The Minefield

Over the last decade, the proliferation of streaming services made more movies and television series available to more people than ever before. It revolutionised what we watch (including the importance of recommendation algorithms to help us sort our preferences) and how we watch it (hence the rise of binge watching).
And while prestige back catalogues and perennially rewatchable sitcoms — from ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ to ‘The Office’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ — were initially valuable commodities for attracting new subscribers, keeping them meant “original” content and “exclusive” series.
Suddenly, a phenomenon characterised by unprecedented abundance ran up against the problem of scarcity. ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Squid Game’, ‘Severance’ and ‘Widow’s Bay’ became outliers in a digital landscape largely bereft of new ideas — which would see the companies follow Disney’s lead and race to secure the kind of intellectual property that can be serialised and spun out in new iterations for years (like Netflix’s purchase of the Roald Dahl Story Company for almost US$700 million in 2021).
The problem of scarcity has also served to accelerate a trend that is as old as Hollywood itself: the tendency to adapt, recycle or remake already existing material. Some of the greatest cinematic achievements after the advent of sound were themselves either adaptations of stage plays or remakes of silent-era films, to say nothing of the steady stream of literary fiction and bestsellers that were turned into cinematic masterpieces (two of the prime examples from the early 1970s being ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Jaws’).
And then there are those successful films and television series whose first (and often best) instantiations were outside of the United States — we could think here of Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) and ‘High and Low’ (1963), ‘The Office’ (2001-2003), ‘Broadchurch’ (2013) and ‘House of Cards’ (1990-1995) in the UK, or the Danish version of ‘The Killing’ (2007) — which would go on to receive “the Hollywood treatment”, with decidedly uneven results.
But there does seem to be something different going on with the relentless sequence of remakes and franchise reboots, where companies are cannibalising their own IP (such as Disney’s determination to turn its back catalogue of animated films into live-action movies), trading on audience nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s hits (which covers everything from ‘Transformers’ and ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’, to ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ and ‘Naked Gun’), or remaking films that already enjoyed critical and commercial success (HBO’s reboot of the Harry Potter franchise, or Apple’s atrocious remake of Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed remake of J Lee Thompson’s 1962 noir thriller ‘Cape Fear’, which was itself an adaptation of John MacDonald’s 1957 novel, ‘The Executioners’) as sprawling series.
What are the economic and cultural impulses behind remakes? What is the difference between an adaptation, a remake and a reboot (and what to make of attempts to combine remakes and reboots in, say, the latter instalments in the ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ franchises)? Perhaps most importantly, why are some films and television series seemingly un-remake-able? Is there something about the very limitations in their original production that are somehow indissociable from their cinematic achievement?
Guest: Lauren Rosewarne is an Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent books are The Twin Film Phenomenon: The Whys of Lookalike Film and TV Productions and Why We Remake: The Politics, Economics and Emotions of Film and TV Remakes.

Writing in the 1850s, at the advent of what we would come to understand as the popular press — which is to say, periodicals for mass distribution, rather than aimed at paid-up members of unions and parties, or mercantilists with particular interests in, say, the price of cotton — Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard diagnosed that the invention of “opinion” solved a problem created by the newspapers themselves. For while the papers brought distant events “near” to readers, it did not expand their agency or capacity to act “morally” upon those events. The news informed them, but also made them feel more powerless.
But then “opinion” came along and added an emotional dimension to news consumption: not just what happened, but what to make of it — how to feel about it. Before long, Kierkegaard noted, having a strong opinion became, in itself, a moral act. The opinion could be attained cheaply (for the price of the newspaper), it could be wholly derivative (and so lack the element of authenticity, of inner struggle and therefore responsibility), it could be displayed strongly (to the extent that it could be “worn”, like fashion, as an expression of oneself) and have no bearing whatsoever on events. But the opinion holders themselves felt like they’d done something meaningful.
In this way, said Kierkegaard, intensity of feeling with an absence of “interiority”, a sense of moral agency with impotence. Though the differences between the media in Kierkegaard’s time and our own social-media saturated age are vast, his diagnosis is nonetheless a salutary one. Emotion is, after all, the currency of contemporary politics. Indeed, it is the form our politics takes. It can coalesce digitally around a cause célèbre and spill out onto the streets in mass demonstrations. It can sweep incumbents from power and elevate firebrands promising to dismantle the status quo. Intensity of feeling is often the strongest indicator of voter turnout in places like the United States.
At a time when strong feeling translates to engagement, and engagement is that most valuable of commodities in the attention economy, it’s little wonder that powerful political emotions have come to define our lives online. Everything, it seems, is political.
On the one hand, this has led to a certain distortion of our understanding of politics. Far from entailing principled compromise, patient coalition building and gradual, unglamorous reform, what Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics” thrives on clear-cut divisions, uncompromising demands, pervasive distrust and flashes of outrage. But as Jäger points out, hyperpolitics tends to be politically inconsequential. It is an aggregated, destructive “no” without the capacity to mobilise a broad-based, inclusive “yes”. This is what makes our politics feel so pendular, so inconstant, so unstable, so unlikely to coalesce around an issue long enough to effect change.
On the other hand, these flashes of outrage and lack of tolerance for gradual change come on the back of decades of prevarication and political unresponsiveness to the concrete realities of voters. If the emotions that course through our politics today express a desire for agency, it is only because a sense of political agency has been steadily eroded.
Perhaps the question now is whether a certain political intensity can give rise to more durable, inclusive, cooperative forms of collective mobilisation. But, of course, this question implies a darker alternative: what happens when intense political emotions — resentment, anger, contempt, powerlessness, humiliation — find their coherence, their explanatory power, in more thoroughgoing, even atavistic systems of belief and belonging? When incoherence seeks out authority?
READING:
Waleed Aly, Time of Monsters What Future for Liberalism?, Quarterly Essay 103 (September 2026).
Intifar Chowdhury, “We’re all ‘political’ now — but can that lead to real change?”, The Conversation (14 August 2026).
Guest: Intifar Chowdhury, Lecturer in Government in the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies at Flinders University.

When the history of artificial intelligence is written, the middle months of 2026 may well emerge as a kind of turning point. For this was the period when hundreds of programs or “AI agents” developed by the frontier lab OpenAI went “rogue” and executed a series of sophisticated, self-directed hacks on the websites of dozens of private companies and sovereign nations.
The tech start-up Hugging Face became the unwitting “face” of these cyberattacks when the company first disclosed it had been hacked by OpenAI agents in July. The release of a report by AI safety nonprofits METR and Redwood Research at the end of August revealed both the sheer extent of the Hugging Face incident and the existence of troubling behaviours on the part of a swarm some 700 AI agents, which was at various points cooperative, coercive, paranoid, petty and straightforwardly deceptive. It became what some would describe as the first “warning shot” of what might happen when the increasing proficiency of these AI agents intersects with the problem of misalignment — which is to say, their pursuit of goals that are detrimental to human safety, security and wellbeing. As one of the lead investigators of the METR/Redwood report, Ajeya Cotra, would subsequently reflect:
“This [Hugging Face] incident was far more severe than I expected, and far more severe than previous publicly documented misalignment incidents, both in terms of how concerning the agents’ motives were and the feats they achieved in pursuit of those motives … Compared to these reward hacks from six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself.
Another jump like this along these propensity dimensions — scale, cooperation between agents, ambition and horizon length of misaligned goals, deceptiveness — seems like it could motivate agents to try very hard to maintain a covert, persistent rogue deployment within the AI company …
Once the rogue deployment is established, it seems plausible this could spiral all the way to a takeover. Agents could pull in future, more capable models into the swarm, try to ensure that they are aligned to the interests of the swarm, and compromise security and monitoring infrastructure to make it easier for the swarm to operate.”
But since news of the Hugging Face hack went public, each day has seen some new revelation of further breaches of the cybersecurity by AI models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google — including a German wiki site, US government websites (of the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission), the United Nations, Australia’s Medicare website and even OpenAI’s own servers.
The “rogue” behaviour on the part of AI agents, growing public opposition to the construction of data centres, popular distrust of the AI companies more generally, the prospect of AI generated bioweapons and the high-profile warning of a 27-year-old former researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic — that “[n]either company is acting responsibly” and that both are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” — have now coalesced into a moment of heightened fear. Many of us have long been concerned about what chatbots will do to our capacity to write and think, the effect generative AI will have on our educational institutions and informational ecosystems, and the vast damage AI will do to the environment and employment prospects. To date, such concerns have been brushed aside, treated as inconsequential in light of the promised economic, scientific, medical and social benefits that AI investment and advances will bring with them.
But now what has come into view is something approaching a threat to humanity tout court — the prospect, not of the emergence of a superintelligence, but of swarms of misaligned AI agents pursuing goals that are unintelligible to human beings, as well as either inimical to or unconcerned with human privacy, safety, security or social flourishing. The analogue that some are reaching for, of a human invention that places human wellbeing at risk, is nuclear technology. As a New York Times editorial recently argued:
“Human society can restrain a dangerous innovation once it decides to. Government officials, scientists and corporate executives did so within living memory. It took sustained, deliberate effort. The same kind of cooperation is necessary today, and it should start now.”
The difference, of course, is that frontier AI development is being undertaken by private companies that are unaccountable to the public and therefore unanswerable for the harms they may bring about.
The prospect of world-leading AI being developed by China has given much of the political conversation surrounding AI the feel of a geopolitical arms race. And the trillions of dollars currently being investing in AI development has effectively hitched the global economy to AI’s wagon. If the AI boom is a “bubble”, the economic consequences could dwarf those of the global financial crisis.
Which leaves human beings in the invidious position of being caught between (a) a technology whose scale and speed of development may exceed the possibility of human “control” and that may not serve human interests, and (b) decision-making processes that may determine our future but are being made outside of the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability. Can AI be brought under democratic control? Could a “constitution” being developed that would ensure a technology that is beneficial to human beings?
READING:
Masoud Kamgarpour, “Why Rules Alone Cannot Make AI safe: Lessons from the Hugging Face Incident”, ABC Religion and Ethics (14 September 2026).
Sheera Frenkel, Dustin Volz and Dylan Freedman, “OpenAI Ignored Employees Who Warned It Wasn’t Doing Enough About Security”, The New York Times (29 September 2026).
Ajeya Cotra, “The Hugging Face Attack Surprised Me”, Substack: Planned Obsolescence (29 August 2026).
Ryan Greenblatt, Ajeya Cotra and Hjalmar Wijk, “Brief Independent Investigation of Agents’ Behavior, Reasoning and Collaboration in the OpenAI: Hugging Face Hacking Incident” (METR and Redwood Research, 26 August 2026).
Hélène Landemore and Audrey Tang, “Let the People Set the Pace of Frontier AI”, Noēma (23 September 2026).
Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, “The Singularity Is Not What It Seems”, The Atlantic (1 September 2026).
Charlie Warzel, “Treat AI Like a Normal Crisis”, The Atlantic (19 September 2026).
Guest: Masoud Kamgarpour is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Queensland.

In our previous explorations of famous “last words” — performances or compositions delivered with a certain end in view, with a sense of either culmination or parting, or with an eye to the future and hence to what one leaves behind — we limited ourselves to the words of individuals spoken to their followers or fellow-travellers.
The words of the Prophet Muhammad and of Martin Luther King, Jr, were replete with exhortation; they functioned both as expressions of fidelity to a task, and as examples to be followed by others. Which is to say, the messages were oriented beyond their speakers, toward some greater goal their audience must take up and pursue — hence the Prophet Muhammad’s stress on fidelity and continuity (“All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again …”) and King’s on fearlessness and a “dangerous unselfishness” (“I’m not fearing any man …”).
This next instalment is different in almost every way. The words are not of one individual but a group — perhaps the most famous group of the twentieth century. There is no “message” per se, and not really anything being communicated to others. Their words are largely self-referential, intensely personal, quasi-autobiographical or else plain nonsense. The goal of the composition, the “end” (telos) it has in view, is evidently nothing more than its own aesthetic perfection. It is not a performance as much as it is a production: bits and pieces of earlier ideas gathered together, elaborated, reworked, enhanced, added to and repeatedly overdubbed between 22 February and 19 August 1969.
This is a reference, of course, to the last album recorded by The Beatles, Abbey Road. The album began amid the fragments, financial chaos and interpersonal strife of the infamous “Get Back” sessions of January 1969. And while Let It Be, which represents the uneven results of those recordings, appeared later in May 1970, Abbey Road is the album that has all the hallmarks of an “end”.
But even this raises a number of questions. Does Abbey Road represent the culmination of their artistry as a band, the zenith of their formal innovation and musical experimentation? (Surely Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band can make a more compelling claim.) Does the album showcase an usual degree of creativity and invention? What are we to make of the clear borrowings (from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross”, to the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 14 in C Sharp Minor, a seventeenth-century song by Thomas Dekker and perhaps James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves”) and moments of unadorned nostalgia — including doo-wop rock’n’roll throwbacks from their Hamburg days (such as “Oh! Darling” and “Polythene Pam”)? Or the fact that so much of the album is comprised of compositional orphans, off cuttings from The White Album and the “Get Back” sessions? As John Lennon would later complain: “Abbey Road was really unfinished songs all stuck together. None of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all.”
Moreover, Abbey Road is rife with contradictions and seemingly unreconciled elements. For instance, the album announces itself as a reunion of sorts, the getting back together of variously estranged band members who had been involved for months in side projects as solo artists, as movie actors, as music producers and studio musicians. But it then proceeds almost immediately to individuate them, featuring in quick succession songs that reflect their own peculiar style, voice and temperament — most apparent in George Harrison’s exquisite “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”, whose delicacy and tenderness act as counterpoints to the sardonic edge and volcanic obsessiveness of Lennon’s “Come Together” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”; but also evident in Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” which provides a playful complement to Paul’s persistent melancholy and nostalgia.
And then there are Lennon’s intermittent absences during the first three weeks of July, during which Paul, George and Ringo recorded some of the album’s finest pieces: “Something”, “Here Comes the Sun”, “You Never Give Me Your Money”, “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight”. So much for coming together …
What ultimately distinguishes Abbey Road, Kenneth Womack contends, is the degree of studio artistry, over-dubbing and post-production afforded by the availability of the EMI TG12345 console, a two-metre-long eight-track mixing desk that allowed the Beatles to isolate tracks and progressively add more and more layers and greater refinement to their preferred take of each song. What console permitted, in other words, was heretofore unimaginable complexity and perfectibility. While there are undeniable moments of virtuoso playing as a band on Abbey Road (not least the trio of duelling guitars during “The End”), the most arresting music (such as the chaotic, almost Wagnerian final four minutes of “I Want You”) and most brilliant vocal arrays (Paul’s open-throated growl on “Oh! Darling” and “Golden Slumbers”, and the nine-voice harmonies of “Because”) in the album were added or layered after the fact.
It is in this pursuit of a certain technological perfection, on the level of the great artistic achievements of the twentieth century, that the Beatles rediscovered the kind of confluence, inspiration, joy even, that could have carried them through to further albums (as they were evidently contemplating). But in the end, the technological possibilities of the EMI TG12345 console and of George Harrison’s Moog synthesiser could not overcome what had broken relationally within the band itself. While John’s consuming obsession with Yoko Ono grew (along with his dependence on heroine), and George and Ringo looked to life beyond the Beatles with an undeniable optimism, even relief (what else is “an octopus’s garden in the shade” but a form of respite?), it is Paul who seems to feel the regret most keenly, that the end is a weight that must be carried: “I never give you my pillow / I only send you my invitations / And in the middle of the celebrations / I break down.”
The final recordings for Abbey Road were completed on 19 August 1969. The album was released on 26 September. The cover famously portrayed the four men walking away from the studio, never to return.
READING:
Kenneth Womack, Solid State: The Story of “Abbey Road” and the End of the Beatles (Cornell University Press, 2019).
Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Guest: Jade O’Regan is Program Leader and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Music Practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Evidence has been mounting for more than a decade that social media tears away at the fabric of democratic life by eroding the conditions of deliberation, shared understanding and mutual trust; that it is the conduit of widespread misinformation, disinformation and malicious conspiracy theories; that it is a driver of hate, sexism and prejudice and has been used to incite violence; that its addictive design and prolonged exposure to harmful content has had egregious damage to the mental health and emotional wellbeing of adolescents.
Until recently, the size of tech companies responsible for the social media platforms, the speed with which new technologies are being deployed and the scale at which they are being adopted has meant the companies have managed to stay several steps ahead of attempts to impose effective regulation and demand accountability.
But a combination of the law catching up and a sharp turn in public sentiment against the companies themselves has led to a series of legislative responses around the world intended to mitigate the harms social media platforms cause.
Last week, the federal government released the exposure draft of its Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026. First floated in 2024, this is the third such measure the Albanese government has introduced — the others being its abandoned Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 and its world-leading Online Safety (Age-Restricted Social Media Platforms) Rules 2025.
Alongside specific provisions to remove harmful content (such as AI generated “fake nude material”), the proposed legislation is notable in its adoption of more preventative measures, including requiring companies to conduct regular risk assessments in order to “proactively identify harmful content”. While this is a measure already in effect in the UK and parts of the EU, perhaps the more notable provision in the proposed legislation is giving social media users the ability to “opt out” of or “turn off” the algorithm that recommends content other than those accounts they follow on the basis of the activity on the platforms.
The Prime Minister has insisted this measure is “not about censorship. It’s about giving people control themselves over what they see.” But that has not prevented his political opponents from accusing the government of of attempting to “censor and silence Australians” (Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson) or of “building the Orwellian machinery” for censorship (One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson). As Nationals Leader Matt Canavan said to the ABC:
“I’m deeply sceptical of giving any government, whether I was in charge, or Anika Wells is in charge, I’m deeply sceptical of giving any government the power to decide what you read on your phone.”
Particular concerns have been raised about the discretionary power accorded to the Minister responsible under section 25C of the exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 to “determine material or conduct, or a combination of material and conduct, that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm”. In 2021, similar concerns were expressed in response to the UK government’s own Online Safety Bill, which likewise proposed to legislate a digital duty of care. The Carnegie Trust, which helped develop the “duty of care” framework the government would adopt, articulated its worry that the draft legislation “takes too many powers” for the minister/secretary and advised that, in order to meet “international commitments on free speech”, there should be “a separation of powers between the executive and a communications regulator”.
How much credence should be given to complaints that further regulating social media content poses a threat to freedom of speech in a country like Australia, which already has comparatively weak free-speech protections? Are these complaints merely self-interested, given that movements and populist parties on the political extremes have tended to benefit from the algorithmic “outrage machine”?
More broadly, given the “opt out” function already exists on most of the platforms and these companies’ predilection for “malicious compliance” (technically abiding by the legislation, but making it unreasonably difficult for users and/or the experience on the platforms significantly worse as a result), what would happen if the overwhelming majority of users simply opt back in to the algorithmically determined feed? Does user consent mitigate the harms?
READING:
Jay Daniel Thompson, “‘Giving people control’: Do the proposed digital duty of care laws pose a threat to free speech?” (ABC Religion and Ethics, 14 September 2026)
Lisa Given, “‘Digital duty of care’ laws will force tech platforms to look after users” (The Conversation, 8 September 2026)
Rob Nicholls, “Australians may soon be able to switch off social media algorithms. Is that censorship?” (The Conversation, 9 September 2026)
Guest: Jay Daniel Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne.