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The woke culture factory

Woke diversity is a repetitive set of characters and tropes that lack the broad vision that only intellectual diversity can achieve.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

The old cast members of Monty Python spend a lot of time complaining about money. The problem is that in a world where Netflix, Disney and their various competitors spend over $100 billion a year making disposable content for subscription services and the occasional dying movie theater, old comedy skits that double as cultural touchstones are practically worthless.

Except as fodder for YouTube upload clips generating a cent for every 1,000 impressions.

The new entertainment is a woke culture factory in which original ideas are worthless except as grist for intellectual property franchises.

Some original ideas, like Superman or Batman, are worth a lot as franchises even while the original works are only of interest to collectors.

The internet made every original work duplicatable and disposable. The new merger of Hollywood and dot coms represented by Netflix and other streaming services was based on video content having a very brief half-life to drive subscriptions to gated content libraries.

Churn was the only function of content. Netflix casually cancels successful shows once they achieve their purpose of generating enough new subscriptions because the new metric of success isn’t viewership, it’s subscriptions and subscriptions driven by ‘newness’.

Generations of television shows are worthless because they’re not new. Their only value is as brands that can be rebooted.

That’s why Blue Bloods, despite being enormously successful in the ratings, was canceled, while Magnum PI can be rebooted with practically anyone.

Movies and TV shows are now just ‘content’ that fall into one of two categories: experiences or franchises. Both are disposable, but the franchise is a mold that can be used to produce infinite amounts of new content.

The ideal franchise, like Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars properties, is a ‘universe’ that can be endlessly recycled, rebooted, spun off, and then rebooted all over again.

This slop is everywhere now. The endless remakes, reboots and cinematic universes are billion-dollar slop factories that chew up the culture, masticate it, spit it out, chew it again and then vomit it up on audiences. Each iteration, reboot and remake is worse than the last.

And what makes it truly worse is that wokeness is a core part of the culture factory.

The woke culture factory updates the old by making its themes, characters and message over to its own. Updating the sensibilities of the old for modern audiences allows corporations to transform distinct original ideas into interchangeable soulless end products.

The woke culture factory lovingly refurbishes the old music, designs and visual themes while gutting the core.

Culture factories are premised on the interchangeability and disposability of their products. The Left is a virus that infiltrates a culture, hijacks its moral imperatives, and makes it over to serve its designs.

The corporate culture factory assumes that the core doesn’t matter while the woke culture factory wants to replace whatever the core is with its own message as the core.

What both agree on is that original ideas don’t matter and that everything is infinitely plastic.

The Left believes that human beings are plastic products of society. So do many of the giant corporations. Their tools of mass propaganda are fundamentally the same.

Where they occasionally disagree is on the intended outcome. Corporate wokeness puts the suppression of original ideas at the service of the Left and the end result is what we see around us every day.

Individualistic originality threatens totalitarianism. If people are free to choose their own way, they might end up subverting the system whose power is built on telling them where to go.

Mass production of culture will always lead to homogeneity but what was once seen as an indictment has become a virtue.

The bland edginess of woke mass culture may be corporate slop, but it’s corporate indoctrination slop made by wokes for wokes and really no one else.

That’s why Hollywood franchises feel like watching television in another country.

It’s not made by us and it’s not made for us. Its values are alien and hostile. It may mimic the classics, but there’s nothing classic about it underneath the skin.

It’s not any different than the old unlicensed Turkish knockoffs of American culture except that the budgets are bigger.

The motivating ideas of the culture that produced the things it’s imitating are incomprehensible to it.

No amount of multiverses can compensate for the underlying lack of imagination in the slop that trickles out of the woke culture factories.

The more expansive they appear to become, the less they actually encompass because underneath the special effects, everything is interchangeable.

Woke diversity is a repetitive set of characters and tropes that lack the broad vision that only intellectual diversity can achieve.

And the economic imperative of the culture factory is built on keeping consumers penned inside the walls of its franchise without realizing it.

The numbers suggest that the woke culture factory is faltering. The franchise model is cracking as comic book movies continue to fail.

Joker 2 is the latest catastrophic franchise Hollywood bomb. And it won’t be the last. Superhero movies may have tried to swallow the culture, but the culture has spent the last few years spitting them out. And that’s bad news for the ‘factory’.

Americans are getting tired of the woke culture factory. And the rest of the world isn’t far behind.

Wokeness, like all leftist politics, is built on capturing the central sources of power. The consolidation of the culture industry into a handful of massive entities made woke culture possible.

But if the culture factory in which a handful of companies control movies, shows, comics, publishing and music falls apart, much of the woke culture will go with it.

Woke culture only succeeds as an infection. It’s not something that people choose, but is chosen for them. If the factory stops, the woke hijacking of our culture will also stop.

For now everything is woke and everything is the same, but the end of woke culture and the beginning of a new culture is coming.