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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I was reading this article and made a possible connection to the culture war.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-11/disney-star-wars-writers-of-royalties

It details a series of conflicts between writers of various properties and Disney, but I suspect the basic phenomenon (trying to avoid paying creators of IPs) is industry-wide.

It made me wonder how much of the specific Hollywood brand of "wokeness", radically altering or combining characters etc. is more about avoiding royalty payments to the established authors, shifting the writing to a writers room, where the product is the property of the corporation. Were these dumb fucking writers so happy to be allowed to doll up their creations with the latest political fashions that they were overjoyed to participate in the destruction of both the IP itself, and also the legacy authors, and for a lot less money than real writers cost? Ironic if true!

How much of this push to "diversify" is being run by the companies themselves to get cheaper creative labor? I don't know the answer to this question, but it would be enlightening to find out who actually owns the intellectual property of a lot of these "woke" shows/movies, and whether that differs structurally from the "classic" or just better made shows.

As the media model of television shifted to the streaming age, I would theorize there was a lot of structural changes that needed to happen. The companies didn't want to pay people on the old model, but young people, new people, cheap people from good colleges would work for relatively little money (well paid staff positions are far cheaper than royalties if your show hits it big). Because they're taking a shotgun approach to content, they need a lot of cheap writers. And if you doll it up in social justice, the kids will cheer for and demand their own economic subjugation.

It could very well be that a part of the Hollywood "wokeness" is wresting away controll of profitable IP:s or kill them off while trying. Hollywood accounting tricks are well known and it is prominent in other creative industries like the recording industry. But then there is also an aspect of Hollywood wokeness is just old fashioned nepotism and using woke shibboleths to signal being part of the group. A while ago read an article (which for some reason google is not finding, suspicius) that analyzed the ties of woke Hollywood writers on Twitter with their public interactions on there. No surpise that they all knew each other and went to the same colleges and so on.

That's definitely a thing, but elites are always clannish and nepotistic. It's how they become and remain elites.

With my fasting of culture war topics have given me a little distance and reinforcement that a big part of the culture war is just the elites talking down on us plebs and the plebs going "what do you mean that you don't know what a woman is?"!

They get to pick the topic. Trans people are a tiny fraction of a percent of the population. Whatever issues there are with them, whichever side you are on, it doesn't matter to national politics one single bit. So why is this the prime political topic?

With just a sprinkling of tinfoil, it's not hard to see the utility of winding people up about inconsequential bullshit while, say a european land war is being escalated, or the Chinese and Saudis make moves on the dollar as the world reserve currency, or inflation is killing everyone's (well, everyone with jobs) savings and wages.

Conservatives got baited into boycotting Bud Light with another InBev product so they can all rage about some troon influencer, and the policies we're talking about is building a prison next to Disney to own the libs. The establishment, the joint party of the permanent parties, is engaging in its usual controlled-opposition hijinks, distracting us with idiocy while they vote in bipartisan lockstep about the important stuff.

However cynical you are, it's not nearly cynical enough. We're gonna have to become russian about this stuff.

Well my tinfoil hat days are over now. Now I only believe in incompetence theories(as per my new online persona) with a heavy dose of corruption. But a big part why I'm trying to be less involved is because I'm not American. Conservatives boycotting piss-water is not worthy my time and I'm trying(fairly unsuccessfully since I'm aware of it) to stop in caring about it. My only goal here is to adjust my worldview towards something more accurate, testing it and/or share my findings hoping that someone else might find them useful.