Shades of the Pop Cult

Pop Cult Hipster

The “I f***ing love science!” crowd gets short shrift around here, but one of their favorite boutique mantras may have some truth behind it. Time does indeed seem like it must be subjective sometimes.

Case in point: It’s now been ten years since the consumer revolts of the 2010s promised to take on the decrepit commissars in charge of pop culture and  shake up the mainstream. Sure, the establishment was dug in behind fortified positions, but the new tools of KDP, social media, and meme magic would empower the scrappy renegades to get around the old guard’s defenses. Everybody was sure we just needed to expose the establishment’s double standards, and the public would wise up to the grift.

When that win condition failed to materialize, the common wisdom shifted. We would build our own parallel conventions, studios, awards, platforms, and publishers. Given a choice between globocorp slop and fresh ideas by young, passionate talent, the genpop would choose the new, fun stuff over the old, dreary agitprop.

A decade later, you can go to any comic, gaming, or book convention and see two unmissable differences: Attendance is far larger than in the SP/GG days. And while cons always catered to the Pop Cult, they are now in total submission to the Death Cult.

Spend a few minutes wandering the halls of any megacon, and you’ll run into countless palette swaps of this exact guy:

Pop Cult Hipster

That’s not to rag on hipster fashion. OK it is, but that’s not the main point.

Just five years ago, Pop Cult gatherings were dominated by garden variety nerds. They were Boomer – Gen Y fans who grew up reading Green Arrow or playing D&D. And while they made consuming related product the center of their lives, they largely left politics out of it and gathered once a year to have fun pursuing their shared hobby.

Now, as author David Stewart has observed, the last devotees of American pop culture are aging out. You’ll still find graying Xers and Ys waddling around the dealer room after hours in their vintage Wolverine and Return of the Jedi tees. But they present the image of branded horses with blinders on. There’s something the old nerds are doing their best to ignore. And the elephant in the room is the Death Cult that’s conquered their hobby.

You can tell because the palette swap hipsters who’ve invaded the scene stand in stark contrast to their subjugated forebears. They’re almost all Millennials; in clutches of 3-4 soyjaks or paired with tatted landwhale or agoraphobic waif GFs. Never with kids. And never dressed in the superhero or SFF iconography of the Pop Cult, either. Instead of shilling the brands that nerd culture is supposed to revolve around, the new set come bearing symbols of the Death Cult. Again, they’re impossible to miss because it looks like the six-color rainbow projectile vomited on them.

The other oddity you’ll notice is the Death Cultists’ relative lack of participation in traditional geek activities. They’re underrepresented in panels, events, and games. For the most part, they patrol the halls, making their presence known. It comes off as a more subdued version of Antifa rent-a-thugs doing a victory dance around a saint’s toppled statue.

And there’s nothing new and cool. Mainstream pop culture offerings are limited to retreads of 20th century properties infused with Death Cult anti-morals. It’s super weird, and that’s coming from the guy who defined Cultural Ground Zero.

In the final analysis, the grassroots consumer rebels turned out to be wrong. Before I’m accused of throwing stones in a glass house, let it be known that we did go into it with honest if mistaken intentions. It’s only now that we’re beginning to realize what we were up against all along.

Here’s one example. Dungeons & Dragons is the definitive tabletop RPG. With only brief interruptions, it’s been the number one TTRPG for half a century. Magic: The Gathering is D&D’s analog on the card game side. Both games are owned by Washington State-based company Wizards of the Coast. Wizards is owned by massive toy conglomerate Hasbro. Look at who owns Hasbro:

Hasbro Owners

There’s an ocean of money behind corporate pop culture. But it’s not coming from the consumers. The whole industry is being financed by the same Great Reset megacorps that are working to crush those consumers and make sure they can’t own homes.

We can now see why the great consumer revolts of the previous decade failed. They were based on the “Get woke, go broke” theory that assumes free markets where customers vote with their wallets. But that’s not the paradigm at play here. Instead, we’re living under a command economy that combines the worst aspects of Soviet top-down planning and incestuous crony capitalism. None of these fifty to 100-year-old zombie IPs are dying because oligarchs keep them afloat as propaganda vectors. Jeff Bezos is happy to take a loss on the Washington Post. It’s not a moneymaking venture for him. Neither is owning Magic and D&D for BlackRock.

“So what can members of the new counterculture who just want fun comics, games, and novels do?” you ask …

Based on my analysis of the situation, we’re looking at three possibilities, presented in chronological order by length of wait:

  1. Some new black swan IP nobody saw coming breaks out of indie to capture a wide audience. Then the owner somehow rebuffs international financiers’ buyout and sabotage attempts.
  2. The whole Rules-based International Order project collapses under its own contradictions. All the skinsuit IPs will dry up overnight, but then we’ll have other problems.
  3. Gen Y finally shuffles off the stage. With the last Pop Cult generation gone, the skinsuit brands will remain, but reduced to unvarnished Death Cult liturgies. Normal people will shun Marvel movies like they did X-rated flicks in the 70s.

Whichever eventuality comes to pass, our job is to prepare for it. And lucky for us, getting ready for the future of entertainment involves one core strategy, regardless of where we end up: adopting a neopatronage model.

And not giving money to people who hate you

Let me show you how:

Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You

11 Comments

  1. I don’t go into creation with the aim of fixing pop culture; it’s not going back to the way it was pre-2014, because the big investors are the only customers that matter now.

    Instead, I do my best to grab the attention of anyone willing to listen. If they do, they do; if they don’t, they don’t.

    But everyone must remember one thing: If you don’t go along with the SocJus propaganda, all mainstream outlets will shun you. Your indie game will not get a good write-up in Kotaku or IGN. Pop-culture YouTubers will not touch your comic series with a ten-foot pole. Your book will not get a Netflix deal, no matter how well it sells. The only way to succeed is to build up an enthusiastic fanbase who can’t wait for your work, just like Eric July did.

    • You’re right that newpub creators will have to content themselves with doing what they can where they are with what they have for the time being. Absent megacorp financing, neopatronage has proven itself the best model for laying the groundwork against the day the Pop Cult implodes.

      And a crucial step toward building an parallel market ready to step in after the collapse is to ditch the e-drama kayfabe stuff. Working together for the sake of the art and the audience helps us get there. Infighting over niche personality cults sets us back.

      • And a crucial step toward building an parallel market ready to step in after the collapse is to ditch the e-drama kayfabe stuff.

        True that. Building enthusiasm for the work means talking about the work.

  2. Matt Wheaton

    Razorfist’s “Get broke, go woke, and f***ing choke” proves more true as time passes. We’re already in the midst of a new counterculture on the rise and I’m looking forward to what the Iron Age brings us, especially in the anime realm.

  3. What a lot of NewPub creators need to have sink in on them is that the old system was originally built to last and will only fully collapse when the fumes have run out, and that could take a long time. They could have less customers (in the case of leaked OldPub sales data, they actually do) but it won’t matter until the system can no longer sustain itself off the back of the dead.

    In the meantime, the groundwork has to be laid for an alternative so that audiences can get their entertainment and art. It might be long and thankless work, but someone has to do it. If you were doing this for fame and fortune in the first place then this was never the line of work for you anyway.

    We simply got too comfortable with the way things were, and now we’re paying for it.

    • Tell it on the mountain!

      Not long ago I checked in on what used to be one of the top writers’ seminars in the business. Back when I was still breaking in, name authors like Brandon Sanderson, Mercedes Lackey, Larry Correia, and Scott Lynch were regular panelists. This time, the headliners were a couple of Baen editors, another editor who couldn’t stop gushing about Mouse Wars, and a friend of MRK’s. There were plenty of empty seats left.

      That’s not to throw shade at the whole bunch. It is to reinforce your observation that fakepub is a withered appendage clinging to the rump of the global finance-backed movie and game complex.

  4. BayouBomber

    After reading the OP and the comments, it reinforces an idea I’ve had for a while. We need to pit our culture against there’s. What I mean by culture is the fan experience from what our IPs have to offer. More specifically this: the death cult has movies, books, comics, games, and merchandise for all of their IPs. To even stand a chance, our IPs need to have the same. We may be small now, but as previously mentioned, we need to be laying the foundations to become relevant. I believe a significant portion of that is being able to offer just as much for one IP as the mainstream does from multiple adaptations to merchandise.

    Speaking of merchandise, I think this will be the biggest player in the development of our creative works. I’ve been reading through the history of American cartoons and the biggest media giants who still have a hold on the culture today, were the ones who merchandized their IPs either first or most effectively.

    That and also we need to find people who can coordinate creative talent for larger projects. From what I read Disney made his mark on history because a three major reasons:
    1) He spared no expense to grow his talent so he would produce quality over quantity
    2) He merchandised early
    3) He knew how to lead his creative teams

    But that’s just my two cents.

  5. So help me, all I want is to show the world what happens between Valley of Fear and Final Problem. If the monopolies do keep it from selling, it will still have been worth it. But please do click on my profile if interested.

  6. The big problem with the SP/GG movement and its assumptions of overthrowing OldPub, etc. was twofold:

    1.) The vast majority of people, and fans, knew nothing about it;
    2.) It was no match for the mainstream propaganda apparati (Gawker, Reddit, etc.) that constantly demonized them/framed the narrative to those on the outside.

    Even at the time, the predictions of guys like Vox Day that these movements were going to change everything struck me as implausibly optimistic.

    On the other hand, everybody knows Marvel and Star Wars crap because it’s constantly shoved down their throats through advertising, backed by the incomprehensible financial power of Big Capital. Although there are plenty of signs the public is getting tired of these overexposed nerd properties, I don’t think we’re going to see them replaced by indiepub stuff anytime soon. It seems more likely to me that high-production value stuff from other sources – like anime – will replace mainstream consumer interest in comic book movies or whatever.

    Anyway, on to a different subject: hipsters as they were caricatured fifteen years ago have mostly disappeared, as they’ve morphed into other stuff. Many have grown up, gotten married, had kids, and still have a taste for fancy coffee or whatever, but are more or less normal people at this point.

    But a lot of them aged into SJW activists – no surprise that a lot of the most memed SJW figures are obviously post-hipsters. And they seem to have brought a Flanderized version of hipster qualities and proclivities into their Death Cult colonizer lifestyle, hence the funny graphic at the top of the post.

    They’ve also been absorbed, to a large part, into the mainstream pop/nerd culture in a way that would have been hard to see coming fifteen years ago, where there was not a lot of overlap between nerd stuff and hipster stuff, and indeed the two subcultures seemed at odds with each other; most hipsters would look down at nerd entertainment and stuff like video games in favor of movies and books. This started to change with the popularity of Scott Pilgrim – as we’ve talked about recently – but another great illustration of this is video game critic Tim Rogers.

    In the late 2000s, Tim Rogers was relentlessly mocked for his self-indulgent, “post-modern” style of games journalism, and Kotaku articles. He had a small community of progressive nerds around him, but his blending of these two subcultures didn’t have much of an audience, in addition to his abrasive, hyper-elitist and narcissistic personality.

    But then something surprising happened, around the mid-2010s Rogers started to get taken more seriously, and especially gained a new, bigger audience after he started making video content for Kotaku. Now he takes in tons of cash on Patreon to make periodic, TV-season length game reviews on YouTube. Although some of this can be attributed to Rogers becoming somewhat more mature/toning down his most abrasive and self-indulgent personality quirks, I think it’s just as much a result of the Elitist Gamer becoming a recognizable category of nerd.

  7. Rudolph Harrier

    One thing that a lot of indie people don’t get is how all the media outlets are in on it. A news report on a piece of entertainment is never a review, it’s either an advertisement or an attempt to destroy an enemy.

    Take the recent “Barbenheimer” meme. On the internet this may have been some people playing around (though a lot of the twitter engagement was undoubtedly done by shills.) However there were news report after news report about this supposed event, which was nothing but shameless advertising. After a successful opening weekend, the reporting then acted as though reporters had nothing to do with getting people in theaters, which was of course just further advertising (these movies are so good that they blew up without any help!)

    • It isn’t like they have an excuse for not knowing, either. One big win that #GamerGate did achieve was proving the existence of secret industry email lists. Media mouthpieces used to swear up and down they didn’t exist while calling anyone who said otherwise a conspiracy theorist. Now we know they use back channels to crowdsource witch hunts and coordinate this cycle’s narrative.

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