Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

You either die a hero or you live long enough to see Batman’s words misattributed to you

I wrote a little essay around ten years ago about The Dark Knight film and the broader cynical turn in cinema, riffing on the line “you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. It was originally spoken by Harvey Dent early in the film before being repeated by Batman late in the film as he runs into the night:

It was popular on the original site and the reposted version of my blog has been a consistent source of traffic since then. At some point in the last few months Google recognised its popularity and began misattributing the quote to me:

Since then I’ve found it being attributed to me on Twitter, including the application to current events:

I gave Feedback to the Google snippet but that hasn’t led to any changes. Oddly “die a hero quote” attributes it to Harvey Dent but “die a hero become the villain” or anything more extensive attributes it to me. With each passing day it becomes quasi-factual that I am the source of this quote. Given my evident inability to correct Google, there’s a certain temptation to lean into this misattribution and try to fuel it, including by writing further blog posts in which I repeatedly use the quote in SEO friendly ways… 😎

, , , , ,