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:
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:
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
