Generations of Fakes

Sometimes it's hard to believe the mid-90s was thirty years ago. It definitely doesn't feel like it's been that long, and in the grand scheme of things I suppose it hasn't. Nonetheless, it is an entire lifetime away from the world in 2024.

This year has been a very bizarre one so far. I've noticed a trend with the "younger" generations, particularly as half of Gen X has now reached their 50s, half of Gen Y has now reached their 40s, half of Millennials have reached their 30s, and half of Zoomers have reached their 20s. That pattern being either internal implosion, or a tightening of grit and effort to move beyond the failed past and build something new. It's one or the other, not much in the way of variety.

The ones that have imploded the worst, I've found, are the ones still clinging to Geek Culture as their only real identity and questioning why that emptiness rules inside of them. The hole that only the Boomers seemingly could ignore, refuses to be filled by materialism.

The overwhelming suicide and depression rates make sense in this framework, but that's not really what I wanted to touch on today. The fact of the matter is that we are halfway through the '20s now, and the mood of the decade is starting to take shape and become its own thing. The defeatism of the '10s and the malaise of the '00s are making way for an era of change and cautious hope. Though it's not quite the change one can sell as bumper stickers or slogans on posters, it's a shift taking place internally. It's one that has to happen to escape the clutches of the late '90s and finally move on from the mistakes of the early 21st century.

It's been over a quarter of a century since Cultural Ground Zero and there are many lessons we have learned from it. I've written about many of them here, and there is little sense rehashing any of it now. However, there is one part of it that does need to be reiterated because it is holding back an entire sector of Western Culture from regaining any footing. That is the continuation of the myth of Geek Culture and its harmful legacy on both art and general lifestyles. If anything ever hopes to improve, we're going to have to finally shed this dead weight and accept a very important truth.

Here it is: Geek Culture isn't real, and it never was. Clinging to a lie, a false identity, prevents any growth or change from happening. It's been said many times, but it has to be reiterated here, because very slowly are people from these relatively younger, but aging, generations. The key to growth is to have something sturdy to build on, something your ancestors could build on before you rejected it for what replacement the TV and then internet told you to believe in instead. It is time to admit that experiment was a failure and get in line with reality again.

Why beat this drum? Surely everyone reading this now knows that modernity and materialism has to go, and everyone knows it is a crutch for the absolute failure that was the 2010s for those so-called younger generations to claim what their parents said was theirs. When you see just what happened to those formerly misled kids, it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to stay on this track. There is nothing ahead but misery and death.

The wake up call of the 2020s is to finally accept the way things are, not the way things could be, and especially not the way things dying corporations and media apparatuses tell you they should be. What is coming ahead is not an era that will be gotten through by spouting knowledge on zombie mega franchises from the 1980s--it is one that will require you to even remember what that era was like in the first place in order to carry on into the future. And you will have to do is break free of the influence of people who hate you.

This era is over. We just have to finally realize it.

The fact of the matter is that no one alive today will ever have the life the Baby Boomers had, and judging success or failure based on those old and dead standards is a losing game. This isn't to insult or bemoan anything said older generation did or didn't do, but to point out that the future is not living like your parents and grandparents did from now until the end of time. The myth of progress does not even rise to the level of a myth--comfort is not advancement. Also, as comfort is very rapidly and easily being taken away by those in charge, it becomes clear that it is not something that can be earned or maintained, nor is it the path to a fulfilled life.

I've noticed this myself since the end of the pandemic that Baby Boomers, of all generations, are the ones that are imploding the most violently. It's not so much that they are waking up to the artificiality of the lies they were sold in their youth, but more that their health is tremendously worse than that of their parents were at the same age. Their hard living and bad choices have left them in an objectively worse state than the older generations were in, and they are both far sicker and dying at rates absolutely shocking to anyone paying attention.

This is because they made the wrong turns and choices, and are now paying for it. I don't want this to turn into post ragging on an entire generation of people, especially one not doing that great, that's not really the point here, but to point out that this is the generation that raised the relatively younger ones currently trapped in uncertainty and dead ends. The fact of the matter is that it was always going to end this way.

And now we can admit as much.

The uncomfortable truth is that the lives Baby Boomers lived were anomalies in the grand scheme of things and, unfortunately, the way they taught the younger generations was to lead them on with false hope and promises they themselves were fed through their own mass media. Whether they had good intentions or not, today there is little advice to take from them compared to the older generations that came before them.

This isn't the same sort of weird anti-tradition mindset the Baby Boomers grew up with and poisoned much of their thinking (and still does to this day), but a wake up call that they were tricked as much as you were to accept a frame of life and position in so-called modern society that simply isn't real, and the remaining illusion of that false paradise is very quickly dispersing. By the 2030s there will be no trace of it left. At that point, options to move on will be limited to destruction or blindly looking around for pieces in the wreckage to rebuild from. This is why we need to start reconstruction now, before it is too late.

Entire generations have been raised around mistrusting neighbors, running from job to job across the country (and even the world), and chasing their tail for a sort of comfortable success that would allow them to spend their vacations in places without snow while they kick their feet up and worry about little more than waking up in time for their job while everything else around them just Works Out. Sounds wild, I know, but that's what the utopia was going to be, as long as you kept your head down and did what you were told.

But that was never going to happen, and we're quickly learning what the price is of following bad advice based on unreality.

The meme that made a million bugmen mad

It took a long time to get to the overall point, so here it is. The mass media culture that was built up starting in the 1960s and up to the early 90s or so was built by Greatest Generation money funding Baby Boomer projects. Much of the so-called importance and mass market profitability was due to the fact that A) there were no other options for audiences, and B) they were built on then accepted societal truths everyone shared and a frame they all operated in. Neither of these are the reality of how things are done today.

In fact, there are now too many options, to the point that art is completely disposable to most people and consumed passively as if it were oatmeal. Gotta watch something when you come home after work, right? Who cares what it is as long as it hits the broad minimum barrier for Current Year moral acceptability. It's hard to be ambitious when no one cares about ambition.

As for societal truths, well, I don't think I have to point any of that out. We are currently at the point where words and notions spoken by people from a mere decade ago is now taboo. I grew up in a world where 80s kids watched things from the 1950s without blinking and now there are full grown adults who can't even process movies made before 1995. (Seriously, do a search in any search engine and marvel at the amount of people who can't watch anything before that time period--it's an epidemic). Forget anything older than the 1960s (the saying "Don't Read Anything Before 1940" exists for a reason, after all), which severely limits the scope of "acceptable" art in Current Year--we are being taught that everything old has an expiry date on relevance, and that is very dangerous.

Pair these above problems together and you get a greater sense of how things became what they are today. While art is more readily available and has greater reach than ever before, the audience is also simultaneously less and more picky about what ends up on their plate because it exists as more convenience before anything else, as long as it follows the formula dying megacorps have set out for them as acceptable.

At the same time, they have been trained to funnel only modern corporate product down the belt-line in order to avoid encountering anything outside the acceptable societal frame (Hence, the "Don't Read Anything Before 1940" year becomes "1980" and, more recently, "2000"). What this leads to is exactly what the old industries now are, living in a detached void from the past and the wider world, and it's why they are dying.

Just like the Baby Boomer generation that spawned them, these systems were not made as sturdy and strong as you were told they were, and are now on their last legs. All it has left is a giant mess of confused and lost people in its wake.

What's coming next? Well, that is what we must prepare for, and the best way to prepare for it is to get an early start by ditching the system everyone knows is already dying. Cultural Ground Zero is unavoidable now to anyone with ears and eyes, but it's still clung to because there is no obvious path forward. While that may be true, it is obvious that pretending this dead system is still viable only leads to mental stress and eventual self-destruction. You know it's dead, I know it's dead. It's time to stop pretending otherwise. It is the 2020s, not the 1980s--mass media is not going to lead you to utopia. In fact, it is currently trying to lead you to the grave.

Utopia is not possible. Everything built on a lie eventually collapses, and that is where we are right now. We can't rely on the lie of Progress to carry us on anymore.

We need to build foundations based on sturdy things. That is the only way to make anything truly worth creating and preserving.

This was an anomaly. It's not normal.

The greater point here is that this is not culture. "Geek Culture" is not real. Just like Progress, it is also built on a lie.

Geek Culture is a mutation of 1960s to 2000s Baby Boomer mass media consumption twisted in a way to fill multiple purposes that Art was never meant to fulfil. What was originally supposed to be a way to distribute art and entertainment on a wider scale to more people became a way to shape tastes, opinions, and beliefs, of the people consuming it in new and increasingly warped ways. It's no coincidence more people live off pills and medicine than ever before.

If you doubt it then find yourself a modern Hollywood movie where every character doesn't have the same general beliefs and worldview (and the villains don't all have the same bland motivation and lack of drive beyond wanting to be mean for mean's sake), or a historical film where people who lived differently than the superior people of today aren't treated as two dimensional cartoons we're meant to "learn from" and look down on from our superior modern lens that isn't color tinted to murky colors and made overly ugly. It's all the same.

Everything in mass culture, OldPub, Hollywood, Big Tech / Silicon Valley, and AAA video games, are all run by groups that want to control thought and change public morals and discourse. They do this because they hate people as they are. Just the fact that Sweet Baby Inc exists, a group that offers no value to art or entertainment except to enforce corporate morality on projects they didn't create, should be proof enough that quality is not the factor here: thought control is. The whole reason they can do this in the first place when decades ago it would have been pointed out for what it is, is simply because entropy has rotted away at the foundations of what once was. You cannot sneer at Jack Thompson while accepting someone doing the same thing as him, just from a different political position. In fact, within a few years I'm sure many will soften on him, as well. That's how decline and decay works, after all. We're on a downhill slide.

We are also not rolling the clock back on this--Baby Boomer mass culture is over. All that's left is for the parasites to suck the blood dry and devour any carcass that is left. Anyone paying attention at all can point this obvious truth out all they like, but the fact is that the mass audience was demoralized long ago and have already long since walked away. They are not what is keeping this vapid apparatus alive and kicking.

This system is only kept alive by those who refuse to move on. This leaves the Geek Culture adherents, the ones that haven't yet been filtered into this death cult still fighting the pointless fight to roll the clock back before it imploded as the last holdouts on this dead system. And at this juncture, it has to emphasized to these poor souls: it's over, bro. You need to move on and take your business elsewhere. You are no longer the customers of this rickety system. They don't want customers--they want cultists for their lifestyle brands new religion, and they don't need to be reminded that you exist. Because for all intents and purposes, you don't exist to them. You're a relic of a bygone age that is not coming back, one that was used as a stepping stone to get to where they are today. Either get in line, or be destroyed by Progress.

All the more reason why this artificial frame must finally be scrapped.

Geek Culture is not it's own culture--it's the transitional state between Mass Culture consumer and the modern Death Cult. No matter how many snarky jokes you make at how bad things are, you are a dying breed and they know it. You know it. Normal people are gone and your number is dwindling as the 20th century falls further and further away from living memory. Eventually, all that will be left are true believers, just as they want. Your Geek Culture identity was never anything more than an artificial replacement meant to sever you from old normality. It was done to make you easier to filter into the fake identity centered around products and consuming they had prepared for you instead. It only makes sense that the next step after earning your loyalty would be to make sure their walking wallets customers would be warped to think opposing them is a moral wrong. Give your life to the cause or get out. They don't see you as human, because none of this is human at all. It never was.

The world is moving beyond the Corporate Period of Art, and what you are seeing now from it is the dying gasps of a sick patient on his death bed. A last furious and desperate grasp for control over that which they do not control, their delirious state blinding them to their reality. In the end, it will all still die out, but what will take its place after its gone?

What will you be after Geek Culture dies?

Marshall McLuhan once said that the modern era was defined by megaphones. Once a person hears a voice booming from an electronic speaker, his entire disposition changes, as does how he takes in the information being sent out to him. As a result, you gain the most people's attention at the same time, and should, theoretically, be able to hold their a focus to impart whatever you want on them. Back then, this was seen as the obvious future, and it was. For a time.

But what happens when burnout and exhaustion takes hold? What happens when the megaphone is no longer effective? What happens when people, as they always do, build up a tolerance to it, and begin to tune it out. What comes when the megaphone fails?

We are beginning to see it right now in the modern day. The old era is not only over--there is scarce trace of it left.

A livestream on what the Corporate Era of Art is was.

All of this is a way to say that falsehoods and little white lies have already done their damage and have led to generations that take the megaphone for granted. It no longer works on everyone some of the time--now it only works on some of the group all of the time. This cohort of true believers are the last water carriers for a dead system, and will do whatever they can to keep it alive. This is why they have little left but to spout slogans of "ists" and "phobes" holding back Progress by not supporting corporate products meant to educate the rubes.

Those are the only people left who care, and their very support is destroying them. These are the ones from the 2010s who lost their way and now spend their time striking out at everyone else for their mistakes and dashed hopes and dreams. It is an ugly place to be in.

But everyone else aside from the true believers and the older geek culture hopefuls already have moved on. They already know this fake culture is dead. This is why insulting "normies" is a losing game. They are the first to always abandon something once it rolls off the track, the canaries in the coal mine of dead trends and milked ideas, and they are always the first to leave. They might not be the first ones at the party, but they are always the first to depart once things get too rowdy, and it should tell you a lot that normal people have almost entirely checked out of modernity, especially since the pandemic and the ensuing fallout shattered so many lives.

I don't know what comes next. No one does. There are those convinced the future will be done through a neopatronage system similar to what it once was. Maybe they're correct.

However, something will eventually fill the void of the corporations, though how long that take or what form it will come in is anyone's guess. For now it's enough to point out the obvious that what we once took for granted, and what many have based their identities around for decades, is over. Whatever comes next could be better or worse, but it will not be like what we just had. Just like how Rock n' Roll is Dead, so is mass media and pop culture buried in a grave. You can't base your identity on a dead era with no future.

What awaits you in the future is much more than corporate products.

A document of an era long gone

As a Gen Y kid, I am the best candidate to speak on moving on from dead worlds. It is where my entire generation was born and raised, a wonderland of unreality. When the dream we were sold died, we were left without direction by a leading generation who decided to stop leading and instead squeeze every penny out of their head positions until the lights finally turn off and nothing is left for even the locusts to take. That rude wake up call is even still now affecting members of this cohort that are still locked into that delusion that the Future is almost here. they just need to hold on a bit longer!

I was there in the 1990s when all those forms and mediums were first abandoned by audiences who got sick of them. I watched them all decline into the parodies they were by the '00s as sales declined and more and more normal people walked away from them. It's important to note that nothing in mass culture actually increased in popularity in the '00s. Even the now-booming Japanese manga scene had a bubble burst at the time. It was a terrible era for art and entertainment, and it led into the 2010s: the period where the dying corpos took the gloves off and decided to wage war against their customers and force them in line.

If you doubt this, I suggest re-reading the Sony e-mail leaks from back in 2016 where the internal e-mails outright state they were planning on weaponizing discourse against those who thought the 2016 Ghostbusters movie looked like garbage (and it was) before it even released. This is because they knew it would be bad and figured out they could weaponize True Believer cultists against everyone else, a tactic they still use for every single movie they release today. And this is exactly what happened. It can't even be denied. The James Rolfe incident alone is enough to prove that it was a coordinated effort to shame the outgroup for not indulging in what the ingroup tells them to indulge in. Again, this isn't arguable. Everyone knows this happened, and it still happens today.

It's been eight years of this divisive tactic, and nothing but outright bombs have resulted from this hateful strategy. So why do they keep doing it and persist on attacking non-believers? It isn't just about money anymore. That should be clear when a near decade of nothing but financial failures doesn't lead to either bankruptcy or any change of course. They simply hate you for not being the cult member they are programming you to be.

And this entire issue is a remnant of an old failed order that has long since died out. It died out with Cultural Ground Zero back in the '90s.

My generation was told that all you had to do to get by was get in line and do what you're told. Firm handshakes, they say jump and you ask how high, and work smarter not harder. You will be rewarded for all your efforts. If it doesn't work, well, you're clearly doing it wrong. After all, you had an entire "successful" generation who had it all work out for them. Surely, if you can't do it then you must be a failure who just isn't pulling on their own bootstraps hard enough. History ended back in the 1960s and the rules are now solidified from now until the end of time.

The problem with this is that everyone knows it isn't true, but only about half the people will say so. The rest are like Geek Culture adherents, hoping to live in the ashes while still pretending they aren't living in Current Year dystopia. They are being shaken awake, but they are still fighting it, praying they can prolong the dream world of their youth when the future wasn't what it turned out to be. Reality is not what they were promised, and that is a hard truth to accept.

But it can be better, if you fight for it.

And now is the best time to be fighting.

New platforms and ideas are springing up everyday. New creators and audiences are showing up to the scene all the time. The old system might still be around, but it's irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, and, as we've just discussed many times, is over.

Artificiality always eventually falls away. No man can maintain an illusion all the time, and all tricks wear thin after extended usage. What we are seeing now is what happens when something is stretched out past its expiration date instead of being allowed to die a peaceful death. You are left with cultural necromancers who cannot create, who only live to prolong the shadow-play of their corporate masters further. And that is not going to end anywhere good.

What can be done is to put things in their place and accept the world we have now instead of trying to revive an era long since gone and dead. There are creators right now trying to create while dead corporations are rehashing dead IP with no new ideas. The gap between the two has never been more obvious before, and never before has it been easier to move on to greener pastures. It is time to finally let the dead rest.

Of course we can't quite know where everything will end up in a few years time, never mind a decade, but as of now, the path forward is clear: NewPub over OldPub, indie over mainstream, and taking in art over consuming product. The difference is clear.

As we move on into the mid-20s, the change is already upon us and more obvious than ever. Don't get left behind in a graveyard while the parade passes you by. Life is for the living, and now is the exact time to live.

The era of artificiality is over. Now is the time to build.

A story of pirates, zombies, inquisitors, vampires, mermaids, and necromancers! Back a Bad Case of Dead by Jim Breyfogle today!