media

We’re Not Serious

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Ted Giola wrote a fascinating article asking if the US is in a crisis of seriousness. I found this relevant as it codified my feelings about many things the last year or two, as well as the election. As I often warn, this column’s inspirations may not be who you think, but it’s easy to think it’s about THEM. So assume this post is about everyone including you and me.

The article is worth a read, so much so that I’ll just summarize it that ye, the US and to an extent the world is in a crisis of seriousness. We’re performative, we’re working on outrage, our culture is about special effects and marketing, but none of it is serious. Everything is a business, marketing, or frivolous – and oft mass-marketed (I’d argue the latter somewhat). Even when we attempt to be serious there’s nothing too serious about it as we churn out memes and pointless protest and anything but real stuff that feels real and is real.

If we can even recognize reality anymore.

This struck me as for the last year or two I’ve been feeling a decreased lack of interest in many things. It wasn’t depression as I had no sign of that. I was enthused about things, new things, in ways I hadn’t experienced before or in decades. But so much felt empty or pointless, disconnected.

New anime, so what. Some films that looked cool, but . . . eh. Same old same old. No there there. Unserious.

Now I look at this idea that so much of life is performative, unseriousness, spectacle (dare I say, a Society of the Spectacle) that I realize how much I don’t care. I’m bogged down in ads I didn’t want, on websites I don’t like anymore if I ever did, and while I can find great, truly real things on YouTube or Roku, a lot, and I mean a lot is performative shallowness.

And politics? Well I couldn’t tell eighty percent of that from my Youtube or Podcast surfing, or the memes that came across facebook, or anything else. So much is InstaXTubeBook posts (made worse with AI), so much is performing. It’s no wonder people embrace “authentic” even if most of the time they don’t know what authenticity is anymore.

But it wasn’t just this performative, unseriousness element. I realized what made this worse than annoying is that our Unseriousness in the US (and elsewhere) is paired with something worse. Something that together with this unseriousness puts us in pretty deep trouble.

I’ve written here – as many have written elsewhere – about how our economies and governments actually don’t do what we need. A lot of systems have gone stark raving mad, because people focus on things not related to the job they say they’re going to do. You can become rich laying off most of your company and juicing stocks even though your company doesn’t do the job it says it does. Politicians cut all sorts of insane ads to get into office to deliver nothing – its a joke how many get caught endorsing the results of a bill they performatively rejected.

We have economic and political systems where people benefit from not actually doing what they say they’re going to do. We’ve built A System that smart, or clever, or lucky people can manipulate for fame and power, but it has nothing to do with what we say it does. You can get rich by not doing anything useful – and are probably destructive – and be hailed a “leader” or a “genius.”

The Economy and Politics are complex systems, built over decades and centuries, and some people learned how to push the buttons over and over so money pops out.

Now combine the Unserious and Performative with Gaming The System and you get an extremely dangerous and toxic blend. How many so called “leaders” or “experts” are just people putting on an act and who found where the Money Button is? They don’t do anything productive or useful – in fact they’re destructive – but they learned to put on an oft-buffoonish act and how to get that bread.

It reminds me of a person grousing about politics saying, roughly, “at least sometimes kings had to lead a battle.” They weren’t royalist at all, but were making a similar point that useful should be important.

That’s where I find myself, looking at my disgust and dissatisfaction over the last few years, Giola helped me see it. It’s the lack of seriousness and the manipulation of the system, entirely disconnected from anything real. We’ve built a stupidly complex world we didn’t need, didn’t really want, and boy did some idiots get rich off of it.

I said at the start this should be taken as being about you and me first, before we talk The Others. I can honestly say the last year or so I’ve looked back at myself and seen how much I’ve done that was Unserious in the bad way. Yes it got me here, but I can also see how much time and resources and even relationships I wasted not being properly serious.

At least I have the self awareness, but as we’ve been careening around the last few decades, I don’t think a lot of people “in charge” do.

(By the way, don’t expect this to be the last column on the subject. Like “The Unaccountability Machine” this one hit HARD.)

Steven Savage

Living In The Future We Were Sold

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

We’re living in the future, and it’s lousy.

So-called AI is just Ultra-Clippy being shoehorned into everything that will temporarily goose stock prices. We’ve got computerized cars that allow us to bluescreen while driving, and universal automated cars are many dreams and lawsuits away. Phones gave us something like Star Trek gadgets, but we’re using them to become depressed by doomscrolling. I could make a comment on the Cybertruck, but honestly, that seems pointless.

We’ve got a lot of things that we think are futuristic, and a lot of them are lame, terrible, pointless, or have side effects. Plus you know, we’ve got climate change, Nazis, and pandemics as well.

The future isn’t what it used to be? No, the problem is we’re living in the future we were sold.

A lot of our futuristic ideas derive from popular culture, but that popular culture has nothing to do with what we can, should, or even may want to do. A lot of or popular culture is what people could sell us or what worked in media of the time. It has nothing to do with the possible or the necessary.

AI? It’s easier to just have Hunky Space Captain talk to the computer, because no one wants to watch someone scroll on a monitor. Besides, it sounds cool. Also if you’re bored eventually the computer can try to murder people as part of the plot, a real horror film twist. But do we need it?

Automated cars are a dream, especially if you’ve ever driven . . . well, anywhere. It’s a dream that’s cool and convenient and doesn’t have messy people, and looks awesome in films. It doesn’t deal with the reality that driving needs a moral actor to make decisions, even if you’re paying them by the mile. Also it doesn’t deal with outages, software updates, and crashes.

Then there’s our phones, our pocket computers. This is a totally understandable dream of course, going back to hand-held sci-fi gizmos and communicators. It’s just we never asked how we’d misuse them, as if people won’t find some weird use for technology five seconds after inventing it.

All of these are things we’ve seen in pop culture media since the 60’s (and I’d argue a lot of what we’re living in is very 80’s). But it’s not stuff from speculative fiction or deep analysis or asking hard questions of what we want and need in the future. It’s stuff that was fun to put into movies, tv, and comics.

That’s it. For many of us, the future we envision is something that was marketable.

So of course all the backfire we’re experiencing is a surprise. We weren’t buying a warning, we were buying a cool experience.

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam,” said Fredrick Pohl. Indeed it should. It’s just sometimes the warnings don’t sell – and other times people think the warning is cool (see many a stylish dystopia with lots of leather for no reason).

So much of the future that people want – or are trying to sell us at least – seems to just be whatever was laying around in pop culture for a while. It doesn’t have anything to do with speculation, or possibility, or what we need. It’s what many of us assume the future is supposed to be because we bought it.

But what is the future we really want and need? The struggle is to find that, and perhaps in this time where the future we bought is failing us, we have a chance to find it.

Steven Savage

They Don’t Care, I Don’t Care

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

The modern media sphere is a strange space. We’re overwhelmed with some great stuff on way-too-many streaming services. Potential hits like “Coyote Vs. ACME” are being killed by tax purposes. AI art controversies are everywhere, to the point where “bad AI” is an insult.” Some once-beloved figures are revealed on social media to be complete numpties (my new favorite insult). When you just want to watch something for fun, it all seems a bit weird.

What I find is that, more and more, I feel like I care less about media.

There’s so much B.S. that it feels like all media executives and no small amount of other people just don’t give a damn about making neat stuff. It’s tax writeoffs and script changes to extend a season and sudden cancellations and number tweaking. Look, I’m not going to act like a lot of media has been high art, but it feels like the amount of people in media who don’t care is high or has always been higher than we’d like.

Then it makes me hard to care either.

This feels weird. My fiancee recently watched Resident Alien which, though I didn’t get into, was a delightful mix of Northern Exposure and My Favorite Martian – if the Martian was really sort of a jerk. She also started Ripley, which has a compelling film-noir-meets-Bergman vibe that surprised and delighted me. This is just the last few weeks, there’s great things out there in the media.

But any of these wonders could vanish in a moment because of some bad executive decision. They could be archived because of obscure tax codes. Someone might get recast with an “edgy” actor who will then drown in scandal like everyone predicts. Without things on hard media, good things can disappear.

It’s just hard to care when so many people with power and money don’t, or even seem actively hostile to what they’re supposedly doing (Warner Brothers). Why care when they don’t and might destroy something to get a stock bump?

At the same time, I look at zines I read, obscure films and up-and-coming mad geniuses like Mike Cheslik. These are made by people who care and that leads me to care, because there is something about enjoying media that requires both parties to give a damn. I think one reason people will enjoy even sleazy exploitation flicks and bad b-movies is the people behind them cared in some relatable way.

Someone who wants to pay the bills and slam out a film with the proper percent of explosions and dinosaurs I can at least get, you know?

So here I am, surrounded by truly great things I take time for – Dune II, Delicious In Dungeon – but I wonder how many other people care less now, or who’s interests have changed. Reach out to me and let me know your experiences.

Steven Savage