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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31025 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Here's my opinion on how to defuse many aspects of culture war: reduce copyright length to at most 40-50 years.

Consider. Lots of people were upset when Rian Johnson deliberately made the Last Jedi to be about fighting "toxic masculinity" and "fan entitlement". But he is not the problem. I am not here to criticize RJ. His interpretation actually had some interesting ideas even if it was badly executed and inconsistent with my general concept of what SW movie "should" be.

The problem is that Disney anointed him to be the one to save Star Wars from smelly nerds. And there's nothing you could do unless you had a billion dollars to buy SW from Disney. Except in the end this didn't work out for "woke" cause either, because TLJ did poorly at the box office so Disney hired Abrams who overrode every RJs decision. Everyone loses.

I think part of the reason why "culture wars" are so bitter is that all sides are essentially reduced to pressuring (or begging) large, faceless corporations into reflecting their values. This creates mutual distrust because both sides know that corporations will drop your values the second they stop being profitable. It is fundamentally toxic.

But if noone owns IP then we can have both "based" and "woke" version of every franchise. Fans will rise to the occasion to make both. Hence, less bitter culture wars.

Of course, there's zero chance Disney ever allows erosion of copyright, but it is fun to speculate.

Alternately, just don't build culture around proprietary intellectual property. Having your cultural identity as an American tied to the whims of corporate interests is a recipe for disaster. See: Disney's Black mermaid. Millions of white Americans grew up identifying with Ariel and Disney World as part of their core identity, and now when the globalist interests of Disney shareholders decide that white America is a liability and not an asset, white America's cultural heritage is in the crosshairs.

At least when white American identity was more closely tied to Christianity you didn't have this problem. It actually really bothers me as a white middle American to think about how much of my own childhood and shared culture is owned by corporations or even just by people who wrote and published books or created something of their own. I envy European and Asian cultures who in many cases have many thousands of years of folk tales and traditions to draw from when American culture is locked behind IP protection laws from decades ago.

Your proposed solution is to end copyright protection sooner, but to me the ideal solution is to avoid building identity on anything proprietary to begin with. Admittedly I find Marvel and mass market films kind of gauche to begin with and the idea of people rallying around these properties as cultural entities worth tying identity to makes me uneasy.

I envy European and Asian cultures who in many cases have many thousands of years of folk tales and traditions to draw from

Currently being displaced and destroyed by the American commercially-produced folk-culture substitute. It's really sad to me, but that's a culture war that has already been lost. The American mass-produced substitute not only is several billion-dollar industries, but it's also designed to reflect the current social and material conditions. Meanwhile, the conditions that sustained actual folk cultures around the world, such as peasant life in most of Southern Europe, have disappeared or are disappearing, leaving the original traditions void of most of their former meaning. We are left, for example, with American neo-traditions which are usually centered around spending money. But the local traditions have lost their original meaning, so even where they are still practiced, they only can be either a tourist attraction or a LARP (or both).

To give you an idea of how pervasive this is, even traditions that don't depend so much on their meaning, such as tales for children, have been displaced by mass culture substitutes. For example, where I live most of the traditional tales have been completely forgotten, displaced by the Grimm Brothers in the best case (at least still based on a tradition from somewhere) and Disney or books like "X has two daddies" in the worst and more common one.

Currently being displaced and destroyed by the American commercially-produced folk-culture substitute. It's really sad to me, but that's a culture war that has already been lost. The American mass-produced substitute not only is several billion-dollar industries, but it's also designed to reflect the current social and material conditions. Meanwhile, the conditions that sustained actual folk cultures around the world, such as peasant life in most of Southern Europe, have disappeared or are disappearing, leaving the original traditions void of most of their former meaning. We are left, for example, with American neo-traditions which are usually centered around spending money. But the local traditions have lost their original meaning, so even where they are still practiced, they only can be either a tourist attraction or a LARP (or both).

Absolutely. My grandfather knew most of Goethe and Schiller by heart. Dropping a line out of their works in an appropriate context both got a laugh out of everyone and it fostered a shared understanding of belonging to the same culture. Of belonging to the in-group.

That has first been replaced by sit-com catchphrases ("Bazinga", "true story") and now by memes. Which, to channel my inner old man yelling at clouds (itself a cringey Simpsons reference), is just really lame.

And you Yanks are the worst. You wouldn't recognise a Shakespeare quote if it bit you in your very Cs, your Us and your Ts.

That's really disturbing to me and I'm sorry to hear your culture is going through that. I've always loved traveling and the pervasiveness of globalization is super depressing to me when I visit other countries. As an American I feel terrible that exporting our power and values bulldozes everyone else's.

To be charitable I try to also look at what the American cultural exports offer to people though- in many cases people's lives are improved by adopting new technologies and opening their borders to international trade and so on. You have to accept people's agency and their own right to choose to have their culture molded to fit international standards even though I don't think a lot of people do, or even can, consider thoroughly the negative effects of this in the long run. I mean, that's what I have to tell myself to keep from going crazy, haha.

Yes, I'm not laying blame into the American mass-produced culture, or at least not exclusively. It fills the void left after traditions lose their meaning, and in a case-by-case basis it is indeed voluntarily accepted. But it does a terrible job at filling that void (to the extend that it fills anything at all) and there are few, if any, non LARPy alternatives to adopting it. When the roots die the whole tree dies as well, and it's only normal that fungi grow in the rotting mass. But it's still sad that the tree is no longer there.

Both of those plans are unactionable, but "convince society to not build culture around" is maybe a bit more unactionable than "convince congress to change copyright." :)

That's true, but the "convince congress to change copyright" solution doesn't do much for me as it allows people to continue to tie their personal identity to Spiderman, in a novel and more atomized personalized way and I don't really see much value in that.

My solution isn't entirely "unactionable" either, really, it's not like people can't have their opinions changed en masse in certain ways (that are outside of my scope of abilities but not everyone's)

That's true, but the "convince congress to change copyright" solution doesn't do much for me as it allows people to continue to tie their personal identity to Spiderman, in a novel and more atomized personalized way and I don't really see much value in that.

Provocative question that I don't really believe myself: Is that really that much different from an Athenian youth tying their identity to Achilles or Odysseus? The differences between mythology and super hero comics are smaller than we think. People only think of the former as high-brow because we consume it via completely outdated language and through a form with which we are unfamiliar. The content itself isn't that different from a comic book story (defeat monsters, take revenge!). Of course, Homer was a one-in-a-million observer of human nature. But so is Alan Moore. Probably.

Is that really that much different from an Athenian youth tying their identity to Achilles or Odysseus?

Do you mean an Athenian youth as in a young man from Athens, Greece today, or do you mean a hypothetical young man living in ancient Athens?

In case you mean the former, the main difference I would point to would be the test of time- that tales of Achilles and Odysseus have survived millennia to still be relevant and resonate with us today, whereas Spiderman (specifically) was just invented a few decades ago. Additionally there is more cultural legitimacy afforded by the proponents of ancient Greek myth, today and throughout history: philosophers, religious and government leaders back in the ancient times, professors and scholars of literature today and so on. People can argue that this shouldn't matter, but I don't think anyone would argue against the fact that in practice it does matter.

Additionally, I am personally very particular about aesthetic and the form that media takes. For example I have huge respect for anime and most Japanese art forms and find that American art forms are deeply unappealing in comparison. Modern Japanese tying their identity to (90s anime/manga*) Sailor Moon doesn't bother me nearly as much because I think the artwork that Naoko Takeuchi created and the 90s anime are both stylish and attractive and elegant, whereas the style of Western comic books I find garish and amateur and crassly commercial and lacking refinement. I know many Western media fans don't understand this but as a creative/artistic person, I can't stand when media looks bad, and Western media nearly always looks bad, in my opinion.

That was kind of a tangent but to tie it back in with your question: ancient Greek art generally looked good, or at least what's left looks good in the museums today. So if someone of Greek heritage wants to tie their identity to ancient Greek legends, I don't find that terribly embarrassing because it's rooted in something aesthetically pleasing. But when I leave America and have to be associated with the culture that brought the world Spiderman, I'm embarrassed by the lack of elegance and consideration for aesthetic that I see in Hollywood movies, Western comic books, American art and architecture and so on.

I may be destroying the basis of my original argument with this post, but I think the main point I'm trying to make is that if you tie your cultural heritage to someone else's ugly art, you're going to first be associated with ugly art and then you're going to be upset when the owners do something with it that will upset you. Neither of these things are good to me. So in my mind if you want to tie your identity to media, first seek out good media, and then have the foresight to understand that JK Rowling can be a TERF in 10 years or Star Wars can go woke in 50 years, and don't place too much stock in this identity to begin with.

*Sailor Moon Crystal looks bad.

Oh sorry, I meant ancient Athenian youth. I was referring to the popular hot take that super hero stories are the myths of today. Of course, the former are much more manichaeic and underdeveloped than the latter. But that might just have to do with the fact that they didn't undergo the long selection process you speak of. The "90% of everything is shit" rule propably comes into effect here.

I guess to me, this is how I would see the distinction. The Ancient Athenian boy is tying his identity to the religion of his family and community, and the modern American boy is tying his identity to a story that was created by someone entitled to royalty checks every time someone sells a shirt with the word Spiderman on it. The ancient boy's family, friends and everyone he's ever met believes the myths as fact and has never met anyone who doesn't believe them. No one in today's America believes Spiderman was real and it would be weird if you did. If today's boy wants to grow up to make all his money writing Spiderman comics, he's going to have to hash out property rights with whoever's managing the estate's IP from some guy who died 30 years ago or face a big lawsuit, while the Athenian boy could have grown up to create his own myths about Achilles and spread them to everyone he'd ever met and no corporation was going to be able to silence his stories.

How do you feel about Harry Potter? It has made a lot of money for companies, but ultimately it was created by a single person, not a corporation. Would you therefore not object to people considering Harry Potter part of their culture like you object to Spiderman? (Or would you only object for the movies, not for the books?) For that matter, would you object to Spiderman if it was the 1960s where essentially all creative decisions about Spiderman came from two individuals?

Is bubble tea a valid cultural element? The origin of bubble tea is unclear in such a way that it is literally unknown whether it was created by an individual on his own or by a corporation.

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