Imprisoned in the Bastille of Depleted Ideas, Hackneyed Plots and Stale Narratives
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Correspondent Tom D. recently recommended this thought-provoking essay: The Modern World Is Boring. Where are the heroes and the adventures now?
Tom described the essay as deploying "the paucity of science fiction writing as a proxy for the commodification of the world.
The future happens first in the imagination.
That imagination is expressed in stories; oral long ago, later written, today movies, tomorrow maybe on TikTok.
Despite free connectivity and dissemination, those stories have stagnated.
Visionaries who color outside the lines are vilified on a societal level.
That's nothing new; money, conformity, and mandatory validation of the Status Quo have long suppressed free thought.
But rarely has there been such a confluence of width and depth.
And without those stories, the world is dull, boring, without hope.
The innovative ideas are out there, held back by a dam erected by those protecting their position. A dam without a relief valve.
It's a hopeless strategy.
But for now, it is a boring world."
I have long pondered a thought experiment reflecting the stagnation of "The New", the core dynamic of Modernism: there's always something new and exciting speeding toward us.
Consider this timeline. The Beatles released their "final song" last year, 54 years after they recorded their last album in 1969. Both surviving Beatles--Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr--continue performing and selling music in their 80s. As recently as 2020, The Beatles were ranked #8 in Billboard's Top Paid Musicians, earning $12.7 million. (The pandemic lockdown cut touring short, so total industry earnings were down. Taylor Swift topped the list with a paltry $23 million.)
In 2021, The Strolling Bones--sorry, The Rolling Stones--earned $55 million, just behind Taylor Swift's $65 million. That's impressive, given the Stones have been recording songs since 1963--61 years ago.
Now consider these timelines transposed back to these bands' heyday in 1969. Imagine a band that last recorded an album in 1915 causing a media sensation 54 years later in 1969 by releasing a new song, and another band from that era placing #2 on the Billboard top earning acts in 1969. (1969 - 54 = 1915)
James Bond first appeared on the silver screen in 1962, 62 years ago. Transposing the timeline, this is equivalent of a film series that started in 1900 still raking in money in 1962.
Star Trek launched in 1966 and continues to be a durable film franchise, 58 years later, the equivalent of a 1908 film series still being a "tentpole" franchise for the industry in 1966.
Star Wars took the world by storm in 1977, and the franchise continues pumping out films 47 years later, the equivalent of a film franchise that started in 1930 still bringing in the big bucks in 1977.
Can we imagine anything from the 1910s, 1920s or 1930s continuing into the 1960s and 1970s as relevant cultural currency given the surplus of "new and exciting" in that era?
That we're still paying attention to the acts, music and film franchises from the 1960s and 1970s (and constantly mining as-yet unexploited tropes from that era) certainly suggests a culture bled dry of anything authentically new and exciting.
It suggests a culture that worships at the altar of low-risk profits via retreads and recycling of whatever was profitable in the past, jerking it back to life by emptying a needle of marketing stimulant into the comatose corpus of popular culture.
Jokes about Jurassic World #17 are now as limp as the worn-out franchises they lampoon, for they're no longer much of an exaggeration: Marvel Movie #72, coming soon!
Turning our attention to economics, we're still scratching marks in our dreary rat-infested Bastille cells under "Marxism" and "capitalism," beside graffiti etched in the plaster eons ago: the invisible hand, Theses on Feuerbach. "Adam Smith hath spoken" may even date from the late 1700s.
The political sphere is not merely stale, it has decayed to the point of being morbidly tedious. Tattered posters of Soviet-era slogans--the functional equivalent of today's politics--would at least provide a glimmer of nostalgia. The only excitement left is the announcement of how much Senator Pelosi skimmed in the stock market this quarter: only $20 million, hmm, she must be losing her touch....
In the categories of Hackneyed Plots and Stale Narratives, there is nary a bone that hasn't been picked clean. Even the World Economic Forum (WEF) is tapped out; slapping it around is as tiresome as watching a disaster film for the 15th time. The villains are boring, the cardboard heroes and heroines are boring, the metrics of "growth" that are ginned up every quarter are no longer risible--they're boring, too.
In summary: our institutions, ideas, plots, narratives and memes can no longer be parodied because everything has become a parody of its previous incarnation--a clueless self-parody, endlessly self-referential, endlessly copying a threadbare facsimile of itself in a tightly scripted parody of authenticity.
There is one ray of hope in this dishearteningly drab prison of Depleted Ideas, Hackneyed Plots and Stale Narratives: Punctuated Equilibrium.
Excuse me, I haven't heard of that band.
It would make a refreshingly obscure band name, but it's actually a concept from natural selection / evolution.
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