Wreck it Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet

September 2019

In this essay I take a deep dive on Disney's 2019 depiction of the internet, and how it reflects cultural perceptions of how the internet works. I talk about internet infrastructure, human agency and adaptation, but mainly capitalism: The gamified space of the online marketplace, the deliberate obufscation of advertising revenue's immateriality, the denial of the radical socialist possibility of digital media's redistributive potential, and that from the film's perspective, people only exist to generate money.

The first and foundational essay for Johanna Gosse's New Media.

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