Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
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Entertainment is getting worse and you’re getting old. The media landscape has fractured, and there are no dominant cultural touchstones anymore. You’re looking for media in all the ways you used to, but everything is different now. There is still plenty of amazing long form content on YouTube, and lots of great movies. You have to do more seeking now, though, where before you could just open up YouTube or turn on the TV
The loss of widely shared cultural touchstones in media has messed with my perception of time. But also, I’m getting old.
This sounds like a perfect opportunity to start reading books.
Society changes Book is book
Media changes Book is book
Trends change Book is book
Government changes Book is book
Games get outdated Book is book
Servers get shutdown Book is book
Book will always be there in its original format, no ads, no change, no tracking, no brainrot, no trends, no algorithmic content creation.
Book is book
You are deluding yourself if you think that books are immune to AI slop.
Enshittification is coming for all things. It’ll take a lot of careful human curation to keep finding the value among the deluge of crap.
To be fair, there has always been crap. Sure, llms automate the process of slop creation, but you always had to rely on curation and often pure luck to find decent books.
Go to your local library. Many have a great selection on blu-ray and dvds. Having to select something from a shelf is way more enjoyable than the endless scroll of junk streaming services give you. I am now actually purposefully selecting movies and shows to watch and making time and effort to finish them instead of just streaming random stuff.
Plus you get commentaries and bonus features.
Sometimes a kind soul has sprinkled Criterion releases on the shelf too!
I donated my DVD collection (200ish titles) to my local library last year. Warmed my heart a bit to read this.
Yes, it was better.
Now its still good but you need to go underground to find it
Join small clubs. Ditch corpo net and go on the small web. Leave social media walled garden bot farms. Have blockers on all devices.
And shut off the internet/phone on weekends if you can. Makes life better. Go play that ps1!
There’s merit to this. One of the beautiful things about this era is it’s cheap as fuck (compared to other eras of history) to make and put out cool shit. Hell, we had a kid in town a few years back make a feature-length horror film with their phone that got screened at the indie theatre here. But you’ve got to dig and deal with the Sturgeon’s Law factor to find gems among all the cruft out there.
Also noted that folks may want the mainstream entertainment of old, but real talk - once you’re a certain age/level of experience, there’s a good chance you’re not part of the mainstream audience. Large groups don’t make the stuff you like because you’re not the target audience anymore, and four-quadrant approaches are dealing with a very different audience than they used to.
Been thinking about this quote from Terrence McKenna a lot recently (might seem a little quaint in the face of today’s media landscape, but I take away a good message):
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.
This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
