Cultural cannibals - The intersection of nostalgia and propaganda.

We are desperately clawing at today, trying to tear its face off, just to get a look at yesterdays smile.

Manufactured consent, The Matrix, Hauntology, 'Member berries, cultural feedback loops, your current obsession with a 90s trading card game. Different explorations and statements on interlinking ideas, when taken as one they describe a landscape of cultural cannibalism.

And what happens when our species engages in wanton cannibalism? It cultivates prion diseases that destroy our brains.

Some may be saying the metaphor has gone too far there. They may think its fine to criticise the act of cultural cannibalism because its a lazy way to produce media and "art" that stifles new artists, but they draw the line at equating nostalgia bait with real widespread societal harm.

However a core part of the way our society grows, changes its views, learns new perspectives and lessons, is through our media landscape. It always has been, from half sung oral histories and the pageantry of priests, to radio plays by Orsen and accessible print publications. From the pictures on cave walls that fire lights projection appeared to move, to the moving pictures projected on walls and our modern theatres on the move. The media landscape has informed our societal development for aeons, and does so now more than ever, in a million differing yet unified ways.

So when this stream that is so intrinsic to our society is polluted, when too much of it is consolidated under a limited number of leaders, you must see there is the potential for real harm. And hell im not saying this is some unified conspiracy to deliver specific messages to us. In many cases they so not do it out of any point of principle, they do it because its more profitable to go with an established IP. Maybe they buy the rights to one story just to stop it being made so it doesn't take market share form their latest blockbuster and risk eating in to the Q3 profits. The banality of evil truly is limitless.

But we must be aware that despite this banality, there is great power granted to a message when hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on republishing it every decade, and their is danger in having such poor and profit motivated stewards of culture. Realise that being profit driven means those who put out such repeats happily take free military gear in exchange for script rewrites casting the military in a favourable light.

Then think how powerless a counter message can be when it faces off against that billion dollar industry. When 3-5 companies control access to every last one of those dollars, and they can damn near shut your message out of that whole industry. Consider that power and its impact when its not just one remake or sequel, when its not just one film shut out or one story silenced.

That is the danger this cultural feedback loop opens us up to. We continue to support he largest, the largest merge with each other, they get ever bigger until we stand as blades of grass before leviathans. Those leviathans obscure tomorrow as they whisper songs of yesterday, they keep us looking back, they mythologise and idealise a past and blame the present for not matching up to the imagined feeling they've built in our minds. Eventually we become so consumed by repeats, sequels and remakes, that novelty seems jarring, that newness is met with suspicion, and the monolithic systems which dictate our modern interaction shun it as it does not fit in to the algorithmic equation for profit.

In truth we should have known it would be profit leading the charge, people don't want to see a burning man being cut down in political violence on their morning paper, the advertisers certainly don't want to run alongside it, so the paper wont print it, better to go with a safer image. Now that photo would later go on to win a Pulitzer, and the paper would in fact print it, but it was a close run thing in 1991, I wouldn't like to run those odds again in 2025. Investigative journalism has no place amongst nostalgia.

Understand it's not as though one super hero brands independence props up our freedom, or that one more remake will drown us all, but if it is said that if liberty dies to thunderous applause, then it must be said that liberty dies a death by a thousand small claps, drowning out the sounds of nuance, novelty, and hard questions, one remake and merger at a time.