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I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
I'm realizing slowly but surely that most of what is afflicting Disney isn't ideology itself but sheer incompetence of people that run the company, they just get to use the ideology as a shield for their inability. Also because of the mechanics of ESG(so they are funded on arbitrary ideological metrics) and bad media analyst company like Parrot Analytics using social media "engagement" as a success metric not the sentiment. So Disney can shove ideology to pump the ESG numbers and when the audience notices the bullshit they go on social media complain about it, we get response from culture warriors calling them everything bad under the sun, and Parrot Analytics claims it a success because people talking about it. So the incompetent people that decides on all of this get to keep their job because it doesn't affect the investments and they have an analytics company claiming success on something else than if they audience actually liked the content or not.
Oh come on! Your whole shtick here from the start, including your username, was "it's all just incompetence and mundane market forces, guys!"
The ideology creates incompetence though. One of the culture war fronts was woke culture's hostility to meritocracy.
It's almost like this is exactly what ESG was specifically designed for.
Yes that is the shtick, give me an example where is there more to it then! I want to have the shtick tested, it is the point of me having it! But it is not only mundane market forces, there is a bit of corruption and dare I say conspiracies there, the reason why I'm claiming the incompetence angle here is that it is obvious in income of the company that there is no customers for what they are selling, why are they still persisting with it?
So the incompetent don't join the ideology because they see that it hostile to meritocracy and use it to avoid becoming competent? Can we reverse the cause and effect of your statement?
So if we have a sketch on how the ESG system is designed: Who benefits if they aren't making profits by doing this?
Right, that's fine, but my point is that it's not "realizing slowly but surely", it's just your initial assumption.
Maybe they only care about profit as a means to an end, and one of the ends is pushing these messages. After all, what's the point of having money and influence, if you can't spend it on anything?
OTOH, if it's incompetence, how did all these people end up on the top of all these companies at the same time? They are all incompetent, and never got weeded out?
That sort of works too, but at some point you have to ask - if the incompetent are able to push through against everyone's wishes an ideology that will shield them against meritocracy, are they still incompetent?
People who want to use ESG to reshape the world according to their vision.
Well almost. My username is based on how the COVID response was handled and listening to conspiracy theorists talking about it, like there is no conspiracy there... politicians just were incompetent and large corporations(e.g. amazon and pfizer) took advantage of to increase their profits of the cost of the citizens. So I'm just reprogramming my brain from thinking that it is grand conspiracy by changing from the first thought what is going on from that someone is puppeteering the masses in the background to trying to identify who knows what they are doing and those who don't. So the initial assumption here is Disney don't know what they are doing, so who knows what they are doing, takes advantage of it and why. I'm being honest here, it is a long slow process for me.
Yeah but they are spending the money to send message in media that no one is looking at? So if nobody is paying for it or even looking at it, isn't it a failure in activism too when nobody wants to hear the message?
Well that is the little flaw in my theories, that is why I discuss it at all I'm trying to find out! I found partial explanations in Stupidity Paradox and Bullshit Jobs but it is not covering all the holes.
Well it is assuming that the incompetence is on all areas. They are maybe more competent on keeping their job and blaming it on bigots but not competent on producing mass market media. Like I'm fairly competent at my job but I suck at organizational politics so it has hurt my career.
So if ESG is fighting against climate change why does Shell have a higher ESG score than e.g. Tesla that is more inline with the current ideas on how to reach the vision on climate change?
Fair enough, in my defense, this side of you is all that I've seen.
Not necessarily, it's all a question of relative to what. If you're doing your activism with full knowledge of how unpopular your views are, having your message pushed through Disney is still a win, relative to it never making it out of the fringes of society.
Bullshit Jobs feels to me like kicking the can down the road. Yeah, it's not the fault of an individual bad actor, or even a group of bad actors working together, it's... that our system maintains legions upon legions of workers that bring absolutely nothing? I'm not against the theory, but the magnitude of the systemic failure is about as mind-boggling to me as an outright global conspiracy.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Though with that phrasing it becomes less distinguishable from my theory. Is a conspiracy to push an ideology all that different from a conspiracy of incompetent people using an ideology to cover their asses?
Others pointed it out already, but the whole idea is that ESG is not about fighting climate change, but about propping up political/ideological allies and punishing enemies. Under this view, their decisions re: Tesla are a lot easier to explain.
It is a online persona that I use only here where I want to discuss semi controversial views. It is the only side you are going to see. And for the first time it is working.
In many ways the culture war is virtual where they consider themselves as being mainstream and not at the fringes of society. In many ways it could be considered the mainstream views, that the majority of people that is not on Twitter and so on(i.e. virtual milieus) don't think it should be in their entertainment.
Yeah welcome to my world view.... the stupidity paradox comes into play with that maybe the systemic failure is because of a reason, some mechanism in our world makes it necessary. Even if the book about stupidity paradox only talk about organization, my synthesis of the two essentially touches there is a reason for Bullshit Jobs is that there is a functional reason for them to exists which Graeber only touches upon but don't delve into deeper. The mind-boggling nature of it validates is a "incompetence theory" akin to "conspiracy theory". On the other hand the question is though if the framework of "incompetence theory" is useful for me, I haven't decided that yet. Also it all could be wrong and useless and then I'll invent a new persona instead.
Well it is a question if they are true believers or if they are adherents of practicality. So if it is practical adherence when the ideology is not useful for them anymore they dump it and move on to the next thing to cover their asses. True believers would stick to it unless they end up in a crisis of faith which is a higher bar for change. So I'm just speculating about the future of the ideology, that when reality strikes and how high the bar is for them to change. Much of the culture war is just virtue signaling for status and if the number of true believers are low then the shift might be faster when people break ranks around the issues.
So it is corporatism where corporations dictate the state and politics?
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini (although disputed if he really said it)
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