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Ya know, you're not wrong, but this is a thing that happens constantly, and it's not because of a dumb woke conspiracy to force humiliation rituals on us.
My comparison is the government: why do government officials and politicians make so many empirically bad decisions? Why do many of them seem to be very bad at their jobs? Most of them are not stupid, and at least some of them actually want to be successful in managing the government and the economy. You can say some of them really are ideologues and just want to hurt their enemies (probably more true in government than in Hollywood), but most don't actually set out to be villains or incompetent.
The simple answer is that there are no adults in charge, and most people are just... not good at what they do. Ego and ideology do get in the way, but I believe in both Hanlon's Razor and Clark's Law.
Principal-agent problem. It's not their money they're wasting and there are preciously little consequences for failing the public.
Their job is to get the job and keep the job. Sometimes that requires being good at their nominal duties. But especially in politics, that connection is often rather loose.
Sure, but in a non-dysfunctional ecosystem, that just means that these people will eventually be replaced by people who are. The question is: why is the entertainment ecosystem so dysfunctional?
Please tell me what non-dysfunctional ecosystem I can go live in where this happens.
My local bar? These places are not hard to find. Don't know how it would help to live there, though.
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Best bet would be new frontiers that haven't yet been colonised by parasites.
Every system is dysfunctional. But they are dysfunctional in different ways and to different degrees. We are trying to figure out the nature and extent of the dysfunction of the entertainment industry and speculate about its causes. What I meant to say with that comment was that a system driven first and foremost by a profit motive would not give rise to the phenomena we observe: namely products that fail in the exact same way over and over again without anybody correcting course.
If that's the case, then they are obviously not failing and we have chosen the wrong lens to measure success. But what are these bombs succeeding at?
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