This is from September 2025, but I’m intentionally posting it now because it’s relevant.
Criticism is useful, yes. The discussion is helpful. But when the product is so bad that trying to critique it makes my brain hurt, you have to go to a different level of analysis. I’m not even going to go into the woke rhetoric being used in the “marketing” of various media properties. I’ve touched on that briefly before in a definition essay that apparently needs a follow up. What perplexes me are the aesthetics and the philosophy of these inconsistent yet consistently awful productions that somehow manage to make a lot of money occasionally, somehow enough to offset the historically awful failures. And indeed it’s the aesthetics. Most of these things look nice, for the most part, even if the world building is shoddy and a lot of the eye candy is there to distract you from the fact there is rarely anything regarding a plot.
What bothers me more though is the philosophy behind the “creative” process here behind this slop. There are good premises and sometimes kernels of good ideas that exist on the periphery of today’s media. But when you need to reiterate what came before, steal ideas and even lines directly from other legacy media, people eventually are going to catch on. These “creative” teams apparently treat every idea as sacred in the writing room and somehow try to jam incongruencies into the script. There’s very little time taken to smooth over much of anything outside the visuals. Constant reshoots and bizarre editing choices only exacerbate the puzzling and baffling natures of the “content” being produced. You can blame AI all you want, but the incoherency is manmade. It’s sad because there is great work in the visual department and occasionally great acting despite little to work with. But so much of today’s works are forgettable outside of how bad they are.
Even some personal blogs these days are clearly produced with AI. That’s very concerning. Yet those make more sense than what big budget productions create. Independent productions can still turn out promising results, even if they fail a lot more than they succeed. They’re at least trying to innovate or challenge audience expectations. The woke nonsense is definitely a problem, but it’s not what ruins media; it’s the arrogance that’s fully on display. Arrogance has always been a problem, especially in legacy media. Executive tampering has always been a problem but it’s worse than ever. Like with the Hobbit films, meant to be two films but executively stretched into three is what ruined those films. Those films were never going to be as good as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But as originally constituted, Peter Jackson had a shot to produce two very solid films. The problem is when you stretch a premise too thin, as all these recent franchises have been doing, and not take the time to produce something at least coherent.
“Popcorn” entertainment is one thing. This isn’t that. People’s expectations are now so low that they’re willing to tolerate this slop, although that has fortunately changed more recently. Late stage capitalism, it seems, is on its death bed. But the tribal “independence” that relies on commercial platforms to persist isn’t going to last. It’s why I left content creation behind earlier this year. The platform I seek doesn’t yet exist and those that do have it, apparently aren’t reaching the right people. I know things could be worse.
As I’m winding down listening to my background train in the rain and playing some mahjong, I find myself thinking about useful thoughts. By this I don’t mean productive or those ideas intended to create some product, but rather thoughts that keep me moving forward, not getting stuck in the all too common feedback loops. My feelings towards the doom of humanity on its present course may be warranted, but it isn’t useful to dwell on them. Instead I need to be thinking about rethinking the language I use to think about many different things and invent words if I have to. The great irony is the writer of the dictionary of obscure sorrows (John Koenig) created something awesome and yet, where are any of these invented words seeing use? Nowhere that I can tell. So, when I finally get to parsing those notes, it will be interesting to see if any of these words have been used pretty much at all.
