The Stars in Your Eyes Are Stolen: Æon Flux and Decentralized Power Systems
2026-01-14
Æon Flux is a series created by Peter Chung that aired on MTV's Liquid Television back when people could follow a complex story with no distractions. Today, Netflix asks producers to make sure characters are announcing what they are doing on screen because most people are assumed to be doing laundry or paying attention to something else while streaming a show in the background. The series will take multiple viewings to understand, context clues dropped throughout the series will only make sense after having watched it in its entirety.
I first encountered the show on VHS as a teenager, it impacted me in different ways at various points in my life. In my youth I was more interested in its surreal visual style, sexuality and violence. Today the themes of surveillance, bodily autonomy, and resistance to authority give it extra weight when seen through the lens of the last 20 years.
Æon Flux has always been more than it appears on the surface. Beneath its style is substance, a commentary on authority, autonomy, and the limits of order. In revisiting it today, its depiction of centralized power makes one feel uneasy. Where big, centralized, orderly platforms promise safety, they extract our data, attention, and agency in exchange for convenience.
The nation of Bregna and its leader, Trevor Goodchild, embody the authoritarian ideal. It was not meant to be a blueprint for modern-day Silicon Valley. Surveillance, biological regulation, and enforced stability are upheld in the name of safety. This is not just raw oppression; it is justified order. The argument is that control is required and that disruption is unwelcome. Æon infiltrates this system and studies it, destabilizes it, and in doing so exposes how fragile it really is. She is anti-authoritarian in a visceral way, not a solution to the problem but a disruptor of certainty.
Trevor advocates for a stable state of being, but that order does not prevent violence. Their attraction is strong, and their encounters result in lengthy debates about the merits of each other’s systems. The series refuses to let either side win cleanly, which reflects reality.
Æon’s resistance is not about replacing one authority with another; it is about undoing the assumption that centralized authority is a default state of being.
What would Trevor Goodchild make of Facebook?
Large corporate platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X promise safety and order, yet fail to deliver on any of those promises. In return, they command our attention, surveil our behavior, and monetize our data. They control what we see and who is visible. Like the citizens of Bregna, we are encouraged not to question those who control their society. In Æon Flux, it is heavily implied that Trevor "knows best"; these platforms assert that they know best, and users are left to adopt those platforms or drift away into oblivion, which might not be such a bad thing.
Æon Flux demonstrates, as others throughout history have shown, that systems claiming to protect freedom can just as easily destroy it.
Decentralized social networks are not perfect. One of the many complaints I hear about Mastodon is that it feels disjointed. The inability to view all posts from a user on another instance prior to when you started following them is solved by viewing their profile on the original instance, and this feels unintuitive and inconvenient compared to what normal users of centralized social networks have come to expect.
What we consider acceptable to share has shifted dramatically. Not just our own personal information, but that of our friends and family. In a data-driven economy, these companies have convinced us that we should share our entire contact lists and more. They promise to reward us with a $5 gift card, or a few gold coins to use in the casino slot machine loot boxes of some subscription game people don’t even want to play. Like the citizens of Bregna, we are encouraged to snitch on one another for pennies. When the lines are blurred between corporations and the governments they rely on to do business, we are essentially handing over the identities of others to anyone those entities decide should have them.
In decentralized systems, no single authority dictates what can be said or who can persist. The fact that communities are able to emerge without corporate lords, free of influence, and unable to be censored, is threatening to the status quo.
We have seen social media companies cooperate with and capitulate to governments over the last 25 years. They are the central authority governing the perception of reality for the vast majority of people. With no warning, they have the ability to remove information that they have decided is dangerous to the state. Decentralized systems that are easy to deploy around the world become resistant to censorship. This will be an important aspect of these systems in the years to come. When information federates across thousands of Mastodon servers around the globe, taking down the author’s primary instance will not stop the dissemination, and more importantly, the discussion of that information.
The internet we inhabit today has been optimized for extraction and centralization. We are urged to be users, consumers, and renters defined by engagement metrics.
Æon Flux never offers solutions, only warnings. She reminds us that systems that claim total wisdom, total order, and total legitimacy are systems that will always demand compliance. Decentralized systems do not erase power, but they can redistribute it. Choosing to operate outside corporate platforms, to host your own services, these are acts of defiance. We may not fully destroy Facebook, Instagram, and X, but we can deny them complete, unchallenged power.
Throughout 2021 I was fortunate to talk to Peter at length about Æon Flux. During our conversation I was offered my pick of an original animation cel from his personal collection and am now in possession of my own piece of Æon Flux.
