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I have a question that could turn into a culture war topic but I need some kind of sanity check before I flesh it out further:
Does anyone else feel as though, even as the general populace becomes less and less optimistic, the mainstream narrative has nonetheless converged on a message of unrelenting positivity?
It is hard to describe, but the best examples of what I'm talking about that spring to mind are The Rise of the "Corporate Memphis" art style and the seeming ubiquity of beauty filters as a default feature in smartphones.
Or in the way Youtube video comments have turned from a cesspit of trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls to basically a competition for who can heap the most bombastically hyperbolic praise on the subject video.
The common thread is that these techniques/styles end up minimizing the appearance of 'flaws' and 'ugliness' whilst also idealizing the subjects it examines so as to avoid... I don't know. Offense? Critique? Any possible negative emotional valence? Where before there might be depiction of ugliness as ugliness or actual examination of social and personal flaws in a way that risks causing offense, where before there were art styles that embraced ugliness (while still being aesthetic) and Cartoons like Ren and Stimpy could use unpleasant visuals for comedic effect now it seems like most products are produced with the intent of avoiding any unpleasant sensations on the viewer's part.
And this now seems to apply to every single product of modern culture, aside from some decrepit/degenerate corners of the internet. "Good vibes only" seems to be the accepted norm... with the exception of certain acceptable targets who may be used as punching bags.
I'm not even getting into possible causes, I'm literally just trying to see if this is an actual, noticeable phenomenon.
Have you felt as though mainstream/corporate-produced culture has reached increasing heights of 'toxic positivity' even as your own outlook on the state of the world has degraded?
I'm familiar with the phenomenon you're describing and I think it applies in the realm of UX, brand identities, graphic design etc., but I'm not sure how applicable it is beyond that.
If you compare any random film made in the last five years with a film made in the 90s, one of the first things that'll jump out at you is how washed-out, desaturated and visually dark modern films look compared to films from the 90s. Modern films tend to be filmed digitally rather than on film, which produces more washed-out, low-contrast visuals compared to film. They also tend to use VFX and CG extensively, and one of the most effective means of hiding imperfections in VFX work is just to make the whole image darker. Six years ago, Zack Snyder got a lot of stick for producing a desaturated high-contrast interpretation of the Caped Crusader; now, we're at the point where people are complaining that literal Disney films are too (visually, not tonally) dark. The same trend is obvious in prestige television.
10-15 years ago the big complaint in video games was that everyone was adopting the house style of Call of Duty and Battlefield and making everything brown or grey. The worm has turned and now lots of things are magenta instead, but it still isn't hard to find modern games which are washed-out, desaturated, dark and generally unpleasant to look at.
To my mind, most of the big trends in popular music in the last ten years have prominently featured a conscious embrace of ugliness and poor taste, whether it's the ear-splitting sonic assault of drill music; the self-aware tackiness and excess of hyperpop; the bored, amelodic, disaffected repetition of British and Irish sprechgesang bands; or the deliberate minimalism of modern trap and SoundCloud rap.
There's an interesting contrast to be made between the Call of Duty era where games went for 'gritty realism' and the, call it the Fortnite era where literally nothing needs to be taken seriously, and real life personalities and pre-existing characters are rendered as a perfected, cartoonish versions of themselves.
I won't even say one is better than the other, but Fortnite definitely represents the sort of unrelenting positivity, the hiding of ugliness, the avoidance of negative emotional valence that I'm talking about.
On the other hand, I'd point at bands like Imagine Dragons and a lot of imitators that produce peppy and/or 'epic' sounding songs with aggressively positive/affirming lyrics that... also don't mean anything. They want to induce some positive emotional valence but without having any real 'message.' Other than a vague "YOU GOT THIS! YOU ARE UNSTOPPABLE, YOU CAN ACHIEVE ANYTHING YOU WANT" sort of statement. And these songs become MASSIVE HITS.
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