Dune, Fish Speakers and the business of subsidized ideology

"Go proge go broke" doesn't add up: the ideology that does turn a profit

If every product marked by commercial activism went under, half the catalog of the big brands would have been in liquidation for years. That is not the case. The Dune literary franchise, whose books are estimated to have earned between 300 and 400 million dollars worldwide over its history, has spent half a century selling the very thing its films and video games later resold: a brand with a narrative. The slogan that "going proge" ruins business sounds great in a headline, but it crashes against the balance sheets.

The Fish Speakers: an army that governs, spies and kills

At the heart of the matter is how the saga is read. Leto II builds an exclusively female armed corps —the Fish Speakers— that is not just an army: it is the empire's administration, its priesthood, its spy network and, when needed, its assassination service. At the head, millennium after millennium, he places a succession of Duncan Idaho gholas, his way of always having an Atreides taking orders. The most cynical reading —no less solid for that— is that Herbert was not distributing gender, he was distributing obedience: no one suspects those who administer and execute at the same time.

There is one detail that dismantles the commercial reading: Herbert wrote Dune when a video game was still nothing more than "a dot and a dash." Today the saga works in reverse: first the video game and the film, then the book.

The business is in the narrative, not on the payroll

From there, the suspicion jumps to the industry as a whole. The argument is that inclusivity in video games is a showcase, not employment, and that if quotas actually generated profit, companies would already be offshoring to any market without filters. The forecasts that promised "millionaire kids" thanks to ICT now coexist with unemployed programmers. And the pattern repeats: whoever signs the report gets paid for their conferences no matter what happens.

How much of that narrative is conviction, and how much is simply a paycheck at the end of the month?