Podcast – The Implausi.blog

Streets Ahead

(This was originally published as Implausipod Episode 50 on November 8, 2025.)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/17441059-e0050-streets-ahead

A wrong turn and a 20 minutes detour due to poor signage led to an inquiry into the evolution of autonomous vehicles. We’ll examine how the idea has appeared in popular culture, both within and outside science fiction. Turns out when it comes to self-driving cars, we’re thinking street ahead.

Get in. Let’s go for a ride. I wanna take you on a little trip around my town, down a few of the wide open roadways. We caught them at a perfect time of day. The city is still sleeping and the roads are mostly empty. It’s during these quiet times so we can see how the roads actually work. We’ve got a corner coming up here, but the main road continues this way for a bit before turning right to the north.

We continue around the city, but the exit on the right is actually for drivers continuing left towards the west. Curious. As we come through this lovely pass to see the city laid out before us, we come to the same issue. A quick turn to the right to go left to head to the west and the rocky mountains.

The road straight ahead is called Stony Trail North, but it’s headed east. Confused. You won’t be after this episode of the Implausipod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode we’re asking who are roads for, are they built for the cars or the drivers? It’s an interesting question. One we have to ask more often as we’re seeing more and more self-driving cars on the road, the desire for autonomous vehicles has some deep roots and some of those cross through science fiction.

So it isn’t just because I accidentally took a wrong turn due to confusing road signs and had to take a 20 minute detour down the highway as described in the intro. No, no. That had nothing to do with today’s discussion, but the truth about those confusing road signs has a lot to do with our autonomous vehicles as well, because it’s difficult for us to navigate than how can anything else hope to understand it.

It turns out we have different and overlapping systems of direction that we use when we’re trying to navigate the world and humans having grown up in it. Generally pretty at adept at uh, parsing it out. But once you try and break it down and explain it to something, something that can only follow rules, it gets quite complex indeed.

So we’re gonna get into these rule-based systems in a little bit, but first I wanna look into the genesis of an idea of how the concept of self-driving vehicles came to be. Because what a vehicle that can move itself, that seems very implausible.

IMPLAUSIBILITY 0 1 4 Autonomous Vehicles

In this week’s implausibility, let’s take a look at how autonomous vehicles have shown up in science fiction in their various forms. It comes as no surprise given how prevalent automobiles have been in the 20th century, that the two have been combined so often. But one of the first instances wasn’t really a car at all. One of the earliest autonomous vehicles was a bulldozer.

And not just any bulldozer but the Killdozer. That’s right. Killdozer. First appearing in the 1944 short story of the same name by Theodore Sturgeon. Here we have a proper autonomous vehicle that decides to take revenge on the humans around it and the killdozer is autonomous. It has goals and agency, albeit those of the alien energy weapon that has possessed a normal construction bulldozer and it proceeds to fulfill its original programming.

Hence, the killing and the dozing. The rampage ends when the machine is electrocuted in a pool, going quiescent until it’s possible long-lost cousin shows up in the movie Idiocracy years later. Killdozer appears early. Science fiction had quite entered its golden age, so there weren’t that many stories yet.

And of course when it comes to robots and science fiction Isaac Asimov has to get a word in, and in 1953 he gave us a story of Sally, a car with the Robo Brain. In fact, in this world, the only cars that are allowed are the ones that have robo brains as humans are not trusted behind the wheel, so to speak, as the

Wheel no longer really exists. The robo brains of the cars here are not described as the positronic brains common to the rest of Asimov’s robot stories either, and they aren’t bound by the three laws. So we get an alternate take of what vehicles would be like in that universe. But the idea of autonomous vehicles is taking hold.

The next entry on our list from the very next year, 1954, is the first time we see a vision of autonomous vehicles on the screen. In an animated short produced by General Motors, titled Give Yourself the Green Light. This 22 minute mix of film and animation showed overhead shots of parts of the highway system and the problems that the USA was facing with congestion.

We can recognize that the short by GM is what we’d consider propaganda, trying to make a case for the expansion of the highways and opening up more of the country to cars. So that gives us maybe a bit of a hint at the answer to the question of our episode, but let’s go further. The push for highways really kicks into high gear a little bit later in the decade when Disney released Magic Highway USA, directed by Ward Kimball, and airing on the Disneyland TV series in May of 1958.

This animated short depicted how the automobile of the future would fit within society, and it falls along the line of the GM video we just mentioned by framing things about the highway, though centering on the individual within the car Here, the autonomous vehicle is coupled with an autonomous driver forming a complex, almost cybernetic assemblage that we’ll have to dig into more in a little bit.

What’s truly impressive about the short is the list of innovations that it showcased that have since been developed. Some of these include electronic dashboards, traffic bulletins, overhead maps, TV for a rear view screen, heads up displays, and of course autonomous vehicles. Another interesting element later in the short was the introduction of containerized shipping first invented in 1956.

The first containerized cargo ship didn’t leave port until 1958, the same year as the short. Containerization was growing by the time Magic Highway aired, but it hadn’t reshaped society in the world economy the way it has since. Of course, looking back at the show from a viewpoint from 2025, we see a number of elements that aren’t quite as positive, including the decentralizing of the urban areas and the sprawl to the suburbs, the private houses and isolation and the paving of vast tracks of wilderness.

Magic Highway definitely remained a product of its time. I can’t recall whether I first saw this as a child at school when they’d roll out a film to keep us occupied on a substitute teacher day, or if it showed up on repeats during a Saturday or afternoon cartoon block, or maybe even repeated in Sunday primetime on the wonderful world of Disney.

The point being like a lot of Gen Xers, I saw this at a young and impressionable age. If you don’t recall the Magic Highway short, you may be thinking of some others as Disney produced several starring the iconic Goofy during this time, including Motor Mania from 1950 and Freeway Phobia from 1965. But these were made to address a generation of current drivers as a public service and were far less future-focused, more educational in nature.

For example, the Freeway Phobia short highlighted safe driving techniques, minimum stopping distance, and the risks of distracted driving and the dangers it poses. With F Progress, the character portrayed by Goofy causing pile ups of with every misstep. Moving on from the Magic Highway, several of the inventions seen within it would pop up again on primetime again in 1962 when the Jetsons appeared in the fall season

alongside the Flintstones. The flying cars may have overshadowed the autonomous driving features, but George doesn’t have to spend a lot of time looking at the road or concerned with the details of where the car is going. He also has some of the creature comforts and vision for car occupancy in a Magic Highway as well, though ultimately, it’s all to get him into the office in the morning as if the Jetson future doesn’t have remote work.

Both the Magic Highway and the Jetsons are really emblematic of that mid-century vision of the future. We talked about in the California Ideology episode back in episode 38 in the sci-fi in the 1960s. We also saw the rise of vehicles that explicitly weren’t autonomous as Frank Herbert’s Dune in 1963.

had humans taking any role where we might expect to see automatons in the mainstream science fiction. Other visions of autonomous vehicles persisted throughout the sixties, but these were less often seen as the vehicles themselves and as often as not regular vehicles piloted by robots, androids, and various cyborgs.

The 1970s was the era of the Cyborg with Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man appearing in primetime during the early part of the decade, and the Bionic Woman soon followed along with DethLok Cyborg, and a host of man-machine hybrids in the comics pages. We’ll take a look at the Six Million Dollar Man’s legacy

soon enough, though that might be in early 2026, as the schedule currently looks like. It was in the 1980s when autonomous vehicles made their real big push into the current cultural consciousness. First and foremost of these was Knight Rider, produced by Glen A. Larson, and airing on NBC in Primetime beginning in 1982 and starring David Hasselhoff, pre Baywatch and cheeseburgers, fighting crime at the behest of a billionaire, while partnered with an autonomous vehicle named KITT, short for Knight Industries

Two Thousand. KITT was a modified TransAm with a custom front plate that had a moving red light, which was the semiotic code for intelligent machines in the seventies and eighties. Though their motives might be suspect, depending on if you were dealing with Hal 9000 or the Cylons of BSG. KITT is basically a mobile supercomputer that happens to have the shell of a car around it, and is generally described during the show as having cybernetic logic.

It also has a voice module in various scanners and electronic countermeasures, ECM, allowing for enhanced visuals and signal jamming, and a variety of other sensors from heart monitors to bomb sniffers or whatever else is needed by the plot of the week. KITT is also powered by Hydrogen Fuel Cell and uses a turbojet engine along with afterburners.

There’s also a host of offensive and defensive weapons, ejector seats, blenders and beer coolers, and whatever else. KITT kind of had it all. Seriously, Hasselhoff is often a liability compared to KITT. The Inspector Gadget to KITT’s Penny, but still able to do the odd task that KITT couldn’t get done, as is the way of sci-fi series.

We also got the dark side doppelganger to KITT, KARR. That’s spelled K-A-R-R. Appeared in season one, episode nine, episode titled Trust Doesn’t Rust. KARR proved popular enough for return appearance in season three as well, Evil goatee and all, the Samaritan to the Machine, the Lore to KITT’s Data. KARR was a prototype version of KITT’s design programmed for self preservation and a lot more hostility when they faced off.

KITT was able to win due to moxie. Good thing that that submarine was programmed in.

As is the Hollywood way, seeing somebody else’s cool idea and trying to copy it to cash in. Larson would try to repeat a success with a Tron inspired series called Auto Man in 1983, but this failed to capture an audience with poor scripts, rough, special effects, and high costs, dooming it to an early cancellation.

We’ll look deeper into Tron during our next episode, but I don’t think we’re gonna talk much more about Automan at all.

Implausibility, 50% complete.

We would be remiss in our look at self-driving vehicles if it did cover the other place that they show up. In our nightmares. For every sci-fi story of the promise of autonomous vehicles, there’s a horror story that preys on our fears. Sometimes. They’re the same story though, like Killdozer. This fear is often the fear of the loss of control of the machines we use.

As such, they often showed up as ghost stories rather than being overtly science fiction. We’ve been telling stories about ghost vehicles for longer than we’ve been talking about autonomous vehicles since the tales of ghost ships, possessed trains and haunted stage coaches. I’ll skip past those tales of the Marie Celeste and the Stagecoach in and move into the more modern era.

Perhaps the most famous example is Christine, Stephen King’s 1983 tale of a Possessed Plymouth. A story brought to life on film by John Carpenter later that same year. Here we have a demonic vehicle with an ulterior motive that relentlessly hunts down those who have wronged it. Christine is not fully autonomous.

Occasionally requiring the aid of those nearby, but has more in common with the Daemon weapons we might see in more fantastical settings. Stephen King has explored possessed vehicles more than once with the 1973 short story Trucks being turned into Maximum Overdrive in 1986, just in time for an AC DC soundtrack.

Here are the motivating forces of extraterrestrial origin. A comet’s tail, bringing sentience to all machines on earth. We have multiple vehicles working in coordinated fashion, corralling and eliminating the survivors, though subject to one of the weakness of 1980s cars, rocket launchers, and running out of gas.

There’s definitely some deep seated concerns about the seventies fuel crisis lingering in the narrative here, but it isn’t just ordinary vehicles that are in ghost stories, we have possessed weapons of war. The Haunted Tank was a comic series published by DC Comics joining Sergeant Rock in the pages of GI Comics starting in 1961.

Here the Possessor is the Ghost of Confederate General Jeb Stuart, and, and their M3 tank is crewed by namesake in World War II, showing up throughout Africa and Europe. Though they would change vehicles from time to time, the tank is mostly operated by the crew and isn’t fully autonomous, but is included here due to the.

Spirit of the thing. The Haunted Tank is also an influence on one of our favorite topics, Appendix W. Within the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the vehicles of the imperium are possessed by the machine spirits as they have fallen technologically and no longer know how their machines actually work. In some instances, the machine spirits are able to provide some limited autonomy, but in other cases, like when the machines and their crew turn to chaos, they may be literally possessed becoming

twisted amalgams of flesh and metal and able to act upon their own. These two axes, Boon or Bane, Promise or horror, can explain much of the divide in modern audiences and their attitudes towards autonomous vehicles. The priming we receive when we are young can stick with us for a lifetime, but these two examples weren’t the only ones, and more normal versions of autonomous vehicles started showing up in versions that are no longer explicitly menacing, but rather just part of everyday life.

Demolition Man and Johnny Cab of Total Recall. I’m looking at you, but I think these last two examples have more in common with chauffered vehicles and we don’t really consider chauffered vehicles to be autonomous unless you have such a low opinion of others that you don’t consider the driver’s, people, and

Hmm. I fear we’ve unlocked something here, as this brings us back to our look at the California ideology and the quest for automation. The further back we look through history, we see that dichotomy arise more and more. The driver is a specialist. The vehicle is something unique, reserved for the wealthy, or a shared resource.

Of course, if you look back far enough, the simplest autonomous vehicle is a horse and buggy. That’s probably not what comes to mind when you’re asked to picture autonomous vehicle, though technically correct is not the best kind of correct in this case.

Implausibility 100% complete.

So what brought us here? Well, a few things, not least of which is me getting lost on the freeway. Often on the internet, in discussion of autonomous vehicles, you’ll hear people asking who asked for this as if the idea of an autonomous vehicle is inconceivable. But as I hope to have shown, there’s some deep seated roots for it, not just in the fantastical realms of science fiction, but also in pop culture more generally, as well as in traditional media.

It turns out that people have been asking for this for a long, long time. We often preach for an empathetic view of technology to consider the potential uses and needs of people other than ourselves. When examining tech, I’m wondering why it is the way it is. Our exploration of autonomous vehicles is no different.

Personally, I don’t have one, and I’m not in a position to acquire one anytime soon either. This does not mean we can’t examine the technology though. Now that we’re well on the way where that implausibility may become a reality, let’s take a look at the state of the art in our present. And here we find there’s a little bit of a challenge, but this challenge is one of bounty fittingly for this harvest season.

There’s so many stories now of self-driving cars as well as buses, trucks, taxis, in all manner of related vehicles that it’s hard to narrow down and focus on the key elements of the story. In part, that’s one of the things that led to the delay of this episode. I got lost on the freeway back in May of 2024 and started drafting this as I was exploring why.

We’ll get into the conclusion of that tale in a little bit, but as I started looking at the reasons and how the challenges I was facing as a driver are similar, yet amplified for designers of navigation systems or. Anything that needs to interface with our roads, the volume of stories steadily increased.

I was trying to stay streets ahead, but kept losing the race with every new twist and turn. So rather than try and encapsulate everything, let’s try and see what this implausibility really means for humans in an age of self-driving cars. As seen with the Disney example of the Magic Highway, there’s an idea that the vehicles on the roadways could become fast and more efficient the more we relinquish control over to machine controlled systems.

We do this in some areas currently, often in flight or on the oceans, trusting our travel to machine calculated systems. In our forthcoming Appendix W episode on Joe Haldeman’s, the Forever War from 1973, we can see how these ballistic systems was trusted as able to calculate the necessary travel faster than any human could react.

Even Han Solo trusted the nav computer when calculated the jump to hyperspace, even if he punched the electronics a few, couple times, just for good measure. This desire to take the wheels out of our hands is ultimately an issue of trust. Trust that we can’t do it correctly ourselves, or at least other people suck as drivers.

I’m okay, which we can see in the California ideology we talked about earlier. There, the cult of acceleration or cult of speed from the era of the Italian Futurists through till now sees the ability to move faster as being a desirable ending of itself by any means necessary, and we find that some people aren’t opposed to that, that moving fast can even be intoxicating and fun if it’s done in a controlled manner.

The public’s fascination with roller coasters in the early part of the 20th century was noted by Walter Benjamin, and that fascination has continued with Zipline skydiving, bungee jumping, and other high speed pursuits. So how do we achieve this, reach those speeds that we find enjoyable or even necessary for force to travel on the freeways in order to accomplish what we need to?

Well, there’s something interesting that happens when we get behind the wheel, and it turns out we have a lot more in common with Colonel Steve Austin than you might think. Let me introduce you to the idea of an assemblage. We’re accepting this term a bit from the work of the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour.

Latour was working on attempting to describe the way both humans and non-humans interact. For him, this is a problem that expanded out of his work in the field of science studies and interdisciplinary field with humanities that looks at the way scientists go about doing science. This is work he published in Laboratory Life in 1979, along with Steve Woolgar, and it’s a tricky question.

How do use similar terminology to describe how humans interact with their technology? One way is to look at how they relate to one another. For Latour, this science of relations or sociology of translation only works if everything was flat and dissimilar things are treated symmetrically. This has led to people looking at the world in terms of a flat ontology.

You can look at the technology, not on its own, but in the hands or control of its wielder or user. This combined entity is different than the entity on its own. To paraphrase Latour’s own words in terms of what we’re talking about here, it could be best understood as car, or person, or-car person. It matters not the truth is you’re a very different person behind the wheel.

Now, Latour was talking about guns in his original quote, but we can see how easily it applies to what we’re looking at when it comes to cars. If you recall, way back to episode 12, we talked about that feeling of connection that you have when you’re holding a technology in your hand. It’s the same way that you can almost sense the edges of the vehicle when you’re driving in it.

This connection leads us back to cybernetics, but we’re not quite there yet. Where the riggers of ShadowRun and Cyberpunk were hooked directly into their vehicles. But while these future cybernetic assemblages, these metaphorical car-humans may be able to exist on the faster roadways, what do the rest of us do?

Right now, we’ve gone from human scale roads interacting with draft animals of various sorts at what are fundamentally still human speeds. But as we’ve scaled up the speed, the interactions have gotten fundamentally more dangerous, and the overlapping systems have grown apart. How do we keep it all together?

If we think of an overhead shot of the Ring Road from our intro example, taken from 30,000 feet or from a drone or what have you, we can think of the issue with the different kinds of directions. We have overlapping systems in play all the time that we need to navigate and switch between these directions are what we’ll acronym is CONA, Cardinal, ordinal, nominal, and algorithmical, or procedural

Cardinal directions are those navigating by the compass. We can think of the four cardinal directions and how they relate at 90 degree angles on the compass, northeast, south and west. You know these pretty instinctively as they’ve been tied to the sun. Even if we might be hard pressed to point to true north on a dime.

Cardinal directions are further complicated by the various subdivisions bisecting the above. Northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest,

Ordinal, or relational direction systems are based on changes to the current position. Left or right is an ordinal direction. These are the directions you would receive if you stop for directions in an unfamiliar town. Turn left at the next intersection. These might also be used when giving directions to someone else describing where something is.

We can also see ordinal directions in cybernetic feedback systems:

The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t. By subtracting where it is from where it isn’t, or where it isn’t from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference or deviation.

Nominal direction systems are the ones that work by name, natch, or label or identifying feature of the item. This is the direction system of puzzle games and treasure maps. So we still use it when driving too nominal direction. Systems can appear in the naming of streets. In some cities like New York where the initials of the Uptown Avenues spell out.

C-A-P-L-P-M, for example, and other mnemonics have been crafted for older cities the world over. Significant features can also be named either directly or by resemblance, and these can be included in nominal systems as well. And of course, the above can be combined in various ways. Head Southeast and turn left at Abe Lincoln or maybe turn left at the rock That looks like a dude with a stovepipe hat. Depending on local knowledge and context, both sets of directions are correct, but whether you get lost or not can depend upon how aware you are of the local lore and culture.

These three are the common ones, the common systems of direction. You often hear about them as number systems or when grouping in data science and the like. But there is another. We need to find a way to describe what we observed as we were driving in the introduction, and that’s how we get to procedural or a rhythmical.

This is rule-based directions like we described in the open. Always exit on the right unless pointed north on the first Tuesday of a month, but our computers aren’t necessarily great at handling all those exceptions are they? They occasionally lose it like a Fembot having to deal with Austin Powers.

However, this is where we are living and driving in a system designed for cars. And not for people. It’s a system that also has the logic of shipping, much like the trucks on the roadways in the Disney Magic Highway from 1958, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s for us. The two approaches to this challenge seem to be either to one, to cede all control and let the machines take care of it, or two, give us more information, and this is where we’re starting to see some more progress.

Back in 2020 at an academic conference, I gave a talk about how AR technologies might actually be useful for both drivers and for pedestrians to provide more information about the high volume of traffic that’s on our roads. And as AR goggles become more widely available, this may be one of those killer apps.

While heads up displays and advanced optics have long been the purview of fighter pilots and those working at the highest speeds, they’ve rarely been applied to more domestic purposes. That’s starting to change. At a recent event, Amazon demoed how they’re going to begin rolling out AR goggles so that delivery drivers don’t need to look down at their devices to follow routes and scan packages ,stated as a bid to improve safety and efficiency, but how well that will work remains to be seen.

There are concerns about privacy as well due to the Always-on cameras on the glasses, but I think AR goggles is an implausibility we’ll have to get into at another time. Regardless of the method chosen cybernetic connection or AR enhanced vision, the way to deal with cars in this future seems to lead to more mapping of the surfaces and roadways into a digital map.

While one could see that having a smart vehicle that can recognize and adapt to situations may be the most ideal, like many tech stories of the 1980s, Knight Rider may have been more of an aspirational tale, and were unlikely to see a system as capable as KITT or even KARR anytime soon. So building a robust map of everything may be the most efficient way.

The question is, what do we do with all those virtual roads? The map might not be the territory after all, right? But one surely exists. What do you do when you have a one-to-one high resolution model of the world? Well, you could simulate anything.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr. implausible AT implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod.com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at implausipod.com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show.

You can follow along with us on the blog, that’s implausi dot blog, or consider signing up for a semi-regular newsletter. We hope to have a new episode out for you soon. Until then, take care and have fun.

From ICEbreakers to RAD-aways

A couple years ago we started releasing some short episodes of the podcast along with the main line episodes. We called these ICEbreakers, after the cyberpunk software hackers used against IC (Intrusion Countermeasures) in cyberspace, and as a conversation starter within public speaking. It was a good fit. Of the 5 ICEbreakers recorded, we released 4, and were looking to do more, though that didn’t come to pass. However, due to recent events, we felt a name change was necessary.

Enter the RAD-away.

RAD in this case stands for Rapid Access Dataport, which seems suitably cyberpunk.

I guess I could call these short episodes “takes”, but in this case we’ll call them “aways”. A quick factoid, a bit to deal with a current event, or address some common bit of misinformation.

Of course, there is a bit of a tie-in with RADaway to the larger geek universe via Fallout series. Not wholly intentional, but a nice bonus, all the same time.

We’re not going to go back and rename the released episodes. But we’ll continue the numbering with the new ones as they come up.

In the meantime, we’ll resume with new episodes shortly. Look for them in select podcast apps shortly.

The Spirit of the AI-dio

(This was originally published as Implausipod Episode 49 on July 7th, 2025.)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/17441034-e0049-spirit-of-the-ai-dio

A look into the rise of ghost artists on Spotify, both AI generated and not, and what the history of Performer’s Rights Organizations mean for art and creativity in the 21st century, and how that may make us question the very nature of creativity itself.

Let me ask you a question. What do you do if you’re a musician working the mean streets of New York City trying to get paid for your work? You see, you’ve made some compositions, but thanks to some hot new tech, anybody can copy it and hear the songs, the music that you wrote, and you don’t get paid a single penny and New York City isn’t cheap.

It’s rough for a musician to make it, but this new tech, and you’ll admit it is a marvelous invention. Makes it hard for you to make a living. But the tech does have its limitations. It’s easier to copy and share your tunes for sure, but they still need to be copied by someone transferred to media. That limitation, that drawback gives you a crack or maybe just maybe you can get paid for your music.

This is the situation Victor Herbert found himself in a little over 110 years ago, and we’re going to look at exactly what the ramifications of his solution was. In this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and this episode has some links, not just to stuff that we’ve been discussing here, but to some recent events in the news, and it’s gonna take some twists and turns. You see the solution that Victor Herbert and some of the other composers in and around New York City came up with in the early nineteen hundreds to help solve their problems has a lot to say about the current state of media in 2025.

You see in the development of a new technology, a lot rides on the physical limitations of the media. Often that could come down to logistical, practical concerns, the ease of duplicating something or transporting it. What Victor Herbert was dealing with was the rise of rolls of music for player pianos, the hot new tech at the time, tech that could be copied and shared and meant that he was losing opportunities to get paid for playing it.

So when Victor and a few of his fellow composers on Tin Pan Alley got together to perform the first. PRO or performance rights organization, one that would negotiate collectively on behalf of its member artists is ASCAP the American Society of Composers, authors and publishers. What they ended up doing, whether intentionally or not, for both ASCAP and the other PROs that follow, was providing a means for listeners to address some of the ethical concerns that they may have had when it comes to the content that they were consuming.

Hmm. It sounds a little weird when it’s phrased that way, talking about listening to music in 1914, in 21st century terms, but that’s basically what was going on, and that’s why the story of how the PROs came about is relevant to us today too. In one of our recent podcasts back in episode 42, where we talked about the incipient diaspora of the potential end of TikTok, we discussed how making informed choices and ethical consumption matters when it comes to media.

At the beginning of our episodes, we sometimes mention that we’re not on Spotify, and that this is an intentional act. I’m not a fan and I don’t like their business model, so I’m not using them. In late 2024 and 2025, some news came out about how Spotify was using AI generated content, algorithmically developed for easy listening and the reasons why we’re not on Spotify became crystal clear.

Now finding there’s a market for endlessly looping smooth jazz isn’t that surprising. It’s a concept that became so ubiquitous that a word was coined for it. Muzak. Invented in the 1920s by American George Owen Squier, Muzak was a non-radio form of music delivery that used the electrical wires to deliver songs directly to paid subscribers over the air. Systems like radio were inconsistent and spotty at the time, so there were takers for this new system. Think of it as an early version of broadband over electrical that you could set up in your own home today. Once radio started to catch on with the home market, Muzak shifted to business customers and as the company changed hands and ownership, it was used to regulate the mood in the environment where it was delivered.

A fast pace equals faster workers, or so the Taylorist line of reasoning went. Muzak was peak in the 1950s and sixties, but gradually became to be associated with bland corporate music, as competitors licensing more popular music came on board providing similar services. It would take a few years still for the popular music to also become bland and corporate.

But I digress. By the time the competitors started appearing, Muzak had become a genericized trademark like Jello, and it doesn’t really make a difference what version of elevator music you end up hearing, just that you’re hearing it. Which is where Spotify comes back into the story.

I said the endlessly looping background music isn’t that big of a surprise. How they are generating it as the use of AI for the delivery of muzak represents a sizable shift. And so in this episode of the ImplausiPod, we’re looking at the spirit in the machine, or in this case the spirit of the AI-dio. And here’s where we’d queue up that Rush song, if I had a budget for music licensing, or even for the muzak version. I’ll trust that you can hum along.

Now one sure thing about studying work in the AI space is that it moves incredibly quickly. It is acceleration made manifest, moving at a ridiculously quick speed. This velocity can be sensed, almost felt giving your eyes to the feeling of an ease many have when dealing with it. That and the killer robots, which we discussed earlier.

Of course, I say this as I started writing this episode back in December of 2024, based on a few articles that I had read, and a then forthcoming book, which came out back in January. Since then, the conditions being described progressed substantially in new stories were continually being added to the topic.

It turns out I have a bit of a halting problem when it comes to researching these episodes. Some of the things that we were planning on talking about have come to pass and we’ll. Still get to them, even though this episode will feel slightly less prescient now than it would’ve back in December. But cest La vie, it’s also a reminder that these things will always be like trying to hit a moving squirming target.

One of the ways to deal with the limit of this snowball sample that we’re working with is through a concept known as saturation. When new queries are not drawing in noticeably new or different information, you can stop the work and get to it. So now that we’ve drifted enough from the original topic, let’s do exactly that.

In December of 2024, the blogger Ted Gioia published a piece about The Ugly Truth of Spotify on his Honest Broker blog, and that he walked through the observations he was making about jazz playlists filled with artists he hadn’t heard before. They were also musically identical tracks published under different names. It would keep showing up.

It’s not a big deal if it’s in the background of an office or a retail outlet like this often was when no one is looking too hard at the playlist. This is something that Spotify called PFC or Perfect Fit Content, which had a royalty rating that was favorable to Spotify. This work by Gioia coincided and resonated with the work that was being done by Liz Pelly, and he mentions her in his blog post, in her book on Spotify titled Mood Machine.

She was talking about the rise of ghost artists, something she had been tracking since 2017. This is a rumor where Spotify was quote “filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians” end quote, much like the Muzak corporation of 80 years earlier. The thought was that Spotify might be making the tracks in-house, all in an effort to lower royalties in a market where streams were already fractions of a cent. And perhaps this is the moment where a little background on Spotify is an order in 2025. It is a ubiquitous brand name for streaming music, but it had to start somewhere.

Spotify is a Swedish online services company specializing in the delivery of streaming audio. This includes music as well as podcasts and audio books. Founded in 2006, it experienced rapid growth starting in 2011, and by 2015 had become the defacto streaming app on most platforms. With this growth, Spotify is now in position of being one of the key drivers of the music industry, setting rates in the business model that others must compete with.

And make no mistake, there are competitors. Tidal, the Swedish streaming service acquired by Super Bowl impresario, Jay-Z in 2015, and subsequently sold to ex-Twitter honcho Jack Dorsey currently has market share, and the now venerable iTunes from Apple still accounts from about 12.6% of the market share as well with Amazon and Google’s own YouTube music falling at 11.1 and 9.7% respectively.

So Spotify isn’t alone, but the scope of their business worldwide is staggering. They announced that the payouts they made to the music industry was in the neighborhood of $10 billion in 2024 alone, and that year was also the first year that it was profitable, providing those payouts from revenue of $15.7 billion.

But not all is rosy in Spotify land. Aside from the outsized influence they wield on the music industry, which would be bad enough in and of itself, Spotify has been the subject of controversy for almost its entire existence. Most prominently is the pay rate that they give out for artists, which can be about 0.0029 cents per stream. For your mega stars with millions or billions of streams, your Taylor Swifts and the like, this can still amount to a decent return, but it falls off rapidly. One would need about 1.7 billion streams if my trusty calculator is working correctly to earn the median income in the United States if one was being paid at that lowest rate. Though the rate does go up to an average of what Spotify states is about 0.70 cents per stream according to their press releases.

So over 10,000 artists make a hundred thousand dollars or more using their streaming services, but. Of course many artists earn much less than that. Spotify operates on the classic long tail model where a minority of artists make an outsize amount of the revenue, and most of the rest gets a tiny fraction of the sales. This business model can be seen in many cultural industries like the movies, book, sales, traditional music, and even things like OnlyFans. One or two big hits ends up funding the label or a platform, and the others break even if they’re lucky or more likely are a loss. This is ultimately a speculative enterprise, at least how it is constructive in the capitalist framework.

And this speculation preys on the artists as well, where dreams of quote, making it big” provide a constant stream of new entrants to the industry. This never-ending flood of new artists and content has been why the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Eck has said on record on Twitter in 2024 that quote “the cost of creating content was close to zero”.

Or sometimes less than zero, as much of the expenses of music production are born by the artists, and even after all that effort, they may not recoup anything if they list on Spotify. In November 2023, Spotify announced that they would no longer pay artists for less than a thousand streams, effectively cutting off many small artists from earning any income whatsoever from the platform.

And the list of Spotify’s misdeeds grows from there. While cutting off small artists from revenue, they turn around and take those funds to finance high profile artists like Joe Rogan and others. And recently Spotify CEO Daniel Eck made the headlines for a billion-dollar investment in drone warfare company Helsing, of vampire hunting fame. A German defense contractor, which uses AI for the control systems in its aerial and underwater swarm drone technologies.

They also create a virtual environment, which provides the drones with spatial awareness, and we’ll look into that in a future episode. Their technologies are currently being actively used in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ek’s investment has caused an uproar among some Spotify users with cancellations being directly attributed to that connection and investment.

And of course, along with all that, there’s the aforementioned PFC. Depending on the extent of it, Spotify may be one of the few companies turning a profit on AI-fueled content. There’s no reliable measure on the extent of the issue, though it has been going on for years, and finally the amount of AI generated titles reached the point where it was noticeable to the keen observer, if not perhaps to the casual listening audience.

All of these reasons and a few more besides are why you can’t find the Implausipod on Spotify. Like we mentioned earlier, it’s an intentional act. When podcast creators say that they’re available everywhere or on all platforms, and they’re saying that the issues with the platform don’t matter to them. There’s a degree of what I like to call platform illiteracy going on, but we’ll save that topic for a later date. The end result of these developments with ai, music generation and algorithmic delivery is that we are now living in a world with endlessly available, unique instrumental music. So much of it is being created that you could listen for a lifetime and never hear the same song twice.

Now, this is also technically true under the current model with 120,000 new tracks hitting Spotify every day according to a 2023 article by Maurice Schon. But again, our focus here is on the AI generated music.

Hold that note in your head, that little snippet of the interstitial music we use for the show. We’ll get back to that in a hot minute. We need to address the question at hand. What’s the problem with AI generated music anyways, about six months ago, there’s a trend of AI style covers playing Metallica and the style of a fifties doo-wop band or whatever. And while that was an amusing exercise, the novelty soon wore off. There’s only so much of that kind of act that you can take as Richard Cheese and Me First and Gimme Gimmes can well attest. Clearly that kind of style cover or genre switch can be done without AI, but all the transformers are doing is accelerating the process, filling some niches that otherwise might never get explored.

If AI generated music is filling a need there, and otherwise it’s mostly supplanting the niche previously occupied by Muzak for inoffensive background noise, what’s the issue? Perhaps the issue is quote-unquote “authenticity”. I say that because literally, as I was in the middle of recording this, the news story came out about a hot new band on Spotify called Velvet Sundown.

They play a radio friendly mix of seventies rock and indie pop, and they had amassed over a million monthly listeners when people began looking to see if there’s more info, because it’s not like music fans are the ones to become obsessive about their favorite band. And what those music fans noticed was something that had a lot in common with the music noticed by Liz Pelly and Ted Gioia earlier.

Odd connections and inconsistencies and a lack of the data or digital footprint we’d expect to see of a band if they had been around for a while. It now looks like the band is a complete fabrication with AI generated art and music. A man operating under the pseudonym, Andrew Prelon, claimed responsibility saying that the music was generated with Suno AI and that the whole project was a quote unquote art hoax.

But even that might be in dispute as there’s more than one claimant that says they’re acting on behalf of the band. It may have been that there was another AI artist out there, and Prelon just decided to step in and act as the band’s publicist, and that little bit of the hoax was completely tangential to whatever was actually going on with Velvet Sundown.

What Prelon and the Velvet Sundown affair highlight is the question of whether a producer of an AI art is actually the artist. They’re the driving force, commissioning the various elements of the work. If so, do they occupy a similar role to managers of boy bands like Lou Pearlman and the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, or Malcolm McClaren and the Sex Pistols?

At some level, these bands are still quote unquote authentic, even though they’re clearly manufactured in the same way that a chipboard table from IKEA is still a table in form and function, even if it’s not handcrafted from oak. This authenticity of art is one that has been under scrutiny since the dawn of the 20th century.

Walter Benjamin discussed how art loses its aura in an age of mechanical reproduction, where the aura is the very thing that cannot be reproduced. But maybe this whole Velvet Sundown thing highlights the way. If the music is replaceable, then maybe the art lies elsewhere.

When attempting to answer all these questions, much of it comes down to the position one takes on AI ethics. This is often driven by our feelings. The way AI ethics is framed in the media often leads one to believe that the only ethical stance is to oppose its use on all levels, and we see that cropping up more and more.

But this often feels like taking sides in a battle between billionaires, just as the image we have in our mind of the small independent farmers, often exploited by agribusiness concerns, The mental image of the struggling artist is often leveraged by billionaires and IP rights holders. If we recall that Robert Downey Jr. has a net worth of around $300 million. We can perhaps understand his stance when it comes to AI generated arc, but for others, the position is less clear. And as we’re talking about songs here, perhaps we could focus on the music industry. The history of the music industry is rife with abuse and exploitation where original artists have been tricked, coerced, or threatened into signing away the rights to the music that has gone on to make others millions.

By way of example about what copyright can mean for artists at the time of recording, the Verdict is being laid out in the trial of Sean Diddy Combs an artist who still pays Gordon Sumner AKA Sting, $2,000 a day every day, 365 days a year for the unauthorized use of a sample on “I’ll Be Missing You” in 1997.

At the time of his arrest, Combs had a net worth of $400 million. Sumner has a net worth of over $500 million and Combs’ former collaborator, Jimmy Page has an estimated net worth of $180 million. These artists have not done poorly, and granted these artists are household names with enduring legacies, but much like the farming analogy above, when looking at it from a distance, appears we are caught up in a proxy war between billionaires.

We may not want to be simp for either side in this fight. What confounds that ethical calculation when it comes to modern music is that much of the industry operates as a form of rentier capitalism. This is where property is held without new investment and used to extract rents. The intellectual property, the stuff under control of the rentier in this case is used for value extraction and they’re not really adding anything new to the system.

The near endless ownership of IP can be seen as the enclosure of the digital media commons, where the AI companies turn everything into soylent culture fighting against the enclosure of the analog media commons by the old guard media companies operating under the established paradigm. So what’s the solution to this entrenched warfare between media, titans, old and new?

We’re not trying to rehabilitate Spotify. Rather, we’re here to adapt the idea of an artist’s rights organization for use in an age of generative AI. If we accept that there are valid uses for AI, and there are, we talked about this in episode 38, then there needs to be a path forward to dealing with this.

And as we hinted at in the beginning of the show, our friend Victor Herbert and ASCAP show us one of the ways that this might be accomplished, and there’s been some very recent moves forward on this front. The Creative Commons Organization has recently announced CC Signals, a licensing framework that will quote “allow data set holders to signal their preferences for how their content can be reused by machines based on a set of limited but meaningful options”. In addition, recent court cases have found that some of the data gathering done by the AI companies falls under the provisions of fair use. Together, these don’t cover every instance – it’s still early days – but it does show that there is a path forward out of this to something that’s equitable to the parties involved.

Of course, here’s the big twist, which probably wasn’t much of a shock if you parsed the punny episode title. There’s more than just the ethical question behind AI generated music. One that the AI-PROs may help ameliorate, but cuts us all closer to the core. We are seeing a great deal of Echange, of technological replacement, come to the music industry.

For musicians finding themselves replaced or that an algorithmically generated smooth jazz music act is good enough in a lot of instances, does this call into question the very nature of art and creativity itself? This appeal to creativity, the ad creo or ad fascia, depending on how my Latin is working, is something that has been called for increasingly during the debates around AI and the cultural industries dotting YouTube thumbnails and memes on blue sky and everywhere in between.

The ad creo is the claim that using an AI is anathema to the creative act, as if using a tool to generate an image somehow negates the spark and inspiration that led to the creation of the piece. This leads us to the Ditch Digger Fallacy. The counter to the ad creo of course is that what do you think creativity actually is?

Let me illustrate that question by an example. It has long been observed in nature that crows are particularly clever, that given sufficient motivation, usually a treat, they can use sticks or bits of wire to fish out a treat from within a piper or other closed environment where one wouldn’t expect the crow to be able to navigate at all.

This anthropocentric conceit of them having a limited bird brain refuses to let us believe what we were witnessing before our eyes. But even more complex behavior has been observed in crows. They appear to hold grudges. Yes, the birds got beef. And these grudges can both persist for years and be shared amongst the group.

Observations of crows engaged in group attacks gaining up on smaller animals or humans who cross them has gotten so bad that trackers have been set up in cities like Vancouver and Seattle to show the incidences and locations where the attacks have been fiercest. And the research is growing. The field of ethology is the study of the behavior and communication of non-human animals and has been producing fascinating findings that challenge our anthropocentric view of the world.

Much like the one we just mentioned, we are constantly finding creativity, communication, and intellect within the natural world. The more we observe it, and just like in other natural sciences, as the tools of observation improve, the more we can witness within nature. What we are seeing – what the ethologists are guiding us to – is that the more we can observe nature without disturbing it in some Heisenberg manner, the more we can observe the intelligence of the other species of life with which we share the planet.

And it leads us to ask, are we going to continually redefine intelligence as the ethologists uncover more and more ways that animals are smarter than we think they are? Is intelligence something anthropocentric, something we can only think of in human terms? If intelligence abounds around us in nature, in ways that were previously reserved for us in terms of problem solving, communication, emotion, grief, and so on, perhaps we’re not as special as we like to think, and this potential fills us with existential dread.

When it comes to creativity, perhaps our role is much more limited. Perhaps our role is that of the watchmaker, not the machinist building the gears. Recall the concept of the Allographic art that we introduced back in episode 38. This is the creation of art by other hands. The artist as architect or programmer, as choreographer or composer, the kinds of artists who Victor Herbert brought together when founding the first performers rights organization.

Here art is a question of control, and the skills in shaping art differ depending on the media. Within computing, one of the enduring tropes is that the users are like unto wizards and treating with demons in order to coax magic from the thinking sand. Here too, they must deal with the spirit of the AI-dio, the ghost in the machine.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod.com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at implausipod.com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show.

WYCU Revised

With Predator: Killer of Killers coming out this weekend, I’ve started in the rewatch of the movies, beginning with 2022’s Prey (which is fantastic; more on this later). The prep has necessitated a slight revision to the WYCU timeline, which we talked about here.

Adding in the new releases, plus the Blade Runner franchise and the chronological year, and our WYCU now looks like this:

WCYU Chronology (revised)

Title	Publication Year	‘Verse	Chrono Year	Chrono Order
Prometheus *	2012	A	0?	1
Prey	2022	P	1719	2
Predator: Killer of Killers	2025	P	1500/1800/1943	3
Predator	1987	P	1987	4
Predator 2	1990	P	1997	5
Alien v Predator	2004	X	2004	6
Alien v Predator: Requiem	2007	X	2004	7
Predators	2010	P	2010	8
The Predator	2018	P	2018	9
Blade Runner	1982	B	2019	10
Soldier	1998	B	2036	11
Blade Runner 2049	2017	B	2049	12
Predator: Badlands***	2025	P	???	13
Prometheus **	2012	A	2093	14
Alien: Covenant	2017	A	2104	15
Alien: Earth	2025	A	???	16
Alien	1979	A	2122	17
Alien: Romulus	2024	A	2142	18
Aliens	1986	A	2179	19
Alien³	1992	A	2179	20
Alien: Resurrection	1997	A	2381	21

Andor, Season 2, Week 4

(This was originally published as Implausipod Episode 48 on May 17th, 2025.)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/17048093-e0048-star-wars-andor-season-2-week-4

Andor concludes! (and Rogue One awaits?) Join us as we wrap up the second and final season of Star Wars: Andor with the fifth in our five-part series looking at the show. We’ll recap the final three episodes, released on May 13, 2025 (titled “Make It Stop”, “Who Else Knows?” and “Jedha, Khyber, Erso”) and provide our overall impression of the series as well. (If you’re just joining us, our Andor recap began with Episode 44, available on Implausipod dot com, or selected discerning podcast hosts.

Andor concludes and Rogue one awaits. Join us as we wrap up the second and final season of Star Wars Andor with the fifth in our five part series. Looking at the show, we’re recapping the final three episodes released on May 13th, 2025, titled Make It Stop, who Else Knows, and Jedha Kyber Erso, and we’ll provide our overall impression of the series as well on this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Let’s get right to it.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. What makes a story a Star Wars story? Are there certain elements that let the audience know what they’re watching? The give it away. Surely there’s recurring elements and themes.

Is it the Jedi and the force? Those have been almost entirely absent through two seasons of Andor. Is it themes of empire and rebellion? Those are hardly Star Wars exclusives. Is it the tech, the droids, the starships, the blasters. Again, not exclusive to Star Wars, but some is the aesthetic. Definitely is.

Is it the characters? Well, again, no Jedi here. No Skywalkers in this particular saga, but. Maybe we’re getting at something closer. I think in the final three episodes of the season two of Andor, we’re clearly getting a Star Wars story, but we’re also getting something much more. Let’s get into how we can tell.

It starts in episode 10, titled Kleya’s Story. Or maybe Make It Stop, which might have been what the show owners were told. A shame really, but it does help us focus. This episode is all about Kleya, the ruthless backbone of the rebellion up throughout the entire run of the series. It was during a review of season one that we’ve noted how the women were the rebellion, obviously by about episode seven from threads that were starting in episode four, and Lea was clearly the one people were lying on to get things done.

She filled an archetype in the Star Wars story, one that’s been there since the very first release in 1977. One that we’ve come to expect and that clearly makes Star Wars. Star Wars. Now this archetype isn’t unique to Star Wars witness, Christina Hendricks’s, Joan Harris, of Mad Men or a different t Take with Amy Acker’s Root and Person of Interest.

But having a character around kind of like Leia in the OG Star Wars really does help make. Andor fit within the universe with the diversification of roles and, Andor with more room for strong female characters, different elements of Leia’s character can be ascribed to different people. So we don’t have to have Leia being all things to fulfill every role needed.

Mon Mothma is the diplomat. Bix is the mechanic and the love interest. Vel is the heart Dedra the dark mirror. And Kleya, well, like we said above, she’s the ruthless backbone. There’s other character archetypes that we’ve become accustomed to as well. Ones that make Star Wars feel like Star Wars, the Rascal and Cassian, the idealistic youth like Nemik, the wise Council, like Luthen, or perhaps Saw Gerrara.

The Droid, B2EMO, the shaggy muscle, in this case, K-2SO and more. We’re focused on archetypes here to distinguish them from say, stereotypes. Archetypes here aren’t the Jungian archetypes that are ascribed to various elements of human psychology. They’re more like story archetypes or character archetypes, personalities that we meet.

And they have a lot in common with the Star Wars tabletop role playing game from West End Games that we mentioned a few episodes ago in that game released back in 1987. The characters are defined by their quote unquote “type”. This could include several of the ones we’ve just mentioned, the smuggler, the bodyguard, the courier, and a few more similar to how we get a game like D&D would have a fighter, a wizard, or cleric.

And interestingly, force users were rare in that game too. At least according to the rules, but I think a lot of campaigns ended up with a Hidden Jedi or two. So those links to Andor are deep, the idea in the game that the type was more important than the specific character. And we’re seeing that we’re getting back to that archetype again.

But if I’m talking about roleplaying games, I’m digressing. This is Kleya’s story, after all. let’s get caught up with what’s going on. We begin with Lonni requesting an emergency meeting and Luthen goes to meet him. Telling KIeya, “I fear we’ve used up all the perfect”. He meets Lonni in public during daylight, and Lonni lets him in on the news of the plot, what he’s just learned about the battle station in the last few hours.

Fearing he’s been burned, Lonni gives Luthen all the details that he’s been in Dedra’s files for the last year. Luthen leaves and we later see Lonni found dead on the bench, though it isn’t clear what he’s died of, a blaster shot or poison or something else. Luthen sends KIeya off to get a message out and starts with destroying the equipment and prepping to leave, but Dedra shows up to the antiquities dealer.

He buys some time for the acid to do its work and then stabs himself, but is stabilized in time by a med team and he’s taken to the hospital. We get KIeya’s story, then told him flashbacks as she’s reliving them. In the flashbacks with KIeya and Luthen, we see some of the events that turned him to the resistor, those small acts of rebellion in Nemik’s words.

Taking place during a raid or some other military action where he subtly sabotaged the ship, allowing room for KIeya to stay aboard as a stowaway and likely preventing more mayhem. A young KIeya has witnessed to more imperial atrocities, including executions, as well as early acts of sabotage by Luthen.

She began picking up her skills at a young age. Some of these flashbacks take place while she’s traveling to the hospital where Luthen is being held and we get another cyber punky plot: Is she there to rescue him or take him out before he can be interrogated? And I wanna point out that the level of detail in the show here remains amazing.

We see the same symbol on the hospital sign on the roof of the building that we saw in the arm bands of the rebel medics in the previous episode. There’s a bit of a real-world conceit here as well, that of the hospital emergency that has played up based on the audience’s knowledges of the tropes of that genre, things that don’t necessarily make sense in a Star Wars universe, but are shown here as roughly analogous to our own, like the orderlies or the layout or the various wings in the hospital.

As we cut to the hospital, we see the Dedra is in charge monitoring Luthen’s status, waiting for him to be ready for interrogation. But she’s in charge only briefly, as she’s soon relieved of her duty. Apparently it was, she was snooping a bit to make the caller, and she’s overstepped her bounds.

Any who in all this distraction, KIeya manages to sneak in, detonate a diversion, saying the least, and then proceeding to use a meal tray in a pistol against several armed guards and a storm trooper that stood in her way of getting to Luthen’s room and she says goodbye. Before heading for the Exit, this is an amazing episode full of character and depth where we say goodbye to some of the most important characters of the series.

There’s a thread here where I’d love to see KIeya as a rebel operative between Star Wars and New Hope and Return of the Jetta, acting as a body double for Leia, serving as a decoy or engaged more directly in her own right. She’s already one of the most skilled members of the alliance. There’d be room to see more from her in the future.

But first we have to get there. It’s time for a return to episode nine’s cyberpunk plot. We need another extraction,

And we get that extraction in episode 11. An episode of CSI: Coruscant, or perhaps it’s titled, who else knows? Because we start with an investigation. Looking at the body of a dead storm trooper, and I’m left to wonder for a second at the incongruity of it, we clearly have the apparatus of a surveillance state in the empire, especially on Coruscant.

We have cameras everywhere, though, not quite a full panopticon. I’m wondering why there weren’t body cams on the storm troopers or officers to presumably show the imperials who was shooting them. It’s a little weird. But we have an ISB investigative team. We’re almost going through the motions of a buddy cop movie, and the detective here is issuing commands even as he’s trying to puzzle out the mystery

He’s introduced to the hospital director, which again, is a very modern conceit of how the hospital would operate. But the ISB detective is clearly flexing how he’s in charge saying: “arrest him. You’re slowing me down. That means you’re a suspect.” To which the hospital director soon concedes.

And as the investigation continues, we shift a bit. As much as last episode was KIeya’s story, this episode is Dedra’s. We see her in custody in a windowed cell or interrogation chamber, and someone turns off the monitors. The panopticon is not watching; just we the audience, and it’s Krennic that we see.

We’ve seen him earlier in the season, of course, during the fancy ball, but here on his own, he is not playing nice. There’s a magnificently framed shot during the interrogation where we can see Dedra’s eyes and only the lower half of Krennic’s face asking the questions with pure malice because his pet project has been found out.

“Say the name, the one that matters.” “Death Star.” “Who else knows?”

“I want the names I don’t know.” After Dedra offers up Partagaz and some other known parties, and here we start finding out how much Krennnic knows and how cooked Dedra might be. The scavenging, the rooting around in cases that weren’t necessarily related to her department. The stuff that allowed her to succeed early on because she’s able to draw those connections are what now have her in deep, deep trouble.

Because according tore, “I should have pegged you as a scavenger years ago.” The ISB is all about control, and part of that control is very much for the officers to stay in their lane as Partagaz mentioned in season one, they’re healthcare providers, and that healthcare is very much about maintaining control of the situation, and the situation has been very much out of Dedrae’s control.

The fact that Lonni had access to her files for a year, the fact that’s now been discovered by Krennic and others is what’s going to bring her down. As Krennic notes: “If you’re not a rebel spy, you’ve missed your calling.” But Dedra seems to have caught some of that main character syndrome that Syril was feeling, one BBY ago as well.

Contributing and thinking that her compliance will get her out of this jam, not realizing that much like Lonni last episode, she’s done. As Krennic states, we’ll do our best to carry on without you. From there, we bounce around through our fractured narrative quickly, cutting between the hospital and the buddy cops trying to track down the suspect and the dimly lit tenement where KIeya is getting some work done trying to send out an emergency message.

The tension is increasing as we cut to Yavin, where the rebels are starting to actually look like rebels, and we’re getting much closer to something from the original trilogy, which we may recognize, and we step into a situation that almost feels like something out of a Star Trek episode where we have a game of poker being played with Cassian and Melshi and K-2SO, having a moment of convivial downtime.

And that Star Trek reference goes a little bit deeper for me because as they’re playing poker with the droid, I, I almost feel like K-2SO sounds like Data in some ways. You know, this is, game is confusing, this isn’t logical. And the Cassian and Melshi laughing as they say, oh, “he’s going to droid you” here and start bringing out the, uh, the numbers where. K-2SO goes: “We’ve played 863 games. That’s a solid predictive sample” and being confused by the seemingly random actions of humans.

It’s nice to see here this, uh, friendliness and the banter going back and forth, but the tension is still escalating as KIeya’s message comes in and they have to decide on how they’re going to address it.

The debate doesn’t take that long, and they’re soon off. Meanwhile, the ISB investigation is proceeding as well. The ISB is using fears of a virus to help in the arrest of the subject Kleya plan put forth by Major Partaggaz. Again, part of his ideology is the ISB is healthcare providers for the empire. I mean, the virus seems like a plausible explanation, but I’m not sure it’d work here.

Our experience over the last five or so years seems somewhat contrary to that. But there’s multiple approaches to the ISB’s investigation and we cut to Dedra in a cell where we’re getting some real silence of the lambs type vibes in the interrogation, or at least that’s how it was coming to me. Her colleague comes to her asking for advice, uh, quid pro quo almost, and saying that “a quick solve may help her situation”, but realizing that otherwise she could well truly be cooked.

Her last line there, “it’s probably too late” is layered with meaning. Is it the rebels or for her? We have the rebels and the Imperials in a race to get to Kleya, and the intensity is incredibly high. Just well done Filmmaking to everybody involved here. The rebels get there first by just a bit, but an open communication channel.

The smallest of coincidences that a transmission is taking place while the imperials are actually talking and looking at it, leads for them to. Track them down and send an armored team, and we end with the ISB enforcers, not in full storm trooper armor, but close to it, ready to kick down the door. We’ve rarely seen a cliffhanger in this show, but here we’re moving directly into episode 12.

And episode 12 is titled, “This Will be on the Test” or perhaps “Jedha Kyber Urso”. KIeya needs some convincing and she doesn’t see Yavin as a safe option, and both Cassian and Melshi make the case for it being the safe harbor of the moment. The comms channels that have brought the ISB so close are cut with K-2SO assaulting the shuttle and Cassian’s blaster to the transmitter.

But for the ISB, this is close enough. And with that, we get into a fight scene in the hallway, and I’m wondering if I’ve actually stumbled into a different Disney show, like a Daredevil episode or something. Cassian and Meshi are holding their own buying time as K-2SO makes his way towards their floor.

We saw how destructive the enforcer droids were in the episode eight, where they were unleashed on the crowd by Kaido, and here we see it again too. Viewing the hallway from behind and over. K-2SOs shoulder to give the point of view of as he absolutely wrecks the combat squad. And in the midst of it, the inspector whose body armor does little protect him when he’s used as a human shield for the droid, A literal meat shield.

K-2SO is frightening here. An icon of the real world fears we have of the development of humanoid robots that we’ve seen and discussed before. You can check it out in episode 29, here at the podcast, his arrival makes short work of the remaining ISB troopers with the sergeant firing away point blank at his approach echoing back to Cassian in the same position during the Ghorman massacre.

The apartment hallway doesn’t have room for a power loader to make the save for him, however. Cassian and Melshi and K-2SO are able to escape with Kleya who is injured in the fight. This is aided by the Imperial’s own search efforts for Kleya. With everyone tracking down the false virus leads and unable to respond in time, we returned to Yavin.

And much like in the previous episode, the rebel base looks nearly complete with as many sparks flying is in a heavy metal music video from the 1980s. The quote unquote alliance is still fragile though as we see Saw Gerrera arguing with Mothma and Organa accusing her of sending spies his way, confusing the imperial spies with internal factions.

Saw Gerrera gets in a dig just before he closes the comms channel. “If you could only fight as well as you lie.” End quote, symbolizing the mistrust that is high in the alliance. The most difficult part of maintaining this where discovery could mean death, and Cassian’s return is not welcome, treated as a potential hostile and brought in under guard by both X-wings in the air and the general and troops on the ground.

I was delighted to see one of the Mon Calamari, one of Admiral Akbar’s species in the flight control room, and at the Table Council. It made this feel a little bit more like Star Wars too. Cassian brings the three data points that are the title of the show: Jedha, Kyber and Urso and Andor the show at this point is a masterclass in rhetoric.

If I was still teaching a class on that, I think I might use this boardroom scene as an example. Cassian makes a strong case on Luthen’s behalf, but the rhetorical situation is swayed by the general mistrust of Luthen by all involved. Organa lists some of Luthen’s faults. Quote, “his paranoia, his secrecy, his inability to collaborate the web of doubts that he created.

It makes everything unbelievable.” End quote. And when you’re trying to believe in the construction of a moon sized battle station called the Death Star that needs the mining of an entire planet to function well. Yeah, it’s a little hard to believe.

I think it highlights how much Andor, again the show, and the rebellion as a whole, is built on these speech acts like the securitization of Ghorman that we saw in weeks two and three, as well as Nemik’s voiceover that soon comes in here. Nemik’s words – repeated from the tape that he made in season one, episode five – play over a montage of a number of characters that we’ve seen throughout the two seasons, helping bridge Andor the series to where it needs to be at the start of Rogue One.

We hear Nemik’s words as a diegetic voiceover, listened to by Major Partagaz of the ISB, realizing that the viral spread that he was talking about last episode was not that of Kleya, but of this speech out of control of a system that desperately needs it. Partagaz faces an imperial fate with the blaster kept in his desk for emergencies, and a little later we see Dedra in an imperial prison, much like Cassian last season with us, knowing what awaits her.

Much like the closing scenes that we’d see in the final episode of a season of The Wire, we step through all the ensemble characters and see where they’re at and where they’re going. Vel and KIeya discussed the personal and emotional costs of the rebellion. The toll that their course of actions and the decisions that they’ve made have taken upon them.

Vel with some regret, speaks with Cassian and advises him to not wait too long in regards to reconnecting with Bix, and we know how bittersweet that that will be.

Cassian is soon suiting up to go on a mission based on the intel that Luthen brought in, and we close out Andor with the scene of Bix in the field of the harvest planet with a newborn swaddled in her arms.

I’d like to wrap up with some final comments on Andor both as television and for Star Wars more generally. First off was Andor too short, was the Two seasons enough? It’s hard to say, but I feel like the answer is no. We’ve been with these characters for eight movies now, effectively treating each of the major arcs of season one and season two as one movie in its entirety.

And notably by doing so, each block gets close to my favorite runtime of just under two hours. And it feels right. It didn’t outstay. Its welcome. The need to focus to tell the whole story in season two led to the show really getting down to the key points. And I feel that that economy of storytelling really helped.

I feel that if Andor had received that rumored five season arc that they requested, they wouldn’t have managed to maintain the intensity, something that they held to quite well. On a longer timeline, we’d get various shaggy dog stories thrown in, which might have been cool in the moment. You know, a three episode arc where, Andor is trapped by Jabba or something.

But ultimately these arcs would’ve detracted from the overall narrative arc of the show. The temptation or management pressure to throw in a Jedi or something, to show Darth Vader in the background, or have the emperor actually appear on screen, the temptation would’ve been too much and the overall story would’ve been less due to that addition.

Andor also, quote unquote, “cracked the code” for streaming, with regards to the schedule. The three episodes per week, four weeks schedule allowed for each week to feel suitably epic, and didn’t necessarily tie down viewers to feeling obligated to binge the show or avoid all social media less. They risk spoilers while still allowing the show to maintain some momentum and not get bogged down by six or eight or 12 weeks of releases, and give time for the good word of mouth to propagate. The diffusion of information takes time, after all,

Andor isn’t without its faults, of course. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on these and cast a negative pall over the series as a whole, merely mention them so that it’s noted or maybe something to be looked at again in the future. Some of these criticisms of mine are ones that we’ve highlighted over the last few podcast episodes.

The media realism that we spoke about during the run ups to the Gjorman Massacre, and the subsequent fallout is one of those where real world, 21st century and media culture gets deployed to a galaxy long ago and far away. Our mediated lives are particular to our time and place, and they’re very much rooted in our history and the technology that we use.

There’s no reason for it to exist in that way within the universe of Star Wars. So too with some of the other analogs to the 21st century, the office politics and the hospital, these elements exist as a conceit to the audience to allow us to follow along without having to explain too much more or obfuscating things beyond recognition for the sake of “science fiction realism”, and the role, or lack thereof, the non-human characters in this show and the universe at large needs to be examined.

Part of this is that the story being told, that very human story, but the alien races that are so iconic to Star Wars are often they took on an ancillary role as a mouthpiece for the emperor’s wishes. They could have been integrated into the story so much more, but perhaps it’s that very fact that Andor is a human story or human presenting one at least. And that was the focus of the show set on Coruscant and Ferrix and Ghorman and Yavin rather than the broader galaxy. And that was the story that the showrunners wanted to tell.

Maybe the alien races, those who have already rebelled, and those who were Captain Kaido and others honed their imperial playbook for riot suppression, and that’s why the aliens are hardly there. This kind of makes sense. You test out your pogrom on an outgroup before bringing it in internally, and the real-world analogs sadly, continue.

Was Andor “cyberpunk Star Wars”. Yeah, I think as close as we’ll see, cyberpunk draws on other tropes and traditions, both within sci-fi and without. As much as Star Wars drew on sources for its own inspiration, and it’s no surprise that there’s some crossover, but the trade craft and the missions and the roles the characters filled made this a wonderful blending of the two intentionally, or not in a way we’re unlikely to see again.

And finally that question that we had at the start of this episode: is Andor Star Wars? Well, most definitely, though Star Wars on the home front showing that what is taking place across the galaxy has impacts on a personal level, despite the lack of any mention of Jedi lightsabers or nearly any mention of the Force it still felt embedded within the universe, making it make sense and feel real, where the stakes mattered.

Did it make me dust off my old Star Wars RPG and look into grabbing some action figures or maybe a Star Wars model or two? Maybe. I’m not saying it didn’t do that. It definitely sparked some joy and it made it exciting to watch some new Star Wars material for the first time in a long time.

The final takeaway for me are in the speeches, those of Mon Mothma and Luthen and Partagaz and Nemik, of changing the narrative away from “May the force be with you” and replacing it with “the rebellion begins with hope”, and “I have friends everywhere”; catch words and catchphrases more relevant to the here and now and needed here in the 21st century.

This wraps up our Andor coverage here on the Implausipod, save for one more episode sometime in the future. Thanks for joining us over the last month. It’s been a lot of fun watching something with you in real time. That one more episode will be Season Three of Andor: Rogue One, of course, which I haven’t seen since its release. And I intentionally didn’t go back to rewatch during or before the Andor viewing. I want to be surprised.

When we get to that. I’d like to touch on some of the ongoing meta commentary we’ve been seeing around Andor the last few weeks; content I’ve intentionally been nescient of. We’ll look at that sometime soon.

Coming up, before that though, we have a few episodes on recent happenings in cyberspace, returning to some academic material on the internet, and in the month of June, we’ll be starting our look at the WYCU, the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, something we’ve mentioned over on the blog and in the newsletter. And we’ll have more on that soon too.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr implausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod.com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

Once again, thank you for joining us. Until next time, take care and have fun.