The Bureaucratic Banality of Andor

This is such a great article digging into what makes Andor's depiction of the Empire so effective and relevant. (via Tess)

⁠In Andor, rebellion isn’t sparked by righteous anger or sweeping ideology. It emerges from miscalculation. Staffing errors. Bureaucratic overflow. The real genius of the show lies not in its allegory, but in its accuracy. For all the Empire’s sleek corridors and ominous surveillance towers, what Andor reveals is a much plainer truth: authoritarian regimes run on labor. Fear isn’t ambient; it has to be staffed and actively turned on. And someone, somewhere, always has to push the button.

Really interesting to think of fear as a service, a service that requires labor, deployed by an administration. Taking this metaphor I'm interested in thinking: can hope be a service performed by labor? What would that look like. If we had a hope button, what would it do and who would do it?

⁠⁠Unlike most political fiction, Andor doesn’t portray fascism as an aesthetic, but shows it as an operating system. The kind that requires contractors, custodians, caseworkers, and coordinators. There are no central villains in this narrative. Just functionaries. Just people doing their jobs, most of them poorly, some of them too well. What we’re watching isn’t the rise of evil. It’s the maintenance of empire.

I think this is a big part of what makes Andor, a pretty dark story on zoom-out, feel surprisingly hopeful. Systems can be hacked, disrupted, and destroyed. The Fascism operating system is fragile in its need for maintenance, in its very system-ness.

⁠⁠Resistance must coordinate without centralized control, distribute risk without guaranteed outcomes, share intelligence without shared ideology, fund operations without traceability, and act decisively without consensus. What’s depicted here is not dysfunction, but coalitional insurgency. This is Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism applied to rebellion: friction isn’t failure, it’s function.

I think this is something worth digging into further (I'll have to read Mouffe). The Silicon Valley mentality assumes that all friction is bad; friction-less systems are smooth, fast, and optimize to retain the user. But in reality friction has purpose. I was thinking this recently when reading up on the Abundance people, who have somehow determined that Reagan-era deregulation is all that's needed to smooth and accelerate the government. But that is so foolish and wrong, friction in our systems is important, it grinds out bad actions, danger to people, and refines down to healthy outputs

So many factions made up the Rebellion, all having their own means and motivations for what drew them to the fight. It’s never neat or clean, but ⁠⁠realizing that our differences together aren’t as significant as those who object to our liberty is a key component in making things go and having people lower their guards.

Good advice to take into politics today.

I really found the conclusion of this article excellent, another ingredient in what makes Andor more of a hopeful piece.

The real threat to authoritarianism isn’t disobedience. It’s burnout. This is the regime’s blind spot. Fascism believes it can replace loyalty with automation, that bureaucracy can substitute for meaning. But every camera needs an analyst. Every arrest order needs a clerk. Every fear mechanism has to be pushed by someone.

This is the operational paradox of authoritarianism: it creates more systems than it can maintain. And in doing so, it turns its enforcers into liabilities. Compliance decays. Systems misfire. And eventually, the machine begins to eat itself.