True story. After the 2016 election, there was a panel discussion. They had all the creators of the top US political TV dramas; The West Wing: Scandal: Veep: House of Cards and others. Every writer and producer said the same thing. If they'd had a character who said that they 'liked soldiers who didn't get captured' the advertisers and network bosses would have demanded that the character be hated by all Americans.
Propaganda implies that the message being pushed is for the sake of convincing the population of some doctrine. The network is trying to cater to an already held public belief for the sake of dollars.
I've become more and more aware of "Irony poisoning" in every facet of our culture, from movies to memes to every other human interaction.
Maybe because of social media influence, we're so scared that holding any kind of sincerity will reveal a vulnerability that will be ruthlessly attacked...
We must be ready to say "No I don't mean that seriously" and change our projection within a moment's notice when the culture winds change again.
It's so bad anymore that people now need to add "un-ironically" to explain that they genuinely feel anything at all...
in science fiction the AI that takes over the world is sapient. usually as intelligent as a person if not more. reality is dumber. we're just trying to surrender the world to a series of algorithms that can't tell how many fingers there are in a hand or which way they bend, or what a fucking fire hydrant looks like.
Idiocracy is not an accurate depiction of what we have going on, and I'm tired of people saying that it is. Idiocracy was about a dumbing down of everyone because smart people did not breed.
However, people still had the best of intentions despite their limited brain capacity. They just didn't know how to actually fix the world.
And real life we have people actively denying climate change despite the obvious effects not out of idiocy, but because they are literally being paid to, and because it makes a decent wedge issue for political gain. There is an obvious motive there that can be explained by malice instead of stupidity, especially since the people trying to get this money in power are likely to die before the effects of climate change come into full circle.
An idiocracy, they actively want to fix the climate problems, they are just literally too stupid to use water instead of Gatorade for plants. Because everyone is taking a slogan more literally than actual evidence.
Another great comparison is Donald Trump and Camacho. Donald Trump ignored the existence of covid-19, downplayed the effects of it, and blamed the parts of it that could not be ignored on his predecessor. He also villainized Anthony fauci, the man who was trying to make covid-19 only last a couple of weeks, but because he was villanized so hard it became a global pandemic that lasted over a year.
Camacho was fully aware there was a problem, acknowledge the people who were suffering and the Direct effects of the problem, and put the smartest man in the world in charge of fixing the problem.
It is not an app comparison, because Society is not the way it is because it is stupid, but because it is actively being manipulated by malefactors and bad faith agents.
The planet is not being mismanaged nor is it dying because it's just time. It is being murdered for personal gain by people with names and addresses.
My dad complained that Captain Planet was “libtard environmentalist propaganda” 30 years ago. Some things never change. Now it’s just Trump instead of Limbaugh.
Hey, there’s also a New York businessman obsessed with gold and status who has political influence and ties to the ex KGB agent with goals of overturning democracy
Is he though? More like an incompetent businessman aligns himself with evil baddie to stave off company bankruptcy. In exchange he pawns off state secrets and tries to destabilize the world's largest economy.
Eventually incompetent business man either meets his end shanked in a jail shower or evil baddie will conveniently dispose of him out a 10 storey window once he is no longer worth the trouble.
Especially the part where, he has a bunch of followers who claimed the emerald mine never existed and that it's all a hoax by his detractors. Even though the main man himself has admitted that his fortune came from a God damn Emerald mine.
The real fiction is that government agencies would be trying to rein them in. If Musk came up with a ray that turned people into eldrich-style horrors, those agencies would be lined up as buyers.
Austin Powers at least got phallic shaped rockets right though
I don't know if you are joking and I am whooshing it but: Putin. He was former.. i believe even chief of the KGB. Was stationed in East Germany for a while and made quite the career. And now he instigated himself as a Russian Erdogan who can rule for as long as he wishes.
Look I get it's a joke but calling Elon and Putin "our two main antagonists" is mind numbingly stupid and doesn't seem to be the punchline.
The only group who I can think of that would be true for would be college freshman from upper middle class backgrounds that get their news exclusively from social media and do not have any attention span as a result of the Adderall shortage.
Putin has started the largest land war in Europe since WW2. Elon does shit that wouldn't even put him in the top 5 of evil billionaires. He's just super active on social media so anyone who puts in the slightest amount of effort can see what he's up to.
Elon is a bit worse than that: he also pollutes our night sky with thousands of satellites for a service that is a capitalist initial landgrab of space (he does it quickly too so he can skip regulation), and then based on a whim and his ill informed political views use said satellite service to meddle in global politics because again, no regulation.
So of course still nowhere near the ex kgb agent, but yeah, a pretty big dick too.
Elon is not just super active in social media. He destroyed Twitter for fun. I didn't use Twitter before, but for someone that used Twitter (which is most young people) I see how he can seem a villain. Sure, not at the scale of Putin, but way more than "super active".
we criticize hollywood for lazy tropes but our two main antagonists right now is a former kgb agent with a penchant for poisoning and an emerald mine heir who wants to live on mars. if these were bond villains they'd be dismissed as caricature
I really don't get the pervasiveness of this emerald mine heir story. His father that owned the mine is still alive, and disowned Elon after divorcing his mother, and then later, marrying Elon's step sister.
You’re forgetting the creepy old guy with a German accent, no hair, and a penchant for dressing up in weird costumes, who runs a quasi-secret society with the intention to infiltrate every world government and bring about global communism that way.
Klaus Scchwab, and it's not Alex Jones stuff you can ignore, the book his organization published literally states that that is their goal. They don't hide it, mass media ignores it.