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.
This week's post didn't take a lot of time in the oven because I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible. The reason for that is because it's not only a timely topic, but one I have a lot to say on. Today's subject also contains several elements I've wanted to go over for some time now, and this is the perfect opportunity to discuss it all. I also recorded an hour long episode of the podcast on my Patreon on the subject, so you can also hear more about it here. Suffice to say, I had a lot to say about this topic.
I grew up in the 1990s. I think that's very clear for anyone who has read anything from me. I am a member Generation Y (born in the '80s and grew up mainly in the '90s), also called the baffling moniker Older Millennial sometimes. My childhood memories are all encased in this decade, and impossible to remove from it. One of my own books, Y Signal, was set in 1995-1996 and I did my best to make it as accurate as possible for the story being told. Suffice to say, the decade means a lot to me, even if I am well aware of its flaws and criticize it all the time.
All this is to say that I loathe what the decade has been turned into in the modern age. Whether by my own cohort or not, it has been transformed into a theme park for bitter burnouts who also hate the era they are trying to profit off of.
I once covered the failed Netflix series Everything Sucks, which took place in 1996 and got absolutely everything wrong about it, from the fashions to the attitudes to just plain misunderstanding what normal people thought and believed back then. This turkey turned the decade into an amusement park ride of media kitsch and sarcastic eyerolls in order to sell a stock "finding yourself" story that has been told a million times before. In other words, the '90s shell was a cynical gimmick to sell garbage to both nostalgic adults and curious kids. The moral, as always, is that the past is terrible and you've always been miserable and will always be miserable in every era to come. That isn't true, of course, but it's the only reason these uncreatives use any 20th century time period to tell a story. They have no other story to tell.
Unfortunately, that failed series is not alone, as the video above highlights. In the years since, cynical nostalgia revisionism has only gotten worse. With the rise in physical media, vinyls making a comeback, and older TV and movies being enjoyed by younger generations than ever before, it is clear there is an interest in What It Was Like. Unfortunately this means propagandists and opportunists are using this thirst as a way to poison the well.
You might wonder why this subject annoys me so much, and I'll tell you: I don't like the decade I grew up in treated as a playhouse for cynical hipsters stuck in 2000s irony poisoning posturing to fool around in and lecture me over. This isn't just about historical accuracy, but about general respect for both the people who lived in that era and those who want to know about it. Basically, I hate lying, and that's all this amounts to.
I should also clarify that I'm not criticizing works that aren't 100% accurate. That is not the argument being made. When doing a period piece, things will go wrong. It happens. The difference is in the authorial intent: why those inaccuracies exist.
For instance, I once read a Dean Koontz book that took place in 1997 or so and it was fairly accurate to the time period (which it had to be before the time jump to present times for the latter half of the story) and more or less got it right except for a single mention of Pokémon cards, which were not on these shores for another year. The author probably got them confused with the game and assumed they came out at the same time and would be just as popular. He mentioned other things that were correct from what I could recall, but that wasn't. This, however, was not a big deal because Mr. Koontz tried and he did his best to treat the time period with basic respect. The book is good, too. Therefore, it doesn't matter.
The opposite of the above example is a piece of hackwork that cynically exploits the time period as an aesthetic to cash in on blanket "nostalgia" to sell the audience phony memories and attempts to rewrite the past to suit their own selfish ends. Material like the above Everything Sucks is like this. It's meant to sell a lie wrapped in a candy coating of an era it doesn't understand. Another product like that failed series is the recent Mixtape movie-disguised-as-a-video-game.
For those unaware, Mixtape is a "video game" that was made to invoke '90s nostalgia, though from what I heard the writer director of it did not even grow up in America, where the thing takes place. Regardless, there's no defined year, but you can parse it down to being around 1997 (again with that year) simply due to the music selections and the level of technology mentioned. There is no file sharing mentioned, which means it has to be before 1999. Though even that gets dicey (more on the subject later). The selling point of the game is to fool burnout adults into misremembering what the '90s were like and tricking Gen Z kids into thinking this is what it was really like back then. There is no other selling point here. Why else would you tell the story?
It certainly isn't the gameplay, as there is basically none. I can't even say the soundtrack is a selling point, because it is oddly chosen and extremely inaccurate to the time period. More on both of those later. For now it's enough to say that "recapturing" the era is its selling point, so let us talk about how it fails at that before anything else.
Mixtape lives or dies on whether it successfully inspires nostalgia in '90s kids or not, so let me start this criticism out first as a '90s kid.
The story concerns soon to be high school graduates named Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra. They were supposed to go on a road trip, but Stacey (the game calls her by her last name "Rockford" for some reason instead of her first name) decided she needs to go to New York to catch some kind of soundtrack programmer (this plot point is very vague, I'm doing the best I can) by running into this woman she has never met randomly in the street so she can get a job making mixtapes as a Music Supervisor professionally. Therefore she has to leave tomorrow morning for this one extremely vague chance to define her future. Yes, this is the inciting event of the story.
I will talk about the absurdity around the music later, but for now I want you to remember that this is 1997. While she has a computer that certainly has Windows 95 on it, there is nothing saying she has the internet. It's not even mentioned. Even if she had the dialup internet required, how would she know any of these things about this random music industry woman's daily schedule she wants to run into? It's never explained. Given that, again, this is before the internet was ubiquitous and there was no social media, coming across even vague information would not have been easy, never mind a random employee's personal schedule in a place like New York. Anyone who lived in the 1990s in North America would know how hard it was to get any deeper information on anything you liked. Again, it isn't even like the character is a computer whiz. It never comes up.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, by the way. No one talked the way any of these kids talked in the '90s. No one used the expression "Big if True" in the '90s. No one liked things ironically for "cheese" in the '90s. No one talked in stilted smirking above-it-all aphorisms that would make Joss Whedon blush in the '90s. All of this is hyper irony hipsterism that emerged out of the 2000s. The writing is no different than flops like Dustborn or Forspoken, or even older punching bags like Life Is Strange. Unless you believe teenagers have been talking exactly the same with no differences for the last 30 years, it's obvious this is fake and put on.
Everything about this game is dated, not because of the era it's supposed to take place in, but because it feels like a product of the empty-souled 2000s that produced a million Ramona Flowers wannabes. It would be like if the anti-80s slander of the '90s were still the default of today, or if tastemakers still stereotyped the '70s as disco world with giant mustaches. It's an outdated frame that should have been discarded years ago, but still it persists.
The tired revisionist '00s hipsterism is what makes this fall so flat. The core trick is to present nostalgia full of winking nods to tell you that the person writing this is just as uninvested as you should be because nothing means anything. Don't ever be invested, don't ever stick your neck out and try, just do as little as possible and convince others that you should be rewarded for doing it, or, like, you know, realize it's not for you. If '90s nostalgia is not for me, someone who grew up in the decade, then who is it for? I am the exact audience for this, which is why I'm going to tell you why it doesn't work. The '90s might not have been a pristine decade, but it was not this dead-souled as outdated '00s irony hipsters portray it as. Accuracy should not be this hard.
Not to mention that there are countless hours of home movies from the 1990s, in contrast to previous decades, one could watch for research. It should be the easiest decade to get right, and yet is the one portrayed incorrectly the most. There are also actual films from the decade starring kids and teenagers one could watch, too. They might not be 100% accurate to the times, but they are far more accurate than nostalgia pieces being made today. When the kids from the Mighty Ducks sound more mature and realistic than these supposed teenagers do, in a zany kids comedy of all things, something is very wrong with what you're doing. Fulton Reed might have had a ridiculous slapshot, but he still talked like a normal person. No one in Mixtape does.
All this to say is that I hate that '90s kids are not allowed to have our own Stand By Me or Wonder Years. By that I mean a TV show or movie that legitimately tries to adapt the time period as accurate as possible. We can't even get a Dazed & Confused or That '70s Show (both made in the '90s, ironically), a more comedic take that at least treats the decade with respect. We can't get anything at all that actually even tries. It's all dated ironic hipster-brained slop from burnouts who can't leave their warped 2000s philosophy behind. Instead of something made to try to understand the past of an era of real people, we get smirking backwash slop slathered in lies. It's hard not to get even a little miffed at this repetitive pattern of disrespect.
The 90s kid factor is only part of it: what of the music? After all, the game prides itself on nostalgia for the '90s and music as well. Music is part of the title, even. Surely this means the soundtrack is a mix of songs teenagers from the '90s actually listened to. You have an unlimited budget for your "indie game" to get songs in perpetuity that not even Rockstar could get for the million selling blockbuster Grand Theft Auto games, after all. Accuracy here should be even easier with that crutch. How could it possibly fail on that level?
Well, it does. Spectacularly, even.
To be fair, Mixtape doesn't fail because the songs are necessarily bad. It fails because it undercuts its own nostalgic selling point (the entire reason this is being made) by completely disconnecting with the music selection of what '90s kids listened to. Let me explain what I mean by this, because it's hard to get across in only a few sentences.
The point of Mixtape is to sell nostalgia to a mass of people who actually lived in the time period in question. This means the soundtrack should have things teenagers listened to at the time, specifically delinquent loser kids since this is what the main character ostensibly is supposed to be. and yet the soundtrack comes across as, yet again, a 2000s hipster's music selection. '90s kids did not listen to almost any of these songs. The game fails monumentally on getting this aspect right. It fails so badly it ruins any hint at nostalgia its trying for.
To get to the point: No teenager in 1997 was listening to music from 1969-1989. You might have been, as in you as an individual or a few of your friends, but this was not how teenagers listened to music in the '90s. It was a constant battle to be seen as fresh and cool. The '90s were defined by an endless series of fads and no one wanted to be the one caught listening to old stuff, because it meant you were not cool. That's just how it was.
As an example, I had to convince a friend to listen to Led Zeppelin, of all things. He didn't listen to "old music" back then. Beaming over discovering Boston's self-titled in a used CD store was considered weird for a teenager. Isn't that music for old people? None of the people I'm talking about were hipsters, either. Hipsterism wasn't really a thing for teenagers. All of my examples were ordinary kids. They did not listen to old people music.
If you want to get the era right, the soundtrack should be songs from the era it was in that kids listened to. Even if its something as varied as Megadeth's "Sweating Bullets" or Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" or at least something that was playing on the radio in 1997. Rap, ska, swing, jangle pop . . . there was a lot, and Mixtape contains absolutely none of it.
The point is that this is what the majority of these kids listened to back then. If you want to connect through nostalgia then you need to connect to what the majority of the people at the time were doing, even if you weren't. No teenager was putting Rainbow, Stan Bush, Rush, or Devo, on mixtapes in 1997. Kids at the time would have thought they were old people music. I know because I saw it for myself. You would have been seen as a massive weirdo for listening to "your parents'" music. It's only in the 2000s with the combination of irony music hipsterism, file sharing, and the rise of video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, which helped introduce younger generations to this stuff that changed this perspective around. In the 90s, it was very different.
On top of this, there is the practicality of how a teenager in a small town would acquire this music in the first place. Vinyl was a relic and forgotten by teenagers in 1997 and cassettes were already fading. They bought CDs. If anything, the '90s were the decade of the CD. Therefore, the local music shop is probably the only way the main character is getting music, which would certainly only contain newer music since, again, vinyls were shoveled out by that time and not everything old had been re-released on CD yet. This is a lot to keep track of, but, well, of course it is. It's a lot of work to get things right, but it doesn't mean I shouldn't expect people to try.
If the answer to inaccuracies is "Don't think about it" then why am I tasked to think about any of this? Does any of it matter at all? If it doesn't then why was this made in the first place? If you aren't taking the music seriously, then why should I?
Lastly, in regards to music, why does the main character have burned CDs in 1997? They barely existed then due to insane cot and availability, and were in no way common until the 2000s around the time file sharing was. I know because I was burning mix CDs myself at the time. Yes, they existed in extremely rare places, but again, this is not a common or shared experience. Most people only started burning CD once Napster blew up. Why are burned CDs in a nostalgia product that is trying to sell common and shared experiences? No mass group of people were making mix CDs in 1997. On top of it, why is the movie game then called "Mixtape" at all then? The soundtrack used in the story is on a burned CD. It's all so baffling.
This is also supposed to be a "video game" that takes place right in the center of the Golden Age of the medium, and yet video games play absolutely no role in the character's lives. None of them, not even side character. Everyone in my class growing up in the '90s from kid to teenager played video games, owned a console, or knew someone who did. They were massively popular among the under 25 set. When Tony Hawk Pro Skater came out my entire class was buzzing about it, and that close to the time this movie game takes place in.
You have the premise of a nostalgic video game supposedly centered on the '90s and you don't include your own supposed medium in it. I don't even think the rental store included in the game carries video games. They're just not there at all. Strange choice. Then again, Mixtape features none of what games at the time did. There is no challenge, no lives, no score system, and no fail states. So what makes it a game when it doesn't contain what even Sierra adventure games from that same era had? It is possible to pass entire sections of this "game" without touching the controller. So why is it considered a "game" or "interactive" at all. It even gets the part where you rewind the cassette tape with a pencil wrong. It not only ignores video games as a medium, it isn't one itself. No wonder game journos love it. They've wanted movies with minimal button presses instead of video games for decades now, and here is something that gives them the bare minimum.
We went through how Mixtape failed at reflecting the '90s, how it failed at using nostalgia, how it didn't get the music right, and how it failed at being a video game or even paying tribute to them, so let's move on to the last one: the writing.
The best way to describe the writing of Mixtape is that it's written by someone who doesn't remember the '90s, loves '80s "cheese" ironically, and still thinks '00s hipsterism is cool instead of annoying like it's been for the last quarter century. No one acts like a person here. The main character is a vapid selfish idiot who talks like a listicle from Cracked circa 2004. Her guy friend is trying to channel Bill & Ted with quirk chungus random one-liners that make no sense while adding nothing to what little story is here. The two of them only seem to be friends because it's convenient and have nothing in common aside from their generic hatred of normal people, because these stories always have to star losers and never actually contain normal people except to sneer at them. The other girl is possibly the worst one, a psychotic narcissistic airhead with anger problems brought on by a cartoon strict dad stereotype that folds the instant she threatens criminal activity on him. Every other character is a non-entity that all talk in the same repetitive cadence.
The story, such as it is, contains pointless asides, one-note minigames, and dialogue straight out of a Scott Pilgrim fanfic, all on the way to . . . nothing. Whatever story just ends suddenly because it decides to. There's no real climax or satisfying denouement. It just stops. Perhaps you're supposed to take away that life is fleeing so always take a chance. That might work if the main character didn't initiate this story of leaving her hometown for a stupid reason that will never work out and would have been stopped if a single person had bothered to mention that impossibility. So no it's a series of pointless absurdities that would have been easily avoided if anyone had decided to be what hipsters like these hate more than anything in the world: normal.
You see "normal" people have problems, too. They have fears, hopes, and dreams, and they actually do matter. "Freaks" who choose to be freaks, who choose to reject normality because they think they are above it, are not more interesting people for it. Those who fall through the cracks by accident or unwillingly, then work to find their way out of the dark, are more compelling characters than those who wear their deliberate anti-social posing like a badge. You could be normal but you chose different because you're Special and Better. Good for you. You have nothing of substance to offer anyone, normal or on the fringes, because you just admitted to believing you are above them. You have no story to tell that will connect to those you dislike..
That, if anything, is the ultimate failure of Mixtape's story. It wants you to care about people who don't care, people who would actually hate you. It wants sympathy for the unsympathetic. In short, it a whole lot of nothing for those who believe in nothing.
All of this comes around to the fact that right now the past is popular even with younger kids. They want to know it better. Products like Mixtape are trying to sell them a past that never existed. They're lying to them to sell product and profit off a past they never experienced themselves. These kids are looking for honesty, for hope, and maybe a window into a world they never knew to add onto their own: and they'll find none of that here. They can tell, too. You'll find plenty of clips online of streams, reviews, and Vtubers, dogging it for its "Millennial writing and humor." They can see through it all, and that's certainly a good thing. It's saying this doesn't work anymore.
The original intent of this whole project, however, still rubs me the wrong way. It's indicative of a generation that won't move on, and I'm not talking about the 1990s. I'm talking about the revisionist brain worms that cause nonsense like this "game" to be made in the first place. That didn't exist in the '90s and no one needs it to exist now.
Much has been made of "grifting" in the current entertainment spaces. One aspect of it not elaborated on is the reason it is so prevalent is because those doing it have no respect for the people they're trying to wrestle money out of. They only want money and kudos from cliques of people like them. They have no interest in normal people, which is why they have no qualms fleecing them.
If these irony poisoned types don't want to sell honesty, then what are they trying to sell and why is it so important that you buy it from them? Every piece of art exists for a reason. Why does this lie exist to do? Who is it for?
Nostalgia might be a feeling as much as it is a time and place, but if the feeling is built on a lie, then you have been lied to by the feeling. Lies are fake which in turn makes the nostalgia phony. To what end is this lie meant to take you? What benefit do you get beyond giving money for a product pumped out for consumption? How does it benefit you, in the end?
The reason I live in a wasteland is because of lies like Mixtape, because of those who care nothing of truth or honesty beyond what they can get materially. The reason '90s nostalgia exists is because so many people want to get away from the grifters crowding in on all sides to hose them and are looking for a window to a world different from this one. For the jailer, to sell the key to another cell, then lock it up and say the prisoner is now free, is an evil act. It is wrong.
You might ask why all this matters. Why do you care so much about your past, old man? It's just a product: either consume it or shut up. I care because it's fake, it's cynical, and I am well within my right to loathe an attempt to cheaply exploit my past and lie to my face because it's easy. Art should mean something, even a silly throwaway video game, and it is silly to not expect more. At some point we need to expect more than the bare minimum.
You deserve more than to be exploited. We all do, and asking for a little bit more from people you are giving money to should be normal. What is all this for, in the end, anyway?
It's been a bit, but I'm finally back with a new post. This time I wanted to expound on the way modern studios think of their audience. Mostly in that they don't, at all. Well, they do, but not in the way they really should.
You've heard the phrase before: Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You. This means that refusing to reward people who dislike you should be paramount in your decision making. Even if you like something, you shouldn't reward the people making it both so that it doesn't encourage poisonous behavior and so that you aren't complicit in rewarding it. It's been a growing notion, the phrase getting a lot more use these days than it used to, partially because of the buying public's increased apathy towards those trying to sell them products while simultaneously spitting on them.
Truth be told, separating the art from the artist is not not totally possible. The artist will always have something of himself in what he does. However, what matters is not whether you agree with his philosophy or way of life, but if what he creates is genuine art: an attempt to connect with people outside himself. This is increasingly difficult in a world where Hollywood and the music industry (and most other industries) can't help but wag their finger and sneer at those not like themselves, and inform the audience that unless they believe 100% in lockstep with them they are not only not Good People but also unworthy of purchasing their product and engaging in their wares. This unearned arrogance is why such folk should not be rewarded for what they do.
That said, most customers understand this now. The issue comes from after that realization that these people do not see you as people.
In today's art and entertainment climate, finding someone who doesn't hate you is surprisingly difficult, even more so to find one who doesn't see you as little more than a wallet with legs even if you do believe 100% of the same things they do. The only places one can seem to find and reprieve is among scattershot independent artists. It just seems as if everyone has an ulterior motive and, unfortunately, they do.
The above video from Real Life Fake Wizard highlights a recent example of a grift played with audiences that have long since gotten tired of being played with. It is what happens when you don't see the audience as people. This grift is particularly malicious since it requires many layers of lies to be explained. Check the video to see it in detail.
It once used to take a long time to discover these sorts of schemes. It could be decades before you learned that author you enjoyed secretly hated everything about you or that a certain musician was some kind of a criminal deviant as opposed to a normal drug addict. Now, we find out almost instantly because modern artists and creators (and the money men) no longer care about even trying to lie to the people they're trying to get money from. Now they just outright tell them that they hate them, if not with words than with direct action, like this. Whatever level of respect that once used to exist is gone, and the audience knows it.
There was a lot of talk recently about the destruction of "Christian Art" industries and the revelations that there never actually were any to begin with. It was an artificial genre ghetto construct no different than what happened with siffy way back in the 1940s. The people in charge catered to a fringe demographic and pretended it was now the mainstream one, and in the process alienated the majority in order to profit solely from the obsession of Fanatics. In this case, instead of anti-social materialist zealots it is Bookstore Betty, an archetype that barely even seems to exist anymore.
And not only that, they are perfectly willing to throw Bookstore Betty under the bus if it gets them a seat at the big boy table. As seen below:
This is what everyone can sense now about how things are. It's all about grifting now. There is nothing that puts the audience first before opposing sides over silly political games. The worst part is that it always ends up here, in the end.
The issue with most studios/groups/artists/whatever today is that the audience comes secondary to either monetary compensation or fame. Such people are wannabe Hollywood insiders using acceptable verbiage and rubbing the right shoulders to get what they want. They never believed in anything to start with. At some point we bought into the idea that however you make money doesn't matter. All that matters is that you make it. It's either that or become a true believer of some ideology and obtain infamy instead (which will also somehow get you tons of money from your masters for doing what they tell you). This is where the industries have ended up.
But that's never been the reason to create.
You create because something inside you stirs you to put something forth: and it's something only you can put forth. It's not so you can be famous or become showered in praise and money. You create because you have to, because there's no other choice but to create. There's a spark begging to be lit, and when it is lit it cannot be stopped. This is creation only you can make and give to the audience, and it's your responsibility to do just that.
Nothing else will do. There is no other option but to do it.
For one who creates, you can't hate your audience. You can tell yourself you do, or misdirect your frustrations at them (countless examples of that happening), but people who create never actually hate their audience. It's impossible. The reason is because the entire spark to create is due to the need to express this idea, this piece, this work, that no one else can express, in order to connect with other people so you can help make sense of it in some context. At the base of it, this need requires an audience or it's not really creation, it's just vanity. Even if it's unintentional, all art does exist for audience enjoyment. We can't keep pretending otherwise.
Therefore the way many modern companies and creators treat their audience is wrong and backwards. It is also why the audience is shrinking and walking away, and why the monoculture is gone and more or less forgotten now. There is no attempt at connection, only leeching, and there is no industry or medium that can survive for the sole purpose of leeching. This is the reverse of how it should be, and why it is not sustainable.
Lecturing in art is also leeching, by the way. It implies that you deserve an audience to berate and browbeat into submission with your work. All anti-audience motives in creation are also anti-art, a sign of death, and will not lead to any growth. Lecturing isn't connecting. If you want to learn, find a teacher, not an artist.
In fact, that subverted view of the world is why we are where we are right now.
There are plenty of creators aiming to do better than this dead end state of being, and those are the types to support in order to get the art and the work you desire. Eventually the dead wood will be cleared away and all that will remain will be the path forward.
After that? Hopefully we can finally leave this era dead and buried. I don't know about you, but I'm beyond sick of the grifting and the lecturing. I just want something to connect with again, just like it used to be.
Been a bit since the last post, but there's also been a lot going on behind the scenes. For instance I was suspended from Twitter/X last week for "Inauthenticity" despite my account being a decade old and have been given no actual explanation for it. I severely doubt a human being has even been involved in the process. That said, there's little I can do about it from my end.
Anyway, let's get to today's topic. We're in 2026 and we're nearing the end of a lot of things we thought would be immortal even a decade ago. In fact, we're closer than we've ever been before and there is no turning back.
Movies are over. I bet you've heard that statement before but never really put much thought into it. Why would you? Everyone has been saying it for years. On top of it, it's very difficult to imagine how the death of an entire industry will come about or look like, especially one older than any of us alive today. Well, now you have a very good view of it happening right now and right before your eyes. You are witnessing Hollywood dies as we speak, and it's no embellishment or lie. Everything is coming to an end, and it won't be much longer.
The above video from Red Letter Media features a look at the recent trend of a sea of flops flowing out of Hollywood. Not even movies people aren't seeing but movies people have never even heard of, movies that barely even exist. Content being pumped out into a flood with no destination is everywhere and nowhere at once. These works might as well be AI generated because for all the effort it is making the same impact on the audience as someone who pumps a random joke video out online. No one is seeing anything anymore, and that isn't going to change.
And the question of why that might be is an interesting one. The younger generations are not watching movies or TV anymore. The only thing that makes money is old IP (which means it is primarily Gen X, Y, and Millennials, watching what is put out) and nothing new is being created or built up. There is no younger audience being cultivated which means the industry is destined for the grave. Much like comic books and the music industry before it, the old ways are not attracting new faces anymore. The only people keeping the old crumbling machinery operating are the nostalgic who still consume the old IP hoping for some of that old forgotten magic to return again. Some even tell themselves that it's just as good as it's ever been. This isn't a formula for growth, creativity, or anything new being done, it's just stagnation.
While this is going on in the foreground of the industry for all to see, behind the scenes hides an even bigger disaster.
At this point, it's all just fighting over scraps. Whatever idea that creativity was ever a part of the formula has long since been lost to cynicism and grifting the next couple of bucks out of the nearest mark. This is the only idea anyone in charge has left. There is nothing being built in these formerly big spaces, it's all in decay.
The older generations only want nostalgia and the younger generations want nothing. Nobody wants a future, so one is not coming. In a few generations these industries will be gone, dead, and buried, with the geriatric Gen Y kids who couldn't let that IP die . . . well now they can then be buried with it. So in the end they get what they want.
Though there are plenty of younger people interested in old artforms, none are actually interested in the current state of any of these industries. No one wants to be a movie star or a director, they want to watch Charles Bronson or see David Lynch's filmography. No one wants to go to the theatre, they'll watch an old movie on streaming or (increasingly) DVD and Blu-ray instead. No one wants to rent from Blockbuster, but they want to know how the rental industry worked. In essence, it's more interesting as a myth than as it currently stands, like walking by the ruins of an old civilization and barely remembering it was there not that long ago.
The above example of the video store is actually the subject of a brand new game released on Steam that appears to be gaining traction recently. Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is about running a rental store, specifically, in the early '90s when rental stores were at their peak. There is a good reason for that.
This is because despite appealing to that Gen Y nostalgia, it was also a unique time in modernity not likely to ever be repeated again, and this is really the only way to present it in a way that makes sense to modern sensibilities. There isn't any way to really explain to people who weren't there how these places operated or why they were a big deal.
But now they can have at least an idea.
One might be surprised at how interested younger folks actually are in these old mediums: movies, TV shows, music, video games, and comics. They are just, like everyone else, not interested in the current zombie versions of these things as they exist in in the void of Current Year. One can't blame them for that. They want something made for them, but their generation gets nothing but table scraps and cynical brain rot appealing to keywords and hashtags (the modern version of buzzwords) that exists only to pander and grift a few dollars out of their already slim wallets. No one is aiming for them because they have no idea who they are.
These industries are all fake, and they know it. However, that doesn't mean they don't still hunger for art and entertainment that means something to them. Everyone will always want that. They just know they won't find it in the modern world where everyone is out to get them, not speak to them. It's just a lost cause.
So what actually is the solution? How does one even talk to the younger generations when we don't even speak the same language anymore? Can it be done?
No, probably not.
The only solution is to create a society that values high trust, shared values, and community. It would have to be the opposite of today's hyper individualist (yet, paradoxically, highly conformative) society of backwards language, constant political agitation, and hatred of the past. As long as these divisions exist, there will never be any sort of world like that one that was lost. It will just be more division and less in common until we are little more than several billion little islands floating around detached from each other in the sea of modern society. It's a dead end.
Until then, well, this is what we're left with, and this is all we'll have. Better get used to it, because we'll eventually lose that too. That's just where we are now at this point in time.
I'll leave you with this bizarre (and oddly common) find on YouTube, before that, too, is also eventually swallowed by the void. Travel back to this strange mirror universe of 1991, back when you still had a shared culture and wonder where it all went.
Because it's not coming back again, and the younger generations seem to understand that a lot better than we do.
Thanks for reading! I'll see you all again soon enough.
Been a crazy February, and March isn't looking to slow down. Here's hoping the weather does, at the very least. I'm still working slowly on various projects and dealing with some annoying real life things, but I'm also still thinking about topics to discuss with you all.
And today's is a good one, so let's get right to it.
Recently, one of the topics that has been running through my head (to the point it became a topic on my podcast), is the subject of Edutainment. It's more about how the definition of Edutainment has stayed the same over the years, but its perception since I was a kid has changed, and not for the better. What was once seen as a joke is now taken seriously, and it has made entertainment and art as a whole considerably worse and less inspiring. I don't think anyone can deny this with a straight face: Edutainment is lame, but now we insist it's not..
The reason for this change is still quite unclear to me, though it's undeniable that a shift exists, at least with those around my age and slightly younger. At some point we came under the delusion that Edutainment was not only extremely effective (it isn't), but it's also worth defending and reshaping entertainment around (it's not).
But there is no reason for this silly belief. Edutainment is a perversion of both entertainment and education, taking the worst parts of both without offering anything in return to make up for its deficiencies. An invention of the 20th century in an attempt to subvert the mass media landscape, all Edutainment has ever done is fail and leave no mark on the minds of its viewers beyond mockery and a neutering of both Entertainment and Education. It just doesn't work.
The reason for this is because both Entertainment and Education exist to do different things, and cannot be crossed over with the other in a satisfying way. Of course this does not mean you cannot be entertained while learning or learn something from entertainment, but that those are secondary to the primary reason said things exist in the first place. You can't prioritize both. It's simply impossible.
Entertainment exists to entertain, it is primarily for leisure. It is meant to allow the audience to relax and unwind, to allow the audience to rest in the place they have chosen to lay their head down. Art exists to allow the patron to appreciate a slice of reality from an angle they might not have expected. There is a sense of trust between the artist, the art, and patron, that involves both understanding and like-mindedness. They all come together to connect for a wider purpose for everyone involved.
No one engages in art and entertainment to be educated: they come to be enlightened. There is a very subtle, but important, difference here. Enlightening means to be shown a world apart and yet close to the one we live in and seeing a new side of it. It does not mean teaching or lecturing the audience about a specific subject. This difference is not as appreciated these days, but it's still reality, and one of the reasons the audience trusts the mainstream industry less and less.
We have lost the original point of what we're doing.
Education, on the other hand, exists to instruct and teach. It requires a very specific type of relationship between the two parties, one above the other. This cannot be an equal relationship where one gives and one takes: it involves one side deliberately speaking down to another party in order to educate them on the subject the student agreed on in order to be there in the first place. This is why so many kids don't learn much in school: they not only didn't agree to this relationship, they also aren't looking to learn in the first place. Education only works when the relationship is agreed upon and the student and instructor are engaged and on the same page. It cannot work otherwise.
This is the opposite of how art and entertainment works. One is done on even ground, the other is not. It's a fundamental difference which precludes any sort of mashup from working, and they clearly do not from any example we have seen over the past decade especially.
Edutainment dilutes entertainment by making its focus on that unequal partnership with the audience. It also dilutes education by masking it in a fog of entertainment and blunting any point that is supposed to have been gotten across through learning. In essence you're getting entertainment without the wonder and mystery, and you're getting education without the focus and clearcut language and relationship between a student and teacher. You are getting the worst version of both at the same time.
And everybody knows this.
This is why obvious propaganda like Captain Planet was a punchline among all the kids when it came out. Everyone knew what it was and it was terrible at doing what it wanted to do. The lessons were unsubtle and not very clever, and the entertainment value was stunted so that those kids wouldn't get the wrong impression of violence or adventure as anything but controlled and neutered. Neither of these approaches satiate childhood wonder.
It was much like how Peggy Charren and her ACT group forced educational content into kids shows and was never not a punchline in the schoolyard. Remember the GI Joe lessons at the end of episodes? The ones that had nothing to do with the show and were crammed in? That was because of her and her ilk. If you don't remember that then there is also the Sonic Sez segments in the Sonic cartoon which had marvelous lessons such as "Don't climb into the dryer" which is as ridiculous as it sounds. You can also find them on YouTube with a comment section filled with people laughing at them, some of which weren't even around when said shows aired.
This is how you know they failed at what they were doing.
All this aside, an other issue is that this lame moralizing occurs while at the same time executives and parent groups keep dictating what sorts of "lessons" shows should be taught to the kids, thereby affecting the creation of these series from people that had nothing to do with their creation. Again, all this was supposedly for kids but no kids liked them and they were always treated as lame punching bags, which is how they stayed for decades.
But recently that changed as the people now in charge of the entertainment industry have decided they want to lecture the customers in everything, because they see themselves as above those they are supposed to entertain. It doesn't matter what gets put out, if it has the correct message then it is considered a net good and anyone against what they are doing, for whatever reason, must be a Bad Person. There is simply no other explanation for this madness. This would be like if those parent councils browbeat all the kids back in the day who made fun of Captain Planet for being lame: Who cares if it's lame, it's right!
The thing is, it actually doesn't matter if it's right or not: it has failed as entertainment. It has focused on the lecturing first and left the entertainment a distant second in consideration, and the audience can tell. This approach is a dead end, and it's why no one in charge of these industries can produce anything of value that connects with a wider audience anymore. They can't do this because their priorities are backwards and they have no intention of being humble and realizing that.
This doesn't mean you can't "say something" in art and entertainment. It's more that what you say is meant to be baked in to the piece you're creating. The themes and meaning come from the story the artist has to tell. It comes from the music, the art, the creation, itself. This is how you sometimes get interpretations of pieces not originally intended by the creator. It isn't because either party is wrong but because they see reality from different angles and are able to come together over the piece and find new wrinkles in it together. Regardless, it is impossible to create art without meaning, but it is possible to miss the meaning in the creation process. This is because the primary importance is in the creation: not the intended meanings.
Another way to put it is that education is about learning what you can and can't do when learning about a subject; entertainment is about seeing all the subject has to offer. They are entirely different approaches that cannot mix together.
Edutainment is one of the worst and most embarrassing failures of the 20th century and it is one that has no business carrying over in the 21st. No one learns anything from it, and no one is entertained by it, and yet we pretend it is successful when both the least imaginative and most didactic people are the ones who push for it, thereby proving its failure right out of the gate. If this is the kind of people edutainment produces then it's clearly well past its expiration date.
Instead, let's strive to improve both the dismal state of modern education and create a new ecosystem for art and entertainment. They both need it instead of us constantly hiding behind a failed mutation that has no place in today's climate.
And maybe we can finally leave the failures of the past behind us. We can finally have those better ways we were promised long ago. We're well past due for a new golden age of art and entertainment. Let's make it, together!
I don't know about you, but the sudden winter weather has been quite the pain to deal with. Was hoping for things to ease in a little more, however it doesn't seem like it's going to let up. We're just going straight into cold weather, it seems. What a pain.
That aside, let's get to it.
Today's topic is less about the contents of the above video in question (though not entirely) and about the great message included inside of it. Today we will discuss what truth in storytelling is supposed to amount to and how it can be used to dishonestly divert attention or focus by those who engage in it honestly. This is hard to describe so I'll try to e straightforward about it. Essentially, storytelling is truth telling, it is meant to impart reality on the audience... which is why it can be used to lie about reality instead. And there are countless examples of just that out there, especially today.
In essence, stories are powerful and are meant to present truth to both the teller and the audience, and it takes a special kind of deceiver to weaponize that against the people who are meant to be the audience. And deceiving is almost expected these days.
To sum it up: stories might not be obviously true on a surface level but they are always meant to be epistemically true. When your audience sits down to listen to you at the campfire, they are expecting a true story. If they're not it's only because they've been lied to so much they are skeptical by default. This is not how it's meant to be, but storytellers over the past century have deliberately soured the relationship with their audience due to the antisocial crowd in charge of the large industries. And now stories are seen as completely disposable and throwaway.
So what does it mean to be epistemically true and how did the subversive crowd lie about it? That is a bit complicated, but the long and short of it is that they didn't just outright lie to audiences: they told the true . . . to a point. They used the truth to wedge themselves in to present lies as truth. The way this is done is quite interesting. This process means that storytellers can focus on part of the bigger picture that is True while ignoring the whole, thereby lying by omission and manipulating those they see as beneath them. The thumbnail topic in the above video about the "Satanic Panic" is one such issue that is still bandied about today.
Before anyone rolls their eyes and starts smugly typing their expert opinion, it might be wise to ask why this is being brought up at all in today's topic. The reason is that the "Satanic Panic" is a media buzzword used to distract from the epistemic truth in order to frame a different lie as reality instead. Let's get into how that works.
For example, when one tells a story about how crazy it is to think of Dungeons and Dragons or metal records are satanic, they deliberately ignore the real issues of the time period to frame the entire thing as one large canard about the former subjects instead. This why you were taught to hear the phrase "Satanic Panic" and dismiss everything related to the subject. You won't learn who Ralph Underwager, Gary Caradori, or Marc Dutroux are, or why they matter, but still consider yourself an expert on the subject because your silly out of touch grandma took away your Pokémon cards a quarter of a century ago. You don't know what the Franklin Scandal is or why the Finders not being a one-off project is significant, but it doesn't matter because Tom Hanks was in a silly Dungeons and Dragons is Evil movie back in the 1980s. This is how an audience can be manipulated.
And it still carries on today.
This process of lying by omission is an appeal to emotion using massaged facts in order to avoid considering a larger truth. But this is only part of it. This whole mechanism prevents a sort of epistemic investigation of the larger project, a form of propaganda made to stunt thinking. In fact, it's the most effective kind of propaganda there is, because it it isn't straight out lying: it is using a piece of truth to cover the bigger picture. It is the worst kind of manipulation there is.
Let me explain further, using a similar example we still hear plenty about today. This isn't meant to be directly political, but since it involves political decisions that changed an entire industry, it's unavoidable.
Why does no one ask why Bill Clinton's Telecommunication Act of 1996 enabling Clear Channel to rise and Al Gore's wife persecuting an entire industry then lead those same people who had their careers directly harmed and industries gutted led to those same people to vote for them and enabled their destruction. How does one support those who directly harmed them without even a second thought or doubt? Where does that attitude come from? As we've seen, it did not fall out of the sky: it was constructed.
Why do supposed anti-censorship crowds today still obsess over the above "Satanic Panic" half truths while ignoring the existence of entire organizations like the ACT and people like Peggy Charren who broke the back of the animation industry in the west and eventually allowed Japan to eat their lunch? It's because they were told half a story and never investigated further, because it seemed truth enough, even though it wasn't actually so when one looks into it. The woman who gutted the animation industry and children's programming was awarded the presidential medal of freedom for doing so, and once again no anti-censorship soldier ever speaks on it.
Isn't that amazing? It really shows how effective half-truths are to outright lies, and it's why this has been the way it's been for so long. It's a winning tactic for subversives.
This is the larger point being made. These are all half truths meant to obscure a larger and more important Full Truth, and to this day there is a whole generation that consider themselves experts on all the above subjects despite not knowing half the story. This is by design. It's very diabolical when you think about how it's done. In fact, it's the sort of thing people increasingly hate journalists for today, because they only investigate half truths that look at a small piece of the picture due to being taught the larger one doesn't actually exist at all. Only their pet causes matter, not what led to said causes existing or what supporting them might lead to in the future. What are causes and consequences? They don't matter aside from the one narrow subject. After all, it's about Your Truth, not The Truth, and that makes all the difference. The Self comes before all else.
The largest issue with the 20th century was exactly this obsession with fragments at the expense of the whole. Investigation for the cause of half truths, not epistemic ones, and this lack of care for the whole is what lead to the alienated culture we live in today, and the loss of a high trust society and shared language and customs. We are currently living in the late stages of this way of thinking, and still repeating old half truths constantly to keep us locked there.
How do we get out of this? There isn't an easy answer to that. Much of this is simply decay and entropy not being fought against. Much like the so-called "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec, it's just a fancy name for moral laziness and lack of care for the wider picture. Unless decay is actively fought against and reversed, the state of things will not get better, and everyone knows it. Whether they accept this Full Truth or not is another story. However, it will change. Much like how the younger generations now think the status quo from the past quarter century is lame.
Here are some examples of this happening right now:
Whether you agree with the language or specific examples in the above is not quite the point. It's more that the younger generations are not as satisfied with half truths as ours were taught to believe wholeheartedly since the 20th century established its new reality as default. The younger generations know something is wrong on a deeper level and that the answer is to not shut up and do what those in charge say to do. Whether that is due to generations of broken promises and dead end thinking is to be seen, but the status quo will not continue on this way.
They want to keep digging for a better truth than the ones they were told to accept. This is going to lead to something quite different than the 20th century we've left behind.
If anything, this should all be an encouraging sign. Whatever we think is coming is probably not what is actually on the way, but it hardly matters since Truth always eventually wins in the end. Half truths and lies eventually fall away to the mists of time even if we don't care to discover them for ourselves. It just Is.
And after that? Well, that's when the real building begins.
Until then, keep your chin up and eyes forward. December is almost here and so is the cold pushing in. Let's get through it same as we always do, and see what lies ahead.
We made it to October and the weather finally shifting to something seasonal, so let's really get into something eerie for the spooky season. Once again, we're going to go into today's creative climate, a horror unto itself.
Much has been said and written about how terrible the education system has been for fostering creativity and imagination, but in the end it's still not enough for the simple reason that it's frankly not good enough. We are all hungry for more.
This isn't just about the US, either, but a worldwide phenomenon of machinery designed to turn both the individual and the collective into a machine meant to churn out whatever the top of the chain desires. This mentality has turned all mainstream entertainment into pure swill bailed together by tired 20th century tropes and franchises meant to educate the ignorant masses into worldviews and behaviors that might have felt fresh 100 years ago but are clearly outdated today. We've gone over that before, so there's no sense rehashing it. Artificiality has always been valued over creativity.
As the above video shows, the system itself is not designed to stir the imagination, no matter how many TV shows or movies you see or remember that told you how important "Creativity" was, in the end it was never about that. It was only ever pretty words meant to boost the ego and coax all potential creatives to follow the same path to deliver the same Content. And looking at the modern climate today, it feels like a joke from a '90s animated sitcom. That is because it is.
And that was made in the '90s. Nothing has improved since then, but clearly it was an issue even back then. In Current Year, the film industry now is on its last legs.
So how do we create a system that incentivizes creativity over slop? Humanity over artificialness? Excitement over formula? How do we overhaul the 20th century machinery that has ground to a stop here in the 21st?
Many complain about how the AI explosion fosters an environment of lowest common denominator storytelling to churn out product, but the truth of the matter is the industry has been incentivizing it themselves over decades now. The above video from the '90s highlights the mentality as it already existed back then, and it's much worse today.
The problem has always been the artificialness has been baked into the education artists receive themselves. One cannot explore outside the socially acceptable ideologies of today. One cannot look beyond the genres the mainstream has decided are all that is, even as their stores empty and their sales crater. One cannot experiment because safety is incentivized and mass produced to blot out anything else coming up.
As the below thread shows, the issue with artificiality is not the lowering of the bar, that is already on the floor and has been for decades. The problem has always been that the education system has always desired it end there. Blaming AI for it is missing the forest for the trees. The system was always going to lead here, and it is the root of all this.
The biggest problem with all of this is that there is no easy solution. There is no switch one can flip to making everything better. In order to even begin to fix if requires an honest reflection and reassessment of a lot of bad ideas that have come since the industrial revolution kicked into high gear and became a religion for materialists. We simply aren't there anymore, no one thinks that way or believes it, and yet we float on rehashing it to diminishing returns. Now there are no returns at all.
We know the education system does not produce creative people. It also does not produce writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, or critics. Yes, people go into these schools and come out in those professions, but next to none are actually made into those things from what they learn. Kids are instead turned into automatons and widgets for the crumbling machine, meant fulfill roles no audience wants and job positions that are quickly fading away. It is detached from reality, and we all know it.
So why are we still operating in this way?
As I said, blaming AI at this juncture is stopping well short of the problem. Even if it went away tomorrow, it wouldn't stop how the audience has been trained to Consume Content and expect beltline product pumped out indefinitely. That isn't going away. All this AI stuff is simply doing exactly what those in charge want. (Which is why they are already using it without saying anything at all, and audiences will eventually accept it. Anything to keep the flood of Product going forever.)
The only way out is reorienting of systems and thought processes. The 20th century is done, as been said countless times, so why are we still clinging to it? What advantage do we have clinging to dying systems and ideas that have proven to be dead ends?
We don't train creatives. Arguments could be made that we never have, but we certainly do not do it today. We have Content Creators, not artists or creatives. All we want is nothing and everything at the same time, and that is why we have no need to educate or train anyone. And that is how you get today's dead culture. Nothing is being made: it's being produced.
We require a re-enchantment of the world, a detachment of cynicism, subversion, and emptiness. The only way to get that is to admit where we are now was a mistake and won't lead anywhere else. We have to move on.
Let's not worry too much about a dead past, but work to build a living future. It's going to happen eventually so there's no sense wasting time. We can start today.
