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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