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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   32061 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism.

That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.

You want stuff that pushes boundaries you go to the smaller films that actually try to find niche audiences, not the Marvel Movies or Nostalgic Cash-in Remake Of Children's Franchise.

Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.

I'd certainly agree we go too far with respecting IP and copyright laws, like Mickey should definitely have been in the public domain way earlier than he was. But if you don't have any protection from copycats then that seems like an issue too. Why spend resources creating new things, especially the risky boundary pushing stuff you wish for, if people can just use any successful thing you make without permission, or at the very least compensation?

Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.

There is entertainment that appeals to a large number of people, and there is entertainment that is designed to be mainstream. Post-IP law, the former kind of entertainment will persist, but there will be no point in creating the latter kind except in the form of excludable physical objects and in-person events.

Just think about it:

No more soulless, toyetic cartoons. No more lowest-common-denominator reality television. No more hyper-generic romantasy novels getting polished tiktok campaigns.

These properties only exist because they can be marketed-- because they're the type of cultural product that let middlemen extract the most wealth. Without them taking up a huge chunk of our cultural vigor, more earnest works will have the space they need to thrive. Or not thrive, as the case may be-- but that's fine, because that's natural selection.

Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.

My experience with fanfiction (and fanart) proves this wrong. Fanfiction authors have sub-zero protections against "theft." And yet, authors are constantly appearing and making a mark as a direct result of their creative talent. And by establishing their bonafines for quality, they can even start making money themselves off of patreon. Name recognition and marketing will matter, yes, but just think about the incentives-- your goal isn't to sell your last work, it's to sell your next.

Frankly, you have insufficient faith in the free market. It's trivial to think up business models and financial instruments that could pool money from interested readers to generate new texts. Even if every current creative immediately goes out of business, people will still demand entertainment! The market will find some way to make the transaction happen.

That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.

The top ten highest grossing movies in 1990 looks very different from today. IPs have always been a thing. Slop has always been a thing.

But you used to have smaller-scale movies like American Beauty be one of the biggest movies of the year, you used to have more variety in your action slop so you'd get a Gladiator along with your Marvel and Bruckheimer slop, and that movie could credibly win Oscars without it being a pity nomination like with current comic book films like Black Panther.

If anything, the American audience has proven itself capable of watching more complex stuff. Not just in the past but on TV today. Part of the problem is the opposite: films have an even larger global market they need to appeal to today. The slop is extra bland because they need to squeeze juice out of every disparate community in the world.

Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.

Is that what happened to the zombie genre?

Also if you've ever consumed standard Chinese entertainment products they're hardly immune from slop creation.

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