Mainstream Culture is a reflection of public hypocrisy.
It has always resembled one of those bloated, drawn out weddings, where everyone knows that the groom is fucking the mother-in-law in the bathroom. At the same time, we are offered happy glimpses into the light and jolly music of the wedding band, the gorgeously expensive wedding gown, the happy family and the adorable ring bearers.
Mainstream Culture is gerontocratic (semi)erection with unclear purpose. Tons of sterile television (ahem!) seeds are shot out into the ether without delivering a gram of pleasure to millions of brains, let alone fertilizing anything substantive. Ideas – the funny, the sad, the revolutionary, the informative – stop being acknowledged as they pass through its machine. They stop being read or seen because the machine is actually a big Soviet-style Tooler with loads of buttons, levers, handles, and flickering red lights.
It is one of those machines working with a lot of noise, jolts, whistles and vibrations, in which everything is rigged haphazardly, done by hand, hammered here, hammered there, without thought or planning or an engineer who oversees. No one has an idea of how exactly the machine works – but we can see at first glance that it’s firmly entrenched in the Fabric of Society, and around it are thrown about the lopped off hands of all who attempt to override it .
On the conveyor belt of this machine comes out its product. Mids or
GenZ might rejoice in it. Most do not. In most cases it is poorly sterilized and lazily packaged canned crap.
Mainstream MEDIA is an encyclopedic example of conformism.
A panoramic presentation of the always ready questions, answers, and lobotomized blah-blah-blahs. A kaleidoscope of unnatural ‘talking heads’ who are always asked the wrong questions, always get the right answers, and always something troubles them. After you watch or read, you wonder what these people actually said.
Mainstream Culture devours its children and with this all its similarities to a Revolution end and its similarities to the Augean Stables begin. Mainstream Culture does not tolerate compromises. Every good idea that has passed through its halls, rooms and Slacks, even if it has just started to develop, goes through the creative and cultural sieve of reviews. The review, in the sense in which this action is carried out, is a real double whammy of unwritten censorship – political and moral panic. And since everything in our beautiful country and rotten state has devolved into politics and righthink, anything real that remains of any content endeavor are polite intros, title cards and the weather forecast.
Because of ‘good intentions’ and the eternal ‘compromise’, the (new) shows, articles or content fall into the proverbial Catch-22. If you don’t change a good screenplay, a good book, a great idea, a decent content, to predetermined parameters it will be killed. If you change it according to instructions, it becomes so stupid and pointless that one day the Management itself calls you and says that you are removed from the creative process due to content that ‘fails to engage’.
→ For completists, obsessives, and people with too many tabs open.
Go root around in the archive. It’s messy, but so is life: themaladapted.substack.com
