Destruction Incorporated

Welcome back to the wasteland!

Been a bit, but I don't want to waste any more time, so let's get into it. Not a long one today, and yet there is a bit to discuss.

I don't think I have to tell you much about the mess that is OldPub, the old publishing industry sometimes mistakenly called "TradPub" (there is nothing "traditional" about them), and how far they've declined. It's fairly obvious just from one perusal of the shelves of your local big bookstore that they are far beyond irrelevant despite all the money and "prestige" they have behind them. It's all flooded with Japanese manga for a very good reason, and that's because the industry has long lost the plot in connecting with the average reader. They have to outsource it now.

However, it is also good to remember how this all happened. There are are more and more people joining these niche spaces every day, trying to understand just what might have happened to lead us to this position where everything is so fractured. Why are bookstores completely barren of new material from this side of the world, why is what little there so formulaic and vapid, and why is a foreign culture leading the charge for our own entertainment instead? Not to mention, there are still plenty of older folks who have been around for a while who don't quite understand all of this, either, and mistakenly blame Japan for this situation. Lots of fingers pointing in different directions. All of them should be pointed at OldPub itself.

This is kind of an odd situation, if one thinks about it for more than a second. Theoretically, manga could be topped. However, what requires that to happen requires a total overhaul of how OldPub functions. It's simply not going to happen. There is way too much ideology and far too many fragile egos in play for any kind of reversal. It will all simply crumble away just as the infrastructure built by previous generations does. It is now Destruction Incorporated, and the idea of selling art and entertainment instead of religious pamphlets is far too absurd to continue. If it wasn't there would be discussions going on between parties instead of endless lectures from the failures in charge of the rusted mechanisms.

And to think it all started because the adults in charge forgot how to say no, and let in fanatics to destroy their own hard work from under them. It's not that absurd, however. In fact, it happened before! You probably even know to what event this statement refers to.

The blueprint for the sort of literary takeover that destroyed OldPub is epitomized by the siffy cultists way back in the 1930s, who then seized the industry in the 1940s and turned a market for normal people into their own fetish playground. The pulp revolution over the last decade specialized in the rejection of their frame of "Don't Read Anything Before 1940" to discover just how much fantastic writing was buried for petty political reasons and deliberately left out of print. You can read more about this specific problem in The Last Fanatics where I discovered it for myself as I was writing about it. If one cares about art at all, OldPub is a failure at preserving any of it.

For a more general picture of what is going on now, I suggest the above video showing how the Literary Cartel used the Fanatic blueprint to do the same thing to the wider industry. Books about nothing written to no one and heavily leaning upon gimmicks and the promise of becoming a micro niche celebrity is what the Literary Cartel decided to do to their industry. It's like its own Oprah's Book Club, complete with the advertisement of religious cult figures for whatever ideology OldPub wants to foist on you.

We live in an age off closed of silos where no one interacts outside of them or attempts to connect to a wider culture, or can even imagine one existing, therefore all that is left is ruling the tiny sandbox of the few peasants still unlucky enough to be there. There is no ambition to reach anything wider, nothing but lecturing, browbeating, and celebrating death and dismantling. Us Against Them, over and over again, repeat until infinity.

But how did they do this? What is the secret formula that allowed this cartel to create such a wasteland of entertainment and edification?

By creating a formula for doing it. Art formulas have not solved a single problem over the past century, but boy are they the main culprit in causing a lot of them!

The subject of formulas has become radioactive as a discussion point in recent years, though there isn't any reason it should be. It's very clear to anyone paying attention that every art formula that has popped up in the last 30 years or so does not work for the simple reason that none of them have produced classics or done anything but shrink the market into the exact situation it is in now. All it has done is enshrine fetishes as genres and to lash out at anyone outside (and even inside!) of the small and ever-shrinking spaces.

You don't have to like the current anti-formula (if that's what you want to call it) zeitgeist, but it is an inevitable kickback from people who had to sit aside and watch the destruction happen despite their plentiful warnings that it would lead to exactly this. The obsession with formula implies a distrust in the artist and the environment that might allow him to foster in, saying that in order to succeed there is somehow a one fits all pattern that will mold his unique vision into something Better. Though, again, if that were the case: why has it not happened yet?

The second video above from the same creator goes into the process of creative death through formulas in depth even more than usual video on the subject. The fact of the matter is that art requires identity given from the unique circumstances around the artist's life that lead him to where his is. If the only thing he has to express are the same buzzwords in the same delivery and from the same social positions and the same "Global Standards" approach to not rocking the boat as every other "individual" in the scene, then why would the audience be interested? At that point, it's all interchangeable and meaningless. What is the purpose of consuming slop like this?

When the people in charge tell you that shrinking is growing and ignorance is freedom, what is an artist supposed to gleam from it? How can you connect when the industry tells you that you are meant to be just another cog in the crumbling machinery instead?

Fanfiction writers in particular find the idea of being against the inarguable failing state of modern writing beyond the pale. After all, they saw how all the major IP franchises were brought down by fanfic-tier thinking and the resulting yawn the audiences let out in response. It doesn't even matter if the product "makes money" when it's out of the conversation in a few months anyway. At some point, instead of being a hobby, fanfic writing took over the corpo jobs to pump out more content. Nothing is being explored, because there is nothing left to explore in these properties, it's instead being rehashed and exploited.

This isn't to say there's no value in fanfic writing, but it has always meant to be what it was and never anything more. It's a hobby, not a career. By removing it from its context it has become as polluted as everything else in the industry has. Now there is no ambition beyond endlessly reheating and recycling so the dying system that hates you can stay afloat for five more minutes. What other reason would it have to act this way?

No one in the industry wants to do anything but put out Content, and that is proven, as the second video shows, to be the actual focus of Creative Writing courses in Current Year. It's far off from the purpose of writing, or even creating any kind of art, but is inevitable when the industry itself is run lock, stock, and barrel, by a small group of people who have very limited imagination or idea of what art is even capable of in the first place.

All they care about is the club. Just like the siffy crowd did way back in 1939 when they were figuring out a way to control the industry for themselves. That game has remained unchanged, regardless of the players in it.

This is the end result of unimaginative people running industries that are supposed to run on imagination. They not only cannot imagine appealing to people who aren't them, they think slogans and checkboxes are the end goal and height of art. There is nothing more than this.

How exactly do you reason with that? The simple answer is that you don't. The industry's death spiral is as comical is it is unbelievable, but it's also understandable in a climate where fanaticism is more important than connection. Say that right things and get rewarded, even if your actions don't match up with your words. None of it matters except cynical grifting and elbowing others out of the way for your share of the scraps, leading to a vapid climate of art and entertainment that chases all the normal people off. Eventually all you're left with is a gaggle of ladder climbers scrambling for the top rung that leads out of the sewer. It isn't taking you anywhere higher. Why are you even in the sewer to begin with? That's as much as can be imagined these days.

Without a monoculture to rally around, the audience will not demand better, because they have other options. Instead of complaining, they walk away, leaving the people in charge smug in the thought that their art must be top notch since no one is complaining about it. No, they just gave up on you instead, which is way worse. They don't even care enough to tell you they hate it. This should be the worst place for a creative to be, yet it's the one most strived for these days.

This leaves the "mainstream" to wither away, fighting for the last scraps as it all comes caving in. This leaves us all in those silos to pursue our own individual goals, never to interact with each other ever again. Whatever the end goal of all this modern nonsense is going to look like, I don't think anyone particularly knows or, honestly, cares.

Eventually there will be another monoculture again. It's unavoidable since it is part of human nature to need community and a way to express creativity in a way that benefits more than just themselves. Until then, however, all we can do is watch and observe as the Fanatic philosophy formulizes itself into death cult ritual and obliterates itself in the resulting purity spiral. And hopefully we never let this destructive behavior take hold again afterwards, though that is obviously hoping for a lot. It'll take a lot of time and effort, but hopefully it'll happen one day.

Regardless, Destruction Incorporated is simply the way the people in charge have decided to run things until the clock runs out. Let's see how it works out for them.

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The World Braindead

Welcome back to the wasteland!

I don't know where you are, but here the weather is beating me down and taking no prisoners. It's not unbearable so much as it is annoying, much like today's subject. As bad as the weather might get, you always know it's going to go the other way eventually. The world isn't ending, no matter how much some of us wish it was, but it has also always had its antis: people who just hate everything and want it to die. Sometimes they disguise it very well.

Today lets take a look at one particular movie that disguises itself as one of peace and love but is actually one of death and misery. It also took a long time for this movie to be exposed for what it was, even though it seems so obvious to us today.

We could talk about some of the most obvious subversive movies made. Pleasantville and American Beauty the most obvious ones people still talk about quite a lot. There are some less obviously subversive flicks like Forrest Gump or Wag the Dog, but are no less corrosive than the former two. Even though these films say one thing, they tend to mean something else, which is a nasty trick Hollywood used to be very good at pulling offer. 

However, back in the day it was also a lot less subtle and a lot more blatant about what the message, not that unlike how it is today after decades of trying the poison pill technique instead. The difference is how they focused more on selling a specific worldview back then that is currently fading in the world of Current Year, mostly because it failed and everyone knows it failed, even if they won't admit it. This makes the movie extremely hard to go back to.

The above video speaks about the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still which, for a long time, was looked on as a siffy classic film on par with Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Invaders from Mars. It was seen as one of the Big Ones--and important, to boot. They even had a popular band for a while named after the main character! To this day the film is also studied and looked on as an important building block in modern cinema. It goes without saying that the movie was popular and influential back then. Few movies surpass its cultural importance.

It's also not a good movie.

While the earlier mentioned three movies in this set still hold up, this particular movie does not. The reason is, even from people who agree with its general thesis, because the film is a clunky and ham-fisted lecture with plenteous logic gaps meant to make the audience take one lesson away from the movie in question with no wiggle room or alternate solution. It's a religious tract for the progressive world order of its day. You can see its entire playbook from the above video itself. Suffice to say, the movie does not hold up.

The message being sold in The Day the Earth Stood Still is the same as HG Wells book The World Brain that I discussed in The Last Fanatics. It is the beating heart of 20th century materialism that runs the engine of the siffy mutation formed through convention consensus in 1939. This thesis is the idea that humanity all subconsciously and collectively will come to the same beliefs and conclusions that are, shockingly, the exact same as the siffy author's worldview of the time period. In essence, it says humanity is destined to have an epiphany that siffy authors are actually their superiors and had it all figured out before the rest of you plebs. Do what they say and reach paradise or you are an evil monster who must be put down. As you can tell, things have not changed that much since The Day the Earth Stood Still released.

Therefore, keeping this philosophy in mind, the trick for these writers is to create a specific sort of protagonist, a creature above man that is not supernatural (because the supernatural is infantile and evil) which will guide humanity down the right path. He is clearly above the common piece of filth that is man, and must be portrayed as without progressive sin (progressive sin of its era) with all the solutions that lesser humans are too inferior to figure out on their own.

Once you see this is the one trick, much of what is called "classic" siffy absolutely falls apart, because this is what it is all hinged on. You can even see it done today, complete with new progressive sins and designated acceptable classes of acceptable targets filling in the villain role. It does not work anymore because the trick is obvious to everyone, but said writers have no other one to use, so they just keep using it over and over to diminishing returns and ever-shrinking cliques that do little more than decay into even more bitter beings. Truly the class of betters that should be ruling the world. At least, so they are still told by the people in charge.

This corrosive view of existence is also why adventure stories have always been demonized by these same types. In The Last Fanatics I covered the prevailing view of this set that aliens could never be portrayed as evil or malevolent. Humanity always had to be inferior, the lesser, or the most evil, because the other, the alien, was the Higher Being above them. This is because said anti-social writer considered themselves the outcast and the other, and always saw themselves as above the common man. Portraying an alien as evil is tantamount to calling them bad people. And that's just not possible! They're smarter and more special. The Important People tell them so!

Therefore, aliens could not be cast as anything else than Higher or else the writer and story would be labeled as x-ist or y-phobic and therefore discarded without further thought. Aliens are your betters, just like the other, and you need to process this immediately or get sent to a camp. (Or in the case of a particular siffy con, beat your chest about open minded tolerance while having your convention a few hours away from literal concentration camps). 

You see, Humanity is bad because Humanity isn't like the writerOther. Therefore, it's a personal affront to these types to express any creativity outside this narrow ruleset. Truly the "genre" of imagination and wonder.

Human beings being cast as an irredeemable evil is key to the playbook, since this framework is created by anti-social types who dislike reality and believe it would be changed for the better if they were in charge, but all they have done is made everything worse. You have to ignore reality, you can't argue, you can't discuss, and you can't offer alternatives. You are to shut up and be led by your betters, the ones who decided they know better but have yet to prove it even with having decades upon decades of institutional support from those who hate humanity even more than they do. What we are left with is a World Braindead, not a World Brain.

This attitude is what set the stage for the climate we are currently living in right now. That is also why it's falling apart and in constant need of propping up. It's a little like a circus tent falling down while those under it frantically run around to prop it back up. The end result is obvious, and those panicking are simply wasting their time.

All of this could have been avoided with the one thing such stories don't allow: self-reflection. This means self-reflection of the writer, not an attempt to project a faulty view of the world onto the audience so they can worship at your feet.

The Day the Earth Stood Still does not understand that change always starts with the self. The movie is obsessed with tearing everything down simply because it has its own superman to bully the world into compliance. It centers on demonizing locality and shared culture to prop up a bizarre individuality that is also part of a worldwide collective of acceptable beliefs and rules decided by the strongman. The one world future of Klaatu requires the right creature being put in charge to rule it all, somehow also embodying the everchanging goals of Progress at the same time. This is the world these anti-socials want. It isn't possible, but that's also why it's dying.

The movies, and these people, don't understand that if you want a solution to a wider problem, you have to start local. You have to connect with people you might not understand or might not understand you and come to a new consensus on how to build something better through both of your contributions. You can't wait for some top down revolution to do it for you. As has been shown, that isn't how we got here to begin with. We got here through laziness and flippancy, allowing rot to take hold and telling ourselves its Natural or some nebulous thing like History leading the charge. Decay is easy; growth is hard. We haven't really tried to grow anything in decades, just complain and hope for others to do it for us or punching holes in the boats of those trying. Well, that isn't going to happen by doing this. The proof for that is Current Year.

The only solution to the current state of the World Braindead is to not follow its example. To start small and focus on that. Give attention to what we can. It's the only option we have to counteract the destruction of Klaatu-types who want us to fall in line with their rotting materialistic view of existence. We need to build, not destroy.

The good ending to The Day the Earth Stood Still would have been to throw Klaatu into a furnace and call his bluff. But the narrative was specially made to not give the characters the choice: it's willful and blissful enslavement Vs deserved genocide of the human race. Bow to Satan or die. He'll give you the world and all you have to do is give him power to tell you white is black and black is white for the rest of your life. Isn't that a small price to pay for tolerance? For a world where everyone can be equal some of the time?

It starts with a rejection of the premise these 19th century materialists set up. Not just Doing The Opposite as many online stylize themselves and their image, but understanding what they got wrong in their initial thesis of what humanity is and correcting with a better and healthier vision. Live a better way free of paranoia, bitterness, and tired memes. Instead find one of belonging and growth. Start local, always. It won't start anywhere else.

We can only start from ourselves, not to change but to understand. What we've lost, what we need, and what we have, is more important than what could be. There is no Eden on Earth and there never will be. We have to start living for something better than failed utopias built by people who have proven time and time again to be full of nothing.

Klaatu's false premise and promises need to be rejected. The World Brain must be allowed to finally die. Only then can we finally move on from this pit we've lodged ourselves into, and only then can we finally have a new vision of the future.

It starts with ourselves and those around us, and that's where the focus should be. Until then, at least we can laugh at the absurdity of the Klaatu class and the World Braindead they have left in the wake of their failed ideas.

Not like the movie has much else of value of offer these days, just like the mentality that thought it up in the first place. It's all dead and rotted, so let's finally put it all to rest.

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