I was raised to believe that the planet was, at most, about 10,000 years old. We were agnostic about the reality of dinosaurs. Nobody told me that fossils were fake artifacts planted by Satan to test our faith, we were just encouraged to think that scientists were collectively wrong about the dates and that humans were probably cohabitating with any scaled brethren. To support this we’d pull up a few quotes from the Bible (The Book of Job does a lot of heavy lifting as far as cryptid references go).

Beyond that, we were encouraged to deflect and cast doubt. It wasn’t that we had an anti-science position, it was that we were so skeptical we didn’t adhere blindly to scientific consensus. After all, didn’t scientists go back on everything they said anyway? My comfort (dare I say: ease) with this sort of approach was so absolute (and the opportunity to question those assumptions so rare in my conservative community) that it wasn’t until I was 21 years old and on a pilgrimage to Israel that I heard a religious leader state basic scientific truths. I had spent 4 years in a religious high school, admittedly with a science teacher who was the Bruce Lee of cognitive dissonance, and it took a trip halfway across the world to hear a person of faith clearly support science.

I’d love to say I went back on everything crazy that I believed as soon as I got a decent education, but of course, that isn’t how any of it works. I still don’t really wrap my head around ideas of deep time, or of geologic periods, much less astrophysics, and how the nature of space/time inherently shapes and warps our reality. I’m taking all of this shit on faith, and I’m sure my understanding of a lot of it is fundamentally flawed, as well as totally shallow! So what did change my mind? Or rather, what thread did I pull to start the unraveling of my religious fundamentalism?

Television.

Not so much television itself, as much as the fact that television exists. Let me fail to explain. Television is the sending of electrons from one source to another, then decoding those electrons into tens of thousands of pixel values so quickly that our eyes only recognize motion. How do cameras turn the light from images into electrons? Fuck me if I know, but already we’re at a place where we are creating images out of one of the rawest elements of creation. We all know the Arthur C Clark quote about sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, but there should be a corollary that a sufficiently dispersed and popularized technology, no matter how advanced, is mundane. We have built a magical civilization, and we’ve built it through rigorous scientific inquiry, but in doing so, we have neglected to develop a corresponding technology of imagination.

Well, okay that’s not strictly speaking true either. Plenty of practical, useful, and beautiful technologies exist: social theorists, poets, activists, artists, and saints have all presented structures and techniques for understanding the issues we’re facing. I’ve personally found inspiration and encouragement in the work of scholars like Jedidiah Purdy (especially his After Nature).

For a more expansive and politically radical writer, the late David Graeber should be required reading for any political science, anthropology, or economics class.

(I cannot recommend his book Debt highly enough!)

Unfortunately, while capitalism has proved to be an exceptional system for generating profits, it has not shown itself to be very kind to prophets. Any idea, concept, or value that cannot be made profitable will fall in the arena of the market, which is particularly unfortunate considering that human life is fated to be an eternally depreciating asset.

Our system of education, art, entertainment, and other cultural products are exactly that: products. Workers in these systems are rewarded for their ability to generate profit within the system, same as any other, and like any other system, a race to the bottom in quality has resulted in disastrous consequences.

Okay. So what does all of this have to do with me believing that the world was 10,000 years old? Not much, I admit. But back to television just once and we’ll be done: have you seen the Bjork clip of her going through what appears to be a tube television? It’s currently going through the short viral video rounds.

I’ll leave you with her:

Bjork and her TV

“You just swallow and swallow. This is what an Icelandic poet told me. And I became so scared to television that I always got headaches when I watched it. Then, later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth, the scientifical truth and it was much better.

You shouldn't let poets lie to you.”

It finally happened: I failed to bag a contract for summer work at my community college. That means I’ve got three months (and no money) to get as many things made as I can.

No pressure at all!

Just kidding, it’s a stupendous amount of pressure.

But why? Why does creativity require as much more mental effort and patience than even the most monotonous “normal job?” As kids, creativity was a lifeline to sanity in a world that we didn’t fit yet. As a kid who didn’t really fit in, this was

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an actual life-saver, but all kids bloom with creativity that makes art out of play.

What makes art change from a way of joyfully expressing oneself, into the most mortifying kind of navel-gazing self-absorption?

I had an uncle—a half-uncle, I guess, it’s a long story.

My limited experience with my uncle David was that he was wired into the electric current of his generation’s whole thing. In my head he’s the face of Gen X—a punk/slacker icon who suffered from both the feedback from the counterculture and the corrosion of the wider society. His story was sad a lot of the time, but he had undeniable style, and I think that goes a long way.

The last time I got to spend time with David, my dad tried to nudge him into getting out his acoustic guitar and leading the rest of us in a singalong. (My dad is a big fan of what he thinks of as “positive peer pressure.”)

David’s response was an example of conversational judo that I’ll always remember:

“Do you also want me to strip naked and walk around for you? Because those two things feel the exact same to me.”

So that’s what’s wrong with America’s art! Sharing creativity involves a level of vulnerability that feels like personal exposure.

There’s another half though: talking about money feels like as stripping down, taking a wide stance and bending over in front of God, your mama, and everybody. I hope you’re starting to wonder where I’m going with this!

Let’s jump to my graduate school studies on media and art industries. I was lucky enough to take a fundraising in the arts class with a professor who had raised funds for art organizations for years, and who had enough pull to get our class interviews with the investors behind the wildly successful Broadway show Hadestown. Professor Penny understood the real work behind funding art and media: asking rich people for money.

It should be said that it doesn’t absolutely have to be rich people you ask, but if you’re asking poor people, you need a hell of a lot more of us, (so it usually is rich people.)

A big part of the class was destigmatizing talking about money, and trying to overcome the taboo of soliciting it, even at risk of being annoying about it. It wasn’t likely to actually have the kind of catastrophic consequences that we expect from begging in the street. We had a class project where we were funding some nonprofits through a collaborative crowd-funder. I made a promo video for it.

Within a week we were getting called in to take the video down. They even added a new administrative rule that said students can’t raise money for projects outside of the university. All because it’s okay to ask for money only in very particular conditions. (Also, I probably threw more shade at the university than was wise in a video that used UT’s branded material, but nobody told me that I couldn’t do that!

Bet they told the next guy.)

Sour grapes aside, are we actually facing apocalyptic conditions in the media industries, or am I just being a drama king? (obviously some of that).

Vulture headline declares: “Hollywood Has Left L.A.”

“For years, studios found it cheaper to shoot elsewhere. Post-industry-collapse, elsewhere is the only place they’ll shoot.”

The article is thorough and expansive, and I recommend it. A theme that runs through it is this: it’s not a lack of audience or a lack of labor or talent that’s killing the movies as we knew them. It’s that nobody is willing (or able) to pay for them.

Hollywood was the merchant of dreams for the world for the last 75 years, and now it’s a husk of its former self… a creepy, leering AI mockup of Marilyn Monroe, dress aloft, defacing it’s legacy until it’s nothing but a bad meme.

Still, I can hear you saying, Hollywood isn’t everything. I said “American art industries” earlier as if that’s a real thing, but Hollywood is at best, one narrow sliver of what falls under that wide umbrella.

It’s a popular refrain within the culture war that “Hollywood” is a mouthpiece for liberal ideology, and any struggles it faces are a natural consequence of their queer Cali-Commie leanings. The conservative answer to the slow-motion collapse of one of America’s biggest and longest lasting industries is to double down in appealing to its own base.

Christian and conservative content received a tremendous amount of investment in the later phases of the streaming wars: Pureflix, a streaming service originally stocked with the feature films made by the Baptist production team behind Facing the Giants and War Room. (Not THE War Room, that’s a doc about the 92’ Clinton campaign.) In the world of podcasts and new media, it was the Daily Wire, with their talking heads like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro, that surged to the head of the pack.

In a 2022 interview with the NYTimes, DailyWire’s CEO Jeremy Boreing pitched himself and DailyWire as the next Rupert Murdoch and Fox, saying:

“The difference between what I’m trying to do and what Rupert did…Is that I don’t want there to be a chasm between the missional purpose of the entertainment content and the news and commentary content,”

I did a fair amount of research into the business model behind these conservative media brands. Far from having tapped a previously underserved audience with the potential for growth, in fact they are largely built on (in the case of DailyWire) investment from a few wealthy backers, and (in the case of Pureflix and Sherwood Pictures) had their audiences artificially inflated by privately subsidized screenings at churches.

With the sort of outside funding they get from wealthy backers, it’s hard to hear the conservative accusations of media bias as anything but projection. Conservatives will always get paid to shill for the rich. (Neo)-Liberals have to figure out a way for their content to make money on its own feet.

Later in the same Times article, I found what might be some evidence of DailyWire’s “Hollywood bookkeeping.”

The company, which is privately held, said it had $100 million in revenue in 2021. According to a spokesperson, it is on track to take in twice that in 2022.

…DailyWire+, has more than one million paid subscribers, according to data the company showed The New York Times. Each pays $12 to $20 per month. That’s a drop in the bucket compared with Netflix (223 million) and Hulu (47.2 million), but it represents 65 percent of the company’s revenue

Recently (in the past three months) Daily Wire has laid off 25% of its staff and fired CEO Boreing (who had once referred to himself as the company’s “god-king”.

Looks like he’s got a ways to go before he matches Murdoch.

SO! If traditional media, like Hollywood, is in free-fall, and if new media giants are mostly just hype-fueled propagandists…what else is there? Surely the world of social media has given us access to more diverse opinions than ever before.

Maybe. But it’s not making the people who give those opinions any money. Just this week, two prolific left-leaning Youtubers, Renegade Cut and Innuendo Studios, have announced either their outright bankruptcy, or that their content creation schedule is fully unsustainable.

I point out these two users, not just because of their recent financial crises, but also because if you take the sum of both of their subscribers, you have over 800,000 consistent viewers. Not all of these subscribers are paying a monthly subscription, but also, this is far less than the actual audience these creators are reaching. These numbers should be read in contrast with the exaggerated claims of profits made by DailyWire+.

Somebody is lying about their income, and I don’t think it’s the people who have been making material without pay for years on end.

Well…that’s some of the politics and economics that’s got us in such a bind!

I did warn you that I was going to be getting personal with it.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a job that gives me the time to keep up to date with media, and gives me enough mental flexibility that I can (occasionally!) get some creative work done on the side.

(In addition to the youtube channel and this blog, I’ve got a couple of screenplay drafts in the bag!) I have not been lucky enough for this to make a profit.(if you happen to have a lot of money, check out my Patreon!)

In conclusion…are we doomed? Well that depends! If you mean is America doomed to lose the outsized role in global entertainment that it’s held for almost a century? Almost definitely.

If you mean that we’re doomed to stop making great art? Not remotely. But you’re going to have to dig a little deeper if you want to find it. Look to your local community for your art and music, and don’t be afraid to pay local artists.

It’s going to be a hot summer. The revolution will not be televised.

It might be livestreamed by somebody with an iPhone and 12 followers.

…hopefully I’ll get the next blog done on time.
See you, space cowboys!

In the early 20th century, Buckminster Fuller developed a theory that said the totality of human knowledge was increasing exponentially: before the 20th century it took centuries to double, by WWII he argued that modern society had cut those centuries down to 25 years. Today, scholars estimate that information in human culture doubles every 12 hours. The writer and magician Alan Moore suggests that the next stage could happen when we:

How do we create culture in a world where culture itself evaporates?

I went to college for journalism, but it only took me a few classes with working journalists to have any romantic ideas stomped out by the reality of a dying industry. If you wanted to make a living making content, the only people paying were the people with institutional power. If you wanted to be a journalist, you were expected to deliver the points of view of your employers. If you wanted to be an artist, the only path forward was advertising.

Now even that truism has collapsed. The boondoggle that is the “AI” market has pulled the rug out from even the most corporate-inclined artists, showing what was always true: in the race to the bottom, only the owning-class are winners.

I’m lucky enough to still have a job as a professor of media, (although with media literacy funding being cut, that remains to be seen after May!)

This position gives me the chance to do a lot of reading, and as a denizen of the internet, I come across libraries of independent, unique, and well researched material, and they rarely have an audience that matches the quality of the material.

Creators: if you're ambitious but lazy, please watch this

This week I came across a youtube channel that seemed to be offering the same kind of self-help marketing schlock that makes up most freelance “advice.” I went in prepared to be told the same things: Always Be Creating, cross-post across platforms, engage with your audience, blah, blah, blah. All true statements, but ones that ignore the sheer cost in resources and time that they require, as if to say: “Just make bricks without clay!”

What I didn’t expect was for Chet to provide a proverbial wheelbarrow full of clay, with a clear “how-to” on how to build a brick kiln!

Hyperbole aside, Chet’s videos summarize the realities of youtube content creation while giving actual practical steps to make content that doesn’t sink into the internet abyss. But I know what you want to know! What was his Big Idea(TM)? Will the steps he suggests work to actually build an audience?

The big idea that I’m chewing on today is a concept he gives calls “synthesis.” Synthesis is, basically, taking the content that I’ve been recently inspired by, spending some time to draw out “my take” on its main ideas, and sharing it with people in my community who might dig it. In a way, it’s the simplest thing in the world: if you want people to engage with your material, don’t focus on chasing an abstract algorithm, but prioritize engaging with other creators and audience communities.

Will this work? Will I be able to develop an audience? Will anyone like the videos I’m linking? Will I find work to cover rent over the summer? We’ll find out together!

Stay tuned!

Attacks on Education

This video was a lifesaver! “The Cynical Historian” is the youtube channel of Dr. Joseph Hall-Patton, a historian in New Mexico who has been doing original history online for years. His video style is a throwback to a more innocent time of the internet, eschewing the templates and on-camera tactics of more hip video essayists for a thoroughness that borders on pedantry. Hell, he even goes by “Cypher” on his channel, giving the feeling that his videos were dropped out of a timewarp from an internet as yet unspoiled by the enshittification of web 3.0.

It’s difficult to push back against false premises when they’re repeated ad nauseum, and it takes a tremendous amount of effort to pull back from individual arguments and see the big picture. Having lived through two decades of American education getting stripped for parts, it’s somehow both encouraging and sobering to see those decades in the context of America’s eternal tug-of-war with our worser angels.

It’s hard argue against the sheer tonnage of misinformation and disinformation. Worse than that is when the propaganda seeps deeply enough in to sprout self-doubt: when education has been demonized and targeted so much that self-censorship feels like a natural (and even ethical!) decision.

I don’t know if the arc of history really does bend toward justice, but I do know that good historiography makes the intellectual battleground much easier to navigate.

Thanks for keeping the faith, Cypher!

My first draft of this video had a couple more videos to go over, but on reflection, I think the others would make a better standalone post. Stay tuned for why I think Conan the Barbarian is better than The Lord of the Rings!

And just in case, for whatever reason, that doesn’t sound like your brand of off-market vape juice, here is a teaser of books I’ve read in the past year or so! If you’ve read this far (or just scrolled down, I’m still grateful!), drop me a comment!

(And if you can decipher the image, tell me what you want to hear about next!)

See you, space cowboys!