randomly got annoyed again today at fandom portrayals of elias as a luddite. you think the world’s most powerful avatar of beholding would be…. behind the times? ignorant to the progress of technology? even if you choose to ignore the fact that the digital age revolutionized beholding as a dread power (going from something tied much more closely to the hunt to something so much more exestential and all-consuming… the surveilance state! online surveilance! wiretapping! data gathering! predatory privacy policies! the zoom boom! etc!!!) and that the evolution of recording technology is how the institute was able to function as efficiently as it did to tell us its story… why would it ever make sense to you that the world’s most powerful beholding avatar would remain wilfully ignorant of… anything. let alone wilfully ignorant of how the vast majority of the world functions and communicates. plus his greatest fear is death!! you think he isn’t up to date on all the most prominent medical advances? that’s just a willful misreading of the text.
i do agree with OP here but i also think the people going off that luddite interpretation aren’t conjuring it from thin air. and this is, unfortunately, one of the disappointing aspects of the show, in that it leaned heavily (and illogically if you ask me) into the “stupid eye” thesis. it sees but it does not understand. which negates a big part of /why/ the eye is scary in the first place.
the eye is scary because the thing perceiving you has the capacity for judgment, derived from which are shame and punishment, self-imposed or not. i’ve made this point before but this cannot be accomplished if the entity in question has no capacity for discernment. no one cares if their aquarium fish is “looking” at them eating a whole cake when they’re supposed to be on a diet vs what that same person might feel eating in public.
the second consequence is, of course, that a “dumb” entity like the eye would have no understanding or ‘passion’ for technology. and, indeed, the web has been canonically shown not only to be technologically-inclined, but also to beat the eye at its own game, so to speak, not only (!! this drives me nuts) by infiltrating tape recorders, devices that, by rights, should fall into the eye’s portfolio but also by, essentially, taking over the very institute, i.e. the eye’s place of power. but, then again, you have the eye also canonically being characterised as the purveyor of knowledge. (?) at the very least, the eye and the web should have been fighting over technology. there are some examples of camera manipulation by the beholding, but overall you can’t deny that the web is shown to be the more technologically-inclined of the two, which i personally think is such a sham. rendering unto caesar, the eye should have been the patron saint of social media, influencers, celebrities, reality tv, zoom meetings, the surveillance state etc.
and i am sorry to say, but taking away fear domains that should logically fall into the eye’s purview, just to prop up and overpower another entity, takes away from the quality of the storytelling. the web can be very scary and powerful, too, on its own, there’s no need to cheaply and nonsensically declaw the eye to do it