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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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
...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.
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?
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.
I don't think they're capable of receiving and internalizing the message, unfortunately. It doesn't help that the creative talent pipeline is fucked as well. People chasing quality will find ways to produce quality in their small pockets; most of these large studios will probably just die. Welcome to the new Dark Ages.
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