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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.

A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Edit: typo

I agree it is racist. I agree there is rank hypocrisy. I agree DEI aware hiring is tantamount to gay/race grifting.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world? You want people who intimately understand the demographics you're selling to. A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product. It might not even be the best way to go at 50% male writers.

As long as you're not hiring less qualified people to meet a DEI quota, this is the right move.

Also, isn't there so much insane overproduction of talent in the humanities already? I fully believe you can limit yourself to black lesbian female artists and writers only for a wide breadth of jobs and ship. You'll explode spectacularly if you try that in a hard science, but humanities? Probably fine.

Black americans are a tiny portion of the global population and black americans are not going to appeal better to Indians, Philipinoes, Egyptians or Romanians. If anything they will do worse.

A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Not the first time I've seen this claim, and my response is the same. If you think white males have a lot of money, you're going to tailor your product to them.

The alternative is that you think there are a lot of suspiciously wealthy black women, in which case this argument might hold water and it's worth throwing away the white male audience to cater to black female money.

Does it 1:1 trade white men in the audience for black and female audience though? Some of the white men may complain about the black elves and all of the girlbosses in Starfleet command but they still buy it.

Nothing in sales is ever 1:1. However, ask Jaguar how their rebrand went.

Counterpoint: people have been complaining about woke garbage and DEI and ESG capturing corporate America for at least a decade now but the S&P 500 has been racking up ATHs the entire way.

(I would love to see a counter-factual world where there was no DEI and ESG and press play and compare the S&P 500 in that world to this one though)

I too would love to have a Multiverse Viewer, but I don't think the stock market is a particularly good measure of economic performance.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world?

If they can make the case that there's a bona fide occupational qualification to be a certain race/sex/etc., then they can get their exception to civil rights laws, just like anybody else can. Actually, race can almost never be used in that way (the exception is for actors). Also, customer satisfaction doesn't count.

I'd sure like it if they took the fully-based approach. It would have stalled them for a decade or so as they tried to get new legislation passed, and optimistically we could have had a clear public debate about the merits of sex- and race-based discrimination.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world? You want people who intimately understand the demographics you're selling to. A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Japan seems to get by with many 100% Japanese writing teams for works that are internationally popular, including with American blacks they should be even more distant from.

And by contrast, the sexist/racist hiring for production of cultural products in the US has resulted in an astonishingly massive drop in content quality across the entire entertainment sector, and several of the most notable entertainment disasters ever seen.

What do you have in mind? What exemplifies this massive drop in quality?

I don't consume much movies/tv shows/pop culture these days because most of it doesn't appeal to me but I figured that was mostly a result of my own aging out of the main age demographic.

Concord is the example currently passing from myth into legend. A reported development cost of $400 million and most of a decade in development. The result:

Upon release, Concord failed to exceed 700 simultaneous players on Steam. Will Nelson of PCGamesN noted that compared to Helldivers 2, a multiplayer game released by Sony in the same year, Concord's player count was much lower than the 400,000 Steam players Helldivers 2 attracted at launch. Nelson attributed Concord's poor performance to a lack of uniqueness and a high price while competing in a heavily saturated market dominated by free-to-play games like Overwatch 2 and Valorant. One week after launch, on August 29, the game had 162 simultaneous players on Steam. It was estimated that less than a week after release, the game had sold a total of around 25,000 units, with sales of 10,000 on Steam and 15,000 on PlayStation.

Due to the magnitude of its commercial failure, it is cited by various publications, including The Guardian, PC Gamer, ComicBook.com, and Insider Gaming, as one of the biggest failures in video game history.

There's been a fair amount of competition for that title in the triple-A games market.

More generally, pick a popular media franchise and check how it's done over the last decade. The Witcher, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, superhero media generally. Willow got a revival as a streaming show that did so bad it's been literally scrubbed off the internet. Aliens, predator, terminator are in a bad way. Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question. In fact, I would argue that the drop in quality has become so egregious and so widespread that it has had a measurable impact on customer behavior across the media landscape, with customers becoming significantly more reluctant to give new content a chance.

Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question.

Okay, Concord is one among several examples of the super-woke productions crashing and burning.

But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though? "Body type" instead of sex in character creators, a strange amount of lgbt and dark skinned and girlboss characters, etc. You don't see many categorically 'based' games getting major budgets or publication, unless they all just escape my attention. Most forums and games journalists are pretty much onboard with the US Democrat/progressive tenets, even outside the US. Yes, there's the chud gamer stereotype who is not entirely unfairly labeled misogynist etc, but they don't get to do the decision making at the top or anything.

As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though?

You cite a bunch of correlated factors on the production end, all of which are accurate. It is indeed true that if all the major studios and all the major media outlets all adopt an ideological tack in the same direction, the industry as a whole will indeed move in that direction.

But then, consequences.

As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

There will always be excuses for why failure is the fault of nebulous outside forces and not the deliberate decisions of those in positions of authority. These excuses are not going to get Doctor Who another season. Take Star Wars in particular; they've just had a major triple-A game release within the last year or so. Searching for "star wars outlaws sales" gives me the following summary:

Star Wars Outlaws has sold approximately 1 million units since its release in August 2024, but it underperformed compared to Ubisoft's expectations. Despite receiving generally positive reviews, the game struggled in a competitive market and faced challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity.

...Why would it face challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity? Isn't the whole point of the Star Wars brand that it's about as close to universally-popular as you can get? Well, not any more, apparently.

They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

Marvel released 21 movies leading up to Endgame, and I watched most of them. I watched I think two movies post-endgame. I'll never watch another marvel production again. I do not appear to be alone in this decision. Why is it that 21 movies = massive success, but 23 = dismal failure?

Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.

Bungie made a money printer with Destiny and Destiny 2. It's now in serious trouble. Destiny 2 is my hole, it was made for me! I got in as free-to-play, spent increasing amounts of money on DLC, evangelized the game to other players. When the Lightfall DLC dropped, I went all-in and paid a hundred bucks to pre-order the whole expansion package. How'd that go? ...I quit Destiny for good. A lot of other people did too. Bungie's done massive layoffs, game quality has dropped into the toilet with tons of bugs and bad design choices.

But it's cool, they've got a new game coming, a revival of their classic Marathon IP. It's now been delayed, its lunch has been pretty thoroughly eaten by Arc Raiders, and its current trajectory is pretty clearly toward total failure. Sony paid 3 billion for this company, right about the time their output turned to literal shit.

More broadly, was Tolkien overdone? Was Wheel of Time overdone? You're telling me there wasn't actually a market for big-budget fantasy TV, after the dismal collapse of Game of Thrones? Witcher was shaping up to be a hit; why did it implode?

If tentpole IP is a bad investment, why did everyone invest so hard into it, and where's the better path forward that they're missing?

Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.

I'm not sure they thought through the economics of anyone who would approve of this trailer likely being a proud pirate.

You have good points.

I'm just wondering when all this customer/sales feedback will result in actual changes for the better in what output we get from the corps/devs. They should have received the message by now, right? That's why I'm not very optimistic.

More comments

A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then? They represent a very tiny slice of the public. And honestly, Don Draper or any of his real-life pasty-white 1950s counterparts could sell to black women better than they could.

Also, isn't there so much insane overproduction of talent in the humanities already?

There's overproduction of something. I wouldn't call it talent.

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?

Because there are lots of all-male teams by default, and the ones which self-define as trans lesbians don't get cancelled for being all-male?

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?

Because of the gay/race grifting I talked about earlier.

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