A major hurdle to understanding our new era that most people struggle to surmount is the shift from an economic frame to a moral frame. Everyone currently living in the West was raised under a Left vs Right paradigm with roots in the eighteenth century.
Especially in its American expression, the once-dominant dichotomy held that Liberals wanted collectivism and socialism while Conservatives championed individualism and the free market. This model’s obsolescence becomes strikingly clear when you consider that democrats now cheer on corporate cartels joining forces to crush working class people, while republicans wield government power to make people consume a particular drug.
In reality, an exclusively economic model of human behavior never adequately explained the world. It was never meant to. The Left, for example, clearly used various economic planks only as convenient sticks to bludgeon their enemies. Their real strategy was waging psychological war on the moral level while keeping their opponents distracted with vain debates about the tax code. It worked. The Death Cult now control all cultural institutions.
That’s the real reason why many creators, including yours truly, have long counseled against paying money or attention to the big brands the Death Cult has hollowed out into skinsuits. The Cult doesn’t have a profit motive. Instead, it wears skinsuits of your beloved childhood IPs to demoralize you. It wants you destroyed, and demoralizing you is an important step in that process.
Enlightened self-interest would seem to be sufficient cause for not swallowing the soul poison the Death Cult peddles. If that’s not enough, always remember that filling the Cult’s coffers or boosting their signal amounts to aiding and abetting their unholy crusade against you. Cooperating with an evil Cult is immoral.
The error is compounded by the fact that the Death Cult wins by controlling public morality. Only a superior moral vision can defeat a moral vision. Cooperating with the enemy forfeits your moral claim while reinforcing theirs. It’s preemptive surrender.
The above moral calculus often draws the following two objections:
- Boycotts don’t work. Years of failed attempts have proven that dissident movements are too weak to move the needle on consumer entertainment preferences.
- Following from objection 1, commenting on skinsuit IPs is the only way to get engagement. Content creators have no choice but to discuss Big Brand X if they want to stay relevant.
Both objections are easily dismantled by pointing out that they conform to the obsolete paradigm the Death Cult has conditioned its opponents to stay within. They both ignore the far more strategically significant moral level and confine themselves to impotent economic debate. That’s exactly where the Death Cult wants us.
Aside from being strategically unsound, both objections are factually untrue. Building a platform on rants against skinsuit brands starts a countdown to irrelevance. Like professional lobbyists, outrage marketers must secretly hope their cause never succeeds.
We’ve seen these dynamics play out online in the past few days. A rapidly emerging phenomenon within our skinsuit institutions is former Pop Cult high priests who’ve aged out of the crusade’s vanguard being sent out to smash heretical icons. Here’s walking anachronism Kevin Smith describing how to skin a franchise in the shopworn jargon of a tired 90s hipster. Because he’s still stuck in the Clinton years, he gives the game away by explaining that fan outrage equates to free marketing for the skinsuits.
Author David V. Stewart has pointed out how nerd rage turned Captain Marvel from a middle market B flick into a billion-dollar hit. Here he once again warns viewers to ignore the skinsuits:
Another fellow author, Rawle Nyanzi, developed the concept of #BrandZero. The idea is to withhold money and attention from skinsuit brands as totally as possible. Not one penny. Not one click.
This comment on David’s video, which Rawle called attention to, supplements the rationale for BrandZero explicated by Smith.
Now, that’s an unsourced comment from an online anon. It should be taken with a grain of salt, but the call to action holds true, even if the stated premise is false. Marvel may not care whether people buy their comics, and most indicators suggest that they don’t. The point isn’t to hit Death Cult institutions in the wallet. That’s a reversion to the obsolete economic paradigm.
The point is to counter their inverted morality with moral integrity of your own.
Shifting paradigms can be a challenge. Happily, I’ve drawn up a road map to help you exit the dead-end lane where the Death Cult wants you.
I’m just glad this only happened to Masters of the Universe now, rather than a few years ago. I needed the training in detachment from other things before they came for the one that holds a truly outsized place in my childhood and affections. 🙂
You may need to work a little more on cultivating that detachment.
Of course, but if I hadn’t at least started that process, I’d be in a much worse state than I am. 🙂
Good point.
“Staying relevant” seems to be the key. Netflix apparently doesn’t care that people are mad because the conversation “keeps them relevant”. Cue Warhol’s quote about weighing your reviews instead of reading them. At any rate it is funny to see Kevin Smith at the center of all this. You couldn’t pick a more accurate scion for the “Overly Attached Nerdy Celebrity Consumer” if you tried. Kevin Smith is the proto Angry Video Game Nerd, a ranting man child who made his entire career complaining about things other people made. That he would end up calling other people babies for not swallowing his crap is the icing on the cake. These pop cultists are nothing if not self hating wanna be gatekeepers. It’s really all they have. They get to play with the He-Man toy NOT YOU, STUPID BABY! Western culture continues it’s slide into arrested development, we now at Toddler stage.
Smith is someone who replaced his Boomer-infused childhood Catholicism with Gen X snark and consumerism. He never grew from that one-note prankster he was back in the ’90s, and has in fact regressed to a juvenile larval state of crying, throwing tantrums, and needing his bottle (which would be marijuana, in his case) in order to have peace. Who would have thought that the man who wrote Dogma, a movie that makes no sense if you know a lick about Catholicism at all, would have such a shallow view of humanity?
Actually, Kevin Smith is the poster child for everything wrong about late-20th century culture. A hedonist, oblivious to reality and existence, a corporate shill and consumer (marvel as he insults He-Man fans while hawking a pair of shoes), all with an undeserved fragile ego that gets worse with age.
It’s been said that Bruce Willis destroyed Kevin Smith which turned him into what he is now, but that’s not the case at all. What he did was pull the mask off to reveal his true nature to the world.
If Smith had any self-awareness, he would have packed it up and moved back to New Jersey years ago, got back with God, made a living writing indie comics, and unplugged from all this mess.
Instead, he’s destined to shrink further into this quicksand of his own making. Let this be a lesson to anyone who still harbors affection for the old guard rebels. This is what they’re doing now, and it’s not going to get any better for them.
What did Bruce Willis do to kevin smith?
They did a movie together, Cop Out, over a decade ago and Willis revealed that Smith was a horribly inept director who didn’t know what lenses were used for or had any basic knowledge of how to direct. Considering by that point Smith had been directing movies for over a decade, it was quite embarrassing. The two did not get along on set and Smith has been insulting him ever since, because that’s what he does.
Of course the pop cult media attempted to frame Smith as the good guy, they always do, time has revealed that Willis was completely right about him.
The weed of gamma bears bitter fruit.
Brian
Thanks for the actionable advice.
I have been so disinterested in movies, TV shows and tradpub books I pretty much ingore them. I’m reading alot of crowdfunding stuff I’ve sponsored.
And I’m enjoying the entertainment
xavier
I’m a bit (ok, a lot) too old to have formed an attachment to the latest franchise Smith had a hand in ruining, so not being upset by it is easy. The fact is the death cult has already pooped on every pop culture icon I had any childhood emotional investment in, so I’m immune to that oh so clever tactic. Being so far away from childhood certainly helps.
That being said, I am bothered by the dishonesty in Smith’s case. It’s one thing to bow down to woke corporate culture and crap all over other people’s childhood memories. It’s another thing though to make fun of and try to smear someone for pointing out that’s exactly what you’ve done. If you are owned by the death cult, have the stones to admit it.
Oh I’m sorry, were you expecting something approaching basic honorable conduct from a death cult pop cult acolyte?
The dishonesty is a feature, not a bug. It has the same impetus as all the “[X] is a discredited conspiracy theory, and besides, you have it coming!” stories in the MSM.
It’s also how you can discern the Death Cult’s demonic origins. Satan isn’t called the father of lies for nil.
Kevin Smith is a moral coward and always has been. Expecting any different from him is a fool’s errand.
A lot of people seem to want Kevin to apologize to Pop Cult acolytes Clownfish TV for some reason (I’m not too well versed in the drama but I guess Kevin called them out on a video they made). As far as I’m concerned they neither deserve an apology, being nothing more than obsessive lowly pop cultists who perpetuate everything they rail against, nor would an apology from Kevin mean much anyways. Both of them need to grow the hell up and move on.
Your perception that such eDrama is beneath well-meaning people’s notice is correct. Act accordingly.
Here is what happened, for those curious:
A member of ClownfishTV posted on their private account, not the ClownfishTV one, that they heard a rumor that this Masters of the Universe reboot was going to be essentially what it ended up as.
Kevin Smith found the tweet, called them liars (over and over again until the series came out), and said it was going to honor the original series. Basically, he lied his face off for months while dragging on other people the entire time.
Thing is, this is only upsetting if you’re still at the naïve state where you don’t think this is intentional or these people are inherently dishonest to begin with. Why would he apologize when he got the free advertisement and pat on the back from his corporate overlords? He’s going to get a new job offer to do it all again anyway. For those of us not still somehow stuck in 2013, it is merely more of the frog complaining about the scorpion yet again.
The sooner we move on from this the better.
The real advantage to cutting ties with all of the Woke or About-to-Be-Woke IP is that you can curate the stuff you loved and remember it as it was. You never again have to be troubled by what will happen to your characters, or books, or TV shows, or movies, or whatever. The Suit-generated Fan Fiction will never trouble you again. Kick back with that Chuck Jones ‘Looney Tunes’ DVD and enjoy some popcorn and a nice cigar!
The added bonus is they get none of your attention (to deliver their poison to your eyes and ears), and they get none of your money (because they hate you). Shunning. It’s a powerful thing.
Win-Win-Win!
Exactly. We have the books, the discs, and the tapes. Pop Cult outfits will produce nothing worthwhile for the indefinite future. That’s another mental hurdle folks need to get over.
Oh, that extra money you used to spend on the Pop Cult and Death Cult? Spend it on the people who know you want to be entertained and who deliver the real goods to you.
‘Shunning.’ Is there nothing it cannot do?
Sometimes I wonder if I grew up in an entirely different world than some of these people. I bailed on movies long before the nihilistic reboot era, video games before Gamers Are Dead came out, television before the internet made it redundant, comics before the milkshakes, books before they became the Big 5, and music before the bottom fell out of the industry.
All of the problems that exist now did not spring up over night. there was no switch flipped. It was a slow and deliberate decay to get here couched in mealy-mouthed phrases about Progress and technology to convince you the opposite was occurring.
They were clearly lying the whole time. At this point it is all on you if you still can’t cut the cord with these people. The signs were there the entire time.
They aren’t going to be convinced to “be sane again” or whatever you want them to do, because they are still on their quest to reach the bottom which they have deluded themselves into thinking is the top. There is no switch that is going to be flicked to roll the clock back to sanity.
The only answer is to let them reach oblivion on their own and instead hedge your bets on those not in that broken system. There are options, I just wish we could understand that faster than we currently are.
The NPCs will come to understand sooner than they’d like.
They said nothing when the Cultists took their God away. Now they have no recourse as they’re stripped of everything else.
The most effective bit of propaganda that the pop cult has put out is the idea that a game doesn’t matter unless it is AAA, a movie doesn’t matter unless it is a blockbuster and a book doesn’t matter unless it’s from an author with a huge contract. And of course it has to be new, nothing from more than a decade ago counts. People trapped in this mindset have nowhere to go when they get dissatisfied with the current crop, because they have been fooled into believing that nothing else exists.
I’m not really sure when this mindset started. Certainly in my Gen Y youth I remember browsing the small town video rental store and coming back with films that were either decades old or were low budget films from studios no one had ever heard of. Neither me nor any of my friends thought that we were doing anything weird by doing this. But when I talk with Zoomer relatives the situation is different. So it must have happened sometime between the late 90’s and the late 00’s. Maybe it’s that cultural ground zero again, though I remember continuing to rent movies in this way through at least 2000. 2007 is about where AAA games came to dominate everything, but I think it might have been where movies also shut out everything but the biggest films; the MCU started the year after.
It happened with the Millennials. The starkest dividing line between them and Gen Y has always been the former’s loathing of the past vs the latter’s nostalgia for it.
Even Millennial hipsterism embodies contempt for the past. Contrast holding on to your original Brand X tee shirt as a fond memento vs buying a pre-faded Brand X tee shirt because it’s ironic.
It was definitely with the Millennials. I remember specifically in the late ’90s and early ’00s hearing over and over that Kids Don’t Like Old Things as if it were some sort of mantra. Yet, when I was a kid we were watching Rocky & Bullwinkle, Adam West Batman, and Thunderbirds, among many other things, and not batting an eye. I went out of my way to watch Alien, Jaws, and Space Battle and Trek movies, because other kids recommended them to me on the playground.
Coincidentally, when they started spreading that lie about kids, all those old things I watched when I was young completely disappeared and children could no longer watch them.
It was intentional.
Fits in with hearing parents say things like “I’m glad that they are making live action versions of these old Disney movies, or else my kids would never watch them.”
Set a kid in front of the original Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin or Lion King and I guarantee that he’ll watch it with excitement. But if he never gets the chance it’s easy to pretend that he’ll only be satisfied with a phoned in remake.
Imagine that I were a storyteller in a village of hunter-gatherers or early agrarians, and a story that I were to tell were a sequel to someone else’s: a story about a brave warrior who were to rescue his village’s children from a monster. Imagine that I were to perfectly recall every detail from the previous story and were to accurately characterize the warrior and the children—but this time, a supernatural enemy were to possess the children. While the warrior were able to ask the gods for a solution, he were instead to commit suicide because of his wife’s untimely death and the sudden wickedness and verbal abuse that he were to suffer from his own possessed children.
Without a copyright or a brand name to attach to both stories, and without the stimulations of illustrations, animations, or actors, my village would rightly see my story as crap and refuse to humor it. The modern subversives can’t even hold the moral high ground of recalling established canon.