to who do we owe ourselves to?
if we now live in the "attention economy"[0] that must mean by extension that our attention (our time, our energy, our mental space) is the most valuable thing we have.
a perhaps uncomfortable question may be asking ourselves why we consume media and what role it plays in our lives. so many forces in our life are constantly pressing at us to make us not ask those questions, to form compulsive habits that take from us and benefit others, leaving us empty and exhausted. corporate media machines have indeed pointedly made it their goal to capture people's attention, Fahrenheit 451 style [1].
before the ubiquity of the internet, US culture was in a period of relative suspicion towards mass media. various counter-cultural movements across the west had penetrated the mainstream with their skeptical messages from the preceding 70s through 90s, leaving the 2000s abundant in mass media skepticism [2]. however, now in the influencer era much of that skepticism has been vanished. the forces of marketing have invisibilized themselves through influencers and social media, who through their personability and parasociality are accepted more uncritically by the general population [3]. and media conglomerates such as Disney have consolidated control over the public imagination through corporate acquisitions, leaving their shareholders with immense power over culture. seemingly unrelated corporations all too often are directed by the same shareholders and parent companies, giving an illusion of choice. we are in an era where social engineering strategies like FOMO [4] and dark patterns [5] exist ubiquitously to guide our behavior into compulsive engagement and spending.
as uncomfortable as it is, it's undeniable that the internet has facilitated an era where an unprecedented proportion of the population are culturally captured by these corporations [6]. the early dream of the internet was a clever lie: a dream of democratization and a haven for individual voices and grassroots culture [7]. what they didn't tell us was that the structure of the internet, then and now, was fundamentally centralized, and that the resources required to maintain it was already in the hands of the few. and so, the corporatization of the internet was not a corruption of what was once pure, but a foregone conclusion. it has been the strategy of silicon valley from day one, to introduce something generously, and then once everyone depends on it, begin extracting extortionate rents. it didn't start with uber, it started with the home computer itself [8].
however, we must not mistake the tool for its wielder. the core of the issue is that art, culture and information are currently monopolized by corporate interests in a verifiably plutocratic state [9]. this media is intentionally shaped in various ways to fit their interests, to cultivate a placid, politically inert population. to keep everyone distracted, to subtly mold their opinions, and to keep them cutting out a slice of their paycheck for it. give them a little, enough to keep wanting more, but never what they truly want, because what the people want isn't good for business. this is the reality of mass media in the US and much of the western world. media has been cleverly sold to you not as your refuge from disenfranchisement, but rather as a tool to reinforce your disenfranchisement.
we know, through ample evidence in scientific study and lived experience, that people are easily influenced. we are easily deceived, misled and lied to [10]. and the more you think you aren't, the more likely it is you might be susceptible [11]. we aren't taught what propaganda is these days, what it looks like, what forms it takes and where it appears, because its very presence is so ubiquitous that it becomes invisible. we might understand propaganda as uncle sam or soviet labor posters, yet in the modern era it takes one notable form most prominently: through mass media.
there are two primary mechanisms in this process: funding and content.
funding determines what gets made. this alone is an immense power over messaging. when you have the keys to production, you get to filter so much of the culture that gets produced to your whims. through this means, they control so much of what is absent from the mainstream: sometimes it's not what they're showing you, but what they're not. this happens on both a corporate and governmental level, with (for example) the Call of Duty franchise receiving funding from both the US military and the arms industry. [12]
and second is content. ask any creator in the corporate system how much their work has been stifled by director-producers or vague mandates from "on high" to cut or rewrite entire portions of the work [13]. sometimes these directives are made to suit their cynical marketing departments, in other cases it is to curate the content to match their agendas. if you had that power and a motive to use it, why wouldn't you? especially when you are eager to grow and maintain your power against a civil unrest that by necessity increases as the former advances.
the 60s to 80s was a period of great social unrest in the United States, not seen since the labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the era of the robber barons. There was the hippie movement, the punk movement, the american indian movement, the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the black panther party, the LGBT movement, the anti-war movement and more, all acting from various vectors to criticize power. one factor that helped enable all of these powerful movements was cultural sovereignty, where people's means to form and maintain communities and maintain their own culture was held firmly (or at least sufficiently) in their hands.
think about culture all throughout humanity's history--singing, dancing, festivals, oral storytelling. these are all activities that reflect and reproduce a community's shared experiences and identity. during the colonial period, the culture of indigenous populations was repressed just as strongly as their political structures. culture is, ultimately, how we form and conceptualize the world and our identity [14]. when we merely consume culture, especially by those with opposed interests, we become alienated from ourselves and each other. therefore, our cultural agency ought to be protected as cautiously as we protect our personal livelihood.
remember the phrase "the revolution will not be televised"? it was first spoken by black activist and musician Gil Scott-Heron, and unfortunately had its meaning lost through incidental misinterpretations. let's hear what he later had to say on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZvWt29OG0s
Heron is speaking of a dialectical process (dialectical meaning, in brief, a series of successive stages that arise from one another) where before we can change the world around us, we must first change our minds. what happens if we can never change our minds? what if our beliefs, our imaginations, and our understanding of what is true are captured and deceived by those with intentions against our own best interests? people in the US aren't so divided and confused all on our own, we are so in large part due to the frequent intervention of government and corporate entities [15]. it's a hard thought, i know, but it is the reality of the world we live in.
during this period of great unrest, the ruling class in the US realized they needed to redouble their efforts to keep a hold on the general population. this occurred through various vectors: the war on drugs to repress the Black population [16], the AIDS crisis to repress the Black and LGBT populations, the rapid rise of pop music, MTV [17] and the widely criticized mass media of its day that reduced movements into fashion statements [18]. the complete capturing of news agencies into propaganda outlets [19] [20]. artists once had substantial (though far from complete power) in the realms of hollywood [21] and music, and concerted effort was taken to wrestle it back. communities were ruptured and destroyed by drugs, gentrification, state violence, malicious urban planning and increased economic insecurity. then the internet arrived, to "bring the world together", but in a space owned and curated by the very same interests, serving us endless distractions and dictating the very terms by which we interact with one another with profound consequences [22].
thanks for staying with me up to this point. I know it's been dour. but here's where we start talking about the nice things, and everything we're able to do about this as part of the grander picture.
first off: there is no such thing as total control. as much as certain interests might dream of creating such a reality, well, "life, uh, finds a way." they want people to feel powerless so that we do not exercise the power they are unable to take away. even now, social movements are gaining more and more power again, and they don't know how to stop it. all they can hope to do is slow things down enough so as not to reach critical mass. we have so much power! we, collectively, are their incomes, and without it they cannot continue to exist. we've seen ample evidence of this recently with how much recent boycotts sent a shock through the national economy. with some effort, we can create our own communities (on and offline) and curate collectively a cultural imagination that serves us.
culture isn't something that can or should be controlled by the few. it should be ours, shaped by us to represent us, what we value, and our dreams for the future. and we still do! the internet has still democratized a lot of things. there's so many amazing artists out there at our fingertips telling stories that connect us, ground us, motivate us, inform us and bring us closer, rather than numb us, mislead us and waste our time. the trouble is they're all scraping by on the margins. and even when corporations want to keep a monopoly on culture, we're always pulling the strings at the edges with things like fan works [22]. (which, unfortunately, is a complex relationship that often benefits IP holders [23])
I was inspired to write this piece because so many people I know seem to feel exhausted from the obligatory media consumption grind. it's clearly taking more than it's giving to so many people, and here I wanted to highlight that there's a reason for that. it really is taking from us, and pointedly so on so many layers.
we can all keep lowering ourselves through that depressing, commiserating FOMO grind just so we can keep having something to talk to our friends about... or we could not. we could focus on connecting with each other through ourselves, not through things, online and off. and when we do connect over things, we deserve to be able to raise the standards for those things so much higher. we often only get as much as we demand for ourselves, and i think especially now, a whole lot of us are fed up and ready to demand more.
I don't want anyone to feel shamed or like this is a dogma. there are earnest creatives who work hard to thread the needle under oppressive corporate structures, and the things they're able to do with their budgets are currently unachievable at independent scales. but if you do feel unhappy or unsatisfied, I want you to feel like you have a voice in that dissatisfaction, and to regain your sense of agency in our ability to together craft an environment that reflects us.
there are so many wonderful artists on sites like bandcamp, itch.io and even youtube that are eager to share and connect over their work. whatever they may lack in focus-tested polish, they far more often than not make up for in authenticity, commonality, thematic resonance and genuine inspiration. it doesn't have to be one or the other, but nonetheless you might find you don't miss corporate media as much as you thought you would!
I want us to, together, build a world that feels like ours. and to do that, well, Gil Scott-Heron said it best. all change in this world takes place in tiny little steps, until one day we look behind us and realize everything's different. so don't worry about doing it all at once! we can take small steps day by day, that will surely eventually bear fruit into something profound.
I've spent my last year and a half connecting with a lovely community of kind, genuine and thoughtful independent artists, and it's fully transformed how I orient myself towards my work and its purpose. before I wanted to participate in "the system" to create games that would support me no matter the threat to my personal integrity, hoping to thread the needle where I could. now I've experienced how good it feels to connect with like minds, and how when I had that, all these superfluous ambitions and habits that were never serving me began to melt away. I don't want to fit into the world, I want the world to fit to us, because what we're all doing right now is already incredibly valuable. I want to cultivate community, an environment where we make culture together and for ourselves, creating things and spaces we truly own. I want to demand more and more and more until we feel like the world is ours.
plus, mainstream gaming is about to become too fucking expensive!
stay safe everyone, and I love you.
p.s. to begin spreading that love now, I'd like to give a special shoutout to one of those creators I've been in community with whose work has been heavily influential on my own process, PollyPlushie of SocksMakePeopleSexy. her games are as rapid-fire and irreverent as she is, full of fearlessness to defy convention and respectability, to ask much of you and give in return. this work, to me, feels like it embodies within itself the characteristics of a proud and independent community. definitely check her out if any of that speaks to you. and Polly: thank you so much for stewarding this wonderful community I've had the privilege to be a part of.