I came up with an idea this morning about "cultural Lysenkoism".
Lysenkoism was an alternative to genetics and natural selection that was developed in the Soviet Union because genetics and natural selection ideologically cannot fit within socialism because it implies that certain people are naturally better or naturally worse. As an example of the pseudoscience and how it contrasts with science, the proposal was that rather than the children of two organisms carrying attributes that are related to their genetic code and therefore bounded within that, that instead their attributes are set exclusively by the conditions of the two parents at conception, so for example if somebody was naturally overweight and short but they worked out very hard and became skinny for a short period of time, and maybe we're surgically altered so that they were taller, then their offspring would be tall and skinny rather than short and fat.
Here I am taking that concept of Lysenkoism and I'm transposing it into contemporary media culture.
A lot of things have been true isn't for a very long time in the in the media industry, and for good reason: they are true. Things like "sex sells and attractive actors and actresses can sell a movie", or "it is important to make a good movie because otherwise the audience's will stop showing up", or "ultimately it is the customer who makes decisions about what to watch", or "the customer is always right in matters of taste"
A lot of postmodernists have made it into Hollywood, and many of these longstanding truisms are not politically acceptable for their ideology. Attractive actors and actresses don't draw people to movies, they are problematic and dangerous. Having control of a property is more important than what you do with the property because if you have the property then you have the power over the audience because you have the thing that has power. If you are in a position of power then you have the capacity to bully audiences into watching what you want them to watch rather than what they want to watch. And the customer is not always right in matters of taste, and if they want something that doesn't align with your personal ideology and you are in a position of power then it is just and effective to try to change the audience by giving them something that they don't want because you know better than them.
That's not the only precepts of it, I suspect that you could write books on the topic. However, once I start laying it out like this I think that it becomes intuitive for anyone who has followed Hollywood in the last few years, or video games for that matter, and we could quibble about the micro definitions of a certain elements, but generally speaking many people would immediately identify that there was something to this.
Lysenkoism ultimately ended up killing a lot of people because when you were growing grain, it is important to understand the reality of growing grain rather than what ideologically would be convenient. Likewise, cultural Lysenkoism is killing entire industries because the model's being used to produce new video games or movies or music don't align with the reality of creating those things and actually making them operable. It didn't happen right away, because the real world isn't digital, it is analog and it has time constants and sometimes you can make a mistake and it takes 10 years to truly see how badly you've messed up, but people will claim that the video game industry is making more money than ever before, but the reality is that companies that existed for decades are closing up shop because they can't produce successful products under the tenants of cultural Lysenkoism. They end up chasing a false idol of modern audiences which don't exist outside of very limited conclaves, and produce things that cost more and more money, but ultimately struggle to be profitable at all because audiences don't actually want any of this.
Another interesting parallel is that this is in fact enforced. Whether it is through ESG and DEI initiatives which limit what is acceptable, or it is through companies like SBI which are now known to be funded by nation states presumably in pursuit of ideological outcomes, the powers that be have a certain direction that they want things to go in. The problem is that eventually these industries need customers. Even if the government ends up subsidizing 100% of the media industry and video game industry, it will employ a lot of people but there will be no power in those industries because nobody will consume the content any longer. We are in fact seeing that, where audiences are moving on.
Lysenkoism was an alternative to genetics and natural selection that was developed in the Soviet Union because genetics and natural selection ideologically cannot fit within socialism because it implies that certain people are naturally better or naturally worse. As an example of the pseudoscience and how it contrasts with science, the proposal was that rather than the children of two organisms carrying attributes that are related to their genetic code and therefore bounded within that, that instead their attributes are set exclusively by the conditions of the two parents at conception, so for example if somebody was naturally overweight and short but they worked out very hard and became skinny for a short period of time, and maybe we're surgically altered so that they were taller, then their offspring would be tall and skinny rather than short and fat.
Here I am taking that concept of Lysenkoism and I'm transposing it into contemporary media culture.
A lot of things have been true isn't for a very long time in the in the media industry, and for good reason: they are true. Things like "sex sells and attractive actors and actresses can sell a movie", or "it is important to make a good movie because otherwise the audience's will stop showing up", or "ultimately it is the customer who makes decisions about what to watch", or "the customer is always right in matters of taste"
A lot of postmodernists have made it into Hollywood, and many of these longstanding truisms are not politically acceptable for their ideology. Attractive actors and actresses don't draw people to movies, they are problematic and dangerous. Having control of a property is more important than what you do with the property because if you have the property then you have the power over the audience because you have the thing that has power. If you are in a position of power then you have the capacity to bully audiences into watching what you want them to watch rather than what they want to watch. And the customer is not always right in matters of taste, and if they want something that doesn't align with your personal ideology and you are in a position of power then it is just and effective to try to change the audience by giving them something that they don't want because you know better than them.
That's not the only precepts of it, I suspect that you could write books on the topic. However, once I start laying it out like this I think that it becomes intuitive for anyone who has followed Hollywood in the last few years, or video games for that matter, and we could quibble about the micro definitions of a certain elements, but generally speaking many people would immediately identify that there was something to this.
Lysenkoism ultimately ended up killing a lot of people because when you were growing grain, it is important to understand the reality of growing grain rather than what ideologically would be convenient. Likewise, cultural Lysenkoism is killing entire industries because the model's being used to produce new video games or movies or music don't align with the reality of creating those things and actually making them operable. It didn't happen right away, because the real world isn't digital, it is analog and it has time constants and sometimes you can make a mistake and it takes 10 years to truly see how badly you've messed up, but people will claim that the video game industry is making more money than ever before, but the reality is that companies that existed for decades are closing up shop because they can't produce successful products under the tenants of cultural Lysenkoism. They end up chasing a false idol of modern audiences which don't exist outside of very limited conclaves, and produce things that cost more and more money, but ultimately struggle to be profitable at all because audiences don't actually want any of this.
Another interesting parallel is that this is in fact enforced. Whether it is through ESG and DEI initiatives which limit what is acceptable, or it is through companies like SBI which are now known to be funded by nation states presumably in pursuit of ideological outcomes, the powers that be have a certain direction that they want things to go in. The problem is that eventually these industries need customers. Even if the government ends up subsidizing 100% of the media industry and video game industry, it will employ a lot of people but there will be no power in those industries because nobody will consume the content any longer. We are in fact seeing that, where audiences are moving on.
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 1
@sj_zero
Cheaper means of production are allowing others to step in. Not only in media, but sometimes in actual physical products too.
It'll be really nice to see things get back down to the granular level instead of relying on something to have to be this international hit just for you to make a few bucks.