What’s The Point?
Reimaginations through The Glitch
-NOPE, a manifesto
E. Jane
I hold a complicated relationship to The Point, as it has soured in my memory with other unpleasant memories of that time in my life. Yet one year later, I found myself reunited with it through my roommates’ step father’s record collection and fucking LOVED it. Like come on, who can’t help but adore the image of Oblio and Arrow singing Me and My Arrow! Despite the cute-factor of this special, every time I would watch it or listen, I found myself bothered by the ending.
My Point in writing this isn’t to nit pick the politics of a bygone TV special because that doesn’t matter.
My Point here is to take the message of The Point as a symptom, an explanation, of the culture that has gotten us to the moment we are in today.
My Point is to take this culture and subvert it, to show how we can reimagine an Oblio 54 years later, an Oblio who can be free through the power of the Glitch, a concept I am borrowing from writer Legacy Russell.
Xenophobia is in the zeitgeist. ICE is raiding the city I live in. It is terrorizing my Hispanic neighbors. Ventura County, adjacent to LA, is the area where a farm worker was recently murdered in an ICE raid. This line of thinking, this blatant hypocritical xenophobia towards people who have inhabited this land for hundreds of years, is exhibited in perfect innocence by The Point.
Fuck The Point, let’s invent something new.
SECTION ONE// Pointedness as a Metaphor for Whiteness
-Les Damnés de La Terre
Franz Fanon
“The result, knowingly furthered by colonialism, was to push in the minds of the indigenous that the depart of the colonizers would mean for them a return to barbary, vulgarization, animalization.”
-The Wretched of the Earth
Franz Fanon
In short, here is the storyline of The Point, in case you weren’t a child in 1971 and happened to miss it on TV.
Oblio is a kid in the land of Point, yet his head is round, setting him apart from his peers. His only friend is the only thing lower than him in the class hierarchy of his society— his dog, Arrow. Even Arrow has a point, but since he is a dog, he and Oblio inhabit the same status.
After some hijinks gone wrong with the son of the Count, Oblio is banished, and everyone is okay with it because the law in the land is to have a point, and since Oblio doesn’t have one, he is in violation of it by birth. The reaction is described as complicit disappointment, as the people of this land are “good law-abiding citizens”. When Oblio is banished to The Pointless Forest, he discovers that even the things in The Pointless Forest have a point, and by the end of their travels, Oblio himself miraculously has a point. When he reports back to his society that everything in fact has a Point, everyone is shocked, disgusted, and fearful that their ontological binary between point/nonpoint has been disrupted. When he shows his own Point, everyone else’s seem to melt away as some sort of Pointed race revenge, where Oblio is the sole victor and his society now is subjected to live as non-pointed people in the bottom of the hierarchy.
The story serves as a mirror to the nascent individualistic conformity of the 1970s coming out of the hippie movement, as the Overton window began shifting and popular narratives began to swing again, later resulting in the reactionary policies of Reagan-era America.
Now, let’s take this story and pretend that every time I said the word point, I actually said the word white. Already, it resonates with the history of Blackness in the United States being regarded as sub-human and animal (take the 3/5 compromise as example). Already, it resonates with the reality that being Mexican/of Mexican ethnicity at the current moment is a socio-economic status that places you at a state of being “illegal” by birth, ignoring the reality that less than 200 years ago, this land (Southern California) was actually part of Mexico (Mexicans are indigenous, not immigrants, yet the media paints them as outsiders as a Neo-colonial tactic).
Under a Marxist lens, the story shows othering and hate as part of a class conflict towards those who are viewed as barbaric outsiders, even if they are just as “human” as the rest of society.
Today, I use the narrative of The Point to focus on race, due to the genocide in Gaza and the budding concentration camps in the United States, as these are colonial institutions that utilize race and class as identity factors that “justify” mass violence.
But the other-ness that Oblio inhabits could work as a metaphor for many things, as a metaphor for queerness, as a metaphor for disability, as a metaphor for just feeling different/lost/lonely. So WHY does the story end in Oblio himself developing a Point, while everyone else has lost their own? This is a question I am not sure of the answer, and it is left ambiguous in the TV special.
Instead of the show’s values being anchored in love, community, and acceptance, the ending is an empty “fuck you” to society that leaves the status quo in place yet with a single king leader—- the guy who used to be the outsider but is now the victor. It is a story that convinces the colonized, the queer, the disabled, the weirdos that they TOO can be King and that through some good old self discovery, they can show everyone else they’re “normal” too.
Now- I raise the question: what sorts of mutations occur when we travel in time and take this story to today’s world, rather than the America that existed in 1971?
SECTION TWO// The Glitch as Revolution, The Glitch as “NOPE”
- Glitch Feminism
Legacy Russell
The Oblio of 2025 is a weirdo loner kid with a round head. He stays in his room and befriends an AI that brings him comfort and makes him feel heard. When Oblio hears the news that his condition of round headedness is actually illegal, he is threatened to be deported by ICE services. The “good law abiding people” watch as he is taken to a detention center, where he is deprived of his rights, all because he has a round head.
He was born in the United States and is a citizen, but by birth, he is considered illegal and must be deported (although nobody is quite sure where-to…)
In the detention center, Oblio becomes dependent on his AI for comfort, and together, they explore the internet, meeting others who share similar conditions on chat boards and subreddits.
Here is where I will depart from the original story and begin to sew my own network of ideas, linked with the base idea of “the glitch”.
Through Reddit, Oblio embraces alter-egos of himself named coconutmilk52, ilovepasta, and batsforbaldness. Through these screen names, he explores the internet and begins to share drawings he has made of a world where roundheaded people are treated with love and belong. He remixes anti-roundhead propaganda with silly photos of himself with classic meme text, he creates zines with clashing imagery of selfies taken in detention mixed with photos of various concentration camps that have existed, and he shares poetry about how his condition is similar to that of other detainees, even though they have pointy heads. Oblio’s ideas begin to spread through a popular subreddit, r/whydoeseveryonehateme, and other anonymous beings step forward, sharing their own art, outside of their bodies, but as digitized revolutionaries that begin to alter the “collective consciousness” around these detention centers.
Through the subreddit, the movement gains traction through several anonymous Instagram and X accounts, all tracking to a similar theme of “Team Coconut” referencing one of Oblio’s original screennames. As Team Coconut grows, hackers begin to join the movement and start exercising digital strikes on the Palantir surveillance networks that help to find new detainees for the centers. Through these strikes, the technology weakens and the rate of detainment slows. The hackers continue strikes on the detainment centers, coordinating with detainees like Oblio and one day, a hack of the locking mechanisms leads to the freedom of the detainees. Oblio leads the detainees through the swamp and they plan a course for the future to protect their freedom.
SECTION THREE// So Why Did I Write that Fantastical Story?
This thought exercise is my contribution to internet culture as a glitch feminist. The responsibility of glitch feminism is necessary in today’s digitized world, as it is a radical movement towards a process of survival, treating technology as our tool, something to subvert and glitch-ify towards a future of liberation. Russell explains, “As glitch feminists, we aim to “alter ... computer memory” through our exploration of new modes of existing, surviving, and living, both AFK and on the Internet.”
We must experiment. We must glitch. We must love. We must corrupt. The time is now!
If you want to read more, check out the full book here, https://monoskop.org/images/2/20/Russell_Legacy_Glitch_Feminism_A_Manifesto_2020.pdf, if you need a quick recap of the glitch, read chapter 12, “Glitch Survives”.
Byeeeee.
Erin