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Apr 4, 2019Liked by nothing here team

You missed an iteration! We also need to think about Bourne and/or anti-Bourne vs. the figure of the anti-Bond. After all, anti-Bond/Stark characters have got to be some of our worst actors in the global scene. Maybe they are shitty billionaires like Musk or old money inbreds like the Trump sons or something like Saudi princes. Or more under the radar, there are probably a bajillion suave Oxford men who use privilege and oldboy networks to push terrible corporate exploitation around the world.

Who is the network spy taking on the old money privilege villain? Maybe Mr. Robot? Maybe the hacker kids in Bacigalupi's The Doubt Factory? In a way, it's not hard to imagine Bourne using his skills to do some good in the world, rather than just seek revenge/truth/revelation/whatever. Actually, he kind of did that in whatever the last Bourne movie was, right? Stopping a nefarious partnership between Google and the NSA? But like, what if instead of being chased all the time, after losing his memory Bourne had just sort of built a life and slowly recognized that he had all these latent spy skills he could use to help his community? Suddenly he's the Taken father, out of the game, but with a very specific set of skills if he finds a cause he cares about.

I'm just riffing here. But it's interesting that Bourne mostly takes on people who are as globalized as he is. What does it look like when he's using the city as a battle suit to lay siege to the fortresses of pre-global power?

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