn’t. He has his little pleasures for the day, and his little pleasures for the night, and he calls that a life.

The Übermensch says, “No.” Not because the wait or final game was unpleasant, but because a decade spent waiting is a decade not spent creating.”

The Übermensch wants a life worth recurring, one made of things they built, loved, risked, and finished. Saying yes to eternal recurrence is only meaningful if there’s something to say yes to. Refreshing leak threads doesn’t qualify. The Übermensch’s no to the cycle is really a yes to something else, and the test is whether you can name what that something else would be, which brings us to the final question.

I’m not telling you to not play GTA 6. I’m taking two weeks off work to play it. Rockstar will get my money, my attention, and probably another decade of my anticipation. All I’m saying is that Nietzsche predicted everything that vexes us about GTA 6, except probably the concept of a “grand theft auto” itself.

Nietzsche theorised that a society which had lost God as its shared source of meaning would fill that space with nihilism, without knowing the nihilism would one day come as a simulation. He saw that people who feel powerless will turn that powerlessness into a sense of moral superiority, without knowing that millions of them would one day aim it at a video game company for taking too long. He gave us a test for whether our lives are worth living again without knowing we’d spend a decade of ours waiting for a 90-second video trailer.

So, here’s the ultimate question. When GTA 6 finally releases and the wait for GTA 7 begins, what could you spend that decade on instead?

This writer has elected to remain anonymous and is perhaps helped in preserving their identity because their enthusasim for relating philosophy to a modern context in an unorthodox way is so quintessentially PPE it really could be anyone.

Thank you to Maxwell Aspinall and Eloise Taylor for editing this article.

GTA 6 Is What Nietzsche Warned Us About was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The last few months on exchange in Montreal have been magical to say the least. But I have to admit that I was ill-prepared for the cultural tensions I was stepping into when I moved here, which my presence as a foreign anglophone student implicated me in. In Québec, you can be identified as either an anglophone (whose primary language is English), a francophone (whose primary is French) or allophone (a resident whose primary language is neither, excluding First Nation language).

The idea of separating the province from Canada to form its own country, seemed wildly idealistic and impractical… (so) why has Québec held onto this possibility for six decades?

The divide between anglophones and francophones is stark; their relationship often becomes strained and resentful, particularly during tense provincial elections. Everyday interactions reproduce historical divides, with language regulation and discriminatory policies hardening positions on both sides. To live in this province, it is imperative that you gain a preliminary knowledge in Québec’s political history to be able to even slightly comprehend what is occurring in Québec politics today. At the crux of this story is the relationship between colonisation, identity creation and ‘immigrant’ as an outsider status — themes pertinent to current Australian political discourse.

I had the privilege of experiencing the most recent provincial election, discussing the results with my Québécoise friends and in my Canadian politics classes. I was taken aback by how central separation and racial debates are in Québec politics. The idea of separating the province from Canada to form its own country, seemed wildly idealistic and impractical (this could also be said for the Albertan referendum). And yet, the Parti Québécois, who champions Québec independence, managed to secure a majority government in the 2026 provincial election, with only 28 percent of the popular vote. And so, I wonder what the likelihood of separation is, especially in the context of the failed Albertan referendum. Furthermore, if separation is unlikely, why has Québec held onto this possibility for six decades?

History of the Separation Movement

Québec was colonised by France following the imperial expeditions in 1534, developing into a vital trading outpost. French forces, allied with the Algonquian and Wendat peoples, clashed with the British, allied with Iroquois forces, as both powers attempted to control the continent. Following successive intercolonial wars from 1688 to 1760, France ceded the colony to the British under the Treaty of Paris (1763), creating the Province of Québec. To abridge the cultural differences between the ruling British and the Habitants Canadiens (French Canadian population), the British installed the Quebec Act of 1774, which permitted the population to maintain their civil customs, regain their right to use French and centralised French Catholicism. While this created a precedent for Québec exceptionalism under British Canada, the Québécois continually expressed their discontentment with the ruling class and their lack of government representation. During the confederation of Canada with the British North America Act in 1867, Québec was able to gain considerably more autonomy.

Independence has been continually sought on the basis that the Québécois can only protect their language and cultural identity by becoming an independent nation. Many francophones resent the Canadian federal government as a British institution, which they never consented to being a part of. While Québec already has extensive control over their legal and political affairs, francophones argue that the size of their territory, resources, population and economy necessitates, ultimately could sustain an independent nation.

Arguments for Québec sovereignty took root in the 1960s, during a period of widespread provincial reform called the Quiet Revolution. During this, Québec disentangled its institutions from the Catholic Church, strengthened the provincial economy through the introduction of Hydro-Québec and adopted the word Québécois over Canadiens to distinguish the population from either Canada or France. Separatist parties formed, such as Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RIN) and Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). RIN, which later evolved to be the centre-left Parti Québécois (PQ), demanded a sovereignty for Québec that gave the province the power to levy all its taxes, vote on all its laws, and sign all its treaties. Conversely, the FLQ was a separatist, socialist militant group that violently campaigned for Québec independence through terrorist attacks from 1963 to 1970.

The flames of separatism were stoked by the French President Charles de Gaulle during his Montreal visit during Expo 1967. His infamous address to the Montreal public encapsulated what truly drives the Québec separatist movement — the need to be recognised as their own entity. The large fervent crowd held onto his every word as he spoke of liberation and brotherhood with France, roaring as he caps his speech off with“Vive le Québec libre !” (“Long live free Quebec!”) (7:43, Radio Canada Archives). FLQ terrorism had reached a fever-pitch by 1970, when its members were responsible for the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange and the October Crisis, and the kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. The FLQ killed Laporte after holding him captive for a week, and held Cross captive for two months.

Despite the violence of this period, the public continued to support and push for liberation. Parti Québécois continued to gain traction, increasing its number of seats in the National Assembly. This upward trajectory led to their election as majority government in 1976, holding a referendum on Québec sovereignty in 1980 that was rejected by 60 percent of the electorate. Despite this loss, the PQ tried again with a second referendum in 1995, promoting setting up economic and political ties with Canada prior to separation. This referendum only lost by a small margin, 50.6 percent voted to remain to 49.4 percent voted to remain, with the split dividing along anglophone and francophone cleavages.

Recent Election and Political Landscape

Support for separation has remained steady since the referendum, exemplified by the rise of the conservative separatist Bloc Québécois party on the federal level. On a provincial level, only two parties are separatist; the PQ and left-wing urbanist party Québec Solidaire, with the PQ remaining out of power since 2003, despite a brief minority government in 2012. In the 2026 provincial election, both parties remained staunchly separatist, with promises to consult the populace once President Trump leaves office. And yet, the PQ won a minority government of 59 seats (28%).

The PQ’s recent election is significant, as their rhetoric is increasingly courting xenophobia. Nationalist movements have increasingly centred around right-wing exclusionist ideals, such as the Albertan Referendum movement. The PQ plans to implement immigration reductions in Québec, reducing the number of temporary immigrants per year from 500,000 to between 200,000 and 250,000, claiming this would ease the pressure on the city’s housing and public services. This is counterintuitive to the demands of business owners, who rely on the constant supply of immigration to Québec to fill the demand for labour. The centralisation of their anti-immigration rhetoric within their separatist campaign is reminiscent of right-wing leaders such as Marine LePen, Eric Zemmour and Giorgia Meloni, harkening to ‘Great Replacement Theory’ policies. As right-wing journalist Mathieu Bock-Côte would argue, the incoming non-Québec population threatens to “drown” French-speaking Québec in a “sea” of anglophones. From their perspective, high immigration is a calculated move by the Federal government to limit the sovereignty of Québec and its ability to separate from Canada.

Will separation happen?

While it is an undeniably tense period for Québec, I feel as though I can say with some confidence that a separation referendum is unlikely to occur, that it would not pass and, even if it were to go ahead, that an autonomous Québec seems unviable. The leader of the PQ said as much himself; Paul St-Pierre Plamondon pledged to not hold a referendum while Donald Trump is in office, instead focusing on the more pressing issues his government is up against. The Trump administration has inadvertently caused a wave of national pride and unity in Canada, as the result of the Albertan referendum demonstrated. To conceive that a referendum would occur whenever the Trump era ‘finishes’ seems naive. The irreparable damage that the Trump administration has done to the American-Canadian relationship and bilateral trade, through immature remarks and tariffs, will not heal quickly nor be forgotten any time soon. Hence, it is unlikely that intensified Canadian unity will pass anytime soon, either.

Separatism is a way to communicate pride, to share grievances and to assert francophones as disenfranchised.

The PQ have surely noted the whopping failure of the Albertan referendum (which was largely held for different reasons than those of the Québec separation movement), with 76% of residents voting to remain. These results demonstrate that PM Mark Carney’s rhetoric of national unity is connecting with Canadians, inspiring them to believe that his unifying technocratic policies will steer Canada through global economic and political instability. His effect reaches Montreal too — for the first time in decades, Canadian flags are beginning to appear just as much as Québec flags are in Montreal, a sign that Carney’s message of the need for Canadians to ‘stick together’ is landing.

Not only is the possibility of a separatist referendum unlikely to occur at the moment and unlikely to pass in the near future, but a completely autonomous Québec would be fiscally impractical. It has the greatest provincial debt, with $250.3 billion (or 38.8% of its GDP) as of March 31, 2026, and it relies on federal payments to balance out its lack of fiscal capacity. Hence, if separation is unrealistic for the foreseeable future, why does it remain at the heart of Québécois discourse and what are the consequences of this?

Why does separatism persist?

An alliance to separatism, even with no plans to follow through with it, demonstrates a commitment to the continuation and protection of French culture in Québec. This desire to shield Québec culture from anglophones and allophones pervades almost every provincial party, excluding Québec Solidaire. Separatism is a way to communicate pride, to share grievances and to assert francophones as disenfranchised. While this leads to beautiful demonstrations of healthy provincial pride, this sentiment has led to tight language regulations and a platform for xenophobic rhetoric.

The notion of sovereign independence is emblematic, a mechanism that allows francophones to air their grievances and demand respect within the Canadian parliamentary system

The unspoken element of Québécois culture is deciding who belongs to that group and who is excluded. Québec regulation demands assimilation to francophone culture, going as far as being legally exempt from the Canadian Multiculturalism Act 1988, which is meant to promote equality and eliminate discrimination. The argument for this decision is that ‘multiculturalism is a threat to the French language’. The French language inspections are carried out against all businesses and institutions, with 10,000 inspections occurring in 2024. Lack of French service in-store or lack of French signage could have a business fined up to $3000 to $30 000 per day for a first infraction. This poses enormous issues for allophones (individuals whose mother tongue is neither French nor English) living in Québec, who must be proficient in both French and English to be employed. Even the McGill University fees underline the preference of French speakers from France, with students from France being charged the same fees as any Canadian student from another province. Note that the lesser fees for French students do not extend to other French speaking countries.

More importantly, I’ve noted how this culture of exclusivity and racial radicalisation affects citizens who have been raised here but still told that they do not belong here. I had a conversation with two classmates, both raised in Montreal their whole lives, who went to French schools and are both able to speak French, and said they have continually been told growing up that they are not pure lain. The term translates to ‘old stock’, describing people that can link their ancestry to the first settlers of Québec and the immigration of the King’s Daughters. To hear such an archaic term used against two women that lived their entire lives in Québec was a complete shock. Because they both had immigrant parents, no matter how much they truly embodied Québec culture, they were regarded as outsiders.

In conclusion, I believe that it is unlikely that Québec will even hold the referendum for separation, let alone go through with separation, for at least the next decade. The notion of sovereign independence is emblematic, with politicians aligning themselves with separatist sentiment to signal their commitment to Québec language and cultural protection. The argument for separatism is a mechanism that allows francophones to air their grievances and demand respect within the Canadian parliamentary system. The real effect of separatist arguments is tight language regulation, scapegoating immigrants and exacerbating cultural divides. Far more attention should be paid to how Québec protectionism is currently affecting immigrants and residents in the province instead of speculating about the possibility of a future separation.

Piper is a third year Politics, Philosophy and Economics Student and is currently on exchange in Canada. Despite this being Piper’s first article for Statecraft, she is already proving herself an accomplished foreign correspondent.

Thank you to Jack Power and Toby Riches for editing this article.

Will Québec and Canada Go Their Separate Ways? was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our experience of music has been altered significantly through accelerated changes in technology. Since the invention of the phonograph in 1877, numerous forms of recording and playback technology have been introduced and integrated into society, making music widely available as a consumer product and implicating the experience of music as a social event. This technology has also affected the music-making process. Now with the advent of AI-assisted and AI-generated music, we are truly faced with the question of what music means to us as humans.

The technological shift can be followed through the generations of my family. My grandparents on my dad’s side were both classical pianists, playing duets together and raising their three children to learn music through piano. Their bookshelves were lined with piano scores, and we would often walk to the local shops to make photocopies for their piano students.

Soon after recording technology was invented, the ability for people to collect records turned “producers of music into consumers of music” to a certain extent. As Mowitt supports, “more people listened to music rather than played it”, due to the affordances of recording technology. This may be the case; however, it can also be argued that recording technology has enabled people to teach themselves how to produce music, as records can be played back repeatedly, allowing for instruments to be learned aurally.

Pieces no longer had to be suitable to a certain environment such as a wedding, funeral or a church service, and people could now pick and choose what to play.

This change was part of what steered my dad and uncle to eventually stray from the classical path, learning to love the guitar, bass guitar and drums through the music of The Beatles, KISS, The Police and RUSH. They still have magazines that include guitar tabs (like sheet music for guitarists) of Paul McCartney and Led Zeppelin songs, but they mostly learned to play these hits by ear. They drew from their huge collection of CDs and a smaller scattering of cassette tapes and vinyl that they still own today.

Philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously stated that, “‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” Our choice of the medium through which we interact with music is no different. Throughout the decades, we have explored lyrical messages delivered through peace protest songs of the 60s and 70s, the angsty songs of the 80s and 90s, and grunge and pop hits of the 2000s and 2010s. But simultaneously, music was shifting through mediums including radio, records, mixtapes, Walkmans and iPods. McLuhan opposed the suggestion that it is the way we use technologies and mediums that can be good or bad, while the medium remains a neutral conduit of a message. Instead, he believed that the medium itself has something to say, emphasising how “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

Following the rise of the sales of physical records, this new medium of music consumption began to alter how people interacted with music and with each other. Music became free of its ‘live’ performance aspects, taken out of the context in which it was recorded and listened to in entirely different settings and situations. Pieces no longer had to be suitable to a certain environment such as a wedding, funeral or a church service, and people could now pick and choose what to play. Records introduced the ability for people to collect music as a commodity, unlike notated music, which cannot be heard even if it is collected. As sociomusicologist Frith highlights, people like my dad and uncle “can now possess music as obsessively, as madly, as music once possessed us.”

In making music quicker to access, we’ve made connection almost obsolete.

Records later formed part of a new form of music creation and consumption: DJing. Music has always been a stream of creations turned into inspiration turned into creation again, and taste-making in music is not a modern phenomenon. But DJs made this connection between creation and inspiration blatant while still creating something new, becoming living and evolving tastemakers and archivers of music. This human touch in musical selection started to become blurred as Spotify algorithms began to dictate tastes, and is now diminishing even further with the introduction of AI-assisted and AI-generated music.

I’ve lived through a time when the tangibility of music has changed so rapidly, that my own collection of music is scattered between my (now unused) Spotify account with curated playlists, my old iPod classic from my high school years and the CDs I keep in my 2007 Mazda for long drives. When I came to learn piano in kindergarten, everything was written in books, photocopied and annotated. When I picked up the guitar in high school, I learned everything online through YouTube videos and guitar tabs. With each medium, my learning style changed. I still remember by heart the songs I learned through piano books, but struggle to remember basic chord patterns that formed the pop songs I learned through high school. So many factors are at play here, but the constant and easy access to more and more songs made me want to jump around and learn new songs, rather than enjoy the depths and complexities of each composition.

So what message is AI music telling us? That human-to-human connection is not valued in this new age of AI. Instead, human expression has to be collected (as the phonograph did), muddled into zeros and ones (as the CD did), and then turned into part of a mass of data (as streaming platforms did), and then crudely mixed around and regurgitated algorithmically into our ears. In making music quicker to access, we’ve made connection almost obsolete.

When I last visited my grandmother, she told me of how she learned to play the piano. She had a piano at home, but no sheet music or knowledge of how to read it. She had a radio that would play a beautiful song every day, and she would listen intently when it came on, attempting to keep the tune in her memory as she moved to the piano to recreate the notes. To learn to play an instrument this way is to learn to make sense of what the composer was trying to convey. With each highly anticipated listen, my grandmother was building a human connection with the composer and everyone else who had come to love that song. She went on to perform and teach piano regularly and was one of my first piano teachers along with my aunt. Her love of music runs so deep, with the radio constantly playing in her home. Her support for any of my musical projects has always been so sincere, I always find a way to love music more deeply when she encourages me to keep practicing. That radio my grandmother listened to had an important message that I’m not sure AI can convey — that the potential for human connection through music is strong enough to make a young girl tune in to the radio every day, and that the beauty of music is its ability to make us stop and listen when the rest of the world is rushing along.

Kaya is in her final year studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics and this is her first article for Statecraft. Originating from an old music essay of Kaya’s, we speculate this article has been destined to publish in Statecraft for quite some time. We’re thrilled it’s finally here.

Thank you to Boudica Gotlucky and Parker Elliott for editing this article.

Girl, Put Your Records On was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ever-changing political and economic structures can result in economic decline or even a recession. The word ‘recession’ is a marker of stress for unstable job markets, individual financial strain, and the deleterious effects of these on our mental health. Between 2001 to 2023, Australia experienced three significant spikes of financial stress which corresponded to distinct economic disruption, with the COVID-19 pandemic as the most notable example. Now, despite our GDP having restabilised, many Australians, particularly marginalised individuals and students, still feel the heat of financial stress. As global economic and political uncertainty intensifies, the prospect of a recession becomes more than a headline; it becomes a question of our own resilience. Some young people soften the blow with small luxuries like viral lipsticks or micro-indulgences like Labubus. However, in this family of affordable luxuries sits a louder, stranger cousin: the dance floor. When economic hardship pushes young people out of status-based consumption, we are pulled into a collective, identity-affirming space where the dance floor is the house, and house music becomes our new home.

But let us first begin with the origins of house…

House music originated as the prodigal son of disco and came to popularity in the 1980s. Multicultural, inviting, and expressive, house music was born in underground Chicago and is characterised by its “repetitive 4/4 beats, soulful vocals, [and] synthesised melodies”. Originally played in a Chicago club known as The Warehouse, it became popular for mixing and matching different genres of music, and for its blending of cultures. The working class, people of colour, queer, and other marginalised communities found connection through house where mainstream nightlife offered none. This is the beauty of house — a collective identity founded in times of economic precarity and social exclusion, and a safe haven where identity and belonging did not require economic capital.

House transformed the game and invited new guests to the party; Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley also found the house sound in the 1970s and 80s. Perhaps ironically, the Fitzgerald Inquiry, a state investigation into political and economic corruption in Fortitude Valley, left open warehouse spaces free for new musical endeavours to emerge. House found a home here too. This migration of house music echoed the same patterns as the Chicago scene; all were welcome on the dance floor, regardless of one’s bank balance. House music was alive, well, and growing; and it was also affordable for the average young person working for minimum wage.

The house music phenomenon reshapes how people form bonds and their identity around scarcity and shared experiences, rather than through status-based consumption.

This is where substitution economics comes into play. When the cost-of-living rises, and luxuries like dining out and travel become out of reach, young consumers gravitate towards cheaper alternatives with the assumption that their income is fixed for the foreseeable future. Substitution is a framework by which consumers swap out the unaffordable for less expensive options, often moving away from consumerism in the process. Even in a terrible economic climate, we still want to feel we deserve a treat now and then. Despite attempts by businesses and marketers to analyse and target consumer behaviour, they cannot motivate the cash-strapped to spend money they don’t have. This leaves individuals and groups to seek solace in community bonding offered by low-cost experiences, like house music raves and niche underground concerts by local DJs and musicians. We benefit because our dollars stay in the bank for the rainy day we fear is still coming, and our local music scene gets the support it needs to stay afloat in tough times.

Our shared experience of economic hardship morphs into something socially beneficial too; instead of suffering the indignities of poverty over our cheap noodle cup, we learn we are not alone and that, in fact, the dance floor is a collective of shared experience. The house music phenomenon reshapes how people form bonds and their identity around scarcity and shared experiences, rather than through status-based consumption. To an extent, young people are drawn to the simplicity and accessibility of house music because there is something for everyone to enjoy, when financially, we feel like we are on our own.

As reliable as its 4/4 beats, there is a revival of house music every time we are hit with a financial crisis. The early 90s recession in the UK was met with a house music revival in the form of acid house, which helped the struggling working class, nostalgic for better days, seek connection and solidarity. The rave culture of the 90s was not that dissimilar from the original house music of Chicago; it just presented itself in a different font with the same “predilection for [the] nostalgia” of simpler times and a better future. Similarly, a spike in electronic dance music and festivals helped us get through the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The GFC stratified the social classes, marking a turning point for consumer culture where “ways of living appear ‘free’ and ‘equal’… however, thwart self-actualisation in a social order fragmented into classes”. It is no surprise, then, that entertainment consumerism became a form of escapism from the perils of financial hardship.

Today, Brisbane’s own underground house music scene is under construction with new venue costs and economic pressures from mainstream nightlife venues, which again has the young people of Brisbane gravitating towards community-run spaces and music venues. Even Fridays Riverside is closing down after nearly 40 years in business revealing that even established venues are now struggling to stay open. High costs have even led to the creation of Kangaroo Point Lookout house music jams by local DJs, which are free for the public to dance, take in the views, and make new friends. Brisbane is leaning more into the grassroots music scene with the cost-of-living crisis impeding our social ventures. From dive bars to small concert halls, and even in the backyards of suburban Queenslander homes — house music is drawing us to the dance floor once again. The pattern is clear; house music reverberates off the walls of urban spaces filled with collective memories and experiences of togetherness as we get through hard times.

Recessions have historically been calculated by economists looking at patterns of decline in economic activity in a country or state. Today, however, consumer activity has been added as a way of tracking recessions, revealing how financial insecurity in economic downturns force young people out of unaffordable status-based consumption. Economic constraints can shift our wants and needs, but they can also draw us into new, more affordable spaces where commonality and community can be found. From 1980s Chicago to present-day Brisbane, young people are dominating the dance floor, and moving in unison to rhythmically comforting house beats that make us feel more secure in an unpredictable socio-economic landscape.

Zoë is in her final semester of a Bachelor of Arts with an Extended Major in International Relations. Zoë’s article was originally submitted in the 2026 UQPPES X UQES Writing Competition, where she received an honourable mention, and has now been edited for Statecraft Magazine. If you bump into Zoë at a Brisbane house music jam, be sure to tell her what you thought of the article.

Thank you to Parker Elliott and Boudica Gotlucky for editing this article.

When the Money Runs Out, We Dance was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Confrontation, ignorance, and bullying do not have to be the norms for debate… we can choose to disconnect, prioritise political discussions with those around us and champion empathy.

This was the final paragraph of the article I published for this magazine last year. In it, I explored my experiences competitively debating and the communication breakdown political polarisation encourages, something that hinders our ability to “get along” as people. A year on, I stand by this somewhat bleak diagnosis of the current political climate, but also the solution I prescribed above.

The death of American singer, philanthropist, and actress, Dolly Parton, only furthers my conviction that empathy is the combatant to polarisation. Parton’s 60-year career encompassed musical hits including “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You”, movie roles in “9 to 5” and “Steel Magnolias”, a business empire including her theme park “Dollywood”, and a slew of philanthropic work.

What really made Parton unique was her ability to unite people across the political aisle. Dolly’s approval rate was 65%, notably high when compared to recent US presidents who have varied between 14% to -19%, or Taylor Swift at 3%. Her death has been met with a genuine outpouring of grief from every side of a divided America. There are very few people who could both make a guest appearance in a RuPaul’s Drag Race finale and have Donald Trump order flags placed at half-mast following their passing.

Parton and partisanship

Today, there is an expectation that celebrities will speak up on political issues. Many stars receive backlash for refusing to make political statements. For example, Taylor Swift faced immense levels of scrutiny for not using her platform to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024. More recently, Ed Sheeran has come under pressure over dropping tour opener Macklemore, following comments in support of Palestine, an act Sheeran has justified as maintaining an apolitical stance.

Parton was always political; she just refused to be partisan. She practiced values-based politics rather than blind party loyalty.

Parton was famously apolitical and refused to comment on partisan politics entirely. She was offered the Presidential Medal of Freedom by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden and turned it down each time, not wanting to appear to pick one party over the other. So how did Parton manage to remain apolitical and escape this same backlash that so many modern-day artists face?

The answer is that Parton was always political; she just refused to be partisan. She practiced values-based politics rather than blind party loyalty. Dolly regularly spoke out about women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and Black Lives Matter but avoided directly tying these issues to parties, instead promoting them as universal. As a result, those on the political left saw her as a staunch feminist and queer rights advocate. Meanwhile the right emphasised her strong Christian faith and pride in her Southern roots. Both groups felt that she acted on values and beliefs in a genuine manner that was not tied to financial incentives, but rather a result of personal conviction.

In my last article, I discussed how the proliferation of financially incentivised political commentators has contributed to an incredibly polarised culture. To this extent, I believe Dolly is an excellent example of how to approach political discourse:

I try not to get into the politics of everything. I try to get into the human element of it. I have some of everybody in my own immediate family and in my circle of employees. I’ve got transgender people. I’ve got gays. I’ve got lesbians. I’ve got drunks. I’ve got drug addicts — all within my own family. I know and love them all, and I do not judge.

Dolly Parton, 2023

By starting from a universal idea that we should be kind to each other, we are more likely to understand the fears, hopes, and education levels that drive political beliefs. There is so much misinformation and fear mongering in modern politics that taking a step back and having a face-to-face political discussion becomes so incredibly effective. Actually talking to people means we become more tolerant and accepting of their lived experiences. By preaching acceptance, Dolly changed many of her fan’s opinions on social issues such as LGBTQ+ rights.

More importantly, people don’t like feeling like they are wrong. They don’t like feeling attacked or stupid, and when confronted with argumentation, most disengage and retreat into an echo-chamber of like-minded people. It’s the exact same mechanism that drives us to the group chat for validation when we have drama with a friend or even just a genuinely terrible haircut.

When we perceive individuals as friends, take them seriously and in good faith, and stop trying to win “points” in a political discussion, we have much better discourse. Beginning political discussions from universal values and a shared place of agreement is infinitely more effective because it makes politics a collaborative venture. Starting at the root value of a fear behind an opinion, instead of debating a specific welfare or immigration policy, we can unpick the layers of beliefs that support it, are likely to have greater consensus on an issue. This also actually encourages critical thinking instead of wedging out-of-context statistics into a conversation.

Polarisation and mass media has made respectful discourse an increasingly lost art. However, this is the kind of politics Dolly championed. She made it abundantly clear that people should come to their own conclusions but to never lose sight of empathy and respect within discourse. When we practice this form of politics, we become more willing to advocate for our families, friends, and neighbours, we prevent others from seeking out echo-chambers. We might even find our own beliefs surprisingly challenged in an often constructive, delightful way. While most obituaries I have read simply stop at the fact Parton was universally liked, I hope this approach to politics becomes the forefront of her legacy.

Parton and philanthropy

This ties into the second reason Dolly was able to escape scrutiny for being apolitical. Despite the façade of rhinestones and her immense wealth, she felt genuine. Watch any video of Parton speaking and it becomes incredibly evident that she deeply cared about people, especially those in her community, regardless of their beliefs. Dolly’s upbringing in poverty-stricken, rural Tennessee was always centred, her rags to riches story a rare success of the American dream. This image was never discarded to make way for a new album era. Instead, her music, her philanthropy, her appearance, and wit could all be traced back to her hometown throughout her career.

It wasn’t just this clever branding that made Parton so beloved. The reason I, and so many others, deeply admired Dolly was for her philanthropic work. People like to see celebrities “put their money where their mouth is”, so to speak, and from Parton’s actions it was clear she deeply cared for her community.

Parton was the fourth of twelve children and grew up in a two-room cabin with no electricity in her hometown of Sevier County. The area was deeply disadvantaged and in the early 1990s had a high school dropout rate of over 30%. In 1991, Dolly created a “Buddy Program” in Sevier County, pairing 7th grade students together and personally promising them each $500 if they both graduated high school. In 1995, Parton launched the Imagination Library, a program that gives free books to children from birth to age 5. The program, inspired by her father who remained illiterate throughout his life, aims to make reading accessible to all children, encouraging them to continue education into their lives.

The economic impact Parton has had on the region of Sevier County is nothing short of direct fiscal stimulus at the scale of a government.

Even Australia could not escape Parton’s goodwill. A study in Tamworth NSW found that children who received books from the Imagination Library read more frequently, for longer, and had more books in their homes than the average Australian child. To date, the Imagination Library has donated over 300 million books around the world. In Sevier County, the Buddy program and Imagination Library combined have decreased the high school dropout rate from 30% to just 6%, a genuinely incredible feat for someone to singlehandedly achieve through philanthropy alone.

For these high school graduates, the single largest employer in Sevier County is Parton’s theme park, “Dollywood”. While Parton’s lawyers and accountants attempted to deter her from making what they saw to be a major business mistake, today the park has an estimated direct economic impact of $1.8 billion annually to Tennessee, creating an estimated 23,000 jobs within the wider region. At an individual level, Dollywood directly employs more than 4,500 people, approximately 8% of the local workforce. These workers receive, at minimum, over double the state minimum wage, health insurance for themselves and their families and their full college tuition paid for should they choose to pursue a degree.

The economic impact Parton has had on the region of Sevier County is nothing short of direct fiscal stimulus at the scale of a government. Keep in mind that Tennessee is currently ranked the state with the lowest average spending on public school students. Most charities don’t have the resources or time to replicate government support. Most wealthy elites donate miniscule fractions of their wealth to charity. This is what made Parton’s legacy so profound. It’s estimated she gave over $600 million to charity over her life -over half of her wealth. In comparison, three-quarters of the 400 most wealthy Americans have donated less than 5% of their wealth including 40% (including Elon Musk) who have given less than 1% of their wealth away.

The average person does not grasp quite how much money these billionaires actually have. One million seconds takes roughly 11.5 days to pass while a billion seconds takes 31.7 years and if you’re a trillionaire like Musk, that’s 31,709 years of earning a dollar a second. In clear contrast to the work environment at Dollywood, let’s also remember that companies like Amazon have notorious labour conditions and Tesla’s supply chains are directly linked to child labour.

We should not have to feel reliant on benevolent billionaires to ensure basic literacy and working standards are met. However, due to her philanthropy, Parton’s legacy was cemented. In never discarding the people and place that made her famous, Parton earned the admiration and trust of not only the people of Pigeon Falls but America as a whole. This narrativisation gave Parton a degree of perceived prototypicality to working class America. Perceived prototypicality is a sociology concept that relates to how well an individual is seen to embody the traits of a certain group.

Usually when celebrities comment on political issues, their efforts often feel tepid or out of touch. Messages that we should all get along and love each other fall flat when people watch their living standards deteriorate or genocides blatantly ignored. This is why Swift’s song “The Man” gets perceived as a lukewarm take that being a woman can be hard sometimes, or Sheeran’s statement; “The suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy. There are too many wars…” appears as a spineless copout to backlash. Comparatively, Parton’s activism felt grounded in her community and backed up by substantial philanthropic support. This was the factor that made her same “we should love everyone” brand of politics distinct from other mainstream celebrities.

When trust and perceived prototypicality are earned, leaders can nudge their followers towards actions that deviate from group norms by “spending” some of the goodwill they have earned.

Trust cannot be easily bought and is something noticeably missing from mainstream politics where citizens are at best sceptical of their government’s ambitions. What made Dolly so special is not just that she earnt this trust but that she maintained it through her life. This brings us to another politics concept; idiosyncrasy credit. When trust and perceived prototypicality are earned, leaders can nudge their followers towards actions that deviate from group norms by “spending” some of the goodwill they have earned.

Parton rarely spoke out on smaller, divisive issues, but when she did, she strongly galvanised her fans to act. A clear example of this is when she publicly donated over a million dollars to development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and videoed herself getting the jab while singing to the tune of her song Jolene: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate”. Parton’s unique position of goodwill within particularly deep-red, anti-vax areas of America meant she was able to encourage meaningful vaccine uptake in communities that are largely distrustful of official government media.

There have always been celebrities that speak out about politics, and they are vital to the political ecosystem. Olivia Rodrigo comes to mind, having recently raised over $20 million for charities supporting women and girls through her all-female lineup music festival, “Daisy Chain Fields”. Throughout history, hundreds of artists have been outspoken on political issues and their role as activists should not be understated.

Dolly Parton, however, was something different. Despite her courage, she was never a firebrand. Despite her advocacy, she never identified with a single political label. Parton’s role, as a glue that reminded people that they have more in common than they don’t, was deeply important to political discourse. Her refusal to alienate any fans humanised them, not just to themselves but to each other. Her advocacy had real, tangible impacts on the community that raised her. This legacy, like her songs, will endure.

Laura is a third year Politics, Philosophy, and Economics student, and this is her second article for Statecraft. Her articles so far have certainly impressed the editing team, and we’re sure our audience too. If you want to hear more from Laura, be assured we are begging her to work ‘9 to 5’ writing the next one.

Thank you to Eloise Taylor and Jack Power for editing this article.

Parton, Partisanship, and Economics was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The mid-semester break is upon us at last. Are you bored? Troubled? Generally up to no good? Fret not! Our latest batch of media recommendations has been cooked up by the Publications team and delivered fresh!

Boudica

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words (2026) by Sophia Smith Galer

Yet another shameless linguistics plug from me, but I was truly so thrilled to receive this book from my family for my 21st. You may have seen it on social media, or maybe that’s just the algorithm catering to a language nerd, but How to Kill a Language’s release this year was accompanied by great acclaim, which I now join in on. Sometimes it is difficult to understand the importance of preventing endangered language loss — it feels like the right thing to believe in, but how do you explain just how crucial it is?

Smith Galer’s journalist background is the perfect method for translating (pun slightly intended) the importance of language as culture and maintaining these links. She frames revitalisation efforts through travel encounters with speakers and researchers, including with her own grandmother, one of the last speakers of an Emilian variety from Italy. Her curiosity for language shines through, and she’s particularly excellent at striking balance; she will be nuanced in describing the situation of languages, while passionately advocating for their protection. Then, just when her detailed descriptions of historical or political issues get rather dense, her journalistic style and personal accounts from her travels swoop in.

Though I am biased towards liking the content, studying sociolinguistics at the same time still gives me a somewhat more critical eye in identifying some small gaps in the research. But as you can tell, I’m grasping at straws to find anything wrong with this book — it’s a gripping and important read by a journalist whose message is clear: save our words.

Parker

This American Life by WBEZ Chicago

I am not much of a podcast enthusiast at all, yet I have been a listener of This American Life for many years now and could not recommend it more. Each episode revolves around a central theme with stories about everyday American life that fit this idea explored throughout the episode. The podcast does an excellent job of selecting a wide variety of stories for each episode, making each episode intriguing and diverse. Types of stories featured in the podcast range from contemporary political issues, such as the MeToo Movement, to more ordinary stories about love, work and family. The podcast does an excellent job of bringing together stories that at first glance may seem to not fit the episodes’ theme but actually perfectly do, offering a new perspective on how to look at everyday experiences and find humour in the mundane, whilst also highlighting issues in our society that leak into everyday life that we often do not realise.

The podcast has been running since 1995, and with multiple stories in each episode there is definitely something for everyone. The episodes I would most recommend are episode 550: Three Miles, which follows students and teachers divided by public and private school education, and episodes 562 and 563: The Problem We All Live With, an engaging two-part series about desegregation.

Eloise

Edenglassie (2023) by Melissa Lucashenko

Any self-respecting lover of Australian literature is no stranger to Melissa Lucashenko. Her most recent novel, Edenglassie, winner of the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, is my recommendation. Edenglassie tells us about the brutal realities of Brisbane and Australia’s colonisation in the 1850s and the legacy it continues to leave in the 2020s.

I’ve always tried to take opportunities to learn more about the true story of Australian colonisation, but Edenglassie has done more for my understanding than any non-fiction work I’ve read. The past feels alive in this book. While I’ve read about the mass scale of murders committed during colonisation, this book gave me a much deeper understanding of the love, tradition, and connection that colonisers also tried to destroy, than any article or non-fiction book I’ve read. Edenglassie is heartbreaking but beautiful. It is the true story of Brisbane, all of us who reside here should know it.

A quick secondary recommendation is for what has helped me to be consistent in reading lately. The app Storygraph. It tracks your reading stats, moods, and goals. I’m doing a terrible job at meeting my 20 book goal for the year, but so far it’s motivating me to keep going.

Max

Nashville (1975) directed by Robert Altman

Last month I spent my Ekka public holiday at New Farm Cinemas for their retro showing of Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), and out of the 90 movies I’ve watched this year I think it is my favourite. The movie throws the audience into the lives of over 24 characters who are sometimes important, sometimes unknowingly connected to each other, and always obsessed with country music. The narrative is loosely driven by the political campaign of Hal Phillip Walker, a third-party populist presidential candidate who loves to profess pseudo-aphorisms like “When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that’s politics!”

However, the real story lies in how Altman expertly weaves through the lives of this ensemble cast of characters and crafts an incredible microcosm for 1970s Nashville. Uniquely, while the movie’s runtime is 160 minutes, over an hour of this runtime is dedicated to entire musical numbers. These songs range from comedic to heartbreaking, but consistently drive the plot forward and develop the characters on screen. What’s even more impressive is that the songs are almost all written and performed by the actors themselves! One of the funnier lines sung in the movie is during Haven Hamilton’s American bicentennial celebration song, where he self absorbedly sings “We must be doing something right to last 200 years!”

While there is no single lead role in the movie, Ronee Blakley’s character blew me away with her singing and I have been listening to the soundtrack in the shower for weeks (sidenote: I recently found out she is featured on the album Death of a Ladies’ Man by Leonard Cohen and the song Hurricane by Bob Dylan, so literally what more could you want).

This movie is not necessarily for everyone, but it’s the sort of movie that if you get it, you just get it.

Cathy

Arrival (2016) directed by Denis Villeneuve

I got the chance to watch Arrival recently while trying to amazonprimemaxxing my 30 days free trial (which sadly I had to cancel), but I have to say this movie is worth every penny if I were to spend it on the actual subscription. I don’t really want to spoil it because I literally came in blind, but it follows this linguistic expert Louise Banks and her interaction with 2 extraterrestrials after they mysteriously appeared on earth. The tension between her effort to communicate with the heptapods and the ongoing pressure of global politics in the midst of everything makes the movie so rewarding in the end.

The pacing can be slow, but its build up to the climax is intense, very eerie and unsettling, yet calm and floaty to watch. It is emotional when it needs to be. Such a beautiful movie, from the storyline, the sound track (I still get chills listening to Nature of Daylight), to the visually poetic cinematography, never fails to make me stare at my ceiling for hours after. Amy Adams’ performance was wonderful as well. Best movie I’ve watched yet in 2026.

And yes I do believe space movies change my life ( maybe I should say what I feel more often).

Jack

Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022) novel by Shelby Van Pelt

For the first half of Remarkably Bright Creatures, I was not entirely convinced. Author Shelby Van Pelt has a habit of slowly and arduously describing scenes that would normally be considered too boring to put in a novel. Tova cleans the aquarium. Cameron walks around town. People have long conversations about fairly mundane things. It has the faint feeling of literary award bait, and at times reminded me of The Remains of the Day, where Ishiguro can spend pages making something ordinary seem profoundly important.

Yet, somewhere around the halfway mark, I stopped caring about all of that.

The characters begin to fit together in a way that is hard not to like. Tova’s loneliness, Cameron’s aimlessness and Marcellus the octopus quietly watching both of them become surprisingly affecting. The book is sentimental and sometimes cheesy, but it earns it. What starts as a fairly slow story about an aquarium becomes a story about grief, friendship and people finding their way into each other’s lives.

And, somehow, the octopus is the best character.

We hope you’ve found our recommendations a helpful start to your midsem relaxation. If you would like a more extensive list, check out our first or second volumes.

Statecraft’s Midsem Media Vol. 3 was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In August 2025, political journalist Christopher Armitage published an article in the Existentialist Republic entitled “I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%.”

In this article he posits that, “Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.” The article is compelling and this claim is supported by a wealth of historical evidence. I am inclined to believe that he emphasises a profound sentiment with respect to the nature of violence within devolving democracies. However, just nine months later, the 2026 Hungarian elections concluded with the landslide defeat of incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It appears that, as if fate sought to discredit his thesis, Orbán’s defeat represents the first defendable instance of a fascist being democratically removed from power.

Of course, this raises the question: Was Viktor Orbán actually a fascist? Armitage himself refers to Hungary as a fascist regime, but he also does not employ a specific definition of fascism. In general, fascism is hard to define and there are several defendable definitions in academic circulation.

For the purposes of this article, I would argue it can be defined as an authoritarian regime where the nation itself is regarded as the principal moral unit informing civil governance. This is, of course, not a conclusive definition, but I would argue that those two characteristics, nationalism and authoritarianism, encapsulate reemerging themes across various proposed definitions, and are, in general, sufficient to indicate fascism.

Orbán came to power in 2010 on a political mandate formed around an explicitly nationalist ideological core. He sought to reject the idea of a liberal multicultural society, and advocated for the advancement of a state organised around national culture, Christian identity, and racial homogeneity. This platform informed several aspects of his governance including his anti-EU foreign policy position and his steadfast anti-immigration stance which became exceptionally popular after the 2015 European Migrant Crisis.

At the centre of his economic policy position was the System of National Cooperation (NER). Across infrastructure, education, and cultural expenditure, state funds were directed to the preferential benefit of a national bourgeois class that was rewarded for ideological and practical cooperation with Fidesz (Orbán’s political party). The System of National Cooperation is, as it is described by Fidesz themselves, a model designed to skew discourse and expand state political power. With this in mind, to argue that Orbán was a nationalist is uncontentious, and the NER in particular highlights some similarities between Hungary and familiar historical Fascist economies. The question of authoritarianism is more difficult, given that he did, after all, lose an election in the end, but it is hard to stress the lengths Orbán took to make that an impossibility.

The Third Hungarian Republic began in just 1989, and its first free democratic election was held in 1990. From a legal standpoint, it was predicated on a comprehensive reform of the 1949 Hungarian Constitution, in a bill that was passed with an intention to draft a new constitution following the success of a democratic election. Twenty years later, Orbán was the first leader to achieve sufficient political support to pass a new constitution, and so by 2012, the National Assembly entered into effect The Fundamental Law of Hungary — the first constitution to be enacted through democratic means in the nation’s history.

The question of authoritarianism is more difficult, given that he did, after all, lose an election in the end, but it is hard to stress the lengths Orbán took to make that an impossibility.

Among other tactics exercised to centralise power, Orbán used this new constitution to comprehensively rig the Hungarian judiciary in his favour. In Hungary, prior to the 2012 Constitution, judicial operations had been the divided responsibility of the National Judicial Council (NJC), which was run by the courts themselves, and the National Judicial Office (NJO), which served as a forum for executive oversight. While drafting the new constitution, against the best wishes of advocates from within the Hungarian judiciary, Fidesz pushed to concentrate judicial power towards the NJO. This move, combined with complimentary reforms in 2013, allowed the NJO to seize total authority over the appointment and reassignment of judges, and the NJC was essentially relegated to an advisory role.

The centralisation of judicial appointment powers was critical to Orbán’s power grab. Immediately prior to the ratification of the new constitution, an amendment pertaining to pensions was inserted lowering the retirement age of judges across every level of the judiciary from 70 to 62. Given that it was characterised under a separate section of the Constitution from judicial governance, this amendment was passed without consultation from both the opposition and judiciary, and it forced the immediate retirement of 274 judges, including 20 members of the Curia (the highest judicial office in Hungary comprised of 74 members).

Following ongoing criticisms from the European Parliament, Orbán was eventually forced to cede some administrative responsibilities back to the NJC in September 2013, but by then Orbán had already dismissed the anti-Fidesz president of the NJC. By the time that real power was reinstated to the NCJ in 2019, the president had been replaced with an outwardly pro-Fidesz candidate.

Orbán further consolidated his hold on power through the systematic manipulation of Hungary’s electoral system. Arguably the most egregious instance of this effort to centralise legislative power was Act CCIII of 2011, which Fidesz slammed through the parliament without meaningful oppositional consultation.

The National Assembly was reduced from 386 seats to just 199 while the country’s single-member constituencies were reorganised from 176 down to 106. Although the bill’s own text stipulated that districts must form contiguous areas of approximately equal population, the redrawn boundaries were produced through a “non-transparent process”, and without professional and political oversight. Subsequent analysis found that opposition-leaning constituencies contained systematically more voters than Fidesz-leaning ones, diluting the value of votes cast against the ruling party. A study of the initial districts showed that if Fidesz and the left-opposition won equal numbers of votes under this new map, Fidesz would come out ten seats ahead, and this asymmetry only widened with time. Hungarian law required the constituency map to be redrawn if population disparities grew too large, yet the 2018 redistricting required under Hungarian law to correct these deviations never occurred, and by the 2022 election, 25 of the 106 districts exceeded the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights standard for permissible size variation (note that this number was revised down to 20 by the 2026 election).

The 2011 reform also restructured the balance between the country’s single-mandate and party-list seats and, to the advantage of Fidesz, extended mail-in voting rights to Hungarians without a registered domestic address. This provision disproportionately benefited the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring states who had been granted simplified citizenship under a 2010 Fidesz naturalisation law, and among whom mail ballots have since favoured Fidesz at rates over 90% in successive elections. The cumulative effect of these changes was stark: Fidesz retained its supermajority in the 2014 election even though it received eight percent less of the vote than it had in 2010 — a result that would have been arithmetically impossible under the 1949 constitution.

Despite his efforts to comprehensively rig the judiciary and skew the electoral map, Orbán’s sixteen-year rule came to an end on April 12, 2026, when his Fidesz party suffered a landslide defeat to Péter Magyar’s Tisza party. With 97.35 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s centre-right party secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, while Orbán’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 percent.

Fascism doesn’t work. It is fragile and irrational. It is predicated on the horrible idea that people can improve their station through persecution. It capitalises on economic suffering and it redirects anger from the powerful to the vulnerable. Orbán had rigged Hungary’s democracy to favour rural electorates, and still, after four terms of economic stagnation, rural Hungarians turned on him.

The reason Orbán lost the election is clear, but it remains a miracle he conceded defeat. It would seem that he did not consolidate enough power fast enough, and in the face of such an overwhelming electoral defeat, he was left no choice but to concede. He told his supporters that the result was “clear” and “painful,” and stated that in the face of these results, there was no possibility for his party to govern.

Democracy is a ubiquitous part of life in the West. It is entrenched in our institutions, our economies, and our culture. It is the government’s responsibility to disclose their errors, and since it is our right to criticise our political institutions, our tired ears have come to expect the next failure: the next time that ‘culture wars’ come before healthcare reform, the next time we must tolerate some idiot our own neighbours have elevated to power, or the next time a train line is delivered over budget, past schedule, and incomplete.

In spite of all that it costs us, we must meet history in the eyes and face the unfortunate fact that, in the scope of modern civilisation, these defences have crumbled beneath fascism and authoritarianism time and time again.

Still, we tolerate these failures, because our constitutions position them as the cost of principles people have grown to treasure: the respect for consensus, the demands of responsible governance, the desire to be heard and for our voices to hold real political capital. We refute the concept of a benevolent dictator because we fear for the prospect of a malevolent one, and so we refuse to let the powers of governance slip from the hands of the people.

Of course, this is to say nothing of what should be, and I would hesitate to paint democracy and the efficiency of governance in a false dichotomy. However, that narrative has certainly underpinned governance in Australia for the last several decades, and has, at least at subconscious level, excused an astronomical degree of fiscal mismanagement. To top it all off, in spite of all that it costs us, we must meet history in the eyes and face the unfortunate fact that, in the scope of modern civilisation, these defences have crumbled beneath fascism and authoritarianism time and time again. Once the rubber meets the road, it would seem our fail-safes break almost 100% of the time.

I cannot defend modern democracy for what it has done and for what it has failed to do, and to be honest, I am inclined to believe that Armitage is right — one bad actor is all it takes to topple a democracy and no checks or balances can fundamentally shield us from that possibility. Similarly, I cannot in good confidence declare that Hungary is a sign of the times, in fact it is most likely an exception in an unfortunate field of failed states. Still, in this instance, democracy worked despite the greatest efforts of a bad actor to corrupt it. Given that it has been just four months, academia is still in the process of dissecting the election, but without a doubt, Orbán’s defeat will inform existential democratic discourse for years to come. Perhaps it will make democracy more resilient, better suited to its weaknesses.

As for Hungary’s new Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, it’s hard to say. He is a self-declared liberal conservative and is himself a former member of Fidesz — a bad sign to say the least. That being said, since he secured a supermajority in the parliament, he has already imposed term limits on both Parliamentarians and Prime Ministers and has outwardly expressed his intentions to unravel Orbán’s System of National Cooperation. While much remains to be seen about Magyar, I would argue that the content of his character is irrelevant to the victory this election represents, a sentiment which was shared across the entire political spectrum in Hungary. Democracy is lived in the intellectual revolution that unfolds every time a new government enters power, and that fruit is made sweeter in the instances where an incumbent government has refused to abide by the rules of the game.

Elliot Fitzsimmons is a third year PPE student, and this is his second article for Statecraft. After only two articles Elliot has already carved out a Statecraft niche for himself: our expert in world leaders who may or may not be fascists (but probably are).

Thank you to nghcathy and Eloise Taylor for editing this article.

Death by the Ballot was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the 29th of August at 10:30pm, the ABC announced One Nation’s candidate, Luke Herdegen, as the projected winner of the Western Australian seat of Secret Harbour. It is an unprecedented upset; in 2021, Labor won the seat with 71% primary support, and within five years they saw a 47% swing against them. The seat was called officially on September 9th, the speaker of the house was informed of the result and Luke Herdegen, the first One Nation MP in the state’s history, was sworn into the State Parliament in what was once one of the safest ALP seats in the country.

The seat isn’t unusual. It’s an hour and a half drive from an urban centre where the national average is an hour, and houses are roughly 300k more affordable than in central Perth. Most in the area have a mortgage, people aged 39–54 are the main voting block, and half of the population claims English ancestry (against the national average of a third). It is a population older, whiter, and more rural than average, but it is by no means an abnormality. For the upcoming Victorian election, election analyst Kos Samaras lists over a dozen seats with the same make-up.

With State and Federal elections expected in imminent years, pollsters and politicians are currently fretting over the same question. What the hell is going on in the electorate?

The rise

Looking at national polling gives one explanation. In 2016, Pauline Hanson returned to lead the party and for the next nine years the party averaged between 4–6% of the national vote. In the May 2025 election they netted 6% of the vote, but by June 2026 national polls had the party overtaking Labor at 31%, quintupling in less than a year and a half. For an electorate of 18 million, that’s over 4 million people.

However, consider what happened in that time. Since the announcement of the 2025 election in March that year, two major events occurred — firstly, the Liberal Party lost, both decisively and suddenly. In February 2025, YouGov projected a clear coalition victory 73 seats to 66, and come May, they had lost 15 seats and the entire election, as shown in the polling below:

The Liberals’ own review implies a party seen as unserious, chaotic, and lacking policy depth. Metropolitan voters swung towards Labor or independents, and right wing voters saw a party no more incompetent or shambolic than the other right wing option, One Nation.

By November, off the back of infighting and splits with the Nationals, the Coalition primary vote fell seven points, picked up by One Nation, who reached 15%. Within just over half a year since the election, the party was polling on-par with the Greens. However, one month later, the Bondi shooting would occur.

On the 14th of December, two gunmen with ties to the Islamic State, a permanent resident and an Australian citizen, would open fire on a Hanukkah celebration taking place along Bondi Beach. The six-minute attack resulted in 16 people killed and 41 injured.

The perpetrator’s Islamic and immigrant backgrounds mean existing narratives of foreign migration and Islam as destabilising became less taboo, with the horrible event cited as evidence. One Nation, a party who for decades had never shied away from that taboo, rose another 15 points to 30%, tying with the ALP in June. Post-Bondi, their primary vote grew from roughly 1 percentage point per month to 1.6.

The taboos around policy discipline and anti-Islam, that had for years made the party toxic weakened, and combined with a bandwagon effect to legitimise the party in the eyes of the general public.

But the shooting and infighting as the main explanations for One Nation’s rise leaves two issues. Firstly, it leaves the mystery of who is voting for the party and why, and secondly, it gives no agency to the party itself; the presumption is that these events just happened, and numbers just moved. Examining demographic polling can give us more answers.

Who are they?

A June poll by Desmos AU found that the two defining characteristics of the One Nation cohort are that they are rural and 55 years of age or older. There is a slight overrepresentation of women, 32% against 29%, who on average only speak English and are more likely to own a mortgage then either rent or own their own home. They have most likely defected from the Liberal Party (“blue” One Nation voters), but increasingly there is a cohort of “red” voters who have left the Labor party as well. These demographics are in line with those of Secret Harbour.

Judging off of this data, the stereotypical voter is a 55 or older rural woman who does not own their own home and makes less than 45 thousand dollars a year — your average aged pensioner. The issues that push people to vote for One Nation are, safe to assume, ones that resonate with this cohort (55, non-home owners) and the broader electorate simultaneously. There is still diversity within One Nation voters, as outside of rural areas, no one indicator is above or below the national vote of 30% by more than a few points, hinting at the diversity of demands made on the party. George Megalogenis points out that an urban and rural divide comes with different attitudes as well as different living conditions. He’s not the first person to notice this, but he does make it relevant to Australia by pointing out it’s a generational divide. Over half of Australians are first or second generation migrants living in a capital city. They tend to see the country as a multicultural country. Rural populations are dominated by much older 3rd-6th generational migrants from Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, or Europe, and tend to see the country as a Commonwealth country. This is an important difference, with the over-representation of older rural voters hinting at a broader divide in attitudes.

This also explains not just the aggregate composition of the party, but also the likely location of seats they are looking to contest. Secret Harbour, Farrer, and the competitive Victorian seats that One Nation is looking to pick up in the upcoming state election are whiter and older than the national average, suggesting a demographic more sympathetic with parts of One Nation’s anti-immigration policies. It’s important to remember that although One Nation is not expected to pick up diverse inner city seats, they are expected to gain votes there; even if the base of the party caters most towards rural and suburban Australia, they clearly resonate across the country.

Megalogenis’ perspective clarifies the demands of voters but this alone is not enough. You can use demographics as a source of underlying attitudes, but eventually you will need to ask voters what their attitudes actually are, and give the party agency in the explanation of its own rise.

What do they want

The clearest head describing these issues is Tony Barry. He works for Redbridge Polling (the same company as Kos Samaras), and as a result can convey some of his otherwise paywalled findings to the public. His modelling suggests that the party’s vote is split roughly into thirds based on the topics of economy, immigration, and grievance.

The economic voters are the easiest to describe in data. Since 2022, the country has seen a real GDP per capita reduction, which in effect means Australians have gotten poorer owing to inflation, weak GDP growth, and interest rate hikes. People have noticed the unaffordability of day-to-day living, with consumer confidence low and falling. Also recalling that most One Nation voters do not own their own home, the price of mortgage repayments has also increased rapidly from 26% of income in 2022 to 48% in 2024, along with similar jumps in rental costs as rentals are often mortgaged investment properties. Against a backdrop of slowing growth, increasing housing costs is a massive pressure, especially for a cohort making less than 45k per year. Descriptions of the One Nation vote stemming mostly from desperation and cost of living pressures usually have this group in mind.

“There’s no good news for these major parties on the horizon. Interest rate rises, housing prices are going to increase, they haven’t got immigration under control. … people are looking to One Nation and going, “Help”, basically, “please someone do something.””

— Stuart Bonds, South Australian candidate for One Nation

The next group are migration voters, with migration polled to be the party’s strongest issue, polling above both the Coalition and Labor on the topic. In some respects, this is a mechanisation of economic grievances; in others, it is a unique issue. Australia saw a massive spike in net overseas migration post-COVID, reaching 555,800 by 2023, though falling to 300,000 in 2025. The dip from COVID means there are less overall migrants in the country, but more year-on-year arrivals (projected until 2026–7). It has been argued that this spike has overstretched domestic capacity, while others argue it is the result of demand for labour. Regardless, people blame the issues in part for the cost of living.

Migration is also dually perceived as economic and cultural. Within right-wing spaces, there are existing accusations that the U.K. is becoming a Muslim country, and racial suspicions of non-white people living within the E.U persist alongside accusations that the continent is under threat. It is these same suspicions that exist within Australia’s own domestic discussion around migration. The “March For Australia” rallies are an example of this, where January protesters held banners reading “where are all the houses” (economic) and “stop the white replacement” (a dog whistle). As News 24’s political editor Andrew Clennel put bluntly:

“…the dog whistle for them ultimately, which a lot of people want to hear, is less Muslim immigration… we [One Nation] won’t take them from certain countries, read: less Muslim immigration.”

Finally, grievance voters are a clear indication of the frustration Australians feel, directed at the current political and social institutions. Descriptions of the party as a ‘protest vote’ are usually talking about these voters. Perceptions of the major parties in modern Australia are incredibly low; they are seen to be managers, not reformers, aware of but silent on most issues, and most voters do not believe they stand for anything. Labor’s identity centres around being for the worker, probably explaining why it has not lost as much of its primary vote share as the Liberal Party, but the ALP is regardless seen as too timid.

What’s interesting about the Liberal Party is that its rightward shift likely hasn’t helped its perception among voters. The largest issues for voters are economic, but the Liberal Party has been moving right on cultural issues, and in effect not speaking to most voters’ concerns. For some voters COVID has also raised the bar for government action, and feel as if the parties are not cooperating as much as they did then.

As for why One Nation is the vehicle for this frustration, part of this is Hanson herself. Barry explains that she’s seen as an outsider, a wrecking ball, and someone who speaks her mind. When she says things that are too far outside a supporter’s beliefs, her unfiltered tendencies mean they are willing to say “I don’t hold that belief” and then vote for the party anyway. Another explanation is that after the Bondi terror attacks, more people are willing to see ideas they don’t believe in expressed through controversial statements as marks of honesty, not necessarily marks of genius.

Another factor is the views of the other parties. Historically, for example, economics has been the strong point of the Liberal Party, but voters are still unwilling to forgive the party for its performance in the Morrison years, and the opposition leaders since then have not presented a clear economic vision. Meanwhile, One Nation’s messaging on migration has cut through.

The party is also intentional about how it pushes and softens its message, and the ‘Please Explain’ cartoons are a good example of this. Their ‘Welcome to Australia’ episode from four months ago has roughly half a million views, and softens anti-immigration messaging through jokes. In the episode, characters jump from Iran to Australia and there is no difference, with mosques and Iranian architecture everywhere, referencing perceptions of Muslim immigration. Claims about how “numbers keep climbing” and “planes keep landing” are delivered in a musical number from Albanese about how unaffordable the country is, pinning economic and cultural change on migration. For a voter base that has, as implied by Megalogenis, a particular view of what the country should look like, this is a powerful, multi-pronged message that covers concerns on economic hardship and migration with the satire particularly acting as catharsis for grievances against the whole process.

Conclusions

This brings us to September 2026. Their vote has likely peaked, with their June polling matching the ALP at roughly 30%. Over the month of August and early September, Roy Morgan’s polls have them bouncing between 24% and 27%, and a polling aggregator put together by Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, echoes this shift. One Nation peaked in June, matching the ALP, but has been trending down ever since.

Individual polls may occasionally have them higher, but in the absence of another major event or breakthrough into metropolitan seats (which absolutely could happen), 24–27% primary support appears to be the new normal for the party. This is enough to do very well in upcoming elections, but their two party preferred vote, which models preference flows, is still well behind Labor’s, and Pauline Hanson won’t be prime minister without a coalition agreement.

One Nation has built a large, resilient but relatively concentrated coalition of voters. They are playing off of and benefiting from pre-existing frustrations and attitudes, and have netted about a quarter of the Australian vote, mainly in rural and suburban areas. The ‘three-part’ nature of their support means attacking the party’s credibility on one issue won’t inherently weaken it on the other two, especially considering the ability of One Nation to craft sophisticated messaging. Even in the face of controversy and scandal, their support is likely never fully going away.

This is Will’s second article for Statecraft, he is a third year Politics, Philosophy and Economics student. We can exclusively reveal that on the back of this excellent analysis Will has been formally offered the position of Statecraft Electoral Analyst. We are awaiting his response.

Thank you to Boudica Gotlucky and Toby Riches for editing this article.

4 Million People in 18 Months was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You know the scene before it even starts. Someone is sprinting — through a departures gate, down a train platform, across a rain-slicked street against a wall of honking taxis — because they have realised, with seconds to spare, that they cannot let the person they love get on that plane. The crowd will part and the screen will swell with music. And in about ninety seconds, breathless and a little sweaty, they’ll say the thing and the whole cinema will exhale at once.

It’s been a while since anyone actually made that scene. Not ironically, not as a needle-drop gag in a Fleabag-adjacent drama, but played completely straight, as the emotional climax of a big studio film built to sell out cinemas globally. The romantic comedy, the genre that invented the airport sprint as an art form, has quietly gone missing from cinema over the past two decades, and its disappearance says less about Hollywood running out of ideas, and more about what’s happened to how we think about love itself.

Genres don’t die because writers run out of ideas. They die when the economic and emotional conditions that made them make sense start to disappear.

There was a time, not even that long ago, when the romantic comedy was one of the load-bearing walls of western cinema. It was not a niche. It was one of the biggest genres in the business. In 1999, romantic comedies pulled in roughly $835 million at the North American box office and commanded over 11 percent of the total market share — the high-water mark for the genre. Pretty Woman made half a billion on a $14 million budget. How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days starred Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey at the heights of their fame. The genre was mainstream, bankable, studio-tentpole cinema and it starred some of the most famous faces on the planet.

Fast forward to now, and the picture looks almost unrecognisable. Domestic market share tracking of rom-coms shows the genre hasn’t cracked single-digit percentage points since 2013, a steep fall from the double digits it held throughout the late 90s and 2000s. Forbes’ analysis of the genre’s all-time box office leaders found that none of the ten highest-grossing rom-coms in history was released after 2009’s The Proposal, meaning the genre’s commercial ceiling hasn’t been tested in over a decade.

The genre didn’t vanish completely. Crazy Rich Asians, Anyone But You, and The Idea of You have all found real audiences in the last few years, but it has gone from being an industry pillar to being a periodic surprise hit that gets written up as a comeback story every eighteen months. That’s the tell. Things that are healthy don’t need comeback narratives.

The standard explanation is cultural fatigue: audiences got sick of the formula, and critics have pointed to a stretch of underwhelming, formulaic films that never approached the quality of the genre’s earlier generation, training audiences to expect mediocrity. Industry analysts have also pointed to a more structural problem. As studios shifted their slates towards their billion-dollar franchises, there were simply fewer spots left for the kind of mid-budget movie the rom-com always was. While certainly true, I’d argue it’s a downstream explanation, not an upstream one.

Genres don’t die because writers run out of ideas. They die when the economic and emotional conditions that made them make sense start to disappear. Unfortunately for fans of the rom-com, these conditions have changed both too hard and too fast, leaving a genre that is being asked to adapt from its original identity.

The economics of a vanishing genre

The industry side of this decline is real but, on its own, incomplete. Studios have chased international and franchise revenue hard after 2008, and rom-coms, being culturally specific and dialogue-heavy, travel worse across markets than a superhero movie does. Analysts have pointed to this shrinking pool of mid-budget studio slots as a direct cause of the genre’s decline. Streaming also pulled the mid-budget star vehicle out of cinemas, and though these films still exist, being made for on-demand viewing shrinks their cultural reach with no more one big rom-com everyone quotes, just a scattered menu shaped by personal taste. Both of those are supply-side stories though — decisions about what to greenlight. The more interesting story is on the demand side. What happened to the audience?

The genre’s classical aspirational fantasy… now reads as fiction in the more damning sense… a story about people who do not live by the same rules the audience does.

A rom-com, structurally, is a film about two people who have the disposable time, money, and psychological slack to treat falling in love as a kind of adventure. That premise is getting harder for audiences around the world to relate to, as the material conditions of being young and single have shifted.

Across the UK, Canada, and the US, a “dating recession” is emerging, with the pattern of high living costs pushing people to date less, more cautiously, or not at all. One economist described dating itself becoming a “luxury good”, spending that gets cut first when budgets tighten, the same way a holiday or night out would. Statistics Canada found 38 percent of young adults have postponed moving out and 77 percent of couples report financial strain, with 62 percent saying money is a source of conflict. Therapists note a preference among younger people for undefined, low-commitment “situationships” over anything that implies the traditional next steps like moving in together, because those steps now read as financially unrealistic rather than aspirational.

Put that audience in front of a movie where the entire plot hinges on someone being able to drop everything, fly across the world, or take a financially reckless leap of faith for love, and something doesn’t land the way it used to. This isn’t a new problem. The genre’s classical aspirational fantasy — the Pretty Woman premise — worked precisely because it depicted a world just out of reach but plausible enough to daydream about. What’s changed is the size of the gap. When a generation is delaying moving out, splitting bills by necessity, and treating “situationship” as a rational response to economic precarity rather than emotional immaturity, a plot built on effortless romantic spontaneity doesn’t read as fantasy. It reads as fiction in the more damning sense. A story about people who don’t live by the same rules the audience does. When a film’s version of “normal” diverges too far from the audience’s lived economic reality, “charming” starts to feel “out of touch”, however well the film is written.

The death of the meet-cute as a philosophy

The economic story explains a lot, but it doesn’t fully explain why even cheap, well-made romance struggles to hit the way it used to. For that, readers should look to the underlying philosophy of love, what we think it’s for and made of, has shifted, independent of whether anyone ends up married at the end of it.

The rom-com, as a form, runs on a distinctly 20th-century idea: that romantic love is a discoverable, singular, fated thing — that there’s a person, the one, and the plot’s task is to clear away the misunderstandings, workaholic bosses, and inconvenient fiancés standing in the way. It’s a soulmate model: obstacles are external, love is a fixed and findable object, and once the obstacles are removed, happiness is reached.

That model has been quietly losing cultural authority, partly because of changing ideas about the self. Therapeutic and self-actualisation culture reframed love as something you must be individually “ready” for, built through boundaries, insight, and personal growth work, rather than something a partner helps accomplish. People increasingly want a partner to function as co-therapist, growth collaborator, and equals simultaneously, which is far more psychologically demanding than the genre’s classic “we had a meet-cute and I liked your dog”.

Dating apps have also replaced fate with algorithms and scarcity with an endless supply of options. When love is one swipe among thousands, “there’s only one person for you and the universe conspired to put you both at the same coffee shop” begins to look almost quaint. Real compatibility, in this framework, is not discovered in a dramatic gesture but built, tested, and renegotiated, making it harder to compress into a satisfying two-hour arc. None of this means people have stopped wanting connection; rather, the specific story the rom-com tells about how connection works no longer matches how people experience it.

What replaced it: the anti-rom-com

The genre didn’t just die out, though. Rather, what it became is a genre that keeps love’s subject matter but trades the fairy tale of arrival for the harder work of staying.

“…replacing the fantasy of a singular fated love with the more adult, more economically and psychologically grounded reality that people build stable lives with the person they’re actually with, while still honestly grieving the life they didn’t choose.”

The clearest example is Past Lives, Celine Song’s directorial debut, which NPR’s film critic called the most affecting love story in years. It has the shape of a rom-com, featuring childhood sweethearts, a decades-long separation, a will-they-won’t-they built around real chemistry, but it steers away from the love-triangle melodrama the genre trained audiences to expect, and refuses every single genre convention at the moment of payoff. The husband isn’t a villain to be defeated. Nobody runs to the airport. The film’s emotional force comes precisely from replacing the fantasy of a singular fated love with the more adult, more economically and psychologically grounded reality that people build stable lives with the person they’re actually with, while still honestly grieving the life they didn’t choose.

This is the template for what’s replaced the rom-com: films that keep the subject matter of romantic love but relocate it into the emotional register of drama, where ambivalence, cost, and compromise are allowed to be the story rather than obstacles that need to be overcome. Two 2026 releases make the shift almost embarrassingly literal, right down to their titles.

The Drama, directed by Kristoffer Borgli and starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, takes the most sacred rom-com set piece, the wedding, and turns it into the site of collapse rather than culmination. NPR’s review noted that the film understands weddings as fundamentally acts of performance, and spends its runtime cracking that performance open with a “perverse sense of humour,” turning what should be a countdown to a happy ending into an interrogation of relationship performance itself. The film borrows the genre’s structure, including the countdown to the big day, the ensemble of friends and family, the dark comic tone, and uses it to interrogate whether the performance of a perfect relationship was ever love to begin with. Where a 2005 studio rom-com would have played pre-wedding jitters for laughs on the way to a guaranteed altar reunion, The Drama treats the wedding itself as the moment the illusion can no longer hold. However, the movie is not arguing that romance has gone extinct. It’s closer to the opposite: the film seems to trust that something truer can only start once the performance drops, which is presumably why it ends with the couple re-introducing themselves to one another, this time without the show.

The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s A24 dinner-party comedy starring Seth Rogen, Wilde, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton, does something similar from inside an already-established marriage. The film’s own synopsis states plainly that Joe and Angela’s marriage is “on thin ice” before the story even begins, where there’s no meet-cute to earn, no obstacle to clear, because the couple is already past the part a rom-com would have ended on. The film’s real subject is what happens after the version of the story the old genre used to tell — what a relationship looks like once fate, spontaneity, and the thrill of the chase have all been spent, and what’s left is two people deciding whether to keep choosing each other. This is not a verdict that love is finished either. It’s a suggestion that the real work that love requires only starts once the story a rom-com would have told has already wrapped, when there’s nothing left to discover and everything instead has to be maintained. This new genre is more clear-eyed than sentimental, withholding the saccharine promise of easy romance because it knows its audience no longer buys it, and suits viewers who’ve stopped expecting love to simply resolve. Whether it’s a better genre is a separate question. But it’s the one that currently rings true.

The old rom-com promised that if you just found the right person, everything else would sort itself out. The films that have replaced it tend to argue the opposite: that everything else, whether that be rent, timing, expectations, or the life you already built, is exactly what determines whether love is even possible in the first place. That’s a much sadder premise for a genre. It also happens to be a much more accurate one for the world its audience is actually living in. But maybe that’s not actually a downgrade.

The old genre needed you to believe fate had already done the hard work, that the right person was out there, waiting, and all you had to do was not miss the flight. The version we’ve got now asks more of us, but it also trusts us with more. It says love isn’t a lucky break you stumble into, it’s something you keep choosing, on purpose, even once the spontaneity wears off and the rent’s still due. That’s harder to put on a movie poster. It might also be worth more.

Aunima is a fourth year Politics, Philosophy, and Economics student, and a first time writer for Statecraft. Aunima’s contribution ends a conspicuously long and notable absence of UQPPES presidents from Statecraft Magazine. We’re hopeful this is the beginning of a new trend.

Thanks to Maxwell Aspinall and Jack Power for editing this article.

How to Lose a Genre in 10 Years was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Are you a good person?
Did you choose to be?
Likely not.

There is a particular autonomy that underpins our idea of morality. We revere it. Unlike achievement, morality gains sanctity through being purely choice-driven. It is, therefore, something we can confidently assign praise or blame. It seems uniquely person-defining. But when we ask what choice means, and whether it meaningfully exists, our ideas about meritocracy, praise, and blame become much more complicated, and much more interesting.

Our belief in moral desert, the idea that through what a person does, they can genuinely deserve praise, blame, reward, or punishment, underlies so much of the human experience. It feels intuitive.

Each time you’ve felt that someone should be chastised for their small unkindness, or that your friend should be congratulated for their success, you’ve used desert to justify it, whether it was conscious or not.

This intuition is the primary appeal of meritocracy. In praising someone hard-working over someone well-connected, meritocracy reinforces the sanctity of both our inner experience and our sense of control over it. More crucially, it comforts our belief that our personal qualities, as opposed to predetermined traits, make us morally deserving of something.

What happens to the moral appeal of meritocracy if this concept of deserving isn’t possible?

Consider someone you know who benefits from family money or other good fortune. Compare them with someone who instead owes their achievements mostly to hard work and merit. It feels much easier to root for the latter.

In general, meritocracy asserts that institutions benefit more from selecting individuals based on competence rather than nepotism. However, it also makes a claim slightly beyond this. One you likely felt in the comparison you just made. That the second person deserves their success more than the first.

What happens to the moral appeal of meritocracy if this concept of deserving isn’t possible?

To answer that question, we first have to ask what would actually make anyone deserving of anything. Specifically, whether a person’s choices are truly theirs to make, or are instead causally determined.

In a familiar exercise of free will, you are currently making the ongoing choice to read this article, most likely because some part of you wants to. But consider that want for a moment. It did not materialise from nothing, nor was it chosen by you. It can be traced through a causal chain, from prior experience and temperament to the experience of conscious deliberation. So, exactly how free are your choices, and what credit can you actually take for them?

Consider your thoughts and feelings as you read and how you deliberate between them using wants you did not choose, each with a magnitude you also did not choose. Although you experience making this choice, there isn’t an independently originating you who is deciding why one want or one choice wins over another. Your decision therefore cannot be free in a libertarian sense.

Maybe, though, this definition asks too much of freedom.

A compatibilist might argue that freedom isn’t necessarily the ability to originate your desires from nothing, but rather the ability to reflect on your desires through second-order desires. In Frankfurt-style accounts, for example, you may sometimes want to avoid studying and simultaneously have the second-order desire of wanting to not want to avoid studying. According to compatibilists, being able to act according to that second-order desire may be what free choice actually is.

This allows us to preserve the idea of a self that we find comforting. It does justice to the intangible experience of being a person. It also affirms the sense of agency that we feel when, for example, in any moment of decision, we are acutely aware of the endless options it feels we could simply choose between.

However, second-order desires fail to preserve authorship in an originating sense, as they themselves are causally formed. Ultimately, desert, a claim about what a person earns rather than what they are caused to do, seems to require self-originating authorship. Compatibilism may, therefore, preserve the concept of responsibility, but it cannot fully justify a belief in desert: that a person could truly deserve something because of their choice.

How correct, then, is the moral distinction that meritocracy makes between choice and circumstance?

In treating praise and blame as deserved because of a person’s choices rather than their unchosen circumstances, meritocracy draws a distinction similar to luck egalitarianism. However, ambition, discipline, and values are things we also did not choose; we just happen to experience them consciously. So how is rewarding them not just rewarding another form of luck?

What remains of meritocracy if none of us can claim desert?

We still need to operate under some sort of moral paradigm. Without one, there would be no clear way for us to determine how we should act, or how we should respond to the actions of others. Ours is rooted so deeply in desert because it feels as though our moral character is something we can choose and control, and because it feels deeply unsettling to believe otherwise. Because of how emotionally convincing it is, desert provides a very appealing foundation for social ideologies. So much so that it makes up much of meritocracy’s appeal. However, there is something that justifies meritocracy, regardless of desert. The effect of incentives.

Experiencing a reward can itself become a cause. In that way, a reward doesn’t need to be deserved to be justified. It can instead be justified by the good it causes.

Hard work, discipline, and kindness will always be socially valuable. The fact that they can be incentivised by reward is a compelling basis for a social system. However, this justification is often overpowered by how strongly we feel that good people should be rewarded and bad people should suffer, and how important it feels that we do something with that feeling.

It is understandable to think that since rewarding or punishing someone causes them a gratifying or painful experience, it can balance the good or bad experience caused by their action, like a sort of moral ledger. But without desert, it seems impossible to justify balancing things this way. Maybe, then, the only moral justification of praise and blame can come from whether, on the whole, they can cause more morally good experiences. The strongest justification for meritocracy is therefore utilitarian. It is not that certain people deserve success, but that rewarding their behaviour, the behaviour that we value, incentivises more of it. Meritocracy’s defence is, therefore, found further along the very causal chain that undermines its claim to desert.

In a more general sense, it remains difficult to justify praise and punishment because the thing they affect, our conscious experience, is merely the culmination point of a much larger causal history. More pointedly, any feeling we experience through being praised or punished will be because of inner qualities we didn’t author.

It is not that certain people deserve success, but that rewarding their behaviour, the behaviour that we value, incentivises more of it.

Desert does a lot to make this feel justified. It alleviates the moral discomfort we would otherwise feel about, for example, the pain a person experiences through punishment, and it makes our social landscape, full of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, much easier to navigate. It is a convenient fiction we use to resolve an impossible moral problem.

Returning to my opening question, “Are you a good person?”, a yes now means something slightly different. It’s not really the trick question it first seemed. You could be. You could also be a bad person. You just might not be one in the way you thought.

It might be impossible to ever know for certain which you are, or how you came to be it, but the feeling that we deserve something because we are good or bad remains visceral. What that feeling turns into, and who it lands on, is therefore too important not to question.

As the conscious experiencer of reward and punishment, but not the ultimate originator of the qualities that supposedly justify them, what does anyone truly deserve?

Matisse is a third year Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering student, and a first time writer for Statecraft Magazine. We are grateful for the effects of causal determinism leading to her publishing with us!

Thanks to Maxwell Aspinall and Elliot Fitzsimmons for editing this article.

Are You A Good Person? was originally published in Statecraft Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.