spookyuser

In Scott Alexander’s essay Meditations on Moloch, he describes a moment where he looks out into the lights of Las Vegas and thinks: “It is glorious that we can create something like this. It is shameful that we did.” > “Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty- story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side- by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?” This April I signed up to be an extra on Netflix’s One Piece, mostly because I thought it would be cool blog content. On the first day I knew that it was indeed cool blog content. What I didn’t expect though is that I, too, would see Moloch. This happened after standing for 3+ hours in one of the airport sized buildings of Cape Town Film Studios. Perhaps it was the being in a fake casino that was only slightly less real than a real casino. Perhaps it was something else. Whatever the reason, as I was driving home that day I felt like I understood what Scott saw in Meditations on Moloch. This Moloch was not exactly the city sized buildings you see above, though those too. It was more the hidden labour, costs and very serious processes people had to invent to create a few seconds of a goofy tv show. I. Live Dangerously On the outskirts of Cape Town, in a suburb called Green Point there is a forgettable public parking lot that a thousand people drive past everyday without knowing how or even that it is essential to the production of the hit Netflix TV show One Piece. I woke up at 4:30am to drive to this parking lot. It was my first day as an extra on the show or of anything this scale. I don’t remember why I woke up that early because I only had to be there at 6am. I think I was nervous because I genuinely had no idea what to expect. All I knew is that I was meant to get a shuttle from the forgettable parking lot to the studio. This was exciting too, because aft