We're back with another one of these, this time on a subject I know we're all thinking about. The question is in just how artificial is everything right now?
This week let us tackle some questions based on this well discussed subject. What exactly is artificiality in art? Where does it come from, what is the source of it, and how can we move past it? Lastly, why does it feel like everything around us is artificial even when we know it's made by real people? We can't answer them all today, but we can scratch the surface before we can even think to strike at the heart of all this craziness.
What is really going on?!?
We're all well aware nothing in the arts or entertainment sphere is "natural" anymore, in that the ideas being expressed aren't deeper than surface level and rarely do they go beyond cliche phrases and unambitious characters or plots meant to rehash Current Year dogma. What we also don't address is that we also reshape this in the form of digestible Content meant to satisfy all the bots and algorithms that allow us to see anything anymore.
In other words, not only do we deliberately talk down to others in order to satisfy social demands, we also morph our language and alter our approach to our robot overlords so they can even be seen by anyone in the first place. In effect, we aren't actually working for customers: we're working for robots and filtering our "Content" to get it past them
The idea of "Working for the robot" has already affected video makers on YouTube and heavily filtered what they want to produce. If you wonder why so many channels have videos with wildly different view counts on their videos, this is the reason for it. They simply aren't doing what the algorithm gods demand of them. What these means is that they tailor their videos and thumbnails and advertising to be deemed worthy for acceptance by the algorithm (be it YouTube or any social media site) in order to maybe have an audience to watch their videos.
The robots aren't on your side.
This also is why so many bigger creators now have multiple channels (some focusing on livestreams, for instance) because it will not negatively impact their original one. This is because they have to work around (and for) the robots who are their real employers.
Author David V. Stewart talks about the topic in the video above. Since he is a YouTuber going back many years, he has seen trends come and go, as well as channels and creators. Whatever worked back in the day no longer does, making it more of a hassle for viewers to find channels and for channels to get viewers. Essentially, much like everything else, it's been flipped on its head backwards from its original purpose and intent. Check out the video above to see how that is.
It is difficult to blame so many video makers on YouTube since, well, there isn't much choice, especially for those doing this for a living. However, it does not change the fact that their work is being changed specifically for an entity that does not care about them or their audience, and, in the end, will negatively impact the quality of what they do. It's a Catch 22 situation, and the only way to fight it is to risk angering the very gods you are meant to placate.
Basically, as they are, the customer is not the person engaging in what you do: it's the robot sentinel watching you overhead like a hawk and ready to blow you away like an armed satellite should you fail to meet its demands. Not exactly a healthy position to be in.
The only solution, as always, is to take a risk.
We're diving so deep into artificiality we no longer even remember the purpose of producing for people isn't to pump content out like industrialization taught us. It's not to make tons of money, either (though of course that's nice), but to create something that can reach people and show them something a little higher and leave them in a better position than where they started. We can't do that if we're too busy being distracted, terrorized, and ruled over, by things that simply don't matter.
And artificiality doesn't matter. This sort of "Content" will be forgotten. It will come and go and disappear as quickly as it came into the void with the rest of it. It doesn't matter how much the "Content" mimics the real thing--it has nothing to say that isn't surface level or has been repeated hundreds of times by people who have already said it better before. This artificial product can't aim higher or show anything new.
But we can.
Hopefully sometime in the future we can build a scene that has this focus of connection at the forefront. It sure would be nice. Until then, enjoy "Content" being pumped out into the pipes, because that's all we're going to get as long as we work for the robots.
Personally, I think we've all had enough of it. Audiences want something real, something they can believe in. That said, all we can do is wait for enough pushback on how things currently are in order to find another path out of here. Until that happens, we're simply stuck waiting and in neutral, hoping for a new way.
For a post-Cultural Ground Zero society, I'm pretty sure we're used to that by now. After nearly three decades of stagnation, what's another couple years? Hopefully we won't have to wait much longer.
In other news, I recently introduced a new podcast series on the Patreon called the Drifter Mindset. This one is specifically about my writing and storytelling. I read a story, talk about where it came from, the meanings, and the themes, and what it meant to me as a writer. The usual podcast will continue on as always, but this one will be another bonus for anyone who wants to join. It's going to be as in depth as I can get it to be, so the episodes will be longer than a usual episode of Letters from the Wasteland. I have been publishing for nearly a decade, after all.
All that aside, I hope things are going well for you all out there, and I'll see you next time!
We've talked about the lonely generations reaching middle age and what we can do about it, but how about going back a little and seeing where it first became visible? Today I have visual evidence of the originating point for an entire generation, the one most well known for being trapped in their memories and nostalgia. I'm, of course, talking about Gen Y. An entire generation that came of age during the eye of the hurricane that cracked during Cultural Ground Zero and bottomed out during their early adult years in the '00s.
We all know how that story went in that first quarter block of the 21st century. But what was it like being Gen Y before everything collapsed? Well, I can actually give you an example of what my generation was like right this very second!
The above video details the rise and fall of Generation Y centered on one figure who was infamous in the early popular era of the internet. This was the early '00s back when social media was just getting off the ground and Gen Y was learning how to use YouTube to express themselves. In case you haven't realized it yet, the subject is about the Spoony One himself, one of the early wave of those internet reviewers. While it might seem odd to bring up this one figure and his downfall, and you might even consider him an outlier to that generation, there is a very good reason that his rise and fall endures as a cautionary tale despite the countless internet figures that come and go everyday. No one is waiting for the Gamedude to return, for example.
It's been nearly two decades and yet still people think of Spoony. Why is that? Why of all those figures is he the one that elicits the most nostalgia for that specific time and place that is gone now, more than others from the time? Even the above video maker, being a younger figure, was a member of his audience who looked to him to learn about certain things. Even now he still thinks Spoony has something the others didn't. Let us look into why so many think so, and ponder if that is truly the case or just wishful thinking.
The Angry Video Game Nerd is still popular. He's still working at it. It is the same with the Nostalgia Critic. James Rolfe and Doug Walker are the names everyone in these circles knows. These two are still among the biggest in their niches despite the passage of decades since their early beginnings. Most of the others have disappeared, some have imploded, some have even died (RIP Armake21), but despite it all, there is one critic that so many await a return for to this day to resume his career as if nothing has happened. That is Spoony. If you know anything about the era, you are even probably nodding your head along with that, even if you might not understand why. Why is it that nostalgia for Spoony remain over all the others?
The logo you might remember
Unfortunately, there is a realization here, and one his audience all knows deep down. He cannot really return, and we will get to why that is soon. I promise, we will discuss it soon enough! First let us discuss his initial popularity to set it up.
The early era of internet critics back in those early days of YouTube and social media were mostly just AVGN rip-offs. We all know it now, but we also all knew it at the time. There was a demand for over the top deconstructions of childhood favorites, and boy oh boy were many Gen Ys ready to fill that niche. There were almost as many angry reviewers as there were stars in the sky, and none of them really lasted beyond that initial year or two.
Most of these figures are watched for nostalgia's sake today, ironically, though they are an interesting window into an era of the internet and culture long gone today. Despite that, however, there were a few that stood out in the crowd. Aside from the above big dogs like James and Doug, the one that almost reached their level, and many would say even now was their equal, was Spoony of the Spoony Experiment. But he wasn't just an angry reviewer. Unlike the others, he wasn't a character, he wasn't overblown or cartoony, he was just himself and really excitable and personable about what he covered. Spoony loved cool things, movies, games, TV shows, wrestling, whatever, it didn't matter. His excitement was palpable, whether he liked something or not and it was always fun to hear him talk about what he enjoyed.
In those days, it was like meeting a friend and talking about things you both had in common, and it was refreshing. For Gen Y guys, we all knew someone like him, or had a bit of him inside us, or understood where he was coming from even when we didn't agree. For younger audiences he was like an older brother showing them obscure and wild entertainment from the fringes you might never have seen otherwise. Even now in the modern corporate and "professional" YouTube world there isn't really anyone else like him. The world to Gen Y was exciting, there were cool things to be found everywhere, and those things were going to be good in the end.
And then they weren't. This is where we get to those days of the later '00s where the bleakness started to take hold of the generation. Spoony was not only not an exception to this: in many ways he was the posterchild for it all. Those were rough times.
Spoony's downfall was a tough one to watch, even at the time. Though he became an internet punchline, unlike many other early internet figures that crashed and burned, Spoony's was different. Even as he faded away, to this day a not-insignificant amount of people await his return. There is a good reason for that, despite everything that happened, many still wait for him. It will probably never happen, and it should be discussed why.
As mentioned before, check out the above video for details on what exactly happened. In retrospect, his "controversies" are actually quite tame (and water under the bridge at this point), but one part sticks out more than all of those. There is a moment in Spoony's rant at the end of his Ultima series, the last large project he did before he flamed out, that tips his hand. One can feel his despair over everything he loved turning to shit, getting worse, and imploding, and that there was nothing he could do about it. This was clearly meant to cap the video off with a gag, but his clear disappointment over his precious memories being destroyed and being forgotten by the passage of time and corporate avarice, and how nothing will ever be good again, ended up reflecting the feelings of much of his audience at the time. The elephant in the room is that we all knew it was true, and we all knew we lacked the power to save anything at the time. It was the source of Gen Y's despair at the time.
That rant is a good example of that era of Gen Y existence when the warmth of youth has finally faded and left us in the empty cold of the late '00s/early '10s, a hopeless era where loneliness and alienation became common, and it did not feel like any light was coming. The realization was that everything we thought we loved was purposefully being destroyed (and it was), and that without it our generation did not think we had meaning otherwise.
Infamous, but not the low point.
This is why Spoony will not return. Not because he cannot get past that despair, he can, (we very much all can) but that the realization is that those products are not what made those times great. It wasn't the IPs, the logos, or the carboard boxes and jewel cases. Those could be cool, but they weren't the source of enjoyment. When the nostalgia fades, what remains are the ideas, the spirit, the connection, and the sense of higher purpose al the best art and entertainment points toward. At this point, Gen Y is not reveling in the past: they are moving forward using the past as a way to shine a light into newer unexplored territory of the like we never imagined back then.
The reason Spoony can't come back is because there's no more nostalgia for him to mine, and he doesn't need to do that anymore. It's been recorded and shared with the world. His part in that Experiment is over. So now what? If Spoony wanted to come back, it would have to be to move forward in the same way his cohort is starting to. He wouldn't be able to do the same thing anymore.
Were Spoony to return, not only would his demons have to be beaten, but he would have to be in a better place to show those waiting for him a better way out of the pit not only he, but his entire generation, had been trapped in. Some are still there, too. In essence, they may think they want Spoony to taken them back to the past, but what they actually want is to be brought to the future, and they still think he has the ability to that. Maybe he does.
Does the above sound strange? Are members of Gen Y, or his younger watchers in the Millennials, really still waiting for a reviewer who stopped reviewing years ago? They are waiting for something, and probably more than they think they are. Well, the audience waiting for him is waiting for him because he reminds them of themselves. Spoony has always been a reflection of who the audience thought they were, wanted to be, or knew someone like. They live in the same fallen world as he does and wish desperately for the parts of them left behind in that nostalgic haze to also be saved with the rest of them. If he can make it, they all can, essentially.
In the '00s we were told everything old sucked, was useless, and had no value. Now, in the '20s, a quarter of a century removed, we realize how wrong that was. If it had no value we wouldn't have been able to connect with any of it, we wouldn't have huddled around YouTube comments on videos and pages (until those were removed) had countless response videos, or taken to forums and social media to talk amongst ourselves over it. We ad it all in a cloak or sarcasm and irony to detach ourselves, but we all knew it mattered. That is why when it disappeared, a level of despair fell over us all. We didn't realize what we had until it was gone. It was the connection itself that mattered, and that is why we still talk about these things even so many years removed from them.
The old days were good, not perfect, but good. We salvaged what we could from them to bring what mattered forward, but those days are gone and over with now. We can't just marvel at and swim in the past. We need new ways to look forward. We don't need dead IPs, franchises, or corporations, to rule our future. We need to be able to look ahead to something better than what we grew up with. Spoony himself is a relic of that era, but he's also a person. He's a human being who can't live there any more than we can. You can visit the past anytime, but no one else is there anymore.
It is the same when a new multiplayer FPS comes out and people hope against hope for it to be a draw for multiplayer. They want desperately to return to the good times. They want the "community" to return, be it Call of Duty, Overwatch, or even Unreal. They all know it won't happen, it can't happen, but they desperately desire that lost connection again.
But what was the essence of that connection? Playing with strangers? No, it was a variation of an earlier phenomenon.
When one looks at old photos of LAN parties over two decades ago you just realize none of these new games will ever compare, and they don't. Part of the appeal has always been friends, acquaintances, and neighbors, getting together to have fun over the same thing. We all desired that connection. We don't have those anymore, though. There are no communities, no one has the time, and everyone is off in their own little spaces, which means there will never be anything that lives up to the way it once was. That's just the blunt truth.
Waiting for Spoony to return is a lot like waiting for those local communities to return. They're gone and not coming back. You can go back to the past but, again, no one else is there anymore. One can build something different, perhaps something better, but it will only come from taking in what came before and applying it to the future. That is what Gen Y's job will be: to be the preservers and the ones carrying the memories forward to apply in new situations. Our job is to not linger and drown: the hour is much, much too late for that.
At this time, I think most of us have figured this out. We are building, working, and striving for something better. The age for lingering and pining is over and done. That's a good thing: we can always improve and grow.
If Spoony does come back I would hope he's a completely different person, like the rest of us, finished with living in the past and hopeful for a better future. I would hope he could escape those demons of those darker years and build something new. They are over for the rest of us now, but it doesn't mean we have to leave everything behind. We just have to understand where we are now, and what we can offer that no one else can.
Gen Y's worst days are behind us. It won't be perfect going forward, there will be a lot of rough waters and tough times, but we're finally moving out of the pit of the past and ready to carry ourselves forward. It's about due, but we finally know what we can do now. We don't need permission, we don't need to bend the knee to people who hate us, and we don't need to fade away. We won't be defeated. In fact, we will win.
As we head into August and the later days of summer (where hopefully the heat finally begins to taper off), lets take one look back at the loneliness epidemic plaguing the modern world. We've discussed it plenty of times before on this blog and elsewhere, and have gone through plenty of examples both in the arts and in general where it remains prominent, but I don't believe we have ever compiled it in one easy to digest source like the above documentary from ColdFusion has. Where did it come from, and where is it going? And how do we escape?
Suffice to say, everyone is aware of the overall problem on some level and many even realize the cause, but attacking the source is a whole other ballgame that is going to take some time. It's not going to vanish overnight. It's not country exclusive either, as it has roots in not only the West, but also other areas like Japan, China, Korea, and is even starting to grow in places like Africa. Alienation and atomization is quickly becoming the legacy of the 20th century, and it's not one we should be proud of.
At the same time, there has been a vibe shift in the overall culture. This goes beyond politics and voting habits, though those have obviously changed as well, and moves more into the space of the intangible. As someone who was around in the nadir of materialistic nihilism (the '00s) it is very easy to see the change in the way the average person sees meaning and the purpose in their lives. The snark and the irony poisoning is finally falling to sincerity and hope, something we have all needed desperately since the pit that was 2001. Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better, after all.
Part of admiring the past today comes from hating the present, but it should never be forgotten that said era is also what lead us here to where we are now. We cannot mindlessly ape it, but take what we need to move forward and understand the context for it all.
It's over and gone.
It's been said before that the middle is disappearing, but outside of the context of the middle class it also refers to the neutral ground on the purpose of your existence. Lines are forming everywhere that we had once deliberately blurred. You either believe your life has meaning and that we can fix things, or you don't believe it does and will fight to destroy everything while fooling yourself into thinking you're helping. The two attitudes are very different, one straightforward and one backwards, but the latter is dying as materialism has been exposed to be a dead end ideology. Only by realizing what we lost can we hope to make it better.
I don't tend to talk politics here because I don't have much to say on the topic. There are too many talking heads, grifters, and opportunists to count, most of which share and don't share aspects of my views. However, the default in that segment of modernity has changed so much that I think it is worth mentioning at least a little in regards to this topic. It's also another area where neutrality has disappeared which is probably a good thing because no one caring about the overt self-destruction of everyone and everything is how the problem outlined in Bowling Alone went unaddressed for over a quarter of a century. We all saw it coming, but we did nothing.
This piece by Dave Greene, also known as the Distributist, outlines in detail how the default thought of the 20th century, materialist progressivism died. I'm not going to go into it here as it is very long and in depth, but as someone who came from that place and knows others still there, he goes over where the ideology is, why it's dead, and why the sooner we finally give up on it the sooner we can finally build something better. Institutions like Hollywood, big business and big tech, and those with skin in the game are also starting to realize it, but they are behind on everything. This is the big reason why independent creators and artists have seized control of the arts and entertainment so abruptly: they see the writing on the wall. It's just up to the people in charge to finally process it.
Of course I'm not claiming to know all the answers, but as someone who has been blogging for over a decade now I can tell you things are most definitely not where they were back what I started. It's been a long time coming and the shift is very subtle, but the small things always add up. Within the next decade we will finally escape the grasp of 20th century materialism and despair and build something better. It's inevitable now, it's just a question of how much you're willing to let go of to make it happen. People like you are already helping with that right now simply by supporting NewPub, independent, and smaller artists, writers, creators, and entertainers, and contributing to the undeniable vibe shift currently occurring in the culture. Again, you might not have noticed it but the change is real. We just have to be engaged in it. Soon enough we will be able to form new connections and leave this present behind for better things.
It's only a matter of time.
In other news, I recently did a podcast on the series Cobra Kai and looked at just why it resonated where just about every other cash grab reboot and remake failed, and the answer turned out to be quite interesting. It might also be a sign of change, just not in the way anyone might think. We all realize what a waste the early years of the 21st century are and now we need to make up for it with something more than we had.
That is what the reason anthologies like Rock and Roll Mercenaries exist for: they highlight part of the 20th century we loved that is currently fading away. Those days are gone, so we must take what we learned, celebrate them, and move on into the new times ahead. We need the past to move into the future, but we also cannot live there, not forever. The last 25 years spent clinging to the previous century has told us that much.
I was also on the Scifi4Me podcast about a week ago with some of the guys in the above anthology. We talk about writing and stories in it! It's well worth the watch though we only show up in hour two the whole thing is worth it. Watch it here!
Like I said, there's a big change coming. Nothing will be the same again.
July might be ending, but that doesn't mean there are no surprises to be had! For instance, here is a new book sale created for male readers. Looking for a good read for a guy in your life? Here is the chance to join in on something really fun!
Running from Wednesday, July 30th (today!) to Tuesday, August 5th, you will have your pick of exciting books made for a male audience. Find the sale over here!
Books on the sale page will be rotated among the selections every day, so new books will be at the top of the page as it goes. Therefore, if you missed something there's always a chance it will be more visible on another day. So be sure to keep checking. We're going to need more male readers going forward if we want to create a better industry, after all.
As Archer explores this eternal midnight, he can only wonder—is this all just a dream, or is there something more hidden in the dark, watching his every move?
There is one choice. He must traverse the nightmare and learn the truth.
In other news, as mentioned earlier I am currently serializing my next non-fiction work, Fantasy Isn't Real, on the Patreon, as I work out the details on a few other projects. If you enjoyed my previous works in this style, you're going to want to read this one. It's going to be very much in the style of those controversial ones.
There's more to come but since this summer has been way too hectic and unpredictable it'll be some time before I can shake out exactly what is coming next. Regardless, if you want a preview, the Patreon is the place to be. I also have nearly 30 podcast episodes and two exclusive complete serials up on it with more to come. Joining definitely helps with production in these crazy times. You are also free to join in on the comments and offer feedback yourself. There's quite a lot there.
That's all for this short update post. Thanks for a wild July and I'll see you again in August!
It's been a strange week with a surprising amount of celebrity deaths, and the heat has yet to calm itself down even a little, but at least it's done. August isn't that far away. With that out of the way, lets get into it!
I know you're probably wondering, if you're over a certain age, when the internet stopped being a fun place to visit with a lot to see and do. If you're under a certain age you might even be resentful over why so many people spend so much time in a place as boring as the internet. These two views are obviously opposites, but they are also both correct. The answer is that the internet was once a much different place than it is today, and what it is today is a far cry of what it once was.
Of course we have discussed the phenomenon of Dead Internet Theory (which is no longer a theory) before, but what we haven't really talked about is the deliberate moves made to get us to this place. We all made the choice to be here, after all. Where the internet was once the last frontier, the wild west of open spaces and the unknown, decades ago, it has now been tamed and razed, leaving little left but the same lame corpo jargon as every place else outside of it. Chances are you only go online now for a small handful of things these days, no longer is it to explore and find new things. Not that you could anymore if you wanted to.
Without even getting to the growing glut of AI generated nonsense, the untold truth is that the internet had already been heading in this direction before we got to that point. Just like in the arts and entertainment, the goal became to automate a constant flow of Content out into the world and into our overstimulated brains, quality be damned as long as it has certain expected Tropes and aesthetics, and that's exactly what it does now. No longer is the internet about exploring or seeing or creating new things: it's about consuming Content.
It's also flooded the world with noise. Yes, even the offline world.
We're overstimulated and obsessed with both blending into the crowd and sticking out from it, our identities as concocted as the formula we desire in the Content we Consume. All this, once again, before the AI issue is even a speck on the horizon. The AI is just the most straightforward way we learned of making it easy to do.
What to be an artist? Generate an image. Want to be a songwriter? Generate a song. Want to be an author? Generate a story. Now you can get any identity you want with the push of button. That's the heart of the whole issue. It is to keep the old Baby Boomer lie alive that "You can do anything you put your mind to" which is very obviously untrue, but as the post-9/11 world has shown: reality is the enemy. It isn't about the art or the people, it's about the self. The atomized and abandoned individual struggling to find a place in a flooded world of noise with no connections to others. This is what the internet is about today, and it's where it was always going to go once social media came into existence nearly two decades ago.
We aren't connecting anymore; we're turning inward and making sure everyone sees us as we do. It's very contradictory, obviously, but that's the nature of where we are.
This is obviously reflected in everywhere else in our modern world, but the internet was once the last escape. It was once the last vestige of freedom from the safetyism that had been strangling the rest of the outside world since the '90s turned into the birth of Safetyism. Now that online space has begun to fade just as the youngest generations have had enough of the artificiality and wish to blow it all up. They will eventually succeed, regardless of what you believe the "good" or "bad" faction in all this is. It's been a long time coming.
One can always bring up how trends come and go and how times will always change, which is true, however this is different from just a trend or a fad. It's different because the internet has reshaped the way day to day life is performed and the expectations around it. It's changed how people react to one another. It's changed how we see every aspect of the world and raised our tolerance for unreality in everyday life while also diminishing our sense of whimsy and fun. Turns out the real Fantasy is what the Cyberpunk dystopia ended up being. Unreality in every day life, constantly pumped into your brain through ever-present screens.
And even as the digital world implodes, it's still making strides into invading the physical. Constant monitoring, constant pressure to be "on", and the constant elbowing in on strangers' personal spaces continues unabated. It isn't getting any better.
And, once again, this is before we get into the flood of AI Content, mass censorship, or the slow death of social media platforms at the same time as local communities have all but vanished. Everybody is sick of the state of things, but they're going to stick around where they hate to be as long as they can, because there's nowhere else to go.
The truth is that all this is happening because we don't really care anymore. The despair of the '00s lead to the madness of the '10s, which lead to the cracking and breaking that is the '20s. At the rate we're going, the internet will not last into the '30s, an amazing feat for something that was once taught to be eternal. Now it probably won't outlive any of us, at least not in any kind of useable state.
So why do we refuse to reassess our situation? Why do we continue to live in a world that no one seems to want? Why do we refuse to admit the mistakes we made that lead us to this very position we are in today and look for a better course forward? Perhaps it might be that no one has an answer, but it seems more likely that we all know what to do but we are unable to make the move to do it. It's mainly that no one believes they have anywhere else to go. Bowling Alone became real, as it was destined to, and the only way to reverse it is with a lot of effort to rebuild local communities and actually offer something better, something we once had and squandered.
Until then, enjoy the slop future of the internet. There isn't any other place it can go as long as we live our everyday lives virtually and our virtual lives as if they are our everyday ones. Whatever comes next after that is a mystery for the ages, but it won't be this.
What can we do but hope for something better? At some point we have to want more than constant Fantasy. Here's hoping we don't take too long to figure it out.
In other news, I have a story in the upcoming Mistcreek Tales called "Lightning Jim". The only thing I will say is that if you enjoyed Y Signal, you might want to check this one out. It's the first in a new series of shorts I'm working on, and these are going to be really out there. I'll talk more about it when the new anthology drops on August 4th.
I also started a new non-fiction book over on the Patreon called Fantasy Isn't Real, so if you enjoyed The Pulp Mindset and The Last Fanatics, I recommend checking that one out. While the other two are more focused on the present and the past respectively, this one is aiming towards the future. See what I mean by signing up for the Patreon today!
That's all for this week. Have yourself a good one until next we meet!
One of the things audiences of art and entertainment have been craving for a number of years has been an art scene that doesn't beat its audience over the head with what it's doing. Few seem to understand that this has been a problem that existed much longer than the current woes in every media-adjacent industry has. In fact, we have a blueprint for how such an industry was shaped.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s a "Christian" Industry for different forms of media arose. There was a "Christian" space for music, movies, books, and everything else you could imagine. What that ended up doing was creating a cargo cult mentality around it, creating its own language and code of conduct to separate it from the mainstream. Instead of trying to adapt to or communicate with the mainstream, it divorced from it and left everyone outside the bubble to their own devices.
This ended up being a mistake, as both the "Christian" industry and the mainstream would eventually implode into a pile of tired tropes and expected ideas, never to come to together again.
The reason this doesn't work is that Christianity is meant to face the mainstream head-on, not ignore it or talk around it. It's about the destiny of man in the face of the Perfect Man, after all. And art, as we've discussed many times, is meant to connect us and find meaning together. We're meant to have art poke and prod and point us in the right direction while showing us more we might not have considered. If you truly believe in the Savior of the Universe, then you should not hold that belief to yourself. Unfortunately, that is more or less what the "Christian" media complex evolved into being in record time. It's now just another industry with a particular image slapped on top to make it seem different while it sells pale imitations of what the already poor mainstream offers.
However, there are a lot of believers out there who don't want to be part of such an isolated island. There are plenty that want to connect and reach out to others, and find a Higher Meaning to it all.
The above video shows a list of authors who did just that. While being Christian and believers of the One True God, they never forgot their vision was also to reach people who either might not believe or might not even know what the author is talking about in the first place. They released the point of connecting means going outside yourself and doing more than preaching to the choir, and as a consequence their work is much more enduring than you'd figure it would be.
What happened in the 20th century was the siloing of ideas and interactions, backed up by corporations to give the illusion of community based on perceived tastes, at the same moment local community was falling apart around us. We're currently in the last days of such a system as both the internet works to destroy itself, and the old companies struggle to make a profit without turning something into a formulaic franchise or digging up corpses to put in modern skinsuits to attempt the same thing. The climate is changing, and it's a necessary change, but it's going to hurt when it does. It's happening right now in certain places.
What we need now are people who not only believe in a better possibility for what is to come, but also aren't afraid to reach others with their ideas. The old battle lines are faded now, slipping away with both the passage of time and new generations questioning if they were ever really there to begin with. When can we finally work together again to build a better future? It has to happen at some point. It's inevitable.
I know plenty of creators working out there to make a change, and I know many audience members doing the same. We all know it has to change. Eventually, these efforts will cause a shift and the old paradigm will be just a memory. Until then, we can't stop pushing.
In other news, I just put up a new episode of the podcast on the Patreon (Can you believe it's been a year now?) talking about what from the 1990s is worth salvaging. We usually talk the opposite so it was interesting looking it what actually worked. It's a long episode so I made the preview a bit longer to compensate, so if you want to listen you can find it here.
I'm also starting a new post series that may or may not lead into another book in the vein of The Pulp Mindset and The Last Fanatics. Join now and you'll get to see it as its written and see how it shapes up. I can only do this because of the readers, after all.
There is a lot to look forward to. Don't despair over the future because of the dilapidated state of the mainstream: that is temporary. What is to come in the future will offer a much different world, one where all of this falls away. You always gotta have hope, after all.
As the old saying goes, keep your eyes on the prize. Just don't make the mistake of the 20th century and forgetting what that even is to begin with. There's much more than we can even imagine.
Been quite the scorcher around here since July started. I hope you're managing to keep cool. The heat doesn't look to be easing up anytime soon. But enough of that, let us get to today's topic!
Let us talk about heroism.
For a long time, ever since at least the 1990s, there has been a problem in understanding the purpose of heroes and heroism in storytelling. Before that decade that believed subversion was the future (a vision that eventually lead downhill to complete bottoming out completely in the 2010s), writers and authors had a clear vision for what it meant to be a White Hat in a story. That was eventually lost. Now, because of this modern misunderstanding, it has taken an entire industry of people divorced from the mainstream to basically figure out how to get that lost notion back. The 2020s has been a real relearning experience over this and many other subjects. As has been said, a lot of it is like relearning to ride a bicycle.
The above video by The Second Story channel (the same one that exposed "Fantasy" as being a Del Ray formula, not a genre) has decided to weight in on the muted nature of heroism and good in stories these days. What happened to what was once so obvious an idea and why can even a series with such wanton death and subversion like Attack on Titan still manage to understand heroism more than our comparatively simple superhero movies. It is a good video that seeks to answer the question we've all been asking for years now. What even is a hero anymore?
As has been mentioned before, the modern obsession with villains and "anti-heroes" came about because morality was thought of as simplistic and lame. This was brought about because out culture had lost what made a hero so admirable and worthy of imitating. Heroism became a weak frame that holds do-gooders back from "doing what is needed" and keeps them one note "paladins" who have to meekly follow whatever law that binds them. They're all weak and feeble-minded dupes who can't possibly be as cool as the rogues who do whatever they want, morality be damned!
Of course, none of this is what good actually is (nor what real paladins actually do, believe, or act like), but it has been a misunderstanding festering for decades now. In fact, the source might be traced way back to the age of Saturday Morning Cartoons when Peggy Charren told parents that heroes shooting villains is uncouth and it is a moral duty for heroes to spout textbook catchphrases and government approved laws directly back at the viewer so that they don't forget to become a good citizen. School never ends for children, after all.
This generation then grew up, and brought this mutation of morality to full flowering in mainstream storytelling, whether by aping it or by subverting it, but neither side seeming to understand that the entire frame is warped to begin with. That is what has lead the current industry to have such a superficial version of Good and Evil as concepts: it is all filtered through the ACT, and few from back then have realized its influence on every corner of modern life. "You are what you eat" doesn't just refer to food.
It is much how you come across people who speak like sitcom characters or use internet vernacular in real life. It is learned behavior, and it has affected everything.
That's right, much of the modern idea view of heroism, and it being entirely western in creation, comes from the already backwards understanding of morality embedded in the heads of the Saturday Morning Cartoon generation, a medium that was deliberately heavily neutered and watered down to get children to understand the importance of recycling, listening to teachers, and preventing the third (and first) world from breeding by equivocating them to rats (Captain Planet & the Planeteers still airs on TV, by the way), and how all villainy in the end is just one-note buffoonery or evil for evil's sake. To the Saturday Morning Cartoon generation, you either are good by doing what the Good Guys say, or you are an evil scourge to be eradicated. It is this absurd now because we let absurd people talk us into this.
And now you also know why the modern political climate is the way it is, and why a whole generation cannot seem to understand the motives of people they see as cartoon villains needing to be thwarted like the heroes in their cartoon shows always manage to do. Don't you know Sonic the Hedgehog shares my thoughts and beliefs on the constitution! It's this ridiculous now for a good reason. None of this came out of nowhere, and it is not normal or natural to think like this.
Regardless, everyone used to know why The Shadow gunned down villain and why Mack Bolan went on his revenge quest, and they were not called "anti-heroes" at the time, because they weren't, and aren't. They only come across that way when filtered through Saturday Morning Cartoon logic that was picked up by generations under the Baby Boomers who then carried it into other mediums like comic books and video games as they grew older, as well as the ever-popular video essay on YouTube. This misunderstanding of morality has poisoned everything in the west. This is why heroism is so massively misunderstood today. For generations, this was seen as normal and The Way It's Done, which is what lead to the dead end we cornered ourselves into. We had an artificial morality as a frame and we've yet to fully cast it aside into the dustbin of history.
But it is being cast aside. Slowly and deliberately, it is being done.
There is a realization here and that's that we don't live in the Saturday Morning Cartoon era anymore. A generation of kids have come of age never experiencing that mutation of morality and are now working on their own stories without even considering those once expected rules. That leaves the rest of us to make a decision to finally decide whether we want to continue down this path, or finally admit we might have been wrong all along. Heroes are not what we thought they were: they really are so much more.
Heroes were never boring, we just became boring and forgot what heroes were supposed to be in the first place. Once we rediscover that lost art, we'll be on the right track again. It's going to take some time, and a lot of arguments and butting heads, but it will eventually happen. You can see the change everywhere outside the mainstream.
The future is as inevitable as the Truth prevailing in the end. Good always wins, just not always in the way we might expect it to.
In other news, there's only a few days left to get two of my books for a buck! You can get both The Last Fanatics and Y Signal on Amazon for some quality summer reads. I particularly recommend The Last Fanatics if you only read the blog version. It has been edited quite a bit to fit into book form, and those are my preferred version of the texts. Either way, enjoy yourself! Summer should be a good time.
That's all for this week, and I will see you next time!
We've been talking about the Dead Internet for awhile, and now we can perceive the form of our destructor. The end of the internet is in view. It might not be tomorrow, but it is coming, and probably sooner than you might think.
Today's subject is a multipart series to show exactly what is happening. ClownfishTV usually spends their time speaking of pop culture news and whatnot, but some of their videos have also been focusing on the growing trend of megacorps slowly strangling the digital space while everyone is busy focusing their time on other issues. The above video focuses on the largest 20 year old video website that basically defined the era of modern media we live in. We are, of course, talking about YouTube. The company that helped create an alternative to dying mass media is now attempting to dismantle it and run roughshod over what made the internet what it was to begin with.
They have become what the once claimed to offer an alternative to.
As is well documented, from the time YouTube was created, it quickly became the site that defined how the video medium would be presented for generations to come. Before the '00s were over, Blockbuster and Cable TV were already on the way out, soon to replaced on the site itself by a slew of different styles from documentaries to original songs to political debates to, eventually, even livestreams, and news. The old paradigm had been completely destroyed. By the 2020s, videos were defined by YouTube's format, and no one would argue with that.
But those dying news corpos, movie and TV studios, Hollywood, and just about every big party in the old media space has hated how instrumental sites like YouTube were in weaning the public off of the mainstream that had detested them for decades, and have been dying to squash alternatives and become top dog again. And as the video above has shown, they are working overtime to do just that. They want the terrible old paradigm back, and the owners of the new spaces are letting it happen. These shambling dinosaurs (somehow) have lots of money behind them, after all.
It is not just YouTube, either. Make no mistake, they want the entire internet crippled, which will eventually destroy it. They are well on their way to getting it, too.
The second video I wanted to present is what is going on with Google, the world's largest search engine. But make no mistake, it is not just about Google. Every search engine is currently compromised and being demolished as you are reading this.
It did not start with YouTube! This is an issue that has been going on for some time, and does not appear to be stopping anytime soon.
Google Search was first casualty of their play, in the process breaking just about every search engine out there from selling your information to deliberately hobbling certain search terms. It has gone from being highly accurate two decades ago to being unusable today. This is the fate of what was once seen as the immortal internet.
The fall of Google and YouTube has been long documented, but what is gearing up to replace them? That is the main question. What is the purpose in all of this? If it was to gain control of the levers of power in the former Wild West space it is being done in the most incompetent way possible, and will eventually lead to the destruction of the very websites that form a large portion of how the online space worked. It's all going to be decimated.
While bots and studio plants have been a problem for a while, the advent of AI learning has made the issue explode all over in a more dramatic fashion. If anything, this has only accelerated the end of the internet that is obviously on the way.
But of course, it doesn't stop there. It has also spread to areas meant for discussion. Yes, even those have been neutered and rendered even more artificial.
For the final piece we are taking a look at, this one is on the meltdown of the last real news aggregate forum, Reddit, and how it has been infested with bots and glowies (unironically) in a last bid to finally break the system down. Reddit has always been a negative influence on online discussion and it has been made considerably worse.
This mirrors how many old BBS message boards would eventually get so flooded with spam that they would simply not be able to operate at all. The difference in the two is now they've learned to weaponize AI in a way that is trained on human behavior to blend it in better. The AI is now trained on the very behavior of the people they hope to fool.
In other words, the more you act like an NPC the more you become indistinguishable from the very bots themselves. Considering the climate of discussion we currently already have on social media sites, this makes them a prime tool to push for engagement. It is only going to make these site worse and more useless.
If you've used any social media in the past year, and you almost certainly have, you have seen this decline in usability first hand. It is not going to get better, and as the internet is flooded with more and more junk, and the human junk becomes just is as unrecognizable as the AI algorithm junk, people are going to begin turning away from the entire mess, simply because there is no other choice. Eventually there won't be any way to engage with humanity at all. We're nearing the end of the road for this once eternal space.
The internet is winding down, and it is a strange site to see. It is unknown how much time remains, it could even be longer than one might think even based on the above information, but it is definitely going to happen in our lifetimes. The internet is not forever, like was thought to be common knowledge even five years ago. The wild west we once marveled at is tamed and currently being broken in. The digital space is very much heading towards that cliff and its speed is only picking up, oblivious of what is coming ahead.
So what does all this mean? Not much, in the long run. It doesn't change what has to be done with what time we have left. Create, share, converse, and do it for the Good, for as long as you can. We have to break through Cultural Ground Zero before the rotting zombie of the 20th century attempts to drag us back into the grave once again.
The internet isn't forever, but that shouldn't stop us from doing what we need to do. We have to use every opportunity we have for as long as we have it. Do what you've have to do, same as always! Just be aware of what is lurking on the path ahead.
That's it for this week, and I will see you again soon. I've got some projects to get to. I promise they will be worth the wait!
.jpg)
