Anger is profitable

They will feed you an endless stream of effigies to keep the bonfires lit, just so they might sap the heat from you and it, for profit.

I’d implore you to seriously look at the level of discourse that occurs nearly on everywhere online, but at this point you either must have seen it, or you aren’t the type of person to read a several paragraph post.

The intensity of the vitriol poured out over the smallest thing. Reactionary outcries based on headlines not articles, a complete refusal to gain further context if it means watching a video longer than 2 minutes.

And as much as I lament the profit maddened men that have foisted these systems upon us, those men that have made a multi million dollar study of just how best to abuse our pattern recognition and emotional states. Yes as much as we blame them, we must hold ourselves accountable, we must take those “moral inventories” and decide how we go forward. We may not have control over the macro nature of the stimuli, but we do have a level of control over our response, and the degree to which we invite that stimulus in to our worlds.

Why are you spending all your time whining about the colour of some fictional armour (all the while generating revenue for billionaires) when you could simply be consuming media in the colours you enjoy? Why has your favourite colour got to impact another’s enjoyment of something, and why do you have to make it out to be some great herald of cultural death?

You, who’s experience of culture is limited to history’s greatest hits (and a narrow selection of those to boot) what position do you hold to offer a valuable critique on a movie that’s not even out yet? On what knowledge do you stand that allows you to objectively call a visual disgusting, without offering any reasoning. You stand no where, but in the palm of outrage and reaction. A homogenised voice in a chorus of gulls, all looking to claim the next scrap of engagement.

And Christ do I have a solution? No, even this write up walks the tightrope between authenticity & insight, and just being another angry post, hypocritical feeding off the same system it laments.

But I do think there is a partial solution; go fucking make something. Seriously go make something, absolutely anything. Understand what it is to try and realise a vision, the level of work it takes to bring something to life in its entirety. Go suffer through the endless failures, the cost in time and material, go endure an endless climb for just a 1 percent improvement. Go do it all and get to the end just still be wholly unsatisfied with the result and start again. And then do it again, and again.

Then go and give it to the internet.

Then I hope you’ll understand how vapid, how braindead our discussions on art, cinema, and culture at large have become.